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| A Guide to International Auxiliary Languages
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| There have been many attempts at creating international auxiliary languages to unite the peoples of the world. The most famous of them all by far is [[Esperanto]]. But how does one even create such a language?
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| This will be a guide on how to create an international auxiliary language, starting with the goals of constructed languages and auxiliary languages more specifically. Followed by phonemic inventory, phonotactics, vocabulary, grammar and orthography.
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| If you ever want to create your own international auxiliary language or want to see if any existing IAL is any good at all, you can refer to this essay. This will be pretty in depth on some issues so feel free to skip around if you want to. This guide isn't and cannot be exhaustive, though, because there's just so much to cover when it comes to language. I will cover the most important parts, though.
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| ==Goals of Conlanging==
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| The only way in which a constructed language can be objectively bad is if it doesn’t achieve the goals it was designed towards. If you want to create a conlang, the very first and most fundamentally important step is to establish what its goals are and to never lose track of them. To determine the goals, I recommend you to ask yourself these questions:
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| Who is this language for? If it is for humans, it is important to determine what their '''material conditions''' look like. What sort of vocabulary makes sense, what loanwords to they have? On which (if any) media to they write their language? If they chisel on stone to write, an angular orthography makes sense. If they use brushes on leaves or paper, flowing orthography makes more sense. In which direction do they write? If they primarily write on treebark, long and thin orthography that's written downward first instead of sidewards first makes the most sense. You want to think about these things well because humans are smart and they adapt to their conditions.
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| More abstract things are also important to ask yourself. Do I want my language to be isolating, agglutinative, synthetic? Do I want to base my language upon already existing languages or language families? If you do, that's completely valid, it is your language afterall. The question that's the most important to keep in mind as you work on you language is whether or not you mean it to be a '''naturalistic''' language. Naturalistic languages are languages that could feasibly exist in the real world and could be spoken by a real nation on our planet. There is over 7.000 languages and many more dialects, sociolects, pidgins and extinct languages, so practically anything you do can be considered naturalistic. But generally, naturalistic languages are considered to be somewhat complicated, but not overly so. They are generally not hyper-isolating nor polysythetic. They generally have some phonotactic restrictions, not too little. They generally do not have under 4 vowels and not over 30 consonants. They generally do not have over 20 cases. If you have only some of these features, you're going to be fine, especially if you conform to your other goals, but if you implement most or all of these extremes, it's not really a naturalistic language anymore. Only because some language has a couple of these features, that doesn't mean that it is still naturalistic to merge them all in a single language. You can't assume that everything is naturalistic just because you got those features from real languages. Though if you don't want a naturalistic language, disregard all of this.
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| ===Goals of International Auxiliary Languages===
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| If you want to create an international auxlang (I will call it just '''IAL''' from now on), the rules kind of change a bit because they are very specific types of conlangs. Generally, an IAL aims to be a language that can be used by speakers of either multiple, most, or all languages to communicate with each other. That's easy enough, but what makes an IAL good? Here is where the difficulty comes in. An IAL should be easy to learn, speak and write for most or all of it's intended users, but it should also have enough features so that people can express themselves like they're used to in their mothertongue. So, obviously, one must come at the sacrifice of another. The difficulty of IALs is to balance these opposites in a way that works. You cannot have that many grammatical structures and quirks in order for some speakers to express themselves, because that becomes difficult and unwieldy for all other speakers. And you cannot have ultra-minimalist grammar because that is unwieldy und hard to learn aswell and for other reasons. That and the fact that there are just so many languages and dialects is why IALs are so difficult to get right.
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| Remember these goals:
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| *Make your sounds '''compatible''' (or compatible with some concessions) with all major world languages.
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| *Make your sounds '''easy''' to produce and to hear.
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| *Make the grammar as '''plain''' and uninventive as possible.
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| *Make the grammar easy to learn and '''elegant''' to use.
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| *Make sure to equally '''represent''' all nations and people.
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| For the rest of the guide I will be talking specifically about IALs that aim to be global, as an auxlang for specifically germanic, slavic or romance language speakers would be very limited in scope, therefore easy to achieve, but also, the remaining guide applies to these smaller auxlangs aswell. You also have to ask yourself who your speakers are supposed to be. If your IAL is supposed to be used mainly by diplomats or politicians, then simplicity is less important. But like I said, this would limit the scope quite a bit, so I will assume that your IAL is catered not only to diplomats but also to peole who just want to order a beer in a foreign country.
