Re: [glosalist] Re: minimal vocabulary

Hello Kevin,

After staying up all night looking at the three languages you referred to, I have a greater appreciation for what you’ve been advocating. It seems that Tavo and Glo both fit your design requirements. I don’t understand why you say you’ve abandoned them.

In any case, boni fortuna in all your endeavors.

p.s. Do you have an email address you might share? I would like to possibly share some ideas I’ve had down the same line as you.

Nothing. That’s what I did a few years ago. Aside from the vocabulary issues, I found a few syntax/grammar concerns. After a few months of serious work, I ended up with a language that had about 500 Glosa words, and about 5 changes to the language itself.

But at that point, it’s no longer Glosa. It’s not fair to Wendy and Glosa-pe to claim I’m promoting Glosa when it’s not really Glosa. It’s also not fair to anyone who learns my dialect, because they will not be able to read most Glosa text with its thousands of words.

So in 2003 I renamed my language “Glo”, implying that it was a simplified version of Glosa. But having split from Glosa, I then decided to switch from Greek roots to Latin, and chose the new name “Tavo”. Later, Lingua Franca Nova simplified its syntax to be almost isolating (like Glosa), so I mostly abandoned Tavo and just decided to support LFN.

Looking back, I think I prefer the Greek roots to the Latin, so if I do more work, I’ll probably revert to something more like Glo.

To summarize: I can’t wholeheartedly support Glosa because:

1. I am aware of perhaps a dozen possible improvements to the language which apparently have no hope of being debated and perhaps eventually accepted into the official language.[1]

2. I think that a reader should be able to memorize, or have printed, about 500-1000 words of an IAL, and be able to read almost any text that claims to be written in that IAL. The main exceptions would be technical words in a field. Splitting the language into “core” and “full” does not help, unless the non-core words are VERY rarely used.

You mentioned your aims are different then the Glosa community. I’ll bet there are as many different aims in the Glosa community as there are people in it.

Perhaps. But Glosa doesn’t seem to fit my goals. An unofficial dialect of Glosa doesn’t seem to fit my goals either. And a fragmented community will have great difficulty promoting the language and gaining widespread acceptance.

I’m sorry if I sound negative about all this. I really like almost all of Glosa. I am disappointed that it is not in a position to fulfill my own ambitions for an IAL. Hopefully I will end up being wrong and Glosa (or perhaps some other isolating IAL) will sweep the world.

Kevin

[1] A list of some differences can be found under “Glo structures not in Glosa” on this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20030704093009/www.qualitycode.com/html/glo-intro.eng.html But also note that I abandoned some of these ideas when I moved from Glo to Tavo. I think these and other ideas are worthy of dicussion and possible inclusion in the language. I have an open mind.

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