Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

January 15th is Interlingua Day. The people at Interlingua would like you to talk and think about that language during that day. Interlingua's pretty good. I can't say it's my favourite constructed language but I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it grow even more.

http://www.interlingua.com

Can you read it? If you know a romance language, you probably can.

[Qinella]

What are the most popular constructed languages? Esperanto, Ido and LFN?

Of those, and now this one, they all seem to be similar to Italian or Spanish, from the look of them. I mean, I can peruse readings of any of those (Esperanto maybe being the hardest) and sort of get a general idea of what's going on. Is that the point? They're constructed based on the fact that people from so many different native tongues can easily acquire the language?

Of course, this concept bars a whole lot of people, as well, such as Russians, Arabs, and all of Asia.

I'm also curious really why the international polyglot community does not just come together and elect one language to become the one they are all going to get behind and support. I mean, for the average person, learning a constructed language is a pointless endeavor. Having all the various options just shoves it even more into the language enthusiast / hobbyist milieu. But if there were only one, it would seem more pragmatic as there would be hope that it could replace English as the lingua franca.

[mithridates]

Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua are the so-called "big three" and all the other ones don't have any more than a few dozen users. LFN is really new.

I was reading an article the other day about the attitude towards these languages before WWI. I thought it was a universal truth that people don't like constructed languages but before WWI there were quite a few people (as in, hundreds of thousands) that learned the first popular IAL called Volapuk, and after that Esperanto was quite popular for a while too. Nobody is alive anymore from that time so I can't ask them but it seems that the world has gotten a lot more cynical since then. I usually don't subscribe to the view that "the past was much better than now" but regarding utopian ideals, there seems to be a large difference between then and now.

If you take a look at this list you'll see why they don't just join forces to support one candidate. Everybody believes their candidate to be the best one. I've changed over the past year to pretty much supporting them all (or at least wishing them good luck).

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/auxlang/

[Grimalkin]

Wasn't there a news story about a year ago about there being an international conference of one of them (esperanto I think) but they couldn't understand each other because of regional variations.

I could pretty much understand the interlingua in your post but that was cause I had time to read it. If it was spoken I don't think I'd have understood any.

It does seem interesting but again, I wonder how easy it is to learn for people who haven't any knowledge of a romance language?

[Tobacco Dreams]

Allow me to gush a bit:

Interlingua rocks!

It's the one and only language that I can read--more or less fluently, too--without ever having studied it. AT ALL.

And THAT is unmistakably amazing!

To be sure, a background in Latin, French and other Romance languages helps. But then I'm not exactly an expert in either Latin or French; just a little bit of knowledge of either of these (or of Spanish or Italian or Portuguese) would seemingly be all that's needed as a springboard into Interlingua.

By way of comparison, I worked a bit on Esperanto many years ago, but still find that Esperanto-language texts can stump me. (Though it pains me to detract from the beauty and glory of Esperanto in any way: truly a noble language!) Zamenhof is nowhere more brilliant than when he turns "fraulino" (meaning "young woman") into "fraulo" (meaning "young man"): the logic is unassailable, but the meaning will not be readily grasped--not even by German-speakers--without special training. Here, in a single instance, we can see Esperanto's unique brilliance and its unfortunate failure to accomplish quite what it should.

Mith deserves a great big round of applause for having brought Interlingua to our collective attention.

[mithridates]

Yeah, Interlingua's good stuff. There's no such thing as the perfect auxlang but Interlingua certainly excels in being legible to people who have never even studied it before. The disadvantage is that it's not completely phonetic, but certainly more so than English, and it's got that nice neo-Latin feel that some people like. At the very least it deserves to be known, and then people can decide for themselves whether they like it or not.

Grimalkin: here's what Interlingua sounds like spoken by people from a number of countries:

http://www.interlingua.nu/paginas/exemplos/index.htm

[tomato]

Esperanto advocates often get asked, "Why are the words all borrowed from European languages? Can't you give equal representation to languages of other continents?"
They reply that if you drew a boundary around Europe and set it down anywhere in Asia or Africa, you would not find as great a similarity between the languages.

Take, for instance, the corner of the world where we are right now.
We are told that Japanese is the language most closely related to Korean, but their vocabulary is totally different except for the Chinese borrowings.

The first Esperantists I ever met were an American husband and a Korean wife. The wife told me that she tried to learn several languages, including Japanese, and Esperanto was by far the easiest.

[Grimalkin]

"Ceres, sometimes called 1 Ceres or (1) Ceres, is the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system and the only one located in the Asteroid belt. The name of the planet comes from the roman goddess - the goddess of cultivated plants and motherly love. It was discovered on January 1st 1801 by Giuseppe Piazza. It has a diameter of 975 x 909 km and the greatest density in the Asteroid belt, and accounts for one third of the total mass of the belt. Different to the other asteroids of smaller mass Ceres has a round body, not irregular like the others."


How is that as a translation? (That is Interlingua as well, isn't it?)

[mithridates]

[Big_Crazy_Ape]

Yeah, I can totally read it and understand it. I know English and French (and a little spanish too) and I had no trouble understanding it
but speaking it....
i think that'd be another matter. although it does look easier than french!

[Grimalkin]

[mithridates]

[Grimalkin]

Cheers mithridates.

I probably fall into category 4...

[mithridates]

[Grimalkin]

Again, cheers!