Thursday, August 23, 2012

Babel and Kondratov's 'Miracle'


Alexander Mikhailovich Kondratov (1937-1993) was a remarkable man. He lived in Russia during difficult times, when freedom of expression was severely limited.  Yet he managed to survive, even though he was full of intriguing ideas about history and many of the mysteries of our world.

Among other things, Kondratov was a linguist, a poet, an enthusiast of the sciences, and perhaps even something of a Zen Buddhist. That he could accomplish so much, and publish dozens of books on varied topics, was something of a miracle. More data at:

I have a book of his on linguistic issues, Звуки и знаки, Sounds and Signs (Moscow: Знание, 1966). In it, Kondratov discusses many issues of interest to the Acadon project.

In a chapter entitled ‘Tower of Babel,’ he addresses various concepts of a universal or mediating language. He mentions the Biblical story of that tower.

I’ll cite a version here: 
In those days the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, with tar for mortar.  And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.  And the Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them!  Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not  understand each other.” In this way the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city.  That is why the place was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the mankind. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Alexander says of the story: “. . . there is truth in it. When people are united they are capable of great deeds, and language is a tool by which unity and understanding can be attained.  Man has by now reached into the sky without building a tower. . . deep into space. . . . But the world still lacks a common language. To reach into the cosmos proved easier than to create a universal language for the inhabitants of earth.”

He goes on to recount the various ‘mediating languages’ that were in fact used in wide areas of the world for intercommunication: Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, the various pidgins and lingua francas. He then discusses invented languages such as Volapük and Esperanto, both products of the late Nineteenth Century.

Ultimately Kondratov despairs of such efforts. “A language only gains currency when it is indispensible,” he observes.  All scientific literature, he asserts, is being written in Russian, English, French, or German. Almost nothing in anything like Esperanto. So even if an invented language is vastly easier, it will not be learned. The useful language will be studied, even if it is exceedingly difficult.

However, he adds a paragraph: 
 “An artificial language would become widespread if by some miracle the bulk of scientific and engineering journals and books were written in that language. But miracles don’t  happen.”

Acadon does not claim to be a miracle by any means, but it is capable of doing precisely that!

The Acadon system can put everything currently in English into its format, almost instantly and completely seamlessly. No translation errors at all.

Acadon differs sharply from all previous proposals for an ‘international language’ in that it does not rely on utopian hopes and dreams for the future.  Instead, it is designed to bring immediate value to anyone who uses it right now. It does not even need to be ‘learned’ before it can be put to use. With its built-in technology, any relatively simple computer can automatically transfer Acadon texts back and forth into English. It is a tool designed for the age of the Internet and for immediate use. In practice, simple exposure and use will teach people Acadon, not complex grammatical explanations.

Furthermore, the Acadon system takes advantage of many opportunities and is able to form a language that is in many ways better than English. Yes, better.

The English language is very popular worldwide and provides value to  people of almost every nation and culture. To create a language that is better than English in any significant way, is a remarkable achievement.

We believe that we are in the process of doing that.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Happy holiday!

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,  
                                         Leo John Moser

*Let’s not forget February 29, ‘leap-day.’
That was my grandmother’s birthday by the way.