New auxlang: Atlas

[tommus]

Inspired by Rodiniye's amazing work to react to our constructive comments and to develop Atlas so quickly, I have put together an elementary Atlas-to-English pop-up dictionary. It contains the current 515 word Atlas dictionary. You could easily make it into an Atlas-Spanish pop-up dictionary by editing the dictionary file (but keep the same filename). To run it, you need a Java-enabled computer. It has been tested only on a Windows 7 computer but it should work on other Java-enabled systems. Just double click on AtlasPopUp.jar.

It starts by loading all the Atlas dictionary words into the large blue text area. Double click on any word and the Atlas >>> English translation will pop-up in the top yellow text field.

You can paste in any Atlas words or sentences you wish, and that will work too. However, it will only provide the pop-ups for the 515 words in the current dictionary, not for variations of those words. That could be incorporated later.

With all the Atlas words there, you can use the pop-up function to learn them.

Here is the zip file: AtlasPopupDictionary.zip

EDIT: I updated the application to "Atlas Multilingual Dictionary". You can select Atlas >>> English or Atlas >>> Spanish. The dictionary was also updated to the latest (2017-06-25) version of the Atlas Dictionary.

[Ezy Ryder]

Why am i not allowed to criticise a language for having no culture ? Culture is essential in colouring language

Could you explain what makes a culture behind a language constructed for universal communication beneficial, let alone "essential"? Other than providing additional motivation to learn it of course; but what about the "essential" bit?

and yet this and other conlangs have none.

I'll leave this point for the Esparantists to tackle.

That is a very valid concern.

Again, what what's your base for that assertion?

International, country-less, people-less languages cannot have a culture. Ever. Period. This is a fact.

To me that sounds a bit like circular reasoning:
1. This language has no people speaking it (potentially, "yet").
2. No people = no culture.
3. I don't like the idea of learning a language without a culture, therefore it's an objectively pointless endeavour. Goto 1.
Or at least a tautology (minus the "ever" part, depending on whether you analyse it as "you can't ever have a people-less culture" or "you can't ever have a culture if at one point it was people-less).

[Querneus]

While I have considered learning Quenya, Sindarin, or Esperanto, I wander back to natural languages because there is already a vast populace speaking these languages, and there is lots of media to indulge in. As I mentioned earlier, the conlangs with the most acceptance have a franchise or a following behind them. Rather than proposing "here! learn this language!" you should entice us to learn it. The easiest way to do this is to involve a story. Humans care deeply about stories, and if there's other creative features, they will explore those too. I was surprised how much interest my conlang Nansha got when I featured it in my comic, Concerning Rosamond Grey.

I wholly agree that infusing an auxiliary language with a culture, perhaps even some sort of ideology or religion, is immensely helpful to get people to learn a conlang. What would've happened to Esperanto if Zamenhof hadn't used it to also spread his ardent Humaranismo, idealistic as that ideology(/religion) might have been? Not to mention that Finvenkismo thing.

I was surprised by the interest that Mark "Zompist" Rosenfelder's Xurnese had in some people, even though it's an artistic language (not an auxiliary one that's "easy" to learn) and he never promoted it at all, just because of the Endajué imaginary religion ascribed to the imaginary culture that speaks Xurnese in another planet, as some people ended up feeling the religion spoke to them and pretty much adapted it for themselves. There was one guy one time who even considered himself an "insider" speaker of Xurnese because his religion was Endajué, and very much considered Xurnese as one of his own languages.

[Ezy Ryder]

Are you really arguing that language is only about communication and that culture is irrelevant ?

I'll let... myself(?) speak for myself:

Could you explain what makes a culture behind a language constructed for universal communication beneficial, let alone "essential"? [EMPHASIS ADDED]

In other words, no. I didn't claim Language was all about communication. In fact, I've heard some hypotheses suggesting communication might not even be the main/inherent/original use of Language.
What I did say, was that a language constructed for universal communication, is about communication (a bit of a tautology, I guess). Wouldn't necessarily say auxlangs ought to be "only" about communication, but that's just because I haven't looked into it deep enough.

