0. Intro

Every now and then I have some free time and get into the mood to write 
one of these things. Last time was a couple of years ago when I had just 
spent five hours hiking over a mountain (as it is laughingly referred to 
here in the Bay Area) in Marin County. My excuse this time is that on 
Thursday I had an appointment with my doctor, who regaled me with the 
dreaded "c"-word, and then sent me down to see a surgeon, who with less 
glee but a quickly pencilled diagram (that I could easily have lived 
without) described how he planned to open me up and gut me like a fish, 
some eighteen days from today. Given the possibility -- small but not 
negligible -- that I won't be able to rant again in future, now seems 
like a good time to do so.

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1. WHAT IS AN AUXLANG, AKA IAL? (Or: "Por ke lingvo estu internacia, ne 
sufiĉas nomi ĝin tia" - Zamenhof)

I've always assumed that these terms are applicable to languages which 
are used internationally as non-first-languages, for communicating 
across language barriers. Of course, most of the really big ethnic 
languages are used in this way, so the people I've talked with on the 
subject have tended to reduce the set further by insisting that the 
languages under discussion be "artificial" or "planned" or 
"constructed", i.e. originally created for such use and not simply 
borrowed from or imposed by some ethnic group with lots of money, guns 
or wanderlust.

Even with this restriction, the operational term here is basically 
"used". How much any given language is or has been used for such matters 
is open to question, but it seems to me that several of the languages 
recently discussed here -- Ro, aUI, Ygyde, Sona etc. -- have never, ever 
been so used, and so by this definition do not qualify as auxlangs, IALs 
or any such thing, and may never do so, though I would feel disappointed 
in their inventors if they were to abandon all hope.

"Use" incidentally involves not only reading or even reading and 
writing, but also speaking and understanding the spoken language. The 
impression I've gotten over the years is that far too many auxlangers 
like to imagine that an IAL or auxlang will be used only for written 
communication. This is, of course, nonsense, as any Esperanto speaker in 
this lest can likely tell you from personal experience. A language 
suitable _only_ for written communication is of no more use to the 
average human being than is "C" or Prolog or any other computer language.

I'd also like to address the term "internationally". How "international" 
a constructed language may be is often defined strictly in terms of the 
language itself -- is its vocabulary strictly European, or was it 
borrowed from a global plethora of sources, or was it created out of 
whole cloth? Does the language's structure have only European features, 
or does it cut-and-paste features from around the world, or are all the 
bells and whistles based on concepts that the inventor himself created 
and thought were brilliant?

For myself, I've always considered the term "international" as applying 
more to the language's user community than to the language itself. 
Latin, the prototypical euroclone (in both senses of the term, the 
original and the current common one), was during the Middle Ages 
considerably more "international" in this sense (and in fact remains so) 
than e.g. aUI, which has no user community and so no possibility of 
internationality.

There is probably some way of arithmetically defining internationality 
-- an index or coefficient of some kind -- and I will leave to younger 
and more enthusiastic auxlangers the job of working out this number. It 
should include not only the distribution of speakers across first 
languages but also concentrations -- "clumpings" -- of such speakers in 
some particular first languages, not forgetting to take into account the 
size and importance of those first languages. But I'm not sure that, in 
the long run, anyone will pay any attention.

2. A PRIORI vs. A POSTERIORI

Here's a simple historical fact, which I shall take the liberty of 
shouting out:

NO A PRIORI PLANNED LANGUAGE HAS EVER ACQUIRED A COMMUNITY OF SPEAKERS.

One might point to Loglan and Lojban as partial exceptions to the rule; 
this depends on (a) to what extent these two languages are considered _a 
priori_ and (b) how large, enthusiastic and competent those communities 
of speakers have been. In the case of Loglan, apparently not very. I am 
reminded of the comment to the effect that "...because of the low 
geographic density of the loglaphone population, no true 
speech-communities have formed; so there are still no fluent speakers of 
the language ..." (Brown, James Cooke, Burson, Scott Layson, Handley, 
Christopher C., Kennaway, J. Richard, and McIvor, Robert A.: "An 
Unambiguous Grammar for Loglan, a Speakable Language", in La Logli 
1996/1; p. 72, footnote 2.) This is, however, a problem that has been 
faced by every planned language; at least Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, 
Occidental and Interlingua indicate that it is at most a minor factor in 
hindering (not preventing) fluent speakers from appearing.

Another possible exception that might be quoted is Solresol. The 
impression I have is that Solresol, while it had a community of 
aficionados, never had a community of speakers; (*) but I could be wrong 
about this, and wait for documentary evidence of such a community (which 
would have appeared and disappeared, probably more or less spurlos, in 
the 19th century).

