Re: Regular English
- From: "jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx" <jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:59:41 -0800 (PST)
On Feb 10, 9:55 am, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 10, 3:25 am, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 10, 12:16 am, "jerry_fried...@xxxxxxxxx"
<jerry_fried...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 9, 4:20 pm, nos...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (J. J. Lodder) wrote:> Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Has anybody ever made a version of English with Esperanto-like
regularity?
SF author Anthony Boucher has invented a future,
several hundred years hence,
in which English has become completely regularised
by order of a care for all state.
(titled: The Barrier)
...
Speaking of such things, Orwell's Newspeak was much more regular than
English, though "the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative
adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs" were still irregular.
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/1984-Appendix.htm
The Wikipedia article suggests that this aspect of Newspeak was
modeled on Esperanto (e.g., "ungood" is formed like /malbona/, bad)
and says Orwell had lived for a time with an aunt and uncle who spoke
Esperanto at home.
If so, i don't think that's a fair analogy by Orwell.
Esperanto was intended to be a replacement for Latin as a lingua
franca, which Zammenhoff had learned but realised was too much effort
to expect the modern European population to learn.
I think the suggestion is that Esperanto's regular grammar might have
inspired the regular grammar of Newspeak as Orwell described it in the
appendix, not that Newspeak was supposed to have the same function as
Esperanto.
Esperanto has been used in a couple books I know of: in Mack Reynolds'
Homer Crawford series of short novels, and in David McDaniel's
U.N.C.L.E. #8, The Monster Wheel Affair. Both times, Esperanto was to
disguise the origin of the speakers.
Harry Harrison's novel /Deathworld 2/ is set on a planet with at least
one Esperanto-speaking society, the one the hero has to deal with.
SF writers often mention constructed languages: Esperanto, Basic,....
Interlingua, Anglic (which is a spelling reform, but which has been
used as the name of a future language by at least two authors).
Poul Anderson's Anglic has drastically reformed spelling; in /Satan's
World/ a character spells "Shenna" and "Dathyna" aloud using the
letters "sha" and "thorn". (Perhaps not realistic, as the point of
reformed spelling is that you don't have to tell people spellings.)
And there are plenty of constructed languages in sf, some rather Sapir-
Whorfian, most only a tiny bit completed.
--
Jerry Friedman
.
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