
Ask HN: How would you define a new, modern, spoken language? - chatmasta
Imagine you had the opportunity to create a new spoken language, from the ground up. You are not subject to the evolution of any existing language, and can start from scratch.<p>How would you go about defining such a language? What considerations would be important? How could you ensure anyone, from any culture, could learn to read, speak, and write the language?
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Impl0x
This is a difficult question because there are multiple motivations for making
a new constructed language. For instance, Esperanto is designed to be a
universal second language. It emphasizes ease of learning through very regular
grammar, deriving most of its words from pre-existing roots, and a simple-but-
powerful word construction. A language like Lojban, on the other hand, tries
to eliminate linguistic ambiguity by basing its grammar on predicate logic.

So to clarify, are you asking how we'd go about designing a language that's
optimized for universality? Or some other metric?

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chatmasta
Let's say the goal is to optimize universal ease of adoption, and maximize
virality.

Or, conversely, maybe you want to create a corporation where all employees
must communicate in a custom language.

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Impl0x
There are a few "easy" answers for ease of adoption, some of which I think
have been mentioned by other replies. A phonetic alphabet with only one
possible sound per letter, the ability to identify a word's part of speech
given only the word, and an exception-free verb conjugation scheme are all
common approaches for making a language easy to learn. Some constructed
languages have a simple rule for determining which syllable in a word gets
emphasis.

Also worth considering is making the language as "familiar" as possible to a
new learner. You could decide what phonemes your language uses by looking at
the most frequently used phonemes in the most popular languages. You might
decide to go a level higher and base your language's word for universal
concepts (food, day, sleep) based on roots that are common across many
languages.

Another way to make a language easy is to reduce the number of words a person
needs to know in order to use it in the real world. I'm personally a big fan
of Esperanto's word-building system, which uses around 30 affixes (in addition
to the suffixes that define each word's part of speech) that can be attached
to a root word to modify or enhance its meaning. There's not a limit to how
many affixes you can have, the word just has to make sense. Every time you
learn a new root word, you get a huge number of new words for free by knowing
affixes. A language that has such a system can get by with a reduced number of
root words. For example: "laboro" is the word for the word "work" or "job" in
Esperanto. By adding only one affix you can arrive at words like "labor-ej-o"
(workplace), "labor-ist-o" (a laborer by trade), "labor-ant-o" (a person
performing labor), and "labor-ind-o" (a job worth doing).

However, it's not really enough to just make a language easy. I'm glad you
brought up virality; drawing people in is almost certainly the more difficult
part. Once you have your ideal language, you need to build a culture around
it. This is the same thing as when people judge the quality/utility of a
programming language by its "ecosystem". Unfortunately this is largely out of
the language creator's control. There's just too much work involved for a
single person, or even a small group of people. There needs to be an abundance
of learning material, lots of translated works and a growing body of original
works (across as many genres/media/levels of proficiency as possible), and
networks for speakers/learners to communicate and collaborate.

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Koshkin
> _any culture_

Thing is, a live language always comes as an organic part of some culture. In
other words, a language is only _live_ if it is absorbed together with
mother's milk. For instance, I imagine it took a few generations for Modern
Hebrew to really come to life. Chances that an artificial language could
become part of a culture are slim.

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wingerlang
No idea, but I would make each character have only one sound.. and nothing
tonal.

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jotux
Japanese characters (kana) represent syllables and once you know the syllables
it's not difficult to know what a word will sound like. They even have a
duplicate set of characters specifically used to import foreign words into the
language and provide a pronunciation (for example, "computer" translates to
コンピューター ko-n-pyuu-taa).

From this perspective it's a very easy language to read/write (negating kanji)
and pronounce.

~~~
wingerlang
Yes, and Korean as well.

Currently I am learning thai where each character have two sounds depending on
where in a word it is located. Multiple characters with the same sounds, a few
characters which are marked as obsolete (but still in the alphabet) and each
word will have a tone based on the groups of characters (which has a "class"
assigned to them) and a whole bunch of other "special" characters that change
the tone, completely silences a character or repeats something. Seemingly
illogical pronunciations when combining other sounding ones (combining a vowel
sounding "e" and "aa" will pronounce an "ao" sound).

And I haven't even started on anything but learning how to deal with the
alphabet.

