Complexity in language

Complexity in language

adapted from a 16 Dec 96 post by Jim Grossman

Mia s Soderquist wrote:

What are some interesting ideas that I could incorporate a language to make it unusual, but (here's the catch) not too difficult to learn or use for English speakers?
I have been talking to a few friends who are interested in working on this language together, but we want to start out with a general understanding of how it works before we start messing with it to see what we end up with. It is sort of a game.
It will ruin the fun for some of the players if it were to be too difficult, since their interest is more in the creative process rather than the language angle.

A. It's my understanding that the languages that tend to be perceived as the most difficult are those most dissimilar to the languages that the student already knows. No, as far as I know, this is not a scientific statement, merely a rule of thumb. Yes, there are complicating factors:

auxlangs, for example, can compensate for their dissimilarity to their student's languages by being artificially regular,
people with a lot of experience at learning languages might have an easier time learning the strange ones than than initially monolingual students

Be All That As It May, it seems to me that making a conlang that would be easy for English speakers would entail making a conlang that has a lot of grammar in common with English.

B. The latter consideration is NOT a criticism, and I am NOT being sarcastic either. Although relexified English is not the goal for most conlangers, maximally exotic grammar (exotic from an English-speaker's point of view, that is) does not have to be the goal either. Though I have tried to make my projects exotic, I have occasionally toyed with the idea of a streamlined version of English. Natural languages are so complicated, trying to write a grammar for a simplified version of one would, I am sure, be a satisfying challenge. (Come to think of it, some of the folks on this list may have already risen to it.)

C. We would not necessarily be talking about re-inventing Basic English here. In the conlang game I envision, the participants would change one componant of English at a time. They would write sample journal entries incorporating these changes, and then move on to either a) revising the changes to suit the tastes of the participants, or b)incorporating new changes. This process would continue over time until the participants were satisfied that their product just wasn't English anymore.

spelling Need I say more?
phonology Do we really need English "th" & "r"? Change the vowels and make a new accent! Which clusters do you wanna permit? Do you want photography to be the art of taking fuh-TAH-grufs? How would you change sentence stress and intonation if it were up to you?
the nouns dogs, dresses, children, children's ...
the verb system (You could have a FIELD DAY simplifying the English verbs system.)
the prepositions (what if they were more like the prepositions in some other language?)
the other parts of speech
sentence embedding
& so on & so on ....

C. You wouldn't necessarily have to invent novel rules to make changes in your version of English. You could also take the irregularities of our language, and make them the regular rules in yours. For instance, your children might be living in houseren with their parentren.

D. Does it matter if your language represents an exact extrapolation; a hypothetical descendent of modern English simplified according to the rigorous demands of auxlang simplification? Only if you say it does. Otherwise, there is no law against inventing something purely whimsical.

Return to Conlang-related topics|Back to FAQ page