The Value of Acadon

Many years of work have gone into the creation of Acadon, although only a few persons have been aware of it at all. Is there value in the final product?

 Well, no language is final, but in the form we already have, we believe there is tremendous potential in the Acadon system. We feel that anyone will be able to use it to some advantage, often with scant prior learning involved.

 Acadon has many potential uses. Not all users of Acadon will have the same goals. While Acadon is designed to give access to all digital data available in the English language, that is not its only use.

 Those who do not have a full command of English will find it far easier to learn than English, with fully regular spelling, regularized grammar, built-in keys to sentence structure, fewer separate word roots to learn, and only about half as many sounds that must be distinguished.

There follows a list some of the things that Acadon does better than English. Many are far from trivial. Some examples:

1) Acadon spelling is completely regular. This alone saves the learner much of the time that would be spent on learning English. (Yet any Acadon text written by a learner can be automatically put into English, with no spelling errors at all.) 

2) Acadon lacks dialectical and regional variations of spelling and pronunciation that plague English. 

3) Acadon has far fewer sounds (phonemes) than English. About half as many as some versions of English. 

4) Acadon has far fewer consonant clusters than in English. 

5) Word endings are few in Acadon, only the vowels or six consonants ( s, n, m, r, c, l, t, ) Furthermore, all syllables end only in these. 

6) Acadon has about half as many vowel distinctions as English. The primacy of the three most easily distinguished vowels worldwide, [i] [a] [u], is used in word selection. 

7) Despite the constraints, Acadon vocabulary is far more global than that of English. Roots are widely international. 

8) Acadon better integrates certain non-English words and concepts into its lexicon than does English. 

9) It is easier to master the total Acadon vocabulary than English. Words are more regularly derived. Prefixes and suffixes are more specific. 

10) Part of speech is more recognizable in Acadon. 

11) Provision is made to clarify many forms of the ambiguities that exist in English, both grammatical and semantic. 

12) Sentence structure and grammar is far more regular and transparent in Acadon than in English. 

13) Acadon words are much safer for the learner to pronounce than English. The danger of learners making confusing or embarrassing mistakes has been systematically reduced. For example, the Japanese and others will be happy that no two Acadon words are distinguished only by the difference between an [l] and an [r]. 

14) The stress (accentuation) on Acadon words is completely regular, in contrast to English. 

15) Acadon sentences are much clearer than English to understand when heard. Words are not slurred. This will also help machines to understand spoken commands. 

16) Compared to English, Acadon more effectively supports computer interface, particularly speech recognition systems. There are no homophones for example. 

17) Acadon provides ways for casting words and sentences into less ambiguous forms than possible in English. 

18)  Acadon more naturally avoids many sexist and ethnocentric usages common in English. 

19) Acadon is more precise than English in a variety of ways that support scientific communication and the usefulness of scientific nomenclature. 

20)  Acadon provides several mnemonic systems of considerable usefulness. 

21) Acadon has a recognized system for expressing certain complex shades of meaning (for example, degrees of probability) much more effectively and naturally than English. 

22)  Acadon provides a concise way to integrate mathematical formulae and symbolic logic into normal spoken sentences. Symbolic language is built into the structure of Acadon for those who might wish to use it to clarify relationships. 

23) For the hearing impaired, Acadon is designed to be easier to lip-read than English. 

24) There is an unimplemented project for an Acadon font that should help those with dyslexia. 

25) Acadon will have a presence in fantasy fiction. 

Acadon provides easier access to the vast amount of information stored in, or transmitted via, the English language. It is at the same time as neutral and international a medium as can be designed for its purposes. 

Above all, Acadon can be learned in a fraction of time that it takes to learn English. Because of the many difficulties of English, many students of the language around the world end up unsuccessful at mastering English in any useful way. The success rate for Acadon will be very significantly higher.

Categorizing Acadon

Acadon is a Controlled Language (CL), that is to say that it is a consciously designed language with carefully controlled phonetics, structure, and vocabulary designed to reduce ambiguity and complexity and provide for more efficient communication on a worldwide scale. Most immediately, Acadon can give those who are not native speakers of English wider and better access to data on the Internet. But it has many additional uses.

