Being a language nerd, I'm of course interested too in so-called "artificial" languages (the term "constructed language" is currently en vogue). Linguist Akrina Okrent wrote a great book on the subject a few years ago. Some are just kind of interesting as cultural artifacts, like Klingon or Orth (the latter from Neal Stephenson's Anathem). Others have a specific purpose, like attempts to base their languages in symbolic logic and to eliminate all ambiguity, such as Lojban (see also relevant xkcd).
But of all of these, I'm most enamored with Esperanto.
First, I love its purpose. L. L. Zamenhof, its creator, was a Polish doctor living in the late 19th century. He dreamed of a language not tied to any national identity, and which would be universal. This of course means it would have to be easy to learn. He spent about 10 years working on it before releasing his creation. The result is a language that is indeed simple to learn, with no irregulars and no unnecessary quirks such as grammatical gender or overly-complicated verb forms. The name itself (while not coming from Zamenhof) is a testament to its optimism: it means "one who hopes."
The vocabulary is generally pulled from European languages (especially Romance and English, with some Slavic mixed in as well). It's rare, though, to see a word and not have it be clear what it means. A few common examples:
* Vidi, to see
* Skribi, to write
* Blua, blue (adj.)
* Doni, to give
* Kun, with
* Libro, book
* Ami, to love
Etc.
Despite the Western bent to the vocabulary, it has also blown up in China, with that country's first Esperanto museum opening in 2013.
The grammar, meanwhile, is super duper simple. As I said, there are never any irregular forms of any kind, ever. Nouns always end in -o, adjectives in -a, and adverbs in -e. Verbs conjugate for tense only, and even then there's only 6 forms (including imperative and infinitive). Compound words are extremely common, and so it's very easy to build one's vocabulary. It's also common to take a single word and change its part of speech.
An example text (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). From here, which includes same pronunciations.
Ĉiuj homoj naskiĝas liberaj kaj egalaj en digno kaj rajtoj. Ili posedas racion kaj konsciencon, kaj devus konduti unu la alian en spirito en frateco.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
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I had put together a more formal grammar, which is hanging out right here.
viro, "man" --> virino, "woman" That, right there, is really weird. A mother is not merely a feminine variant of a father: there are very distinct functions applied to a mother, like giving birth and feeding children with her milk, that a father can't do (barring extraordinary circumstances). It's fitting in male gay couples where one is more masculine and another is more feminine, but I don't see that kind of vocabulary working for me. Rapida (fast) --> malrapida (slow) Same goes for this one. I feel like that grammar sacrifices essential distinctions for simplicity. "Small" is not lacking in bigness. Again, I can see that grammatical form working when expectations haven't been met ("it's not-big-enough; it's too small"). "Universal" doesn't mean "so simple as to forego basic logic". Forgive my ranting. I've spent the last two days trying to rest, to no avail.patro, "father" --> patrino, "mother"
Granda (big) --> malgranda (small)
For the second point, I mean, small can absolutely be defined as "not large." But it's less about that as it is a way to make learning easier, so you basically only have to learn one word and you have two at your disposal. The same is true for the gendered terms (and there have been some criticisms of this as being sexist, to be fair). But again, it's not intended to remove any kind of cultural or biological meaning to the words. But at the same time, this is built to be a second language, meaning it's built to allow communication from people with varying cultural backgrounds.
My protest with those two points rests on the idea that language shapes the way we think. I feel like it's taking parts of how I understand the world through the names I've applied to the objects that I'm sure are distinct and bends them to a degree I can't accept; much like lies being called "alternative facts". I'm afraid I don't possess the education or the thinking capacity to produce a more coherent and meaningful response at the moment.
I get what you're talking about; it's called linguistic relativity (sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Worf hypothesis). But it's not as strong of an influence as we might think. Most of the research, from my limited understanding, suggests some weak but non-trivial ways this shows up. For example, this study deals with concepts of (relative) space and how they may influence or reflect the underlying cognitive thinking. It's fascinating stuff. I will say that I myself have noticed some interesting quirks of the languages I've studied that kind of coincide with various stereotypes about those cultures, but it's hard to go farther than that. For example, have you ever wondered whether Russian's rather oblique way of talking about possession has some connection to the way Russian society views ownership or individualism? Or is it a reflection of that, or totally unrelated? Meanwhile, I've wondered if the reason the Greeks were so good at philosophizing is that Ancient Greek is extremely good at abstractions, and tends towards really broad meanings in words. I don't speak Latin, but one of my Greek professors (who speaks both) told us once that reading philosophers in Latin you could often see them struggling to get their point across because Latin just doesn't lend itself to abstract concepts the way Greek does. I don't know how true that is, and again I don't know in which direction the causation runs (if it exists at all). But it's fun to think about. Turning back to your examples from Esperanto, I think it's all in how you approach it. For me, I don't really think about the mal- prefix as being anything other than "not," and have never thought about it as having any moral connotations (especially since there are other affixes that do suggest either "badness" (aĉ)- or mistake (mis-).A close look at the linguistic development of children raised in Dutch-, English-, Tzotzil-, and Korean-speaking homes shows that children do not start from a common conceptual core, given say by innate presumption or biological endowment, but from the earliest point of language production already make distinctions more like adult speakers of their own languages.
[...]
As Bowerman (9:170) concluded with respect to the production evidence, “there was little evidence that [the children] had strong prelinguistic biases for classifying space differently from the way introduced by their language. This leaves the door open to the possibility that, after all, spatial thought—undeniably one of our most basic cognitive capacities—bears the imprint of language.”
I read this in December https://www.google.com/amp/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/a-language-to-unite-humankind/amp Fuck it. Weird Google link