2009/1/15 Paul Bartlett <[log in to unmask]>:
> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, auliuniv wrote (excerpt):
>
>> What is an international language?
>> What makes it international?
>> What is the minimum standard for making it international?
>> What is the best standard for making it international?
>> How is the vocabulary chosen?
>> Why is it chosen?
>> Etc.
>
> Bob,
>
> To the best of my recollection, I have never said that Occidental is a
> "bad" language.  Indeed, just within the last few hours I made two
> posts on Occ/Ile regarding positive material that I looked at earlier
> today at the Library of Congress.  Occ/Ile is a good and respectable
> language, even if I myself have not done a lot with it.  However, there
> is the serious question of what internationality really means.
>
> I have said before and will say again that although I have done more
> with IALA Interlingua and somehow, very subjectively, find it (in some
> vague sense) "smoother" than Occ/Ile, nevertheless, when it comes to
> reading extended blocks of connected text, I find Occ/Ile slightly
> easier to read at sight than Ia, given my personal academic background.
>
> But what does "internationality" really mean?  What conIAL as promoted
> on these fora would monoglot speakers of Khmer, Xhosa, Mongolian,
> Mandarin, Aymara, Turkish, or whatever, find "easiest"?  Indeed, to the
> best of my knowledge there are more Chinese users of Esperanto than
> there are of either Occ/Ile or IALA Ia (maybe, indeed, in total).  If
> Occ/Ile (or IALA Ia, for that matter) is such an outstanding
> international language, where are all the users outside the
> EuroAmerican ambiance?  Recently I subscribed to the Occidental
> mailing list at YahooGroups.  Apart from a welcome message, there has
> been *no* activity.  Why, if Occ/Ile is such an outstanding
> international language?  Why are not the internet fora flooded with
> Occ/Ile posts from around the world?  Indeed, what truly international
> -- meaning beyond EuroAmerican!!! -- usage is there of any conIAL other
> than Esperanto?
>
> --
> Paul Bartlett
>

I don't know what internationality means, but I do like a language
where I can write something like this and be understood:

http://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/7pmi8/the_electorate_will_know_that_if_youre_not/c071b5w

It makes it a lot easier to promote it to others that way. Interlingua
has that too but it's far too long and doesn't come with as many
tricks to use.
Monoglot speakers of other languages: the interesting thing about
people in this part of the world is that for some reason they really
like European languages. I spent a lot of time trying to convince
Koreans that I knew that maybe Turkish would be a good language for
them (and it would be) but have yet to convince a single person. OTOH
I even convinced a few people to try out Ido over the past while.
Persian - no way. When anyone here asks me about Persian I tell them
about how it's a simple language hidden behind a weird script but
nobody wants to learn it (and I don't try to promote it either). But
that's fine because I think it would actually be insulting to a lot of
people to come up with a language that isn't based on the languages
that most people have put the most effort into studying over the past
decades - with something like Occidental you can make the case that
it's a more simplified and streamlined version of the languages
they've been studying, but with a language based on too many language
families it's basically saying "hey, remember all those decades you
spent studying that language? Well, forget about it. We've decided
that you're not up to the task so we made everyone a new language
where what you've learned doesn't help you a bit."

Yahoo Groups: I hope Occidental doesn't take off there because I
really don't like Yahoo. It might be a good idea to try to get
something going on Google Groups.


-- 
http://mithridates.blogspot.com