New international language: Rodinian

[aokoye]

So no one want to touch the strong Sapir–Whorf claims?

Take their example with the Hopi speakers: they did not know the difference between orange-yellow, simply because the language was using the same word for both.

First of all, it was the Zuni and it isn't that they did not know the difference - it is that they more often confused the yellow and orange during a recognition exercise and have greater difficulty in remembering specifically these colors than English speakers. You'll find the same occurs with the French when it comes to stop lights (despite that the French certainly have a term for a variety of colours in the spectrum) it is just that stop lights are 'feu orange'. Physiological function is not defined by language.

Anyway, it is at the very least, far from clear cut and linguistic relativity and color naming remains a vast and unresolved debate.

Yeah - it's the end of the school term and I have a final for syntax in two hours. I figured I would point it out and let someone else do that leg work.

[aokoye]

Zero discrimination in Rodinian is more directed to the situations I explained before, which are very common in Spanish for instance:
- use of plural masculine for both male and females.
- words when the masculine gender is used for females too.
- words where the feminine is taken from the masculine form (it happens in Esperanto too).

Emphasis mine.
What’s wrong with it? In my native tongue the things are very similar, but being a female myself I’ve never seen any discrimination in it.

You might not feel discriminated, some people do. Pronouns "hen" in Swedish, "ze" in English, use of feminine instead of masculine in languages like Spanish... proves that.

That is not what the existence of ze proves. It proves that there wasn't a pronoun in that language that the people using pronouns like ze felt comfortable using. I also am wondering who or what institution you think is doing the discriminating in this case (moderators I realize I am walking a fine line here - tell me if I've just crossed it and I'll edit my post accordingly). Yes languages like French have language academies, but it's not as if English does and even within languages that have language academies plenty (most?) people use the language in a way that the academy would deem "non-prefered".

This is kind of akin to saying, "biology discriminates because there are people whose gender doesn't align with their sex."

edit: The creation of new words having to do with identity doesn't mean that the language is discriminatory because those words didn't exist at a prior time.

[Cainntear]

- do you think is fair that ENG is the lingua franca, and ENG native speakers have the advantage of not having to learn another language? (with the amount of effort it takes for others).
...
- do you think is fair that even if other people learn English, reaching an expertise level is so difficult that they will always have problems when communicating, so they will be in disadvantage in front of ENG native speakers?

That's not how English-as-a-lingua-franca (ELF) works.

Native English speakers are increasingly at a disadvantage, as most of us are ill-equipped to communicate with intermediate-to-advanced learners. Whether it's an inabililty to speak English without metaphor and cultural reference, the incorrect assumption regarding what is "simple" leading to attempts to simplify their language actually making us harder to understand or an inability to extract meaning from poorly constructed sentences, we all find it very difficult when we're landed in a mixed-nationality setting. Heck, I'm a language teacher and while I can handle most Europeans' forms of English, I really struggle to understand even some English teachers I've met from the Far East.

[Rodiniye]

Hi everyone for your comments.

Here and there, main objections seem to be similar:
- gender
- sounds
- a few grammatical issues.

Now, I am keeping gender because it's part of the essence of the Language and its aim to be accurate. I strongly believe it is a logical grammar categorization, and I think people have not really understood that neutral gender is what you need when you do not want to indicate masculine/feminine, so there is no need to constantly use one or the other. I might be wrong, but as I said it is essential to the Rodinian purpose. I could, however, simplify it a bit and make if fairer. But it is essential, especially when using morphemes.

So... what would you think if I made the following changes?
- gender a bit simplified, making the point again that neutral is there same as "hen" in Swedish.
- sounds: get rid of all accented letters ê,ŝ,û. Modify diphthongs so that they are easy easy.
- grammatical issues: get rid of dual number, get rid of experimental tense.

Anything else? What do you guys think?

Any other suggestions? anything I have not mentioned that you would change? Anything from other languages?

Thanks for your efforts, much appreciated.

[YtownPolyglot]

The idea is interesting, but I still have questions that probably don't have answers yet.

If Rodinian is going to work as an international language of wider communication, it has to give people a good reason (or more reasons) to learn it. This is the difficulty that any constructed language is going to face. People on this site are probably not typical of the rest of the world; most people won't study a language unless there is some sort of payoff: Can I get a job with this? Can I get a husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend? It's not going to be possible for a language to do this until it has a significant number of speakers in one place. Small languages are more likely to survive and be passed on if they are associated with a place or a culture. Icelandic and Welsh have small numbers of speakers, but they are part of daily life in Iceland and Wales.

Hebrew was revived, but it was associated with a religion and a people in a mystical, essentially religious way.

One of the things that Esperanto has going for it is that it does have a number of speakers and international conferences. Even so, its success is modest. The consensus of the number of speakers seems to be two million.

I have to wonder how many people who learn Esperanto learn it because they like to learn languages. From what I have seen here and elsewhere, this seems likely. How many of these two million or so people don't speak something else I speak even better, such as Spanish or German?

I have tried Esperanto more than once, but it is a challenge to keep up. There is no Esperanto community around me, I only know one person fairly well who speaks it (as far as I know) and he is a native speaker of English as I am. What is going to make this language take off where so many before it have been forgotten?

[Rodiniye]

The idea is interesting, but I still have questions that probably don't have answers yet.