 

We will leave it to professional linguists to decide whether Acadon qualifies as a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) or not. We feel it is natural enough to fall in that category. Perhaps it could be called a subset of English. However, the issue of terminology is not basic to what Acadon is designed to do. Those interested in CNLs can find information on the web. One definition: "Controlled Natural Languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and complexity. Traditionally, controlled natural languages fall into two major categories: those that improve the readability for human readers, in particularly for non-native speakers, and those that improve the computational processing of a text."

 https://sites.google.com/site/controllednaturallanguage/

 

One of the unique features of Acadon is that it is linked to the written English language. This means that it is what we call a Linked Alternative Language (LAL). Acadon differs from all other designed languages in that it is a LAL. With its link to English, Acadon can immediately translate any English text into its own vocabulary and format. This is done in an non-lossy manner, that is without any errors or loss of meaning. It is, and always will be, impossible for Internet translation programs to produce non-lossy texts.

 

The concept of a Linked Alternative Languages is unique to us. 

http://www.google.com/patents/US6275789 While such LALs can be created with linkage to Chinese, Japanese, or any other language, we have not done anything more than a few tests along this line. 

 

We wish to make it clear that Acadon is not designed to be used as a Pivot Language (PL), a language used as a universal means of translation between two other languages. (Pivot Languages do not work well, though English is sometimes used as such. Acadon would incidentally serve this purpose better than English.)

 

While Acadon is most properly a Controlled Language of some sort, it also falls in the category of the International Auxiliary Language (IAL). An IAL is a language that can be used as a second language for communication between persons belonging to differing linguistic cultures. Latin was long used as such in Europe, Classical Chinese in much of East Asia, Sanskrit in South Asia, etc. Of course, these languages were regional, not global, while most IALs today have global pretentions.

 

There have been many artificially designed IALs, such as Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, or Interlingua. That such artificial languages can be used quite normally is most particularly shown by Esperanto, especially by its use in Eastern Europe, and by the fact that some children have been quite normally raised with it as their first language.

 

Acadon is very, very different from all the many IALs that have been spun on the Internet. It has features none of them have. It also lacks many of the features that have limited the success of such projects.

 

How Acadon differs from all other controlled language and artificial language projects will be discussed in a further note here.

 

Best regard,                  Leo

 

Language Design

 

 

We have been involved in creating Acadon for many years. Much remains to be done to implement all its potential powers. Many aspects of the language are set by its nature as a linked alternative language, but not all.

 

What you will see in an Acadon text may puzzle you, but there was a reason for every word, for every choice. No language is perfect, none ever will be. Feedback is always valuable. There is considerable complexity in the design of the language, which will hopefully not be obvious to the learner at all.

 

Ease of learning is a major goal, but not the only one. More on this later. But hold in mind that a language must above all be useful. There are many aspects to this. Our goal is to make Acadon useful, and in ways no other language is.

 

No language, of course, is ever done, despite the efforts of academies and agencies to establish permanent norms. It is my opinion that the efforts in France to retain the ‘purity’ of the French language, will in the long run fail. The Italians have been much wiser in this regard.

 

In creating Acadon, I have at times provided linguistically interested friends with samples of what might be called Acadon-in-progress and gotten feedback. Most of this has been done on the Internet.

 

To experiment with possibilities and to research vocabulary possibilities, I early on developed a sister language called Bahasan. Various short texts in it were circulated on the Internet long ago. This was done in order to get reactions more widely. Project Bahasan was always described as an experimental project centered primarily on the search for worldwide vocabulary. Some of it lives on in Acadon. The concept of a linked alternative language was not mentioned.

 

Languages are complex. No language can be learned overnight.

 

If you know English, or can at least read it, you will find Acadon far easier to learn than any language you have ever come across. And the learning will, we hope, be a joy.

 

But you do not need to know English to use Acadon. Quite the contrary. Much of the value of Acadon will be for those who do not know English and have not the time or resources to learn it properly. They will be able to gain access to the data recorded in English with far less effort. Do other things, too.

