Cainntear wrote:Rodiniye wrote:Covering 75% of the world's speakers would be an achievement for a language that only has over 500 roots, considering that the 16 languages in Atlas have pretty much an equal participation in the vocabulary (I would not say that the language is represented if only two or three words were coming from that language).
As I said, it is difficult to establish a system in order to create the vocabulary, but as I said I think the one used by Atlas is fair. It could have been done in other ways but I don't think it would have been a better solution, just a different one.
In an of itself, there is nothing wrong with your manner of choosing vocabulary. As aokoye says, it's the claim of "representativeness" or "fairness" that causes the problem.
Why should one person be less equal than others, simply because they're one of a population of thousands instead of millions? Equality must look at everyone as an individual, not as a member of a group of a given size. Hell, as a Spaniard yourself, you surely understand that many Basque speakers would resent the idea that Romance vocabulary somehow represents them...?
I am very aware and concerned about minorities, especially language related. Not only Basque, but I am from Barcelona so I speak Catalan, a language that was actively pursued not so many years ago and banned. I included Catalan and Basque roots in Rodinian (I love Basque actually, it is an extremely interesting language for those of you who love grammar and language structures). Atlas is another story. As I said, I could have selected 6000 roots, one for each language (or 12.000, 2 each, etc), but it would not be fairer. M it would tick a box, but it would be useless and nobody would be able to identify a single root in the language. As a minority-language-speaker, I fully understand that an auxlang might only want to include some languages, because it makes things easier for learners, generally speaking. Another story is for instance Esperanto, where only European languages are really taken into account. That is another story and possibly one of the reasons why it "failed" (this can be discussed, but it certainly did not succeed as an auxlang).
Per cert, veig que parles Català, com és això?