---

And your assertion at the end about no people = no culture has missed my point. It can have a million people speaking it made up from every country on earth and it would still be cultureless because all culture = no culture.

Some people talk about the idea of "having/exhibiting a different personality/identity" in each language they speak. I would think that could (mind you, "could", not "would inevitably") occur in the case of an auxlang as well. I think probably all communities eventually develop some memetic (is that the right word?) features, and I'd assume a culture to be largely a community, just on a different scale.
May be completely wrong though, not exactly my field of specialisation

You're free to have your opinion, but why don't you maybe state what you think rather than simply questioning me. I can't be bothered explaining what i see as the obvious.

If it's fine for you to criticise the language put forth by the OP (not implying it isn't), why shouldn't it be fine for me to criticise the comments put forth by you?
Of course you have no obligation to engage (or stay) in such a discussion or debate in an online forum, but I guess if you feel sharing your opinion is worth the bother, defending it could (not the same as "should") be worth it as well?
Lastly, I find it more productive/constructive to debate the points on which we disagree, rather than simply state "I think you're wrong, but I can't be bothered to explain why".

Of course Esperantists and the like will claim Esperanto has culture etc but i wouldn't expect anything less from people learning a political language. For more info on this see Mezzo Guild's excellent video on Esperanto on youtube.

I will.

[desitrader]

Re-read my post. I make some very valid points. Respond to them or don't, but your comment wasn't needed at all. You complain about gossip then post utterly non-constructive posts which serve no end except trying to start arguments.

I re-read your post but it's still the same nonsense.

Start your own thread on why conlangs are bad.

Leave people who want to discuss Atlas here alone.

It's not that difficult to understand, surely?

[Rodiniye]

I was going to just edit my post but I may as well write a new one. First - you wrote, "Languages from other countries did not meet the 1% (basically because the top 10 languages are widely spoken)." I would suggest saying "Other languages did not meet the 1% requirement (because the top 10 languages are widely spoken)." The original that you have up right now implies that Africa, Asia, and Europe are countries (and yes - there are plenty of people who think that Africa is a country which ranges from sad to offensive).

So turns out I actually do have more questions than I thought about how you made decisions about what languages to base vocabulary off of. Why did you chose Kurdish over Punjabi or Telugu (though Punjabi would have been the more logical language based on the number of speakers)? Also why did you chose Italian over Turkish. Yes they have nearly the same number of speakers, though Turkish has 3 million more if you look at their individual Wikipedia pages, but it would have given you a more diverse set of languages (there are for romance/italic languages on your list).

Like I said, I'm still rather impressed with your ability to create this language so quickly.

I admit my mistake with the Urdu-Kurdish thing, so it has been redone. Now it is "Iranian languages", which includes Kurdish, Pahsto and Farsi. As a group, it looks like it has around 200 milion speakers, which is interesting. Choosing this "group" instead of a single language gives the area some visibility as well. Punjabi would have been an excellent candidate, but I did not want to concentrate too many languages in a single area/country. Hindi and Bengali representing that part of the world I think is fair and enough, and it is fair that I give the opportunity to other areas too.

Italian-Turkish, it is a difficult one. I thought about this for a long time. The problem is, where do you place Turkish? Europe? Asia? It is a big discussion here. 99% of the country is in Asia, so it would not be fair to include in Europe in my opinion. Still Turkish would have been a good candidate in the Asia list, but I prefer the Iranian languages as a more representative candidate.

Inspired by Rodiniye's amazing work to react to our constructive comments and to develop Atlas so quickly, I have put together an elementary Atlas-to-English pop-up dictionary. It contains the current 515 word Atlas dictionary. You could easily make it into an Atlas-Spanish pop-up dictionary by editing the dictionary file (but keep the same filename). To run it, you need a Java-enabled computer. It has been tested only on a Windows 7 computer but it should work on other Java-enabled systems. Just double click on AtlasPopUp.jar.

It starts by loading all the Atlas dictionary words into the large blue text area. Double click on any word and the Atlas >>> English translation will pop-up in the top yellow text field.

You can paste in any Atlas words or sentences you wish, and that will work too. However, it will only provide the pop-ups for the 515 words in the current dictionary, not for variations of those words. That could be incorporated later.

