Test Scandinavian Dictionary - With Sound!

This is just a quick test of embedding sound files into a PDF document of a dictionary. It's just a few words extracted from the SamSkandinavisk-Engelsk Dictionary. I've formated the words nicely and put clickable pronunciation guide for each word. It's mainly just an exercise for me to play with the interactive PDF features of Adobe InDesign 5.5.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx0T9Dxrods1R3FCbFpmYjRUWnc

NB If you just open the PDF on GoogleDocs, you will not be able to hear sound. Download the file to somewhere else and open it in Adobe Reader. If you click on the little speaker icons, you should get a speech example for each word.

SinPlatt Spoken by a Human

Here is a second attempt at the extract from De Kartuse fan Parma. This time it's spoken in my own sweet voice.

SinPlatt Spoken by a Finnish Femmebot.

Here is a speech sample from my translation extract of The Charterhouse of Palma.

It is created using Google Translate's speech synthesis option. It's using the Finnish voice, because the Finnish language had most of the phonemes that I needed and the orthography rules are very regular. If you write text the right way, you can force Google Translate's text-to-speech to say pretty much what you want. It does mean that the SinPlatt will have quite a Finnish accent.

“Ik pries de lüttele husar an,” riep de merketantin. “De junge bürger heft ene modig hert.” Korporal Aubry marschärde forbie uten seggen een word. Acht oder tejn soldaten liepen fort and kåmen med him toosamen. Hi leidede hin toorügg ene grote eek, umgegeven med dornen. Wan kam hi dår, hi settede hin fort de rand fan de busch, noch uten seggen een word, an ene wied gestrekkde front, eelke stond toomindest tejn schreden af siene nåjbuur.

Arabic Auxlang Aborts Before Take-Off

First off, here's a provisional name for my hypothetical Arabo-Islamic auxlang, that I postulated in my post called Arabic Auxlang Anyone?

As a contrast to the name of the romanoclone auxlang name Occidental, I dub my hypothetical language Oriental. The Oriental which I am referring to isn't in the more modern sense where it's understood to mean the Far East and cultures such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I'm harking back to the old-fashioned Oriental of the 19th century and the Orientalist aesthetic movement. At this time Oriental included more the Near East and Middle-Eastern, Turkic, Persian and Indic cultures. This realm is pretty close the what this auxlang would cater to.

The most relevant passage of my previous post would have to be:

The source languages that I would propose are:

Modern Standard Arabic

Turkish

Persian/Farsi

Swahili

Hindi-Urdu (One or two languages depending on your political persuasion)Indonesia-

Malay (Essentially two standards of a plural-centric language) 

Perhaps the criteria for words could be that they need to have cognates present in 4/6 of the above languages. Or 3/6 if that's too stringent.

Interestingly enough, with the exception of Persian and Hindi-Urdu, these six languages are genetically all un-related. Contrast this [to] Interlingua, where all the source languages are Indo-European and the majority are Romantic.

I've bolded the really critical fact. Here's the problem. Undoubtedly, these 6 languages have borrowed, lent and shared a large quantity of vocabulary. Some through the spread of Islam, some through the military conquests of the Persians and Turks, some through the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism, some through Arabic traders on the Indian ocean. But whereas languages might borrow large numbers of words when in contact with other cultures, they generally have a core-vocabulary that tends not to be replaced with borrowings. These words tend to be the most basic fundamental words in the vocabulary, words for such things as louse, two, water, ear, die, I, liver, eye, hand, hear, tree, fish, name, stone, tooth, breasts, you, path, bone, tongue, skin, night, leaf, blood, horn, person, knee, one, nose, full, come, star, mountain, fire, we, drink, see, new, dog, sun. These are the words that are typically found in a Swadesh list. The list that I just gave was the 40 concepts that have been found least likely to change over the aeons of a language's history.

My critical stumbling block for Oriental, is that these 6 languages are unlikely to have much shared vocabulary for the most basic of words. Oriental will probably have less trouble finding words for law, religion, government, commerce, science, technology agriculture and warfare. But for the most basic concepts, there will be little common ground between the 6 languages.

Take the case of a typical romanoclone auxlang; Interlingua, Of its source languages French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are all closely related Romantic languages. The other source languages; English, German and Russian are still share a genetic relationship, albeit more distantly by way of Proto-Indo-European.

In my proposed Oriental, the 6 languages come from 5 different language families.

The only languages that share a distant common ancestor are Persian and Hindi-Urdu.

So what could be the selection criteria for the most basic of words, such as are unlikely to have any common ground among the source languages?

