Planned Languages

Note that this abstract contains some linguistic errors (I believe that it was written by someone other than me):

It is possible to classify Artificial Languages as well as Natural Languages into three main types, according to the forms of comparative adjectives. Artificial Languages can form the comparatives using only a synthetic strategy, or only an analytic strategy, or both of them accordingly. Artificial Languages that use only a syntetic strategy can be classified further according to the rules in choosing one strategy or the other. Some evidence shows that a large proportion of Artificial Languages have both analytic and synthetic comparatives, as in some natural languages. The formation of comparatives results to be an interesting area of morphology, where there is room for choice, also for Artificial Languages.

The international auxiliary language Esperanto is probably the best known constructed language in the world, but also one of the most heavily criticised ones. Although it was meant to solve the problem of international understanding, there is still widespread and excessive criticism on Esperantoʼs account by lay people and linguists alike who think it actually cannot solve it and who, for various reasons, consider it linguistically inferior to their native tongues. As a result, this paper deals with the reasons behind the unpopularity of Esperanto, well-known critics of Esperanto, and widely proposed changes to its most criticised points. It closely examines 16 common structural ʻflawsʼ of the language at the orthographic, phonologic, morphologic, semantic and syntactic level, trying to show that there are still significant knowledge deficits behind these persistent objections. It has to be pointed out that all the criticised structural characteristics in this paper are dealt with objectively and scientifically, trying to show that all languages can come under close scrutiny as Esperanto often does. However, we are well aware that natural languages do not conform to the same rules and objections as planned languages still do.

Among the hundreds of artificial languages put forth as possible
international auxiliary languages, relatively few (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua) have seen a substantial amount of actual use. Given this, one might think that the study of such languages might have little to offer pragmaticists, and indeed there has been very little pragmatic work on them. However, I would argue that the pragmatic investigation of artificial languages can provide useful insights and information.
Most designers of artificial languages are not professional linguists.
Although they usually say little or nothing about the pragmatics of their languages, what they do say can reveal popular ideas about pragmatics, which may otherwise be difficult to discover. I shall present and discuss relevant remarks by some artificial language designers. I shall also look at several pragmatic features of artificial languages. Although the amount of textual material available in most artificial languages is limited, what exists can be subjected to pragmatic analysis. Perhaps most intriguing are the a priori artificial languages (e.g. aUI), attempts to
build a language without borrowing anything from natural languages, as, on the surface, these languages can appear quite odd. I shall present some texts from several artificial languages with a view to seeing whether even apparently exotic artificial languages have the same pragmatic properties as natural languages. Such work can be seen as contributing to the study of cross-linguistic pragmatics

Supporters of languages planned for international communication, like Esperanto, often claim that these languages are less complex and therefore easy to learn as compared to natural languages. To what extent does this claim have empirical support? In this contribution, planned languages will be presented from the perspective of learnability. In particular, the question of language complexity will be addressed. Almost all planned languages show a high degree of morphological regularity, obtained by a drastic reduction of allomorphy and suppletion. While these morphological traits can help learners acquire the basics of the planned language more easily as compared to standard natural languages, other factors should be taken into account in order to assess the learnability of these languages, in particular their sociolinguistic status.

Il possesso detiene rilevanza antropologica, socio-economica e culturale, e si esprime linguisticamente nelle strutture grammaticali, mostrando una complessa interazione tra semantica e morfosintassi, prestandosi a introdurre e approfondire riflessioni più generali sul rapporto tra livello cognitivo e strutture linguistiche. Proprio come nel caso delle lingue storico-naturali, più largamente studiate in questa prospettiva, anche le lingue pianificate codificano in maniera diversificata le strutture per esprimere il possesso. Per strutturare la ricerca ho scelto di analizzare distintamente ogni lingua pianificata selezionandone le proprietà specifiche delle espressioni possessive, per poi inserirle in strutture teoriche adeguate, esplicandone meglio il funzionamento. Attraverso un’analisi tipologica, ho vagliato le variazioni sintattiche del possesso, tenendo conto della sempre presente intersecazione in questi processi della semantica. Quello che ho potuto notare dalla mia analisi, è che ogni lingua pianificata ha la possibilità di creare strutture del possesso teoricamente infinite, eppure, ciò non avviene, permettendo di constatare che esistono dei limiti non solo nell’apprendimento del linguaggio, ma anche nella creazione di esso. Rispetto, quindi, alla possibilità che la relatività linguistica sia riscontrabile attraverso le lingue pianificate, mi sento di collocarmi in una visione centrale: da un punto di vista semantico-cognitivo, i “tipi” di possesso immaginabili possono essere molto differenti, in quanto la sensibilità di che cosa si possa possedere, e in che misura, è caratterizzata culturalmente (e in questo senso l’ipotesi Sapir-Whorf può dirsi confermata); da un punto di vista sintattico, riferendomi dunque ai modelli del WALS, la questione del possesso è incastonata in questa grammatica in qualche modo biologicamente guidata, che non può dunque allontanarsi dagli schemi delle lingue umane storico-naturali.

Handout for talk given at the Sydney Language Festival October 8, 2016. Vela is an artificial language designed by an Australian, Ben Prist, who considers it "the easiest language possible", and how appears rather defensive about it, as shown by some of the quotations in the handout.

The complexity invariance of human languages – accepted for a long time – has become controversial within the last decade. During investigations of the problem, both creole and planned languages have often been neglected. After a presentation of the scope of the invariance problem and the proposition of the natural to planned language continuum, the contribution of planned languages will be discussed. The complexity of Esperanto will be analyzed at the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic levels using linguistic data bases. The role of the L2 speech community and development of the language will also be taken into account when discussing the endurance of the same level of simplicity of this planned international language. The author argues that complexity can be variable and to some extent planned and maintained.