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.