nom = name [French]
asal = source, origin [Indonesian, but from Arabic الأصل = al-ʼŞl]
berasal = to come, to originate [Indonesian]
dari = from [Indonesian]
Australia = Australia [Indonesian, but clearly international]
Nom saya Robert Winter.
Saya berasal dari Australia.
Saya dara Australia.
My name is Robert Winter.
I come from Australia.
I'm from Australia.
A Major Problem
The following possible words do not easily work...
rejuliamal = businessman [Arabic رجل اعمال = Rjl Āʻmāl]
amal = business [Arabic الأعمال = al-ʼʻmāl]
rejul = man [Arabic رجل = Rjl]
Explanation
It has become apparent that the Bahasa Internasional project either needs to be reduced in scope, with fewer source languages, or abandoned. I came to this conclusion after trying to choose a few Arabic words to incorporate into the language. Numerous problems arose:
1. Setting out with the best of intentions to choose an Arabic word for "source", from which to create the verb "to come, to originate" by adding the Indonesian prefix ber-, I found it impossible not to choose instead the already existing word in Indonesian. Why? Because it is so close to the Arabic word anyway that there is no point. Arabic has already been assimilated into Indonesian. Trying to add more Arabic into Indonesian will be rather pointless since often the word will already be of Arabic origin in standard Indonesian. Making the word more closely resemble the original Arabic will probably just cause inconsistencies and problems with regard to pronunciation and orthography.
2. I discovered that without a proper knowledge of Arabic, any attempts on my part to inject more than a few token words into Bahasa Internasional will be hopelessly flawed. For example it appears that the word for "man", as in "businessman" or "foreman" in Arabic is not entirely constant in Arabic and this is a complete mystery to me. I am simply not qualified to properly assess Arabic words and understand what the consequences would be for bringing them into Bahasa Internasional; and this whole difficulty seems absurd to even contemplate since Indonesian already contains a wealth of Arabic words. When it comes to coping with compound nouns involving "business" or "man", and verbs to be formed with Indonesian prefixes for "to do business" or "to trade", the complexities, ramifications and consequences are mind-boggling. One cannot simply willy-nilly drop foreign words into a language and have it work, not without a massive amount of decision-making which would normally occur via a process of natural evolution by a population of speakers; too much for one solitary language designer. Completely impractical. The key point is: one cannot use words from languages one knows little or nothing about.
Conclusions
1. Arabic should be removed from the list of source languages for Bahasa Internasional for two reasons: Indonesian has already absorbed plenty of Arabic words anyway; and I don't know anything about Arabic and am not qualified to usefully import Arabic words.
2. Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Swahili must also be dropped from the list of source languages for Bahasa Internasional since I know next to nothing about these languages and therefore am similarly not qualified to make adequately good decisions about importing words from them. In addition, Chinese tones are not compatible with Indonesian orthography anyhow and Swahili already contains a wealth of Arabic words anyway.
This leaves me with only four of the source languages remaining:
English, French, Spanish, Indonesian.
Now, English + French + Spanish = Interlingua, which really boils down to Latin vocabulary at the heart of it, which is the common thread binding these together. Sadly Interlingua, while a commendable language, has idioms which are so hard that despite its familiar vocabulary, standard Indonesian seems easier.
Final Decision
The Bahasa Internasional project is abandoned in its current form. That is, ten source languages are too many and not practical for my level of linguistic knowledge. I simply cannot pull it off.
The best thing is to simply learn and use standard Indonesian instead.
It is very possible that a good auxiliary language could be made by combining words of Latin origin (recognisable to speakers of English, French, Spanish and many other languages) with Indonesian-like simplified spelling and using mostly the grammatical system of Indonesian. Such a project would be within my grasp since I do have adequate knowledge of those languages. There is absolutely no point in doing so however unless for some reason Indonesian turns out to be much more difficult than it seems to be; and there are also other alternatives such as Papiamentu which would have to be considered first.
This ends this blog.
6 comments:
Sellamat Robert !
(apparently, the salutation works both in Sambahsa and Bahasa International...)
I understand your decision to suspend BI if you really can't cope with Arabic and Russian. IMO, those languages can't be discarded by someone who tries to build a worldlang. Creating another one "romanoclone" would be meaningless (today again, a Frenchman told me about his "inter-romano")
Still yesterday, I was roaming primers galore for Sambahsa and I could notice the deep impact of Arabic and Russian (+ Parsi) on Central Asian tongues.
Myself, I am able to communicate in only a few languages I use as a worldlanger. (not in Arabic, unfortunately...) and with experience I have learnt to locate international words, by comparing several languages, or by looking directly at databases or etymological dictionaries. Standard Arabic has a very complexe phological system, but it is often possible to isolate an "average form" from the loanwords found elsewhere (Parsi, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, Indonesian...).
In your case, I want to notice that "business" is âmal while "al-(â)mal" is "the business" ((a)l is "the" in Arabic). Thus, there is no problem with رَجُلُ أَعْمالٍ
(that I transcribe as "rajul(u) â@mâl(in)"
the letters in brackets are optional endings, as in Sambahsa, while @ is a "schwa" sound.
Couldn't "biznesman" be a solution, since English is precisely the language of... "businessmen" ?
