(Oops) FFF: Zonal Auxlangs

[wm.annis]

Earlier in the week we basically decided that Funky Feature Friday's test run made it clear that there wasn't a whole lot of interest in it... some, but not enough to warrant doing it weekly.  So, this will be the last official one.

Rather than talk about a particular feature, I thought I'd just drop some info an a cultural phenomenon I recently ran across and found interesting: Zonal Auxiliary Languages.  An auxiliary language (an "auxlang" in the constructed language lingo) is things like Esperanto, Ido and the dearly departed Volapük.  It's a language intended to be widely learned as a common second language, to ease international communication.  Whatever its faults, these days Esperanto is the best bet if you actually want to talk to people in such a language.  Debates about this are hot and never-ending, and we don't need to rehash those debates here.  In any case, since Esperanto never conquered the world, people keep churning out new auxlangs to this day.

I recently ran across information about a language I had never heard of before, Afrihili.  Rather than intending to be a shared global language, it was intended just for Africa.  Once you start look, it turns out there are number of such projects.

One of the more vital recent zonal auxlangs is Lingua Franca Nova, a Romance auxlang.  The mailing list had about 200 people and was once quite active.  It seems to have gone quiet recently.

There are a huge number of Slavic zonal auxlangs.  One of the more famous is Slovio, which is rather like Esperanto, just with a Slavic vocabulary base.  But Slovianski, which recently got a lot of press in the Slavic zone, is a good deal less simplified than Slovio.  And there have been numerous projects to mix and match Slovio and Slovianski.

One of the more astonishing recent projects is to revive Indo-European.  There is even a large Grammar.

[Nyx]

I was just wondering if these posts would go on or not. Would be nice to see more since languages have always fascinated me and there are people here who know a lot of things that just open my eyes bit by bit. But I understand that it's a lot of work doing this every week. Thanks for the short time it lasted anyway ^^

Now, for the topic. Reviving Indo-European sounds like a pretty cool thing. But there are so many different languages that have to be covered, I hope it doesn't turn into something messy. But then again, Esperanto doesn't seem messy, so this could work ^^

And I'm definitely looking into the Slavic ones, they're interesting to me since Croatian is kind of a native language of mine, and maybe it wouldn't be too hard to get into that. And it would be fun to try speaking that to a real native speaker of any slavic language.

[Plumps]

I was just wondering if these posts would go on or not. Would be nice to see more since languages have always fascinated me and there are people here who know a lot of things that just open my eyes bit by bit. But I understand that it's a lot of work doing this every week. Thanks for the short time it lasted anyway ^^

Same here. It always made for a fascinating read – since I'm not a linguist (only as a hobby) I often found it amazingly interesting but wouldn't know what I could write/comment on them even though I enjoyed them very much.

Maybe it should not be a ›requirement‹ for each Friday but rather a loose project whenever you come across something interesting that you guys like to share with the community.

On topic:
I had no idea there were ZAL ... It makes sense though. Especially for an area where in a certain, confined space are a lot of different languages.

Makes you wonder, though... Reading up on those ... and again making myself acquainted with the evolution of Esperanto, Ido and Volapük ... whether Na'vi will face the same fate. Whether it will sustain that long (and I know I sure hope so) but imagine a hundred years from now, it will still be used – how many ›dialects‹ or ›sub-groups‹ will have developed (if at all) that use the language differently from what we are used to now?

Just a thought experiment