 

Many Acadon sentences may be transparent to you at first glance, especially if you are an English speaker with some knowledge of a Latin-based language. But other sentences may stump you at first—some may take a bit of learning for almost everyone.

 

This is unavoidable.

 

For the entire language, the amount of learning required will vary in accordance with the learner’s experience.

 

This is very unfortunate but also unavoidable.

 

A Chinese who knows only Mandarin will find Acadon more difficult to learn than a Chinese who has studied a bit of English or Russian. Someone who knows only Arabic will find Acadon more difficult to learn than will a neighbor who can read French or German. A speaker of Japanese or Korean who has not learned a word of English, Persian, Hindi, French, or Russian will find it more difficult than those who have. A speaker of Zulu who also knows Afrikaans, will find it far easier than one who is monolingual.

 

There is no way of rationally preventing this.

 

Yet any person on this globe will find Acadon far easier to master than English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Persian, German, Hindi, or Japanese. Much easier also than Spanish, Portuguese, or Indonesian. Easier than any natural language, actually.

 

It is so designed.

 

Whether Acadon is simpler than the various artificially designed languages of the past (Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, etc.) might be contested by advocates of those languages. I believe, however, that practice will show that Acadon is more easily learned by global populations. Taking Esperanto as an example, it has an accusative case, requires agreement of adjectives with nouns, future tenses of verbs, and many other grammatical features that are unfamiliar to the more than one billion Chinese. The word order patterns of English (which are reflected in Acadon) happen to be more familiar to Chinese.

 

Let’s look at Asia. Vast numbers of people there will need communication skills in the future, needs never envisioned by their ancestors.

 

English is touted as the international language, and many sweat to learn it. Some succeed.

 

In 2006 a Chinese official stated that more than 300 million Chinese had studied English as a major or elective course. The reality is that many of these classes have been poor, the teachers hardly qualified. Yet these students have been exposed to many things to be found in Acadon as well as English. It can prime them for greater success if they focus on Acadon.

 

Among the more than a billion persons living in India many have substantial contact with English, and the teachers are far better qualified. Almost the entire population of Japan has studied English, and while the average Japanese is not in full control of English by any means, its structure and much of its vocabulary are widely known. More people are listed as speaking English in the Philippines than  in the United Kingdom.

 

In Africa, Nigerian Pidgin English is reported to be a second language for up to 75 million people. The Internet even has its Naija-lingo pages. Similar pidgins stretch across all of West Africa. English is an official language of many African nations, although the percentage of the population who have succeeded in mastering English is often small.

 

However, English has several strikes against it in becoming the international auxiliary language in the fuller sense:

1)  It is difficult to write correctly, since its spelling is chaotic. Thousands of hours are wasted even by native speakers in learning to spell. And even our electronic spell checkers cannot always help.

2)  Many words that are spelled the same, sound differently.

3)  Many words that are spelled differently sound the same.

4) Stress (accentuation) within the word is irregular, shifting, and unmarked.

4)  There are national variations in spelling, especially between the UK and US, but others as well.

5) Spoken English is a snarl, especially in the pronunciation of vowels. Most learners have to commit to either British or American English, but there are Australian and Indian and other well-established forms.

6)  Even then, the student of any form of English has to learn to distinguish and accurately produce an unusually large inventory of variant sounds (phonemes) and some of these are quite rare elsewhere.

7)  Many languages have five or six vowels, most forms of English have more than twice as many.

8)  There are many ambiguities in English that don’t exist in other languages and can be clarified.

9)  Some important distinctions are hard to hear in the spoken English. (For example, whencan or can’t is followed by a word beginning in t-.)

10) There are many grammatical irregularities in English that could be cleared up. (sing, sang, sung; go, went, gone; ).

 

There is, of course, also the historical or social dimension. This has changed over time. Some still consider English a colonial language. From time to time, the Soviets had tended to characterize English as if a capitalistic language. Some Islamic groups may consider it a Christian language. In parts of Africa, it may be viewed as the white-man’s language. Gradually, however, the diversity of those using English, especially on the Internet, has reduced these various stereotypes.

 

Unlike other designed languages, Acadon brings immediate access to vast amounts of data. This advantage will be the major consideration for potential learners. Languages are learned for a purpose.