I would have taken "bisnessman" in Sambahsa but it didn't really match the phonetic framework of it [bisnesmAn]. Etymologically, Sambahsa has "besic", = Eng. "busy", Nl. "bezig" & Afrikaans: "besig"; but the activity is "besoyn" like French "besogne" (hence, "besoin, "bisogno"...) and the shorter form is "bes" = Eng. "boss", Nl & Afrikaans: "baas"...
I remembered Icelandic "verslun" = "commerce", like Lithuanian "verslinê" = "commercial" and "verslininkas" = businessman
Hence, Sambahsa has "verslyn" = "business" and "verslyning" = "businessman"
Looking around, I found that Parsi and Urdu have "tajir", much like Sambahsa where it means "merchant" ! Urdu has "basarkan" (from Parsi...) much like Sambahsa "pasarghan" where it means "street vendor" ! ("basar" is "market" in Parsi)... We see the same in French which uses "trader" (ex: Jérôme Kerviel) for people working with stock exchanges while this English word can mean "négociant" (more or less "merchant") too !
You see I could cope with "mind-boggling" for Sambahsa !! IMO a practical auxlang should not go beneath LdP, otherwise it has to repay "simplicity" with a lot of idiotisms.
Olivier
@cafaristeir: Thanks, Olivier. Fascinating information, as always. I must say I really do have the utmost respect for what you have achieved with Sambahsa. For one person to have done so much is quite simply amazing. It is indeed a mind-boggling task to assimilate, from so many source languages, so many words and yet to achieve a result which is harmonious and logical, especially in an inflected language like Sambahsa. A very wonderful achievement and one which I respect very much.
Robert, as a possible solution, why not consider a way in which more than one person could be involved in the decisions. You may not know enough about Arabic or Chinese or whatever to make decisions, but surely somebody would be able to. I'm not necessarily saying there should be a democratic process, because that is messy, but some kind of evolutionary process might work.
@Jens Wilkinson: Thanks for your comment, Jens. Your suggestion is a very good one. I will give some serious consideration to it in the event that I decide to resume this project. In that case probably what would be needed would be some kind of collaborative wiki software, or similar, in order to efficiently allow collaboration.
Actually, your suggestion reminds me of some thoughts and conclusions my journey has brought me to. Namely that any language is a kind of agreement between its users; for whatever reason, users agree to mostly use an agreed set of idioms (and hence grammar) and to mostly use an agreed vocabulary, with some regional and personal variation. Therefore, in a way, perhaps it could be said that a language only exists (except for single-user, personal languages) if a community of users exist now or existed in the past and came to some sort of either explicit or de facto agreement about vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, at least enough to understand each other.
Which leads me on to this: as far as constructed languages go, perhaps to be viable all new projects need to be domain-specific languages. That is, they need to be used for and applied to some specific domain or other. An example would be: the domain of the online communication of gamers in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Within that game universe, players might agree to communicate using a particular auxlang. Perhaps that auxlang only contains 200 words but it is sufficient for the communication required between players, perhaps to trade during the game, buying and selling goods.
Anyway, my point is, and this is something I've overlooked until now, perhaps the community must exist first so that the language can then be tailor-made for that community, and not the other way around. Then any auxlang which came into more general use would be one which grew larger after such humble beginnings, leaving its initial community and being used by other communities. So perhaps what I need to do is identify a suitable community.
Of course, my situation is a little different since as a writer I can insert a conlang into any literary work for literary reasons, regardless of any community.
But I digress...
Thanks again for your very good suggestion.
Hi Robert! I am another worldlang maker. My work is called Pandunia.
You are absolutely right that the number of decisions required by global language is mind-boggling. You know, European/Romance based auxiliary languages really boil down to selecting what's in common in the European/Romance languages. That is not possible in worldlangs because there are almost always two or more equal candidates, and that applies both on grammatical rules and vocabulary.
In every craft it is necessary to know the material you are working with. It applies also on language making. "Rejuliamal" is flawed for two reasons. First, "amal" means hope in Arabic, so you should be careful when changing the shape of Arabic words. Second, business*man* is a sexist term, women do business too.
I like that you took Indonesian as the starting point. It is a fine language and an amalgam of different influences. The only thing that is missing in Indonesian is the Chinese component. There are some South Chinese words (no Mandarin) but not nearly enough considering the current demographic and economic weight of East Asia.
In my opinion Bahasa Internasional would need Chinese words the most. The rest are there already.
@Risto Kupsala: Thanks, Risto. That is very interesting. It's a good thing I decided to stop trying to use Arabic words! Clearly, I had no idea what I was doing. As you say, it is indeed necessary in every craft to know the material one is working with. I guess this comes back to Jens Wilkinson's excellent point, that having a group of people collaboratively create a language, each with good knowledge of a different language or languages, might be the best approach; unless one is fortunate to have oneself a very good knowledge of all the source languages one wishes to use.
I am fascinated to hear your opinion that Indonesian, being an amalgam of different influences, already has all the lexical sources it needs except for Mandarin. That is really interesting. The trouble is, of course, that since Mandarin is a tonal language and Indonesian is not, there would be a challenge in devising the orthography and pronunciation to make it harmonious. However I will take your advice, if ever I resume work on Bahasa Internasional, and look first and foremost at Mandarin. I could probably find a local Mandarin speaker to help me, here in Australia it is quite a commonly heard language.
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