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| ==Phonemic Inventory==
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| '''Phonemes''' are any sounds in a given language that distinguish meaning. Take for example ''gold'' vs. ''cold''. These words only differ in the first sound, one being /g/, the other being /k/. This is called a '''minimal pair''' and it means that /g/ and /k/ are different phonemes. Now that we know what phonemes are, we can look at the phonemic inventory of our IAL. We want to have the most common, easiest to learn and fewest sounds possible in order to make our language as internationally compatible as possible. It is advisable for anyone who wants to conlang to become somewhat well versed in the '''[[IPA]]'''. In my essay about [[Essay:Why mocking "aks" is pretty racist, actually: clearing up misconceptions about language|clearing up misconceptions about language]], I already spoke about how I dislike the IPA because of its eurocentrism, but there's no way around the fact that it has become the definite standard for phonetic transcription. As much as I dislike the IPA, I will be using it for my essays and guides.
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| ===Vowels===
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| First, let's look at vowels because they're easier to get right. The most common vowel phonemes are /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. This is the classic '''five-vowel system'''. Many IAL's have used it, including Lingwa de planeta, Novial or Ido. These vowels are represented in most major languages and are relatively easy to learn. In my opinion, the five-vowel system is well balanced between simplicity and variety. The only other vowel that's okay to add is the schwa /ə/ because it is quite literally the sound that takes the least effort to produce.
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| ====Diphthongs====
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| Diphthongs are two vowels spoken in succession. I would personally advise against implementing them, as they can be hard to learn how to pronounce and some of them are pretty rare outside of germanic languages. If you really want diphthongs, you could do /ai/ or /ei/ but I think five vowels are enough.
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| ===Consonants===
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| Now we get to the hard part, consonants. The most common consonant phonemes are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/ and /n/. These should probably be in any IAL, except for /p/ because it is not in Arabic, one of the most widely spoken languages. Also /p/ can be harder to learn than phonemes like /m/ for example. A common feature of IALs in the past has been to add a rhotic sound /r/ and just tell speakers to pronounce it the way the rhotic in their mother tongue is pronounced. Problem is that not all languages even have a rhotic, like some indigenous Turtle Island languages, Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien and many others. If you think that the compromise that past IAL's have made is valid, then go for it, but I am not a fan. Especially because, first of all, speakers can then sometimes tell what your native language is based on how you pronounce the rhotic, second of all, many speakers would have to learn how to make rhotic sounds (they aren’t that easy to learn), and, like, which one do they choose when there's no standard? Third, it may hinder understanding between speakers from different nations if they pronounce their rhotic sounds very differently. I don't think this is in the spirit of an internationalist project.
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| Some IAL's opt for consonants such as the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ ("th" in English). Do not do this. These sounds are incredibly rare outside of English and even languages that do have one of these, like Arabic, don't have both of them and speakers need to hear the difference in voicedness, which would be hard enough on its own, but learning how to pronounce these dental fricatives in the first place is very hard aswell. Do not make this mistake. This brings up a further point. Things you might take for granted as an English speaker are just simply not a thing in other languages. Distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants for example. It can be very hard for other people to hear and to produce the difference between the words ''bull'' and ''pull''. On the other hand, there are features that you as an English speaker might not think about (because it's not really a part of English) such as a phonemic distinction between aspiration, tone, nasalization, vowel length, creakiness, pharyngealization and so on. I would recommend not to add these features in an IAL, though, as they're hard to learn and to hear for speakers who aren’t familiar with them.
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| I would recommend consonants that are easy to learn and somewhat frequent across languages. You'll have to do your own research, but a good example is the voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/. It's one of the easiest sounds to produce, simply by blowing air through both of your lips as if you were blowing out a candle. It is also a phoneme in widely spoken languages such as Spanish, Japanese, Turkish and Korean and in some dialects of English, Italian and Bengali. That's why /ɸ/ would be an acceptable candidate for a phoneme in your consonant inventory.
