Today, the Seventeenth of August, is hereby proclaimed a holiday, at least for those of us here at Acadonea.
We needed a good holiday in August didn’t we?
Think of all the holidays in January and February. It’s been unfair to the month of August.
So what kind of a holiday is it today? Let’s call it a birthday—those make excellent holidays.
But we are here to celebrate the birth of something other than a person. What we wish to celebrate right now is the birth of a language.
Yes, an entire new language, one like no other in many ways. Something called an engineered language, and one inherently usable as an international auxiliary language.
The language is called Acadon. The realm in which it thrives, we will call Acadonea.
We have had an Acadon website for well over a decade now. Meanwhile, the language has been under development. For your mother or mine, that would have seemed a long period of gestation. This is not necessarily so for an entire language, especially one with so ambitious a program ahead of it.
This blog will describe and discuss Acadon—ask you for advice from time to time.
Very little about the basic nature of Acadon was revealed in that early website. You can still find it at :http://acadon.com/index.html . It is not so much outdated as it is incomplete. It does not actually reveal what makes Acadon unique.
But Acadon is unique—the first and only ‘linked alternative language.’ It has a complex link to written English. This means that every aspect of Acadon has been engineered to retain a lexemic and grammatical link to English in order to translate seamlessly everything currently digitized in English. We are talking about what some call non-lossy translation.
(My son Robert and I were advised to get a patent on the system of linked alternative languages and the varied procedures and mechanical subsets for controlling linkage and taking full advantage of the concept in design. NOTE: The use of Acadon as a language is, of course, free of any patent or other restrictive control.)
While Acadon mirrors English, it has a life of its own. For example, a system called MarkedEnglish enables Acadon to go beyond many of the ambiguities, confusions, alternative spellings, irregularities, and other limitations and difficulties of English.
Acadon is, moreover, capable of avoiding what is often cited as the inherent sexism of the English language.
Ultimately, use of the MarkedEnglish feature, can speed the location of needed information on the internet.
We have developed test software to translate from English to Acadon. A few years back, for example, we translated the Old Testament (the King James version). It took less than 30 seconds to translate it all into Acadon. With newer software, the time would be much less. All of Gutenberg materials, all of the Wikipedia, all the Internet in English, will translate into Acadon with great speed.
To do all this, Acadon must have a large vocabulary. All the words in the Old Testament, have long been in Acadon (even the archaic ones). But English has a vast vocabulary. There were about 50,000 words in the Acadon list when that test was made on the Bible, now there are about 90,000.
Great care must be taken in choosing Acadon words for ease of worldwide learning, regularity of form, ease of pronunciation, etc. Unfortunately a great deal of work has still to be done in hammering out the detailed vocabulary needed. Science and technology churn out words rapidly.
All these words must fit together under rules that minimize the potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding. This includes assuring that no two words sound too much alike, considering the way they might be in fact pronounced by speakers of various languages around the world. For example, no two Acadon words should be similar except for an L vs. R difference since Japanese and other languages do not have both. There are many such cases to be avoided.
Acadon can give non-speakers of English access to the vast base of digitized data available in the English language. And it will be far easier to learn than English, with:
fully regular spelling, a much more regular grammar, built-in keys to sentence structure,
fewer separate word roots that must be learned, and about half as many basic sounds (phonemes) that must be distinguished.
Acadon not only eliminates many of the difficulties of learning and using English, but also does or can do many things that English cannot. Many of these are of potential value to English speakers. More on that later.
More on everything later. So for now . . .
If August 17 is your birthday, good for you! You’ll have your birthday made a holiday, at least here. Acadon Day!
Congratulations and ‘Happy Birthday!’
There was only about one chance in 365* that it would be yours. If so, you were lucky. Let us know.
Regards,
*Let’s not forget February 29, ‘leap-day.’
That was my grandmother’s birthday by the way.
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