jo! mi nome is k1attack. mi is in mi domo. mi ej-wil du Dunja Wen. Dunja Wen is multi bon und det has wolt de multi wen simila Englic-wen, Dutc-wen, German-wen, Japanis-wen und Tcajnis-wen. jan, ke wen Englic-wen, kan wakan ej-multi Dunja Wen, bala if det ale ej-wil no stat wakan det! dis is fet tame de Dunja Wen.

Radio~!:

ceigered:Now, I don't mind people arguing on Esperanto's behalf, but let's not be ignorant - just because the wheel was invented, doesn't mean we stop developing it or experimenting with it.

In fairness to Aslan, I think the post he made was completely reasonable and in no way ignorant; it could be argued that the person who started a thread with a two-line post telling us to visit an arbitrary website which has no relevance to Esperanto was less reasonable.

[......]

And for me that's the difference between Esperanto and any of your Toki Bona Neo Wens - Esperanto is more than a collection of symbols on a page, it has a community and a culture

I sometimes feel sad after visiting the Lernu forums and seeing how many people don't realise that yet

Ah, I should add that I was meaning to call Aslan ignorant, I just find the "reinventing the wheel" argument a sort of a trap for the person arguing it. And while k1attack's post was a bit random, we've already told him so I wasn't really going to push it much further. Anyway, I just wanted to prevent this from raining down on one persons excitement and felt like discussing argumentative logic at the same time

And this is the internet after all - that dreaded place where preestablished culture seems to melt away , so don't feel so bad. Esperanto could be argued to not even have a culture, but rather be a meeting place for cultures - and that's what's important (also partially related to English's success - Anglospheric culture is being watered down all the time and melding with the surrounding culture - although, currently, it's not going so well due to some preexisting problems in society).

Now, @ K1attack:
Talking about your language is fine but now you need to try and tackle things that are completely unrelated. Preferably things discussing the history of the Norman conquest of England or other complicated texts which don't focus on language. Conlangers tend to get stuck on talking about their own language so much that their language turns into a system to communicate about itself (this no doubt happened to Esperanto too - if you look at the different versions of the language, earlier and less successful versions tended to focus on the purpose of Esperanto itself).

The next thing after that is to translate something that could absolutely break your language - translate things that you've been avoiding (for example when I play around with conlangs I tend to avoid hard phrases which are fairly idiomatic or abstract). And no offence to Christianity but the Lord's Prayer isn't very good for building a language - it's too straight forward and focuses on the imperative mood like there's no tomorrow.

Is it Create Your Own Minimalist Language Month or something? I feel like I've seen at least five of these recently and I don't even frequent Lernu that often.

Pharoah:Is it Create Your Own Minimalist Language Month or something? I feel like I've seen at least five of these recently and I don't even frequent Lernu that often.

They are all from the same guy. He posted links to Puna, Bon Wen, Vuyamu, and Neo Patwa as he discovered them and then decided those had problems so he'd make his own micro-conlang. (My new term for these things).

My opinion of this Dunja Wen and the perfect GAL (Global Auxiliary Language) was mentioned here

I can point out some immediate faults in these languages.

Esperanto

It doesn't matter that it's too European since that is one of the biggest language families, BUT the Consonant finals and clusters and over load of phonemes are horrible. A world language should have as few phonemes as possible because it will be hard for most of the world to speak.

Ido

A rip off of Esperanto and even worst. It is more like an Italian Esperanto. It reintroduced the useless "Q(u)". It also made learning it harder since the prefix "Mal-" was gone. Ido is horrible in my view

Toki Pona

This is good except for the fact that it can be made even easier by getting rid of "e" and "o". Arabic and many other languages don't have these vowels. Also the Japanese can pronounce "te" but not "ti" and "se" but not "si" so it will make it flexible without the vowel "e" since "i" could be pronounced as "i" or "e". It's best to stick to the three basic vowels just to be safe (a,i,u)

Neo Patwa/ Dunja Wen

Having final consonants (except s, m, n, and maybe l) is difficult for the majority of the world. Even some Spanish people have trouble pronouncing their final "r"s and would turn "hacer" to "hace" or "hacel". The language just seems easier to pronounce without all of the crazy consonant clusters and finals.

