Rodiniye wrote:Sounds... yes you are right. You create a language with what, 5 sounds? tama mata latama tamata. It can be done. Standard English has got how many sounds? 40? more? so 28 against 40 is already a big saving.
English is an unhelpful comparison, because Germanic languages are among the most vowel rich in the world. I think Ma'ori has 15 sounds, give or take, and it sure looks more complicated than "tama mata ta". Here's a piece of Ma'ori text I found on Omniglot:
"Ko te katoa o nga tangata i te whanaungatanga mai e watea ana i nga here katoa; e tauriterite ana hoki nga mana me nga tika."
On a brief google it would seem that Spanish has 24 sounds, I think if you kicked the rhotics out you'd already have a pretty great general purpose phonology.
Rodiniye wrote:I do not think many languages go below 28 real sounds.
Well this is pretty easy to check, let's go to WALS.info. Here's a link:
http://wals.info/combinations/1A_2A#2/19.5/152.8There is a total of 560 possible pairs on WALS.
Here they are the most common five types (overlap due to consonant/vowel ratio):
1. 26-39 speech sounds (86 languages, ~15%)
2. 24-31 speech sounds (84 languages, 15%)
3. 20-24 speech sounds (75 languages, ~14%)
4. 11-22 speech sounds (53 languages, ~9%)
5. 31-39 speech sounds (42 languages, 7.5%)
These scales are bottom heavy because according to WALS 1A smaller consonant inventories are more common than large ones. Let it also be noted that 2/3rds of ALL languages ever studied have fewer than six phonemic vowels. I'd say it's fair to say that the amount of small inventory languages is in excess of 25% of all languages, that is, at least a thousand.
Rodiniye wrote:The distinction you are referring to is not that uncommon, it appears in one of my mother tongues for instance (Catalan), and it comes from Latin, so it cannot be that uncommon.
Common in Europe, not everywhere. Most of the time if a language has affricates, it only distinguishes voicing, very few languages in the world distinguish both voicing and palatal/alveolar distinction. Look at the data, there are studies and books about phonological typology.
Rodiniye wrote:Are sounds overcomplicated when it has got probably the same amount or close to Esperanto, and close to -33% than English? Well... if it had 60 sounds I would say wow yes! but... it is not the case.
Yes and yes. Please don't bring up the abomination that is Esperanto, it is a disgrace and an example of terrible design.
Rodiniye wrote:BUT I will give you that one. Could I come back in time? Maybe 2-3 sounds less could be considered. I agree with you. But for me, adding those 2-3 sounds meant more possibilities for creation, and a wink-wink to French speakers for instance /y/ sounds, or to other languages. I want people to find features in this language that are part of their native language, so that they say... hey! I know that. 2-3 sounds more might be worth that, or not.
94% of the world's languages don't have front rounded vowels, source:
http://wals.info/chapter/11Rodiniye wrote:Most languages do not have future, English does not. However, it uses "will", "going to", present perfect... as non-native speaker and English teacher, I can tell you that is extremely difficult for some people. Single morpheme "z" takes seconds to teach. "will", "won't", "going to", .... etc. is a lot harder and takes months to master, I can tell you that.
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish by comparing it to English and saying "at least it's not like that!", as it should be a given that a well designed auxlang is free from hurdles that natural languages have.
Rodiniye wrote:No marking at all... well I know what you mean, but do you want to lose accuracy and precision, just because you do not want to put a "z" at the end of the verb?
I suppose not, but if I say "I sleep" and you can clearly tell I'm not sleeping, surely you understand that it's a future reference? No accuracy or precision is lost. Semantics, pragmatics, inferences, world knowledge all serve to disambiguate meanings. We can never be unambiguous, temporal reference is the least of such problems.
Rodiniye wrote:vit (lived) - vis (live) - viz (will live-going to live), 3 letters. Is it that complicated? really?
Besides the point. People who don't speak a future-coding language (ie. most people of the world) would have to learn to align their linguistic production to take that into account. I think a good auxlang should go the opposite way.
Rodiniye wrote:I think not having tense markers is even more complicated. You have to be looking for that adverb, or inferee the tense... sounds much more complicated to me!
Nice contribution, thank you.
You're basing this on your gut instinct rather than science, and underestimating the parsing capabilities of human beings.
Peace.