Michael Terry’s Log

I’m a big fan of rules. And I’m guilty of loving the rules of grammar. Never end a sentence with a preposition, that sort of thing. But ultimately, I can’t care too much about it. I’ve always loved how versatile English is.

That’s why I have a love/hate relationship with constructed languages like Esperanto or Ido. Ido appeals to my order-loving half, but I ultimately find it too restrictive to be practical. Let loose upon a large body of speakers, I can’t help but feel it will be contorted and bent. Particularly once it starts adopting words from other languages (as it largely does now, with some extra -o’s stuck on).

English is too good at picking up bits of other languages, Katamari Damacy style. It’s ability to evolve and change is a virtue, not a problem. (Stephen Fry did a podcast about it recently, if you like him.) Although this mutability does make it a bitch to learn, after centuries of rolling around the Earth, picking up dregs of slang, prickly with cows and islands sticking out at all angles.

I’m fascinated by the future of English. It’s currently the lingua franca du jour. But will the Internet congeal that state or break it? I hear that all other countries are learning English as quickly as possible. That Japan and China have a voracious demand for English tutors. But I don’t know how true that is, relative to the demand in other countries to learn Japanese or Chinese. I have a very English-centric viewpoint of the world, and sources of news.

It certainly would be nice if it’s true that the world seems to be adopting English. It would be ever so convenient. And by adopting it in various regional pockets, it’s sure to grow odd, evolving in somewhat isolation. I’d be interested to know all the regional English jargon that must exist in non-English-majority countries.

It’s too bad, I really like Ido.

If you take a dictionary, there must be a small set of words with which you can define all the rest of the words, proof style. So, say words A and B let you define word C. Then with all three you can define D. That sort of thing.

These original words would be English axioms of sorts. I suppose a computer could find them very easily.

This set of words would be the only words that need to be manually taught to students/kids. It could be assumed that any English speaker would already know them (since they would be the core must-haves of the language). Kind of like the set of words that the Simple English Wikipedia uses (though they actually try to use just the 1000 most common words).

I wonder how big the axiom set would be, in comparison to that 1000 most-common-words set.

I was at Shaw’s today, and happily noticed that the express lane’s sign read “10 items or fewer.” I’m used to seeing “or less.”

You go, Shaw’s.

I had been planning on making a t-shirt with a tag cloud of some of my favorite words wrapping all around it.

It being too difficult for me to get my act together, I’d thought I’d share the list of words I came up with for posterity. These were not chosen for much beyond the sound of the word itself. The weights given to the words are somewhat random.

acute amble banana cadaver clandestine contextual ember endeavor entropy
erstwhile finagle happenstance havoc hitherto hoist loll maladjusted malice
malign manic mince nada nautilus oblong omnivore oy panties
pedantic pique sanguine serendipity singe slather slaver slither sly smarmy smother
squeamish surreptitious tap toil tweak upon viscous whorl

A while back, my erstwhile roommate Dave and I learned Esperanto, a constructed language. I did it largely because I felt vaguely embarrassed that I only knew English, and it appealed to my engineering side to see such a well-formed and consistent grammar set.

Unfortunately, I become somewhat disenchanted, though of course not for such an obvious and pedestrian complaint of impracticality. Rather, there were some annoyances under which I felt an invented language shouldn’t suffer. I guess I figured that if you get a shot at making a perfect language, you should succeed.

One bother was typing, since Esperanto uses six characters with diacritics not to be found on my decidedly Western keyboard. Another was that the default gender for all nouns was masculine. In order to make a word feminine, you need to add a special feminine suffix. So, to make mother, you add a suffix to the word for father. This seemed unnecessarily sexist and ambiguous. I’d much prefer a language that had neuter words by default and both masculine and feminine suffixes, which also buys you expressivity.

Ido to the rescue! It was started by some dissatisfied Esperanto dudes and dudettes. It takes care of both those problems and does some other minor tweaks that I don’t care as much about. Come everyone, let’s frolic in a utopia of consistency of speech!