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| ====Affricates====
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| Affricates, are just consonant diphthongs, so two consonants that are spoken as one sounds basically. The ''st'' in ''street'' is an affricate, for example. And just like vowel diphthongs, I advise against affricates in order to keep the phonology as tidy as possible. This plays into phonotactics aswell. More on that later.
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| ===Phoneme Clusters===
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| It is important to check, once you have assembled your consonant inventory, if some of your phonemes clash with each other. For example, the phoneme I just mentioned /ɸ/ and another common phoneme /f/ sound very similar and that might be very difficult for some speakers. You should avoid clusters, meaning avoid too many phonemes that have a similar place and manner of articulation. I would advise you not to go beyond 6 vowels and 15 consonants including affricates and diphthongs.
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| ==Phonotactics==
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| Phonotactics determine which sounds can go where. English has very loose phonotactic rules in terms of syllable structure. A syllable is basically just a vowel surrounded by beginning consonants (the onset) and end consonants (the coda of a syllable). English for example allows arguably too many sounds in one syllable. One example of this is the word ''strengths'' [st(ʃ)rɛŋ(k)θs], which is a single syllable with 9 phonemes: CC(C)CVC(C)CC. This would be too complex for an IAL. Do not go beyond CCVCC. (Remember that this is the maximum allowed length of a syllable, not the only allowed syllable length). But honestly, for the sake of elegance and straight forwardness, I would personally use CV, not more.
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| Depending on which phonemes you chose in your inventory, you might make to put mild restrictions on some of them. A lot of European speakers will have trouble pronouncing /ŋ/ (as in king) at the onset of a syllable. In this instance, I would limit the usage of this phoneme to the coda of any syllable. But of course, you have to look at your phonemic inventory and decide on a case by case basis, and you will likely have to make some concessions because too restrictive phonotactics aren’t a good idea either. First because it limits your vocabulary, secondly because some speakers might find it weird not to be able to say something that they are used to saying in their native language.
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| ==Morphosyntax==
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| This is basically a fancy way of saying grammar. It consists of morphology, the innerworkings of words, and syntax, the innerworkings of phrases and sentences.
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| ===Morphology===
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| A '''morpheme''' is the smallest building block of a language that itself carries any meaning. A letter or a sound are even smaller building blocks but they don't inherently mean anything semantic. As an example, let's look at the english word ''unfathomable''. If we break this word down into it's smallest meaning-carrying parts, we get: ''un''-, which means ''not'', ''fathom'', which is the '''nucleus''' of the word and carries the most meaning, and -''able'', which turns the verb into an adverb and expresses the ability to perform that original verb. In IALs and constructed languages in general, how many morphemes are allowed in a word is very important to think about. There's a spectrum, from isolating to synthetic, which categorizes languages based on how many morphemes are allowed inside of one word. Isolating means that one morpheme equals one word. If English was more isolating, it would maybe not be ''unfathomable'' but rather ''not fathom possible'' or something like that. Agglutinative languages tend to sort of glue a lot of morphemes together to make them into a new word, slightly more than in English. Synthetic language structures are very unfamiliar to English speakers, however. Synthetic languages not only glue morphemes together but every added morpheme changes the entire word in a way that makes it impossible to just take the morpheme away again. Morphology doesn’t just affect adverbs like ''unfathomable'' but also nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. You are making an IAL, so I recommend you to strike a balance between isolating and agglutinative, which is called ''analytic''. In my opinion, it is easier for speakers of agglutinative languages to adapt to more isolating ones, and harder for speakers of isolating languages to learn agglutinative languages. It is hard in both cases for speakers to learn synthetic languages, so I would advise against making your IAL synthetic. Synthetic languages are rare and complicated to learn, they are also very hard to design for someone who doesn’t speak one of them natively. I have tried and failed to construct synthetic languages, because I gradually slipped further and further into agglutinativity.
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| ===Syntax===
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| Syntax refers to how phrases and sentences are constructed. The most basic rule you want to establish is '''word order'''. In a basic sentence like ''she kissed her'', there is a subject (''she''), a main verb (''kissed''), and an object (''her''). This is called SVO word order, which is one of the most widely used word orders. SOV order, as in ''she her kissed'', is also very widely used, though. It is up to you which one to use, especially since it's not that hard to learn for your speakers.