If Rodinian is going to work as an international language of wider communication, it has to give people a good reason (or more reasons) to learn it. This is the difficulty that any constructed language is going to face. People on this site are probably not typical of the rest of the world; most people won't study a language unless there is some sort of payoff: Can I get a job with this? Can I get a husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend? It's not going to be possible for a language to do this until it has a significant number of speakers in one place. Small languages are more likely to survive and be passed on if they are associated with a place or a culture. Icelandic and Welsh have small numbers of speakers, but they are part of daily life in Iceland and Wales.

Hebrew was revived, but it was associated with a religion and a people in a mystical, essentially religious way.

One of the things that Esperanto has going for it is that it does have a number of speakers and international conferences. Even so, its success is modest. The consensus of the number of speakers seems to be two million.

I have to wonder how many people who learn Esperanto learn it because they like to learn languages. From what I have seen here and elsewhere, this seems likely. How many of these two million or so people don't speak something else I speak even better, such as Spanish or German?

I have tried Esperanto more than once, but it is a challenge to keep up. There is no Esperanto community around me, I only know one person fairly well who speaks it (as far as I know) and he is a native speaker of English as I am. What is going to make this language take off where so many before it have been forgotten?

Only time will tell. To me and to many others, Esperanto filed in being too based in European languages AND in sounding/looking bad. I think I have won the battle here. It is extremely difficult to create a language that is esthetically attractive to some people. I think the general tought about that is that people like how it looks, they like how it sounds, but most importantly: they are unable to identify a single source for words: they say it looks like a mixture of Persian/Swedish - Escandinavian/Semitic - German/Kurdish... whatever, but that is extremely good news.

Simplicity? Esperanto did not fully succeed being extremely simple. Others did not either. Is it really that the right way?

Rodinian has got many features that people might find interesting, but as I said, only time will tell!

[aokoye]

I think the other thing that no constructed language has for it (and this is not a bad thing) is that there will likely never be an attempted evasion, coupe, or colonization of an area by a large mass of conlang speakers. There just isn't enough contact between conlangs and other languages for conlangs to disrupt a language in the same way that languages like French, Spanish, Mandarin, Mende, Dutch, etc have/are doing.

[tommus]

So... what would you think if I made the following changes?

I am impressed. Very positive reaction to the many positive comments people have been making. Your explanation for the use of apostrophes for orbitals, etc. seems to be quite reasonable. To ensure Rodinian is able to be parsed correctly, I suggest you ensure that the constructions with the apostrophes are completely unambiguous.

I mentioned earlier that, at some point (and as early as possible), Rodinian needs to become a dynamic rather than a static language. People will not keep coming back to the website to re-read Ali Baba. Even one brief news article on a regular basis (ideally daily) would keep me coming back, at least for a while. I am not familiar with the rules for providing a translated version of the free newsfeeds, but the providers would probably say yes to such an interesting use of their feeds. They usually just want a link to their full version. Here are four possibilities:

Reuters

http://www.freenewsfeed.com/

Wordpress

Free Articles for Translators

Again, I don't know just how such free feeds can be used in translation. But the sites seem to say that non-commercial use is just fine. Now I appreciate that translating (even a very short article) will be time consuming, but I think the benefit in terms of who may follow your webpage on a regular basis may justify the effort. And you will be developing an archive of material with parallel text in another language (which you can rotate (EN, DE, ES, etc.).

Out of curiosity, what do you consider your CEFR to be for reading, writing, listening and speaking? I guess listening would be difficult since you seem to be the only "native" speaker in the whole world?

And assuming "you" write something with no grammar or spelling mistakes, does that become de facto "standard Rodinian"?

[Xenops]

Aside from Esperanto, which is a bit of an anomaly, when I think of successful conlangs, they are all related to a story or a franchise:

Quenya/Sindarin, Lord of the Rings;
Klingon, Star Trek;
Na'vi, Avatar;
Dothraki, Game of Thrones.

As people have said, it's hard to appreciate a language by itself, because we have no culture or stories to associate with it. It's the same with many creative works: on deviantart.com people cry because no one notices their art, even if it's good. Then there's me, who has mediocre art, but I also have fans of the art because I have a story that makes them care about the art . I'm very blessed by the reception my comics have gotten.

Quenya, by itself, isn't terribly interesting: it looks like a Finnish relative. But wait, that's what the Elves speak, that's what is spoken in a profound fantasy work, okay, now I care about it. But I care because I'm one of those few nerds out of the millions that love the books, and none of them, except a few, take the time to learn a fantastic language. People buy the Dothraki phrase book because the show's airing, but will anyone buy it when it finishes?

Another thing I learned about marketing my comics: people aren't just interested in the product, you are also selling your personality. If you have a personality that turns people off, you lost a sale. I am never presumptuous: if my art sucks, I am not afraid to admit it. I'm open to suggestions and corrections, because I want to improve more than I want my ego stoked.

Well, now it's time to study French.

[leosmith]

Anything else? What do you guys think?

I like a challenge - make it as hard as possible please. I like the 3 genders, but how about a Chinese script with multiple pronunciations per character like Japanese? 9 tones like Cantonese. 18 cases like Hungarian. Special verbs of motion and aspects like Russian. I think you've got the "no media, no native speakers and no culture" side nicely covered. Keep up the good work!