I might also mention Klingon, which is not strictly _a priori_ (Okrand 
apparently based certain aspects of its structure on the Costanoan 
language of Northern California with which he was familiar from his 
doctoral work). There is a popular urban legend that "there are more 
speakers of Klingon today than there are of Esperanto" (though this was 
originally "Navajo" when this interesting factoid was first published in 
"The Onion", a venue which should automatically make it suspect). 
However, Commander Marke'm satisfactorily, in my opinion, refutes this 
idea in a letter in rec.arts.sf.written several years ago ( 
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_thread/thread/4fe87d19354c74ff/6c72be297d4df819?q=Klingon+Esperanto+Mandel&rnum=1#6c72be297d4df819 
).

But the simple fact remains: no _a priori_ planned language has ever 
acquired a community of speakers.

Why? Hard to say. Lack of motivation to learn such a language is 
certainly a factor. But I suspect that there are problems with 
structure, and vocabulary as well.

Creators of _a priori_ languages traditionally seem to create delightful 
structural features that, they believe, will facilitate learning or more 
accurately reflect human thought. In practice, none of this is ever 
tested before "release" or "publication" of the language. If these 
features are not reflected in any of the "natural" languages, it's 
possible, or even probable, that they are in violation of what are 
called "language universals". At best, they may cause significant 
problems in the learning of the language.

I've never been a big fan of the idea that the learnability or usability 
of a language depends on where its vocabulary comes from; as far as I'm 
concerned, in principle an _a priori_ vocabulary (one invented out of 
whole cloth) is just as viable as a vocabulary borrowed 100% from the 
Romance languages. The problem is that principle is not practice. The 
human mind tends to organize material within categories, and the 
organization of a vocabulary to accurately reflect distinctions within a 
category by distinctions within the vocabulary may lead to learning 
problems: the Ygyde "yfubo", "yzypybo" and "yzazybo" strike me as 
considerably more difficult to keep organized in my mind than the 
English "cat", "dog" and "horse" or the Esperanto "kato", "hundo" and 
"ĉevalo". (Esperanto uses similar derivational methods, but they 
generally operate across categories rather than within categories. What 
constitutes a "category" may, of course, be open to argument.)

Whatever the reason or reasons, again _no_ _a priori_ language has 
_ever_ approached the popularity of at least the major _a posteriori_ 
languages. This will not (and perhaps "should not") prevent inventors of 
such _a priori_ languages for striving for such popularity, but they 
should neither publicly predict such popularity nor quit their day jobs. 
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong ... 
but that's the way to bet."

(*) I distinguish between "aficionados", or more commonly "fans", who 
are proud to extol the values of a particular language and attempt to 
promote its learning and use, and "speakers", who can actually read,
write, speak and understand the language on a day-to-day basis, with 
only occasional use of a dictionary.

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3. BIG FIVE

Seems to me (without going back several weeks into the archives) that 
Thomas Alexander has described the most popular auxlangs (and I'll use 
the term, because each of these languages satisfies my definition given 
above) as the "Big three plus Volapuk". Is that right, Thomas? From the 
historical point of view, I prefer to think in terms of the "Big five" 
(including Volapuk). These are planned languages that, to one or another 
degree, have acquired relatively significant user communities (including 
speakers, not just readers) that function across first-language 
boundaries. They are, in historical order: Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, 
Occidental and Interlingua. Their current status, which may justify 
Thomas's description, is: Volapuk, possesses a small community of 
aficionados and speakers; Esperanto, possesses large and growing 
speaking community; Ido, possesses a small but at least stable speaking 
community; Occidental, moribund despite the enthusiasm of a few 
aficionados and speakers such as Bob Petry and Sebastian Hartwig; 
Interlingua, possesses a small but, again, at least stable speaking 
community.

All of these are, you will note, _a posteriori_ languages, even Volapuk, 
which at first sight doesn't look much like one.

They, in turn, can be divided into two groups: schematic (Volapuk, 
Esperanto, Ido); and "naturalistic" (Occidental, Interlingua). Some 
enthusiasts for these later languages tend to argue that this division 
shows some kind of "evolution", i.e. "progress", in the development of 
planned languages, and that the "naturalistic" languages are somehow 
superior to the schematic languages. Of course, "evolution" and 
"progress" are not synonymous. If I may be allowed an analogy, there 
were landbound mammals that evolved into pinnipeds. The pinnipeds ended 
up largely being restricted to continental and insular littorals, while 
the landbound mammals had the run of the continents. Similarly, 
"naturalistic" languages tend to emphasize only "consumption" (primarily 
reading), while schematic languages tend more to emphasize "production" 
(writing and speaking, which are necessary prerequisites for reading and 
hearing). If I remember, I'll have a comment further down on the 
emphasis of one of the "naturalistic" languages on science and technology.