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| Having a set word order is important because you can do things like inversion, which is useful for questions or other things. Speaking of questions, they should be marked not only by rising tone but also by word order or some other means, because the rising tone alone may not be understood by many speakers around the world.
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| ===Redundancy===
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| Redundancy is a concept that can, in my opinion, only apply to conlangs, because redundancy does not exist in natural languages. Natural languages in the real world evolve through the dialectical process and every feature of a natural language has material reasons to exist, otherwise it would result in contradictions between the needs of speakers and the language's features that would synthesize into the adding or dropping of features. Double case marking in natural languages exists for the sake of clarity, making sure the hearer has two chances of understanding you instead of only one. This is not redundancy because it serves a clear purpose. When creating naturaliatic conlangs, we want to imitate this process as closely as possible. But IAL's are generally not supposed to be naturalistic. Naturalistic features help learners learn the language but it should not be on your mind all the time as it should be when creating explicitly naturalistic languages. When the main goal is internationalism, one can definitely talk about redundancy. You should avoid redundancies in your IAL unless you have good reasons to implement them and they conform to the rules that I laid out in the beginning.
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| ==Vocabulary==
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| Vocabulary is a very fun part of making languages. It is less technical than all that phonetics and grammar stuff. There are some pitfalls here too, though. You must keep all your phonotactics in check and make sure you conform to them when creating new words. But honestly, when you realize that one or two words don't fit in then you can just change them. This is a constructed language afterall.
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| There is two approaches to making the vocabulary: the loanword approach or the your own words approach. What I mean is that you can choose to coin your own original words or you can loan words from already existing languages (just remember to apadt them to your phonology and phonotactics). Both have upsides and downsides. Loanwords can be helpful when you want to adopt scientific terms or established names for proper nouns into your IAL. Also, borrowing words can be a fun easter egg reward for learners of your language. Imagine learning an IAL and coming across a word that sounds like a word from your native language and means the same aswell. I feel like that's kind of motivating. The downside of loanwords is that it is practically impossible to keep count from which languages you borrowed which word so that you don’t play favorites. If you are only going to be borrowing from English or French, then that's not only unfair to everyone else but also not very internationalist. In that case it is better to coin your own words. My recommendation is that you should borrow words that are incredibly international already, like the word ''helium'' for example, and endonyms for nations. It is advisable to exclusively use endonyms for nations and nationalities in order not to alienate your language learners. All proper nouns like place names or personal names should be endonymic and borrowed, in my opinion, and the rest should be coined independently. However, if you do want to borrow more than that, that's valid, just remember your goal of internationality.
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| The fun part about coining words is that you can be as creative as you want. You can use onomatopeia to come up with a word and use that word to come up with new words, like, ''nam'' could mean ''to eat'' (because it kind of sounds like you're chomping on something) and then eating a lot could be ''namnam''. You can put words together to make new words, you can merge them, you can split a word into two pieces and put another in the middle, you can put suffixes or prefixes before or after a word to create a new one. This is how you create most of your vocabulary. This derivational approach is especially good for verbs, nouns and adjectives. You can also put your phonemic inventory and phonotactics rules into a conlang wordcreator and it will output every possible combination if this is what you want.
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| ===Word classes===
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| =====Nouns=====
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| English has a distinction between count and non-count nouns. For example, you cannot say ''many golds'', you can only say ''much gold''. You cannot say ''much cows'', you can only say ''many cows''. This is incredibly hard to for people unfamiliar with the concept to understand, so I would not add this feature. If you really want to you can add it but then at least make it so that every noun is both countable and non-countable, like ''fire'' for example (''much fire'' (non-count) refers to a big fire, whereas ''many fires'' (count) refers to an array of different fire sources. Like I said, this distinction can be difficult, though, so be careful.
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| I generally do not find the grammatical distinction between proper and common nouns to be important at all, so just omit it.
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| You need to have a way to refer to multiples of any nouns, but there is more ways of doing that than just a plural ''-s'' suffix: you can have a prefix, an infix or a whole different word to mark the number of a noun. ''-S'' works well too, though, because a lot of speakers are already familiar with it because of English and Spanish, but be careful about eurocentrism creeping in.
