Here is a description of the design and goals of a constructed language I’d like to work on.
Alzheimer’s and other dementias have no cure, although mental stimulation is thought to be a preventative measure. Bilingualism delays dementia by four years. Learning a full blown natural language is hard, taking 500 to 2000 hours of study. The most effective way to learn a language is through immersion, but few can afford to travel to a distant land for a long period of time. From personal experience, many language learners get stuck in the permenant beginner mode because of the demotivating effects of trying to accomplish such a massive undertaking, especially without the motivating force of desperation and need that you find in an immersion situation.
If the doctor prescribes learning a language, maybe an artificial language would help, since an artificial language can be designed to reduce the grammatical and lexical burden put on a language learner. The simplest language of course would be a dialect of one’s mother tongue–say–Pig Latin. I suspect that the brain would use many of the same brain cells and dendrites to encode the dialect, so as they die during dementia, you’d lose English and Pig Latin simultaneously. I propose that a fully non-Indo European constructed language with no relationship to the mother tongue would be the least likely to be lost.
Why not use Esperanto or some other pre-existing simple constructed language? Most importantly, I want to create a language. Secondly, Esperanto, is unusually easy for Indo-European speakers, is very hard for non-Indo-European speakers. Esperanto’s “Indo-European-average” characteristics makes it especially unsuitable if my hypothesis that the protective benefits of benefits are limited for bilingualism between highly related languages as opposed to unrelated languages, proves correct.
Lexicon
500 canonical base words
Users have a wide variety of techniques they can use to create new valid words.
- Compound words are permitted and legal if understood, e.g. “animal-fur-pet” is a legal word for dog or cat, unless the person listening doesn’t understand
- Relative clauses are permitted to allow for substituting phrases for unknown words., e.g. Give me the “thing that one uses to cut paper” And this technique can be applied recursively, e.g. Give me the “thing that one uses to cut those ‘things that are white, flat and rectangular’”
And more as I think of them…
Grammar
Grammar has several levels. The first level is “formalized word soup”(FWS) A sentence is correct in FWS if it meets the criteria of a short list of rules.
Formalized Word Soup. FWS is based on a book I read… (citation forthcoming) where there were 5 rules to speak– actor comes first, related words are near each other, etc. It is expected at this level for there to be significant bleed over from the parent language.
Pigdin Grammar. In this form simple constructions are expected to be grammatical, but for complex sentences, there may be bleed over from the parent language. This form has no inflections, but has reasonably strict word order. This form has a few dozen model sentences, (ala toki pona), and speakers are expected to shoe horn as many sentences as possible into the existing models.
Natural Grammar. The natural grammar form has inflections. This form may not really ever be completely defined until there is a significant population of fluent speakers who’ve spoken it since childhood. I skeptical that our on-paper language definitions have achieved the ability to define as completely as whatever our brain is modeling.
Phonetics.
The language is multi-dialect by design. The dialectical difference depend on the mother tongue of the speaker. That means a localization of the alphabet will be required for each natural language. Rather than trying to teach ordinary people IPA and how to pronounce letters that their mother tongue lacks, they will only be expected to speak the constructed language in the localized dialect. An example: In English, most people see the letter “a” and pronounce the dipthong “a-e”. So the hypothetical word “pa” would be pronounced “pae” by an English speaker and “pa” by an Italian speaker. Localizations are to be designed to minimize clashing between one localization and another and to minimize the difficult of pronunciation.
The language will use only the letters found on a Latin qwerty keyboard. Including special characters is an insurmountable burden for too many people to consider their usage.
Sign Encodings.
Since the audience is people who will eventually become hard of hearing, the language has a sign component.
Ok, now I need to generate a dictionary. Much work left to do.
Government.
The language will be governed by a committee of people who care. The original charter will establish a route for language evolution and recommendation for “forks” or “dialects” The original inventor could die or lose interest, so establishing a governing committee is important to prevent and resolve disputes in the community over the undefined and ill-defined parts of the language.