AnvarzhonZhurajev.com

One of two pseudo-scientific terms I regularly use when justifying my obsession with conlangs, and when talking generally about learning some language, is an “entry fee”. By this term I mean the amount of effort you need to master the language to some degree.

I never tried to build a theory about it, putting some levels, calculating percentages and drawing graphs basing on some vision, which in my case would probably be inacurate and biased. Just because my knowledge of theoretical linguistics is pretty bad, I tend to keep it that way. Actually, this might be someone’s master thesis - but I doubt that there were really a lot of investigations in this field. What makes any serious study complicated is the fact that perception of different things is still different for different people.

I do believe that ability to learn a language is complicaed misture of natural talent, general knowledge, number of languages the person already has in his arsenal, cultural environment, place of living, personal motivation and many other factors. However, when you fix all these factors for one person, it is obvious that in that particular situation, one new language will seem easier than the other.

When a person starts to learn a language which belongs to the same language family as his mother tongue, he might think that learning langauges is easy. Very quickly this person starts to realize that “false friends” are his greatest enemies, but this does not stop him from having fun of learning. If the person selects a language from a different family, especially if its written form uses some nonfamiliar writing system, the effort needed to get even the lowest level of mastering this language is great. 

As I said, I compare this difference in amount of work to be done to an “entry fee”. Imagine that you are starting to do some sports. If it’s jogging, your investment is a pair of good running shoes - everything else is an option. If it’s a yachting, you need to buy or rent the boat, which seems to require much more money and time. The same with languages - entry fee in the francophone world is much smaller for catalans than for chinese or russian, while Polish will be much “cheaper” for slovaks rather than moroccans or mexican. 

If you learn several languages in a row, you get a “discount” for every next language you start learning. If you know Norwegian, you get huge discounts for learning Danish. If you ever spoke Russian, the price of learning Ukrainian is much lower than if you never did. 

What’s interesting in this theory in application to conlangs is that the latter ones were often designed to be easily learnable by people with different language backgrounds. There are some great interlinguistical projects that specifically aim to be “a missing link” for some language group, like Interlingua for Romance languages or Slovio for Slavic languages. Having them learned gives great discounts for picking up related natural languages. Pidgins and creoles do the same job, as they often mix two or more natural languages in an easy package.

Using obvious similarities between the languages, you might build a learning path for complex natural languages. My favorite example of such path can be illustrated by an idea once spoken by Dave MacLeod - to learn Arabic, you might at first learn Interlingua, which helps you to pick up Italian and Maltese which mixes good portion of Italian being at the same time a language family as Arabic. Going from Maltese to Arabic is maybe a longest part of this path, but it’s definitely shorter than going straight to Arabic. You might spend the same time to learn Arabic from scratch as if going the Interlingua-Italian-Maltese-Arabic path but in the latter case you get 3 more languages, which will also give discounts for entering the world of other languages. Think about it as if you buy one thing, or getting it for free while buying three more useful things that in total cost the same. Or rather getting three things for free for the same money. Isn’t it just great?

For those who perhaps got interested by previous post about planned languages, I continue to introduce my own take about the subject.

For the perfect introduction to the world of planned (constructed, artificial, auxiliary, international) languages, look no further than Wikipedia - they have both summarizing article and pretty good pages about particular languages. For this post of mine, the most important excerpt from Wikipedia article is this:

“Constructed languages are categorized as either a priori languages or a posteriori languages. The grammar and vocabulary of the former are created from scratch, either by the author’s imagination or by computation; the latter possess a grammar and vocabulary derived from natural language.

In turn, a posteriori languages are divided into schematic languages, in which a natural or partly natural vocabulary is altered to fit pre-established rules, and naturalisticlanguages, in which a natural vocabulary retains its normal sound and appearance. While Esperanto is generally considered schematic, Interlingua is viewed as naturalistic. Ido is presented either as a schematic language or as a compromise between the two types.”

In this fragment, you can see the “big three” - most popular planned languages, usually viewed as most probable candidates to learn. Of course, they are others (for example, Occidental, Toki Pona, Volapük, Latino sine Flexione, Lingua Franca Nova), less popular but not necessarily worse than any of the “big three”, but since very conveniently we have here schematic, naturalistic and intermediate options to compare, let’s review only these.