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| Every noun should have a nominative case, some way to talk about possession (through auxiliaries or a genitive case) and some way to make that noun the receiver or the object of a transitive verb. This should be done through strict word order, not cases in my opinion.
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| =====Pronouns=====
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| Pronouns are words that can replace a noun or noun phrase. You will need the first, second and third person singular and plural pronouns as a base which you can expand at your will. You must remember that the broad goal of internationalism also means you have to include all genders as well. You cannot alienate tens of millions of people by having your vocabulary exclude their gender. You must at minimum include male, female and non-binary third person singular pronouns, but more are highly recommended.
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| Some languages have a division between exclusive and inclusive we (whether or not the person you are speaking to is included in the we). This may be interesting to play around with, it's not necessarily that hard for anyone to learn and some speakers would definitely enjoy having this feature in the IAL they are learning.
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| I would recommend you to get rid of dummy subjects. For example: ''It's dark at night''. What's ''it'' supposed to mean? Speakers of germanic languages have no problem understanding dummy pronouns but they're not necessary at all in my opinion.
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| If you want to add relative pronouns as in ''the statue, which overlooks the city'', I would advise you to just add one, not multiple regardless of whether the relative pronoun is referring to a person, a location or an inanimate noun. Double marking is very naturalistic but can also be annoying or difficult to learn. You should use it sparingly.
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| =====Verbs=====
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| For verbs, it is important to keep the conjugation as simple as possible. Keep the inflection very tidy and leave out stuff like gerund, progressive aspect or agreement. You can have an inflectional tense system, but I would do it through affixes or auxiliaries, not through ablauts, though this is not self evident, as native standard chinese speakers and many others have no grammatical verb tenses and get that information through context alone; afterall, ''I work out yesterday'' is semantically the same as ''I worked out yesterday''. It is up to you as to which one you prefer. There is no purely semantic reason to implement passive voice in your IAL, though if you want to, you can. Be aware of how passive voice can be used to warp a sentence in order to induce victimblaming or indifference in the hearer or reader, as used in the ongoing [[Israel|Israeli]] and western [[Nakba|genocide]] of the [[Palestine|Palestinian]] people by bourgeois news coverage. For that reason alone, I recommend to abstain from passive voice.
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| =====Adjectives=====
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| There's not that much to say about adjectives. You can do the comparative and superlative forms using affixes, auxiliaries or pure context and I don't think it makes a huge difference. You should also come up with a simple and regular way to make nouns and other words into adjectives, most likely through affixation.
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| =====Interjections=====
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| Interjections are interesting because you don’t need to come up with them. In fact you shouldn't really even try to. In conlangs spoken by a fictional nation, this is necessary, but in this case, the speakers are all real human beings existing right now on our shared earth. They will use their own versions of ''ouch'' or ''uh-oh'' and they will be understood regardless of whatever you prescribe.
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| =====Expletives=====
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| Profanities are kind of similar to interjections, meaning people will use them naturally. But unlike interjections, you have to keep a close eye on expletives. That's because a lot of them stem from [[racism]], [[ableism]], [[transphobia]] and so on. There is literally no reason for you to come up with your version of the n-word or the t-slur. I also dislike profanities and insults about sex (as in shaming women in particular for having it), masturbation (as in ''jerk''), marriage status (as in ''bastard''), animals (as in ''monkey, pig, whale''), physical attractiveness and so on. Limit your profanities and insults to taboo but inoffensive topics such as excrement, words for butt, trash and so on. You can also have insults that are words for a person that behaves counter to what we as marxist-leninists agree to be progressive, which includes egocentrism, cowardice, willing ignorance, bigotry, [[chauvinism]], fence-sitting and so on. Basically what I'm trying to get at is, just think about whether or not any insult or profanity could perpetuate any sort of reactionary sentiment, then add or omit consequently. You will also need different cursing levels for different situations. For example, ''crap'' is lighter than ''shit'', which is lighter than ''fuck''.
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| Expletives will be used differently between nations according to what they regard as socially taboo. As the language creator, you have certain prescriptive powers that you can use to omit socially conservative expletives but the language will evolve regardless of your efforts, which means that slurs could emerge at some point and you could do nothing about it.
