New auxlang: Atlas

[Gomorrita]

The five vowels are exactly those of Spanish or Modern Greek, while the consonants are all in Greek (except a couple which have very similar ones anyway). Speakers of these two languages should find extremely to pronounce Atlas then.

[Rodiniye]

The five vowels are exactly those of Spanish or Modern Greek, while the consonants are all in Greek (except a couple which have very similar ones anyway). Speakers of these two languages should find extremely to pronounce Atlas then.

All consonants and vowels are found in English as well as far as I am concerned, and in many many languages (or as you said, very similar ones), so it should be easy for a lot of people!

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.

I understand you, but when creating an auxlang, you need to take the vocabulary from somewhere. All 6000 languages cannot be represented, so you need .. yes, to compromise.

I think the formula behind Atlas is quite fair. Yes, people will think oh why this one and not this one, or why the 10 most spoken + 6 and not the 15 most spoken ones, that is true. But I have chosen what I believe is a good way of doing it. Rodinian had words from many languages but yes, the selection of those languages or the quantity of words for every language was completely made up. Agreed. This one follows a formula and all languages have around 30 roots.

It is pretty difficult that somebody does not speak or know one of the languages. In fact, most of the population will speak at least one or two of them. The only reason for Iranian languages to be in front of others is because that way Atlas could reach more people. I am sure Punjabi speakers will identify themselves with Hindi, Bengali or English for instance, whereas people in other areas did not have representation.

[Ezy Ryder]

but when creating an auxlang, you need to take the vocabulary from somewhere.

Personally, I'm curious as to how did you decide against going for an a priori lexicon?

This one follows a formula and all languages have around 30 roots.

One problem I could see with that, is that it's possible (likely?) that 1) some roots will end up being more productive (there'll be more words you can get from them than others); and 2) (especially considering what I just mentioned), they may provide uneven text coverage (i.e., some will occur much more often in a text. For example "the" will cover a much larger part of the average English text than "get", let alone "superficial". So, some roots will be more beneficial to find easier to remember).

[Gomorrita]

The five vowels are exactly those of Spanish or Modern Greek, while the consonants are all in Greek (except a couple which have very similar ones anyway). Speakers of these two languages should find extremely to pronounce Atlas then.

All consonants and vowels are found in English as well as far as I am concerned, and in many many languages (or as you said, very similar ones), so it should be easy for a lot of people!

I actually should have said that Spanish and Modern Greek have exactly those vowels and no other vowel. They might be found in English, but only if you look among different dialects and always mixed with many other vowels. If English speakers that learn Spanish often struggle pronouncing Spanish vowels, it seems quite obvious to me that they similarly struggle with the pronunciation of this language. I'm not saying that it will be hard for English speakers or any others, just pointing out that it has to be particularly easy for Spanish and Greek speakers. Maybe I am also biased by the fact that I always found vowel sounds more difficult to learn that consonants, while it might not be so by others.

[zenmonkey]

Nice improvement over the last effort - certainly found the example sentences more accessible. Glad to see you didn't give up.

I would challenge the idea that prepositions must be to the point you have - having less words ma be also much easier to use.
The pen is by the book. The book was (written) by George. Please deliver it by 9.

The prepositional clarity may come from verb or situation or use. There is no need for different prepositions there.

[Serpent]

Wow, that escalated quickly
Saying "____ is not a real language" generally isn't an appopriate statement for this forum, whether we're speaking about a conlang, a sign language, a dialect/non-standard variety or something else. Conlangers are welcome here, and threads about specific conlangs shouldn't be used for discussions on whether a universal language is possible/necessary or whether conlangs have a culture. If you do start a new thread for that, please be polite and open-minded. This topic is about as tricky as politics/religion/history.

[tommus]

I updated the popup dictionary application. It is now the "Atlas Multilingual Dictionary". You can select Atlas >>> English or Atlas >>> Spanish. The dictionary files are also updated to the latest (2017-06-25) version of the Atlas Dictionary.

EDIT: another updated version.
Here is the zip file for the application: AtlasPopupDictionaryV3.0.zip

Note for Rodiniye: The dictionary contains duplicate entries for "dake". I assume it is the same word, so in the popup dictionary, I combined the two entries:

English: dake >>> hit, collision

Spanish: dake >>> choque, golpe, colisión

[aokoye]

It is pretty difficult that somebody does not speak or know one of the languages. In fact, most of the population will speak at least one or two of them. The only reason for Iranian languages to be in front of others is because that way Atlas could reach more people. I am sure Punjabi speakers will identify themselves with Hindi, Bengali or English for instance, whereas people in other areas did not have representation.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I did the math and, from the numbers that Ethnologue has, the languages you've chosen make up around 3.928 billion first language speakers. This is actually very generous because I'm assuming you're not looking at most of the Chinese dialects nor most of the Arabic dialects.
If we go with Wikipedia's tally of L1 and L2 speakers (most of which also comes from a Ethnologue) then we get 5.628 billion speakers of the languages that you're using. That still gives us at least 1.872 billion people (so more than the population of China) who don't speak any of the languages that you've chosen. That's nearly 25% of the world's population (if we go with the idea that there are around 7.5 billion people living in the world right now).

edit: so yes - "most" of the population speaks those languages but it isn't hard by any means to find someone who doesn't. An easy example of this is the issues that hospitals have in California (among other states) have in finding interpreters for people who they think speak spanish but in reality only speak a native Mexican language.

[Cainntear]

I understand you, but when creating an auxlang, you need to take the vocabulary from somewhere. All 6000 languages cannot be represented, so you need .. yes, to compromise. [...] I have chosen what I believe is a good way of doing it.

Yes, but once you make that compromise, it is a false claim to describe it as representative -- you have made an arbitrary choice of lexicon. Arguably, a completely novel lexicon would be the only truly "equitable" option, as then speakers of every language are equally (un-)represented.

It is pretty difficult that somebody does not speak or know one of the languages. In fact, most of the population will speak at least one or two of them.

Most of the population of the planet speaks some Chinese, Spanish or English. In fact, if you stuck to English, you'd probably find that people of all nations would know more of the root words than in your proposed language anyway.

As I say, I'm not worried about marginalising majorities -- it's the minorities who need equality.

[Rodiniye]

Nice improvement over the last effort - certainly found the example sentences more accessible. Glad to see you didn't give up.

I would challenge the idea that prepositions must be to the point you have - having less words ma be also much easier to use.
The pen is by the book. The book was (written) by George. Please deliver it by 9.

The prepositional clarity may come from verb or situation or use. There is no need for different prepositions there.

This is a difficult one. Sometimes more is less (or what is the other way around? ). Being an English teacher for a few years, I found out that leaners had more difficulty with those prepositions having lots of meaning (by, in, at, on...) than those with a specific and limited meaning. So that's my experience.

On the other hand, having prepositions with specific meanings helps a lot in word construction. Prepositions can be attached to roots in order to form other words, so it is essential that each preposition has a specific meaning, otherwise the meaning of the new word would not be intuitive.

I hope I have explained myself a bit here