New auxlang: Atlas

[Rodiniye]

Hi everyone,

Some of you might already know about me. I presented a few days ago a conlang called "Rodinian", which I/we decided was better off as an artlang than as an auxlang.

I have taken notes and learnt from all my mistakes, and I think I have built now a real auxlang. Main highlights:

- Vocabulary formed with only above 500 roots, from which all other words are formed.
- Vocabulary following this formula: 10 most spoken languages in the world (L1+L2) and, apart from these, 2 most spoken languages in every continent, as long as they were spoken by at least 1% of the World population.
- Easy phonetics. Vowels a,e,i,o,u and 18 consonants with no difficult sounds. Use of romanic alphabet with no accents.
- Easy/simplified grammar: no declensions, no exceptions at all. Easy verbs (only 2 morphemes possible).
- Gender neutral, although specifying gender is possible.
- Use of grammar particles make complex sentences very easy to use.

The grammar book is only 20 pages long, compared to the 100 pages of Rodinian, so as you can see, things are simplified.

You will find more information here (including grammar book and dicitonary)

http://atlas-language.blogspot.com.es/

I hope you like it, and I will be waiting for your comments and thoughts on this.

[Rodiniye]

Obviously if you don't like the idea of auxlangs and how they can contribute to our society then this won't make sense to you either.

Atlas is, however, much more simple and easy than my previous project. It is made from scratch and using a different grammar and ideas. Only taking a look at its phonemes you notice how different it is.

Thanks!

[Ezy Ryder]

I don't see how this is any different to the other language you invented.

Didn't you read the OP?

it's still no different to every other constructed language out there.

That's a bit of an exaggeration...

Language is supposed to evolve naturally.

Could you elaborate? What makes it "supposed" to evolve naturally?
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?

EDIT: Okay, I guess by saying it's no different from both the previous iteration and other conlangs, you meant the "it's not a natural language" aspect. But that still doesn't explain what difference does it make, considering the OP's purpose for it.

[Xenops]

My, Rodiniye, you pumped that out quickly! I didn't expect to hear from you again for some time, considering how long it took for Rodinian to develop. I would look at the grammar, but my Internet isn't working as it should (many Google sites, and others, are not loading today). For my constructed artlang, Nansha, it might take me an hour to decide on how I want the greetings to sound.

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.

[tommus]

It still has no culture,

This is a totally uncalled-for comment. Did you expect Rodiniye to develop a culture in a week or so?

Rodiniye, I suggest you totally ignore useless comments like this. I appreciate the huge amount of work you must have put in in such a short time. I appreciate how you took so many "serious" comments into account. I hope you wasted no time on useless comments.

I suggest that those who hate auxlangs waste their time and our time elsewhere.

I for one intend to have a close look at Atlas and I hope you will get lots of positive comments and suggestions. You have a very interesting project and I know that the constructive members of this Forum will provide sensible feedback.

[Rodiniye]

This is a totally uncalled-for comment. Did you expect Rodiniye to develop a culture in a week or so?

Rodiniye, I suggest you totally ignore useless comments like this. I appreciate the huge amount of work you must have put in in such a short time. I appreciate how you took so many "serious" comments into account. I hope you wasted no time on useless comments.

I suggest that those who hate auxlangs waste their time and our time elsewhere.

I for one intend to have a close look at Atlas and I hope you will get lots of positive comments and suggestions. You have a very interesting project and I know that the constructive members of this Forum will provide sensible feedback.

I was really looking forward to see your reaction. Seeing that initially it is possitive, it means that I have been working in the right direction.

Hopefully people will have the opportunity and the time to explore a bit and see how simple its grammar is and how easy the "word creation" (and learning) process is.

I will be updating the blog with more content.

[aokoye]

It still has no culture,

This is a totally uncalled-for comment. Did you expect Rodiniye to develop a culture in a week or so?

Rodiniye, I suggest you totally ignore useless comments like this. I appreciate the huge amount of work you must have put in in such a short time. I appreciate how you took so many "serious" comments into account. I hope you wasted no time on useless comments.

I suggest that those who hate auxlangs waste their time and our time elsewhere.

I for one intend to have a close look at Atlas and I hope you will get lots of positive comments and suggestions. You have a very interesting project and I know that the constructive members of this Forum will provide sensible feedback.

I would argue that the sentences I bolded above were also pretty uncalled for. I have no desire to learn a conlang for a number of reasons but that doesn't mean my criticism or lauding of them shouldn't matter or isn't "valuable".

That said, Rodiniye I'm impressed that you were able to churn Atlas out as quickly as you did and I think at least some of the changes that you made were smart. I'm a bit intrigued, if not feeling a little iffy, about the languages you chose to base the vocabulary on though given the difference in your claims with Atlas as opposed to Rodinian I have far less to critique in this regard. As an aside, your website you list one the languages that influenced the vocab in Atlas as "Urdu-Kurdish". Did you mean "Kurdish"?

[tommus]

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!

[aokoye]

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.

[tommus]

I would argue that the sentences I bolded above were also pretty uncalled for. I have no desire to learn a conlang for a number of reasons but that doesn't mean my criticism or lauding of them shouldn't matter or isn't "valuable".

Perhaps I was a bit harsh. I was not targeting my comments at you, because your comments are critical, positive and constructive. And I have no problem with critical comments on things on the Forum (you may recall my considerable criticism of Rodinian). But I think that people who make only unpleasant, negative comments contribute nothing constructive to this Forum.