In any case, these Big Five languages are really the only auxlangs that 
have, over the last century, counted at all. Almost every other project, 
from Timerio to Intal, from Ro to Ygyde, does not, in all honesty, even 
deserve the label "auxlang" -- though, again, this could change in future.

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4. LEARNABILITY: THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

It can't be argued that the Big Five are all relatively easily learnable 
languages, at least by comparison to other ethnic languages, and 
particularly their precursor languages. (*) I have argued that Volapuk 
was not sufficiently streamlined, that Ido adds complications to a 
system that didn't need them, that Occidental and Interlingua, for 
purely historical reasons, depend too much on unnecessary idiosyncrasies 
that, if removed from those languages, would make them even easier to 
learn. True enough in all cases. And if I had a time machine and could 
go back to Western Russia in the mid-80s, I'd have a finger or two to 
shake in Zamenhof's face, as well. Where's that additional ALI- column 
in the correlative table? Why "klopodi" and "peni" alongside each other? 
Wouldn't it be better, in a language with the -IL- suffix, to make most 
roots action roots rather than object roots, so you don't have that 
"broso" vs. "kombi" confusion? Can you fix the number system so that we 
can talk about millions and billions without confusion? (Zamenhof would 
tell me that nobody would ever need to talk about millions and billions 
except specialists, after which I would describe Super Lotto, the Bush 
deficits, and the current U.S. national debt -- and how the devil can 
you say "trillion" in Esperanto?) And what's this "kvankam ... tamen 
..." stuff, and why do the grammarians get all hot and bothered over 
those non-Western-European Esperanto writers who insist on "kvankam ... 
sed ..."? No, it would be relatively easy to fix up any of the Big Five 
to make it more easily learnable (Interlingua's "collateral 
orthography", one of Jacques Dehee's more laudable enthusiasms); but 
even without fixing, they are all the answer to a schoolboy's wet dream.

"Learnability" is not, of course, "learning". The question arises: how 
many people have actually learned these languages? Nobody knows for 
sure. It's fairly evident from here that, at least as far as Esperanto 
is concerned, the number is fairly large. (**) And since there are 
non-negligible user communities for at least Ido and Interlingua, today, 
it's pretty obvious that somebody has learned them, as well -- and 
usually without benefit of formal instruction!

Ultimately, when somebody claims "the language Agape is the easiest 
language in the world to learn because of the delightful structural 
simplifications and vocabulary restrictions which I've created for it", 
the question to ask is not "how learnable is Agape?" but "who has 
learned it?" "What are the chances that you can meet, either 
fortuitously on the street or through prearranged meeting, somebody who 
can converse with you in Agape?" And, perhaps the ultimately embarassing 
question: "And if you did meet such a person, would you yourself be able 
to converse with and understand him?"

(*) Claude Piron, teaching at the Summer Esperanto Workshop at San 
Francisco State University a couple of decades ago, somewhat 
thoughtlessly repeated the popular idea that Malay/Bahasa Indonesia is 
structurally as easy to learn as Esperanto. One of his students, Vera 
Payne of Perth, Australia, decided to test the idea and learn 
Indonesian. When she returned for another session two or three years 
later, somebody asked her about her experience with Indonesian, to which 
her reply was a heartfelt: "Thank God for Zamenhof!" More recently, I 
found an Indonesian textbook at Barnes & Noble and, while looking 
through it, found a description of how to form the plural in that 
language. The book described three quite different systems, and which 
one you used depended, it seemed, on the semantic category -- not 
"class" or "gender" -- of the noun. Thank God for Zamenhof!

(**) By comparison with English or Chinese, for instance, Esperanto 
remains fairly small by number of speakers. But if you consider that 
class of languages "whose dissemination is not financed by somebody's 
tax money, and which does not increase primarily by inheritance" -- 
i.e., auxlangs in the sense defined above -- Esperanto remains well 
ahead of the pack. Even when you remove the second qualification, thus 
allowing a few thousand ethnic languages into the competition, Esperanto 
stays pretty much up at the top.

