Lowell Speaks Again

Posted by cladrastis on May 25, 2009, 12:18 AM | #

Maltese is a curious language.

On a related note, I think the language of the Imperium should be Sanskrit; what better use for the sacred language of an international people than to appropriate it for our own ends?  If it is adopted by the international community as a lingua franca (much as English is now), it will be a net loss for the Hindus rather than for us.  Hebrew could also function in this manner, but, alas, as a lowly Semitic language it might not be deemed worthy.  Hebrew may, however, be of use as the language (and script) of curses.

Posted by Søren Renner on May 25, 2009, 10:07 AM | #

Cladastris: If you watched the speech I gave last year in London then you know that I propose Esperanto for this purpose. Yes, I know that Zamenhof was not one of us and that his intentions were mondialist.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 25, 2009, 10:15 AM | #

“Maltese is a curious language.”  (—Cladastris)

The thing about Lowell is he’s a riveting speaker no matter whether using English, Maltese, or Italian, or (as is most often the case) a mixture of all three. 

He’s a riveting speaker, period.

Posted by cladrastis on May 30, 2009, 02:40 PM | #

Soren,

I understand your rationale for suggesting Esperanto (aside from its irony), but if ease of adoption is your primary concern, why not promote Uropi or Occidental instead?  Neither of these auxiliary languages was devised by one of the tribesmen, and Uropi is analagous to simplified PIE. 

Additionally, this might result in less J-team blowback in the future (“we gave you your alphabet, your religion, your law, AND your language”  Mwahahahah!).

Posted by cladrastis on May 30, 2009, 10:56 PM | #

Uropi
“Unlike Esperanto, Interlingua, Slovio and other International Auxiliary Languages (I.A.L), UROPI is a really international language, in so far as it has been created from the roots which are common to Indo-European languages. A Uropi word may be akin to corresponding terms in as many as 27 modern (or ancient) Indo-European languages. Uropi was made public in the late 80’s, & early 90’s. Articles were published in the European press (the Guardian, Libération, Frankfurter Rundschau, la Stampa, Komsomol-skaïa Pravda, Kepes Hét, Svêt v Obrazech, etc…). Exhibitions took place in France, Germany and Italy. Crash courses have shown that you can acquire a working knowledge of Uropi within 80 hours.”

“A SYNTHESIS OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

At the same time, the second half of the 20th century was marked by the birth of the European Union, expressing a will to forget past hatreds, to bring down frontiers, a wish to live together. Very soon Europeans were led to ask themselves the following questions :
What do we have in common? Is there such a thing as a European identity?
French sociologist Edgar Morin, among a few others, has given much thought to the topic in his essay Penser lEurope. He shows that, in spite of the bloody wars of our history, all the great cultural, philosophical, political and artistic movements have been trans-European. However, E.Morin doesn’t mention the problem of language. Indeed, how can we overcome this diversity, this linguistic profusion which is Europe’s wealth? Could we possibly go back to a primitive Indo-European ?

How can we meet this growing need for communication between Europeans who will have to deal with each other more and more frequently ? … … …

Uropi was born along those lines. It is a synthesis of European languages, which means that for each word, each structure of the language, it tries to synthesize the original Indo-European root on the one hand, and the present European terms this root gave birth to, on the other hand. The frequent use of a root-word on the whole Indo-European area is a determining factor , and so is the simplicity of grammatical structures existing in European languages today.
For certain words the task was relatively easy: for example: Uropi sol (sun) and mata* (mother) are practically the arithmetical average of the terms aforementioned. (* the ending -a for the feminine, goes far beyond the Indo-European area since it can be found in other languages around the Mediterranean, notably in Arabic and Hebrew.)

For other terms, the work has been more complicated: some common roots have completely disappeared in modern European languages:
for example ekwos*, the horse > Sanskrit áçvas, Greek hippos, Lat. equus, Gaul epos (which subsists in Gaelic: each and to name the foal in Breton and Welsh: ebeul, ebol, the mare in Spanish: yegua) has been replaced with very different terms elsewhere : Hin. ghorâ, mod. Gr. àlogo, It. cavallo, Fr. cheval, Ger. Pferd, Eng. horse, Da. hest, Rus. lochad, Ser-cr. konj, Bret. march, Latv. zirgs, Arm. tzi.

Besides present European words may stem from different Indo-European roots; such is the case for water:
I-e wódr / wedor* > Skr. udán, Gr. hudôr, Alb. ujë, Ger. Wasser, Eng. Du. water, Swe. vatten, Da. vand, Gael. uisce, Lit. vanduõ, Latv. ûdens, Rus, Czech. Ser-cr. voda, Pol. woda, and also Lat. unda, It. onda, Fr. onde = wave; but Latin aqua > It. acqua, Sp. agua, Rum. apä, Fr. eau, is derived from another root i-e akwâ-* meaning water, river. Here the choice was relatively simple; the terms derived from wódr* being the majority; hence Uropi vod = water.

To frequency can be added the criterion of simplicity for grammatical forms. For example, all modern European languages have an infinitive except modern Greek ; few of them use prepositions to form the infinitive like English (to have, to speak) and Rumanian (a avea, a vorbi). There is a general tendency (particularly in Germanic languages) to reduce (even do away with) personal endings in the conjugation of verbs (for ex: Eng. to go > go/goes in the present, went for all persons in the past), which brings about a remarkable simplification: in Uropi skrivo = to write > skriv for all persons in the present, skrivì in the past.”

etc.