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| =====Determiners=====
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| Determiners include articles and certain demonstrative and interrogative words such as ''a(-n), the, this, that, who, where'' and so on. My advice is not make too many distinctions. Especially the difference between definite and indefinite articles is very hard for Russians and many other speakers to wrap their heads around. You should only have definite articles and only one (if any) demonstrative article because the difference between ''this'' and ''that'' is also difficult for most non English speakers.
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| ===Word-Formation===
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| If we look at how words come to be in natural languages, we can take away some lessons on how to create some of the words in IALs, since a naturalistic vocabulary can be helpful for learners, especially because vocabulary always takes the longest when learning any language.
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| There is a couple of word-formation processes that linguists have compiled over the years but you don’t have to know them all by heart.
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| Here is a list of word-formation processes:
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| {| class="wikitable"
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| |+
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| !Process
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| !Description
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| !Examples
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| |-
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| |Derivation
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| |The word is formed by adding affixes.
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| |'''en'''courage, abil'''ity''', aware'''ness''', politi'''cal'''
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| |-
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| |Compounding
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| |The word is comprised of two other words in whole.
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| |nutshell, carefree, small talk
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| |-
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| |Conversion
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| |The word is formed by using it in a new word class.
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| |(to) water, (to) empty (a bottle), (a long) walk
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| |-
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| |Blending
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| |The word is comprised of parts of two other words.
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| |brunch, smog, sitcom
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| |-
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| |Clipping
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| |The word is formed leaving out its last part.
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| |lab, uni, van
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| |-
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| |Abbreviation
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| |The word is formed using some of the letters of its long form.
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| |TV, USSR, laser
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| |}
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| ====Inclusion through Vocabulary====
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| You should equally represent all nations not only through phonemic inventory and grammar, but also through vocabulary. What I mean is that you should never use exonyms for any nation or region in your IAL. Always use the endonym, the name that the nation or region gives itself. A good lithmus test for IALs is the Germany test because Germany has a ton of different exonyms. Germany should ideally be named something along the lines of ''Deutschland'' in your IAL. It shouldn't be named something like ''Germania'' because that sounds kind of icky, nor ''Alemannia'', because that is already a name for a specific region of Germany. After your IAL passes the Germany test, it has to pass the Japan test aswell, because the endonym ''Nippon'' is almost never used in any IAL's that I've seen. I urge you to always use endonyms even when any nation's exonym is much more widespread. You should rather have 95% of all speakers learn a new word for a country than to alienate a whole country from your language. Of course, you need to adapt the endonyms in order for them to conform to your phonemic inventory and phonotactic rules.
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| I mentioned this in the word-classes section but it is very important so I need to make sure I communicate this as many times as I can. Inclusion of non-binary genders is essential. I touched on pronouns before but other words are affected too. Either you make an orthographically and phonetically distinct word for every gender when it comes to occupations or you make every occupation '''epicene''', which means complete gender neutrality. Even though I personally think the latter is more suitable for an IAL, if you choose the former, you cannot make the female or non-binary word for baker for example a derivative of the male word, for example, the English word ''poet'' was not too long ago the specifically male counterpart of the female ''poetess''. This etymology means that the word poet, while being gender neutral today, cannot be epicene because it hasn't been long enough for it to lose all it's implications. You should, instead of that, have a nucleus morpheme and some form of affix for every different gender. Because then, even when you accidentally exclude some genders, they can come up with their own affix very easily. Also, IAL words don't really need to have extensive etymology, but making the gender neutral word or nucleus for baker too similar to any words that specify upon gender is not a good idea, so just be vigilant. All in all, I would advise you to have some sort of word nucleus for any occupation that can be altered via derivation to serve many purposes including addressing genders outside of the male-female binary. Let's say the verb to bake is /'pomo/, the noun bake, could be the same thing, but through word order and context, speakers can distinguish them. Then you can have a suffix for someone who performs that verb /la/, so then baker, someone who bakes, becomes /'pomo,la/. Then you can add gender markers /'pomo,lana/ for a female baker, /'pomo,lano/ for a male baker, /'pomo,lani/ for a non-binary baker and so on. If you want to talk about multiple of each, you can alter the nucleus by doing something like /'pomo,li/ to mean multiple gender neutral or unknown gender bakers. This is only a rough example of how straight forward it could be to include non-binary genders in IAL's, or you could make it easy for yourself and just make everything epicene, which is also a very valid option.