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5. SOMETHING ABOUT SCIENCE

It has been suggested, particularly by proponents of the naturalistic 
school, that the main use for an auxlang should be in science. Of 
course, most people are not particularly interested in science; and most 
material written about science becomes obsolete in a matter of months or 
years or, at very most, decades (not every paper published in the 
"Astronomical Journal" has as much staying power as Newton's "Principia 
Mathematica"). On the other hand, most auxlangs have at least dipped 
their fingers in the scientific pond, or, sometimes, the 
pseudo-scientific pond (Bob Petry's proud reprinting here some years ago 
of an article in Occidental about Hoerbiger and his Welteislehre is a 
good example of the latter). Most recently (unsolicited ad!) I will 
quote ELNA's addition to its book service of a second, enlarged edition 
of Wandel & Galadi-Enriquez's nice introduction to modern astrophysics 
and cosmology "La kosmo kaj ni", published in Belgium by the Flandra 
Esperanto-Ligo.

A problem arises when the proponents of a language tend to concentrate 
on science. This apparently was the case with Interlingua. It's not a 
bad thing, as long as you can keep it up, but it's like the Red Queen's 
Race, compared to some other uses of the language. Not long ago I 
finished my Esperanto translation of "Tarzan of the Apes", and have 
recently exchanged an e-mail or two with somebody in Europe who is 
interested in publishing it in a form that the average electronic 
illiterate can read while sitting in a train. I would bet that, a 
century from now, there will still be people, at least a few, who read 
that translation to enjoy the birth, maturation, and loud cries of 
"Bundolo! Kreegah!" of the ape-man. On the other hand, Forrest 
Cleveland's famous Interlingua magazine "Spectroscopia Molecular" is now 
half a century out of date, and of no use to anyone for anything except, 
perhaps, as an introduction to scientific Interlingua, and not as 
information about modern molecular spectroscopy; for the magazine to be 
of any value, Cleveland would have had to find someone to carry it on 
for him, because the material in it was largely topical rather than 
enduring (unlike Tarzan or, for instance, Zamenhof's translations of 
Hans Christian Andersen).

Another problem is the fact that the "international scientific-technical 
vocabulary" around which this whole emphasis was woven is hardly unique 
to Interlingua. You can write internationally comprehensible scientific 
papers as easily in English, French and Esperanto as in Interlingua. (*) 
This observation is perhaps what led Interlinguan Frank Esterhill to 
observe: "There was no need (and no use) ever for the 'international' 
languages of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and today, with the 
unparalleled ascendency of English, there is no longer any need for 
Interlingua." (Esterhill, Frank: "Interlingua -- R.I.P.", Verbatim, 
Autumn 2000). In the fields of science and technology, he is perhaps 
correct, in both sentences, though the "unparalleled ascendency of 
English" is largely redundant to the fact of the lack of need for an 
auxlang in the sciences.

(*) One wonders whether any scientific work as potentially seminal as 
Wasaburo Ooishi's mid-twenties work on the high-altitude winds of the 
jet stream, published by him in Esperanto, was ever published in 
Interlingua.

6. THE PURPOSE OF AN AUXLANG?

By which, of course, I mean "the purpose of one, some, or all of the 
auxlangers supporting that particular auxlang".

IMHO the purpose of an auxlang is to function as an auxlang -- a means 
of communication between people all over the globe, from the highlands 
of Peru through the savannahs of Tanzania to the cities of coastal 
Vietnam. It is not:

(1) to be linguistically superior to some other purported auxlang;
(2) to somehow represent the legitimate cultural aspirations of this or 
that particular group of people;
(3) to help engineer a properly Politically Correct society (presumably 
through some Whorffian filtering of the user's thought processes);

IMHO opinion, if you are a proponent of, e.g. (and I emphasize the 
"e.g.") Ido, and you can in all honesty say to yourself: "I firmly 
believe that Ido not only can but will serve the people of the world as 
an auxlang more efficiently, sooner, and with greater advantages than 
any other proposed or even functioning auxlang, and so I will continue 
to support it," more power to you. You and I are coming from the same 
place, even if we aren't ending up on the same square. On the other 
hand, if you say: "I have invented and support Agape as the global 
auxlang because I think it's neater and niftier than Solresol and in 
theory more easily learnable than Esperanto, though next month I may 
think differently and propose my new auxlang Bugaboo", then you're a fan 
-- nothing wrong with that, but you're not really involved with what I 
call auxlangs, and you and I are going from different starting points to 
different ends.

7. 'NUFF FOR NOW

Maybe some ideas here to play with, argue against, refute? Enjoy.

Amike salutas ĉiujn

-- 
-- Don HARLOW
    http://donh.best.vwh.net/
    http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo/Tarzan/
    http://www.harlows.org/don/