Esperanto, Ido, Volapuk, Interlingua, and every other constructed language I know of which was constructed in order to facilitate communication between people who don’t speak a common natural language, and which was constructed in a way based on particular living languages, was constructed based on European languages.
I am wondering whether there are such constructed languages which have been based on non-European languages instead.
What about constructed languages not intended for actual people to use to communicate? (For example, Tolkien’s constructed languages.)
From what I do know about various languages, I have the impression that Mandarin Chinese has one of the very simplest and easiest to learn types of grammar there is. Seems like that grammar would be a good place to start for a constructed language intended to be easy to learn and use by people of all kinds of “linguistic stock.” But is that incorrect? Would it actually be difficult for a person who speaks natively a highly inflected language to learn a language where there are no inflections to memorize because word order does all the work in that regard?
Here’s an interesting article about the DLAB. I took (and passed) the DLAB several years ago, and one thing I didn’t know then was based on your score, you’re qualified for learning (in the military) different categories of languages, including the Asian languages (I qualified for Russian for my Military Intelligence reserve unit). The DLAB tests your ability to learn an artificial language (one not intended for daily communication). From my memories, it was very European in its syntax, but then again I don’t know a whole lot about non-European languages to determine whether the DLAB language reflected them or not.
Several years later (when leaving the Army) I took the Border Patrol Artificial Language Test (I didn’t know Spanish back then), and passed it too (but the auto industry ended up being more attractive). That artificial language was easier than the DLAB, but they’re probably interested primarily in your ability to learn Spanish. (This exam was done in San Antonio, and after the exam a lot of Spanish speakers were lamenting the fact that they didn’t do the ALT instead of Spanish – anyone take the Spanish version that cares to comment on why it was so hard?)
I distinctly remember one exam in college (Linguistics major) concerning Klingon. The questions were to detail why Klingon is a completely human language. Its so-called oddities aren’t that odd, as it turned out. When I get back from vacation, I’ll see if I still have the exam on file.
(On Edit) Now that I’ve read the wiki article, I see that it lists some of the human-ness of the lingo. I’ll still search for the exam when I get back.
Lojban and Loglan come to mind. Originally, the language was called Loglan (short for “logical language”). After some internal disputes, a group within the Loglan movement split from the mainstream and formed Lojban (“logical language” in this idiom), which is now the more widespread variant.
Lojban is conceived to be based on formal logic. Instead of the usual word categories in European languages (nouns, verbs, etc.) it employs different word categories with different functions: Some words carry a meaning with them, other merely structurize the text flow or modify the meaning of other words. Single words are meant to be equivalent to predicators in formal logic.
To reflect Lojban’s neutrality towards natural languages, a system for creating new words has been devised. If a concept needs a word in Lojban, a word creating process based the translations for this term in a variety of natural languaes, both European and non-European, takes place. An arbitrary sequence of sounds (which obeys Lojban pronunciation rules) is compared to any of the translations in the natural languages and scored according to how closely the sound sequence resembles the natural word. The scores of the Lojban “word” are then weighted according to the number of speakers of the natural language and added up. This is repeated for a number of Lojban “words,” and the one with the highest score (which is thought to be the word to which the largest number of speakers is most accustomed to) ends up getting this meaning. At least that’s the theory of the Lojban movement (or a part of it).
Thanks, I already knew about those though. What I didn’t know was that they try to create words using an algorithm which sort of tries to “average out” the words’ translations in several of the world’s languages. That’s interesting!
I didn’t find any reference to this process in Wikipedia. Do you know where else online I can read more about it?
I read it in The Complete Lojban Language (the standard reference grammar to Lojban and “The Big Red Book” mentioned by the Wiki article), but I believe I have a later edition, so this part might not ne included in other versions. It doesn’t seem to be included in this online version of the book.
I don’t have the book at hand (it’s in my room at my parents’ house), but I’ll look it up for you next time I get there to get you some details.
I believe the term for what you’re looking for is “auxlang”, or “auxiliary language”. At least, some conlangers seem to have adopted that term to identify a conlang intended for actual communication, rather than for use in fiction.
There’s a Wikipedia page with a fairly extensive list of auxlangs. The only one that immediately jumps out as non-European in basis is Afrihili, which is based primarily on AFrican languages.
If you intended only to exclude Germanic- and Romance-based auxlangs in your question, there’s also Slovio, which is Slavic-based.
Finally, there’s International Sign Language. People generally don’t think of it that way, but it meets the criteria. For that matter, you might extend that to American Sign Language as well–I don’t actually know the language, but I understand its grammar is quite different from English.
When you open the question to literary conlangs, the sky’s the limit. Stargate SG-1, for example, has the Goa’uld language, which is based partially on ancient Egyptian and partly on Unas (another conlang in the show). The list I linked above also includes Ailurin, which is presumably based on cat sounds, although I have no idea how far the author developed it. (For that matter, I’m currently building a conlang for a race of sentient panther-like critters. It’s challenging.)
I just took the DLAB yesterday so I can try for a job in the Air Force as a Crypto-Linguist. I was joking with one of my friends that if I get sent to the Presidio to study ancient Latin, I’ll know that Stargate SG-1 is totally real.
IIRC, isn’t there a boarding school in England or Finland (I honestly can’t remember which) that is constructing a language based on Tolkien’s Elvish, incorporating various elements of the Finnish language? IIRC, it was something the school came up with to get the students interested in foreign languages, riding on the coat-tails of the renewed surge of popularity the books had with the movies’ release.
EDIT: I really shouldn’t post to month-old threads at 2 in the morning, as I just realized that this goes pretty much directly against what the OP was looking for, ie: "languages not based on Indo-European dialects. :smack:
The main two types of conlangs are a priori and a posteriori. A priori conlangs are made of raw material totally made up in someone’s imagination, e.g. Klingon, Lojban. A posterior conlangs are based on material derived from natlangs that has been processed or treated somehow, e.g. Volapük, Esperanto, Interlingua, Basic English.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth conlangs are an interesting blend of the two approaches: He made up nearly all of the lexical and grammatical material a priori, but Quenya is flavored like Finnish, Sindarin is flavored like Welsh, and Khuzdul is flavored like Hebrew. (Unfortunately, Khuzdul was a jealously guarded secret language…) What meager examples of Westron I’ve seen don’t look like any natlang in particular…
To answer the OP: My two conlangs are a posteriori. Mömö is a blend of Uralic and Altaic; Domi is a blend of Mömö and Dravidian. To the extent that the Uralic family would be considered basically European, because it’s thought to have originated on the western side of the Urals, then Mömö is half-European while Domi is only one-quarter European. The rest is of Asiatic origin.
