Re: Introduction

— In glosalist@yahoogroups.com, Robin Fairbridge Gaskell <drought- breake= r@p…> wrote:

Hello Friends, Frankly Stephan, I am overwhel= med. It’s interesting that some people in the Planned Language = world prefer simpler languages like Glosa because they don’t want to = learn a lot of inflection; while others enjoy getting their tongues arou= nd all of the possible complexities of languages, and hence, go for the = more complicated languages. My guess is that you swallow them al= l whole, and don’t notice any difficult bits.

Hello Robin. When I learn= t Esperanto I already knew about adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs and the= ir declensions. Esperanto implements this concept very well, and I enjoyed= learning it. (I “swallowed” it.) I could always apply my knowledge about = grammar in order to go always deeper into the grammar. Glosa is cool becau= se it shows that a language can be even simpler. But my little problem is = that I need to know the part-of-speech of every word in a sentence anyway = in order to feel sure that I’m uttering an actual sentence and not just a = latin-greek mish-mash in order to explain myself. Until now Glosa seems ve= ry, very flexible, maybe too flexible. Now that I’m going to read carefull= y your answers (thank you very much), I shall see if things become a littl= e bit clearer to me.

     Despite all this, Glosa was developed bec= ause there is a  very real problem with language: most people are only ev= er fluent  in  their native tongue.  And this was the reasoning behind Gl= osa's  formation: It was planned to be a language that the vast majority =

of

humanity could learn to use, at least functionally.

What do you mea= n with “functionally”? “Grammatically”?

The same idea is about Esperanto, = isn’t it? Even though the main organisations of Esperanto are making a pol= icy of neutrality. But I agree that Glosa may be more appropriate than Esp= eranto. But there may be also things to improve, for example the “q”. The = first time I saw a single “q” (without “u”), I thought that Glosa was some= kind of sci-fi language, without cultural or political attitude. (Also K= lingon has “q”, maybe I’m preinfluenced by it.)

     Maybe you will = be around when our leaders decide to adopt  an  International Auxillary L= anguage (IAL).

They have already adopted English so far. - And we comply. = :(

     If so, you could find your education and interests helpful  = in working with the project.
     Have you heard of the Distributed=  Language Translation  Project  (DLT, 1972)?  There was an attempt to mak= e Esperanto the  pivot language in a computer translation research projec= t; the  version of Eo used was supposed to be both computer readable and =

humanly readable. Things didn’t quite work out, however, and the fun= ding was stopped. The idea was to have all documents stored and transmi= tted around the system, only coming out as a national language at the o= utput terminal, the information previously having been input into the s= ystem at another terminal that converted a different national language i= nto the “distributed language”.

Yes. I think I have learnt a more suitable= language in the meantime. It’s called Latejami (and had a lot of names be= fore that, the first one was “Katanda”), see www.eskimo.com/~ram/Ladekwa/ = It works (for the cases studied yet) for English very well, I think.

= It was my belief that the project would have been completed satis= factorily had the pivot language been Glosa.

I’m not sure…

Regards, Ste= phan Schneider