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| ==Orthography==
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| As much as I would like not to use the Latin script for an IAL, I must concede that it is the most sensible solution for an orthography. Many languages use it natively, including major languages like English, Spanish, French, Turkish, Indonesian and Vietnamese. Some are familiar with it because of a native language transcription system to the Latin script like in Chinese. And some are familiar with it because of imperialism. It is important to acknowledge that we live in a world that is haunted by [[imperialism]] and [[colonialism]]. Many languages adopted the Latin script directly because of colonialism and many speakers are familiar with the Latin script because of English as a lingua franca due to Statesian and British imperialism. We cannot ignore that reality. The Latin script as the world's number one writing system is inherently illegitimate but we must make a concession and have at least a Latin transcription of any IAL purely for practicability reasons.
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| Ideally, you could have a system like in Chinese, where there is both a Latin and a native script. Depending on how simple your phonemic inventory is, you could invent some sort of abjad or syllabary. I like these better than alphabets because they're more concise than alphabets, more elegant and pretty easy to learn. In general syllabaries are exponentially harder to learn the more phonemes are in your language, but since I recommended the five vowel system, I doesn’t really matter that much. The most important thing is, again, regularity.
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| There is also the problem of the internet and computers. If you invent a new script, new letters or use rare letters, the language becomes impossible or a pain to write on most keyboards. This is also another reason to at least make a Latin transcription of your IAL.
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| ===Latin Transcription===
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| You should make the transcription as phonemic as possible. What that means is to have regular spelling rules without exception and to make no weird design choices as to what graphemes you use (for example, you shouldn't use the grapheme ''m'' to denote the sound /s/, because that would look very weird to most people). I advised against affricates, but if you have added them, you should use a digraph for them instead of a diacritic. Diacritics in general make the language harder to type on a keyboard, so just use digraphs or some other Latin letter.
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| ==Why bother?==
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| Through this whole essay, I assumed that IALs are a goal that's at all worth pursuing. But is that true? Why have so many people of the past tried to create IALs? What drove them? Well, I think that there are two main reasons. The first one is that it's just an interesting and fun exercise for nerds like me; it is a long and difficult project to work on. For me personally, conlanging is also a way to practice some of the things I study at university and to have a reason other than intrinsic drive to educate myself about languages and linguistics. The second big reason why people want to create IALs is the wish for solidarity between the nations of this earth and for all people to have an international language to connect them and to make communication easier. It is important to note that the most amount of IALs historically became a thing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, English had not yet been quite as well established as a lingua franca, so there was a void to fill. But even today, with British and Statesian imperialism having exported the English language practically to the entire globe, there is still a reason for IALs. Not for them to fill a void of lingua francas, but to challenge the status quo of US-led western imperialism, of which linguistic imperialism is an important branch.
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| English as a lingua franca is bad (bad meaning both ineffective and problematic) for two fundamental reasons. First of all, it is ineffective because it fails at every single goal that I laid out for IAL creation at the beginning of the essay:
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| *Its phonology is incompatible with not only most major languages but also almost every single language in the world. The most egregious offender is the dental fricative, which is not only rare but also very hard to learn, especially in its voiced-unvoiced distinction.
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| *Its grammar is neither easy to learn nor very elegant to use (don't even get me started on the spelling).
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| *It doesn’t represent all people equally. There are only four third person pronouns, two of them being very controversial among speakers right now. It uses a lot of exonyms. It is much easier to learn for native speakers of germanic languages than it is for any other nation of people. I could go on.
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| Not only is English technically bad, it is also historically bad. The only reason why a language that formed in the southern part of a small island full of bogs and marshes off the coast of Europe has become the most spoken language in the world is and only ever could be because of colonialism and imperialism. Some people might even say that the dominance of the English language is inherently colonial and reactionary because of this reason (that's me, I am some people).
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| A truly internationalist alternative that's based on liberation and solidarity is, in my opinion, a goal worthy of pursuit. Maybe your language will become even more popular than Esperanto, who knows?
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| Thank you guys, gals and non-binary pals for reading my second essay! I would love to get criticism on this, as well as suggestions on what I may have left unaddressed.
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