With all the Atlas words there, you can use the pop-up function to learn them.

Here is the zip file: AtlasPopupDictionary.zip

Thanks!! grately appreciated. However I had to change a few roots due to the problem of Kurdish-Urdu now turning to "Iranian languages", so I think around 4 more roots have been added and some have changed language. The new version is already in the Atlas blog!

[Rodiniye]

I will try my first sentence in Atlas. As I learn more, I'll try to improve on it.

Here is the well known language learning sentence that is sometimes used to teach pronunciation to English learners.

The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.

Al-otenke i al-dexu Espana ocires huex i al-wu-goru.

Literally: The rain in the country Spain falls highly-likely in the non-mountain.

I put "al-dexu" (the country) in front of Spain because I don't know the Atlas word for Spain. Probably Atlas has a dictionary of place names such as countries, but perhaps a good way to do that is to use the name (where possible) that the country itself uses. For example: France, Espana, Deutsland. Makes it even more international.

I couldn't find a word for "mainly", so I used "huex" for "highly-likely".

Again, no word for plain. So I used the negation of mountain (flat land) "wu-goru" and put "the" (al-) in front. Are multiple prefixes like that allowed, or would it be "al-wugoru"?

That was fun and interesting!

Your solution is pretty much perfect.

Al-otenke i al-dexu Espana ociris huex i al-wugoru.

The only two things I have to say:
- maybe ocirs instead of ocires? ocirs implies that the action is common/habitual, which I think is what you meant?
- wugoru would be correct, as the negation prefix "wu-" is added to the word with no "-" in between.

As for the rest, it is perfect!

Country names will probably be added soon!

[Cainntear]

I admit my mistake with the Urdu-Kurdish thing, so it has been redone. Now it is "Iranian languages", which includes Kurdish, Pahsto and Farsi. As a group, it looks like it has around 200 milion speakers, which is interesting. Choosing this "group" instead of a single language gives the area some visibility as well. Punjabi would have been an excellent candidate, but I did not want to concentrate too many languages in a single area/country. Hindi and Bengali representing that part of the world I think is fair and enough, and it is fair that I give the opportunity to other areas too.

Italian-Turkish, it is a difficult one. I thought about this for a long time. The problem is, where do you place Turkish? Europe? Asia? It is a big discussion here. 99% of the country is in Asia, so it would not be fair to include in Europe in my opinion. Still Turkish would have been a good candidate in the Asia list, but I prefer the Iranian languages as a more representative candidate.

This is a perfect example of what I was saying about compromises and justifications in the previous thread.

Your language was promised to be "truly international" by including vocabulary from everyone, but everyone's too big, so you've arbitrarily lumped together languages from different families as one group because they represent a country, and then countries represent continents, and at the end of the day, some people will find their language is not represented at all, and they have to learn every word in the language, and the promised equality never materialises. At some point, the justification of "major kanguages" would be likely to emerge in a discussion on this topic, but in terms of equality and social justice, the major languages are already alright -- the speakers most needing equality are the minirity language speakers.

[Cainntear]

And since the origins of Language aren't fully understood, could you define the difference between evolving "naturally" as opposed to "not naturally", and explain why should it matter when it comes to developing an auxlang?

This actually cuts to my biggest reason for being against conlangs in general.

We still don't fully understand what language is or how it works, so how can we make a new language? And how does it affect people's understanding of language when we do?

There's talk of naturalistic and non-naturalistic conlangs, and Esperanto is often described as non-naturalistic, but as far as I can see, it was supposed to be fairly naturalistic when Zamenhof created it, just that the understanding of language structure was more primitive then, and people still had this notion of language change as "degradation", which meant that many natural language features were considered "errors", in effect. Useful things from language were binned, because the author of the conlang didn't know what they did.

[tastyonions]

and yes - there are plenty of people who think that Africa is a country which ranges from sad to offensive.

I experienced this for the first time the other week, hearing someone ask questions like "Who is the president of Africa?" and "What was the original language of Africa?" And she was posing these questions to a guy from the Ivory Coast. Smh.