Schematic languages provide most abstraction from national languages, while naturalistic use their resemblance to natural language as a biggest advantage. This is one of the reasons why Esperanto itself is often considered a leftist language and its adepts - nonconformists and even marxists. Which is nothing more than a stereotype. True, average Esperantist has more international and idealistic viewpoints than a random guy-next-door, but calling them marxist is an exaggeration to say the least. I personally think that too much politics is forcedly (and falsely) applied to conlangs.

Selecting the planned language to learn, a person should understand why he or she does so. The motives themselves can help to make a decision. Obviously enough, people learn language to have possibility to communicate to other people. By far the biggest conlang is Esperanto, so the first logical thought is to start learning it. This enables communication in this language with up to one million people worldwide. However, in case of naturalistic language, the strong point is their similarity to real languages. Interlingua adepts argue that after learning their language, one can comprehend to a big extent any of Romance languages, so going this way could provide help with communication with up to one _billion_ people worlwide.

The both numbers are clearly optimistic if learner will never go beyond learning just one conlang. But the main point I personally like about conlangs is that learning them is a bridge to easier and faster learning of real languages. My favourite language of big three is Ido - being schematic in a good way, and having lots of naturalistic vocabulary, it makes a good choice to cover the most possible variants. And I also like how it looks and sounds. But it’s just me - everyone can have his own preference.

In next posts I will share more thoughts about conlangs as an educational instrument.

One of things that take many of my time is learning and advocating “planned languages”, often also referred to as “artificial”, “international”, “auxiliary” or even “world languages” - depending who and why speaks of them. Technically, they are rather “planned” and “artificial” - just because they appeared not as a result of language evolution, but were created from scratch with certain purpose.

Such purpose can be idealistic - to provide a common and culturally neutral means of communication for the people of the world; in this case they might be referred to as “international” and “auxiliary”. This idealistic component of their existence is what draws most of adherents and attracts most of the critics at the same time. The turbulent history of Esperanto in XX century is just one of the examples, how difficult is to view only at idealistic side of planned language.

Planned languages were also created for aesthetic reasons. Elfs in “Fellowship of the rings” and Klingons of “Star Trek” fame speak languages created by John R. R. Tolkien and Gene L. Coon, respectively. They are also created as scientific experiments - Ro language was created to implement category system to recognize unknown words. Proto-Indo-European is a an attempt to find a common ancestor of indo-european languages, and technically isreconstruction project rather than truly planned language. There are literally hundreds of planned languages around, and most of them are very niche and rarely spoken by more than handful of enthusiasts. This might let us think that all of them are useless toys of bunch of intellectuals or leftist internationists (I mean those who are in “world languages” camp).

Wide public is just unaware or ignorant about existence of planned languages. Call me a rootless idealist, but I am one of those who really think that planned languages are not only underused - they are underestimated. I believe that their scope is much wider than most of us think and we are just in the beginning of understanding their real capabilities. Some might say that 120+ years of existence of Esperanto, of which 100 is a period of decline, prove that the  idea was flawed from the beginning. However, the world has greatly changed over the last century, and new possibilities granted by IT progress give us new areas where planned languages can benefit the humankind.

Now, when the world gets smaller and smaller, when more and more people get online, we are facing more and more intercommunication challenges, for which just one “world language” is not a panacea. It’s also obvious that original idea of a planned language  used globally as first alternative to native language is too optimistic. But still, their planned nature makes them really handy instruments for solving communicating problems. 

Over the years I came to a conclusion that planned languages could be used as a bridge for learning “natural” languages. While learning a planned language, a person understands a system that can be reused for learning other languages, and receives enough confidence to speak and use other language. Many people dismiss the idea of learning foreign languages as too complex. This is because they don’t have enough confidence. Learning other language (lest it be an “artificial” one) easily and rapidly would help them break the stereotype and move towards learning the language they were afraid of.

In this blog, I will publish more thoughts about this, as well as drawing your attention to other helpful resources on the net dedicated to the same subject.