I can suggest two possible solutions: 

1. The basic vocabulary is made of words that have cognates in Persian and Hindi-Urdu.

2. The basic vocabulary is made of words from Arabic.

In the first proposal, the common basic vocabulary of Persian and Hindi-Urdu is Proto-Indo-Aryan. For convenience of research, one could base it on Proto-Indo-European. That means Oriental is built as an Indo-European language with superstrates from waves of borrowing from Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian Turkish and Graeco-Roman.. 

In the second proposal, Oriental is an Arabic pidgin with large amounts of borrowings from Turkish, Persian, Sanskrit and Graeco-Roman.

The first proposal happens to be quite close to Olivier Simon's Sambahsa, just with a tighter focus on one region of the world. I guess the wheel has already been invented (by Proto-Indo-Europeans!)

Arabic Auxlang Anyone?

Tonight, I was researching a few words for Germanic constructed languages. I was using multi-lingual dictionaries such as Websters

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/

and Wiktionary:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

I was looking for Germanic words, but I found myself distracted when I noticed a large number of similar words cropping up in a cluster of languages. Those languages were in regions as far-flung as the Middle-East, The Horn of Africa, Western China, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Sub-continent and South-East Asia.

for example:

Arabic فرق / farq

Indonesian / Malay furak

Turkish fark

Persian فرق / farq

Hindi/Urdu farq

The obvious connection was, of course borrowings from Arabic and the spread of Islamic civilization.

Very many auxlangs are classified (disparagingly often) as Romanoclones, for example Interlingua, Novial, Occidental, Idiom Neutral, Ido, Esperanto etc. They are based on the common vocabulary of Western Civilization which is mostly a common heritage of words coming from Latin and Greek. Some of those languages, I would say are very very good if you want to make a language that's easily accessible to educated "Westerners" or Europeans. (For the record, I constantly find myself drawn back to Interlingua for various reasons). It's convenient that very many languages of the world have acquired similar words from the same sources, and if you're lucky enough to be a speaker of one of those languages, then it's wonderful that you can take advantage of it.

But not all the world has shared in this cultural exchange -- indeed they might even be part of their own separate cultural clubs.

Perhaps a different type of auxlang could be created for a different cultural sphere?

BTW, I am using "Western" in contrast to "Islamic" as labels for civilizations, but I don't really want to over-load the religious significance of either. "Western" seems to me to be a convenient short-hand for a civilization that has a predominately European, Graeco-Latin and Christian flavour. It's overloading the religious dimension of the juxtaposition to talk about "Christian" versus "Islamic" civilization. The sphere of languages that have had the Arabic influence include the languages of many people who are not predominantly muslim.  The same applies to "Western" civilization -- it a generalization and  it's not entirely defined by Christianity or Europeanness. For example, I'd readily call myself a "Westerner", although I don't live in Europe and am not a Christian. But for the purposes of this post, "Western" and "Islamic" were the best words I can think of to use.

What I would propose is an a posteriori constructed language based on features common to the major languages that have participated in the spread of Islamic civilization. So it would have a similar methodology to Interlingua, but with a different set of source languages. Instead of the major European languages, it would refer to some of the worlds other major languages.

The source languages that I would propose are:

Modern Standard Arabic

Turkish

Persian/Farsi

Swahili

Hindi-Urdu (One or two languages depending on your political persuasion)

Indonesia-Malay (Essentially two standards of a plural-centric language) 

Perhaps the criteria for words could be that they need to have cognates present in 4/6 of the above languages. Or 3/6 if that's too stringent.

Interestingly enough, with the exception of Persian and Hindi-Urdu, these six languages are genetically all un-related. Contrast this Interlingua, where all the source languages are Indo-European and the majority are Romantic. 

The common vocabulary would be largely descended from Classical Arabic. But, depending on the entry criteria, could include a lot of words descended from Turkish, Persian, and Sanskrit. Some of these source languages have also participated in the "Western" sphere of lexical borrowing. For example Turkish and Indonesian have borrowed large numbers of words from the same Graeco-Latin sources as many European languages. So this proposed auxlang will probably have a large number of "internationalisms", very similar to those found in Interlingua or Occidental.

Although the base vocabulary would be mostly Arabic-sourced, to make a good auxlang, it's grammar, syntax and orthography would need to be simple and regular. And probably the alphabet would need to be offered in two flavours -- Latinized and Arabic -- with some kind of standardized transliteration scheme.

Now I'm surely not the right person to be creating such a language. It's not my area of expertise and I've too much on my plate already. But I am definitely interested and intrigued if such a language has already been attempted. I would love to see an auxlang that didn't fit the normal romanoclone mold. Not a world-lang, but one that had something to offer to a wide cultural-sphere and can leverage the common vocabulary of that sphere. It wouldn't necessarily be a world-lang any more than Interlingua could claim that title.