Re: [glosalist] World Premiere

At 01:40 PM 3/9/04 +1300, you wrote:

On March 20 In the Pilgrims’ Church in Leiden, the Netherlands, an international choir of nearly 200 high school students (with two wind bands) will present the premiere of a specially commissioned 10 minute work ‘U Trau’.

This will be the first ever performance of a text in the Niuspi language, though I am working on others.

Niuspi is very much a work in progress. It grew out of the brief for this commissioned work: a non-religious, positive text with an international flavour. After months of exploring Esperanto, Ido, Glosa and Lojban a new language seemed to start growing spontaneously as I wrote the text - a very peculiar experience! So far much of the basic grammar is in place - but only a few hundred words. It is pretty stable, the last change (Glosa’s numerative ‘plu’ being replaced by ‘zi’ for aesthetic reasons) occurred several months ago.

As you will see from the text and translation below, by far the strongest influence on Niuspi is Glosa. I love the creative flexibility of a truly isolating language, *** Sounds very intuitive, and possibly biassed towards signing. But very promising.

   While the ideology behind Glosa is more related to "problem-solving"  than to the beauty of sound, I'd say from a marketing viewpoint, Niuspi has  more publicc appeal than Glosa.
   And basing our logic on the fact that the world needs a global  medium of communication, adoption of any of the top ten Planned Languages  would be an exceedingly good thing. If singing achieves this end, then hats off to the language and to the  person who conceived it.

   The real-world problem is the mechanics of creating a lexicon that  allows civilised discussion of all of the world's pressing matters.  To  decide what must be the minimum number of such lexicon items - preferably  with songs being able to be  be sung about them, we are limited to a finite  range of concepts.  The CCVV range of letters can be a physical barrier to  vocabulary formation, especially after all of the suitable singable,  four-letter combinations have been used.  This suggests that Niuspi would  need a clear rule for the coining of the technical terminology  covering  matters beyond those discussed by the man in the street, or, for  that matter, which are the the subject of songs.

though (from a musical standpoint I stress) I find Glosa’s constant polysyllabic nature a bit clunky. I thought there must be some reason for why many of the world’s isolating languages seemed to be primarily monosyllabic. Besides I like the compactness of monosyllables. The maximum formula of ‘ccvv’ will eventually allow for around 3000 base words - though for now there are only a few hundred!

U Trau The Dream

Mi pa hae u trau…. Mi pa trau ke Gaia pa bi u gja ple i zi au kla floa. Mi pa trau ke Gaia pa bi mo nzio e u tou hua o le zi nziope. Mi pa trau ke u hua pa bi u fmi, e au pe zi zbi; e ke zi ho e fe pa ge ksoi gua, smi duo flue o bvi.

I had a dream…. I dreamt that the earth was a garden full of flowers of every colour. I dreamt that the earth was one nation and all humanity its citizens. I dreamt that humankind was a family; and all people brothers and sisters; and that men and women were seen as equal, like the two wings of a bird.

*** While you are attracted to monosyllabic words, I enjoy the etymological approach whereby the derivation of a concept’s word is found within the parts of that word.

   However, I especially liked the  ~pa pa~  = [had].
   And so, to bed.

Saluta.

Robin Gaskell P.S. Willl the CD of “U Trau” be available after the performance?