You may think it's no big deal but guess what? Many other languages think their consonant clusters and finals are no big deal either but would you want an IAL with hard to pronounce words like these:

stsii
pneu
pto
gde
psikro
zmrzlina
štvrť
tomatl

by the way, most people still can't say "tomatl" so now it's been changed to "tomato" and "pneu" is now pronounce "neu" and "psi" is not pronounced "si". Consonant clusters and finals are no good

Look, before we go into breaking down every language and pointing out its flaws, there is a lot more to take into consideration. I personally learn languages because I like them, and that's the only way to get people who have no use for the language in everyday life to learn these things, by making them likeable.

In terms of Ido, Ido isn't a "total ripoff" - that's like calling Lallan Scots a rip off of Early Modern English. For an Ido speaker, Esperanto is archaic and redundant. So who's right there? (also, the argument against "qu" is pointless. There is a reason "qu" exists - compare "kui" with "qui". It's merely a design decision, brought on by new rules concerning semivowels, because Ido is more faithful to the romance roots phonetically speaking)

Toki Pona might be made easier by getting rid a few sounds (actually, I do admit to liking the 3-vowel system and being intrigued by it), but what about people who don't have "i" or "u"?

The reason "tomatl" was hard to pronounce is because the lateral fricative "l" sound did not exist in most European languages spare Welsh. "Pneu" and "Psi" are due to a lack of decent teaching on pronunciation (remember, English was developing in a trilingual environment, which is not the best for keeping simple pronunciations).

Anyway, it's not simple at all, at least not as simple as you make it sound Arpee. You raise great points but there's always *someone* who'll be disadvantaged by *something*. And while in Japanese,"ti" is always "cx" (although "ti" can be written as ティ), it's not like a Japanese person can't pronounce T, just like how it's not like an English speaker can't pronounce the German "ch". Humans actually can make an amazing array of sounds even if they do not exist in their own language. The trick is making a system which doesn't dumb things down to 5 sounds, but making a system that can carry an great array of sounds while allowing for allophonic variants and good comprehension even with slightly alien sounds.

To be honest, conlangs require a balance. Esperanto, Ido, Bon Wen, Toki Pona, Dunja Wen, Puna, Sambahsa, Interlingua, Mondial, etc don't really have that balance simply because this is a fairly recent movement born mostly from C19th idealism. It's gonna take a while before the concept of a "perfect" GAL ( double entendre! ) becomes feasible.

(also, things like "psi" and "pto" aren't really complicated, and I've heard fairly monolingual Japanese people pronouncing sci-fi jargon more complicated than that with extreme ease. Things like 25% of Georgian words are)

Arpee:My opinion of this Dunja Wen and the perfect GAL (Global Auxiliary Language) was mentioned here

In my opinion as long it checks Esperanto's non-perfectness visible that's a valuable Esperanto related discussion. How to promote it as an personaly adopted language (child) could be discussed later.

Btw, why did you use a Text-To-Speech machine to let the text read aloudly at the "Unifit Global Constructed Languages" Youtube video? (0:10 min "failed" sound plastic effect). Your karaokeo is not such bad. Most karaokeantoj started this way. I have [url=www.ikso.net/kantaro/eobo_karaokeumo]some experiences[/url] with that

k1attack, Arpee, and ceigered, can you please, please, please, move your discussions of these conlangs to another forum, such as Unilang? Please?

A website whose purpose is to teach Esperanto is really not the place for discussing the intricacies of the development of the languages you are developing.

We are pretty forgiving of off-topic discussions in this forum, but this is really going too far.

k1attack:jo! mi nome is k1attack. mi is in mi domo. mi ej-wil du Dunja Wen. Dunja Wen is multi bon und det has wolt de multi wen simila Englic-wen, Dutc-wen, German-wen, Japanis-wen und Tcajnis-wen. jan, ke wen Englic-wen, kan wakan ej-multi Dunja Wen, bala if det ale ej-wil no stat wakan det! dis is fet tame de Dunja Wen.

Reads like Jamaican patwa.

Radio~!:
In Britain, I would go so far as to say that our publicity strategy is to distance ourselves as firmly as possible from any perceived sci-fi or conlang 'geekiness' and try to emphasise the fact that Esperanto is a *living* language.

This always seemed like a wise policy to me. The stories I've read about Klingon enthusiasts going to restaurants in their costumes and speaking to the waitress in that language do little to promote their cause.