Louis Couturat on Idiom Neutral, Part One: Criticisms from 1903

[rpbm...@gmail.com]

Salut a omnihom! I'm 3 years too late for this group, and over a hundred years too late for Idiom Neutral, but what the hell. I'm an auxlang enthusiast, and I've come to opine that Idiom Neutral is structurally the best candidate, at least from a European perspective. I've been reading Louis Couturat's Histoire de la Langue Universelle recently, and as a service to anyone who's interested (especially those who either can't or won't read the book) I'm posting here a summary of his Idiom Neutral material. The first part is his criticisms of the original 1902 version of the language, and the second part is his record of the numerous reform ideas that were presented between then and 1907.

It seems to me that Idiom Neutral embodies a journey that began in the late 1880s with Schleyer's Volapük and ended before the First World War when the bulk of the Neutralists jumped ship to Latin Sine Inflexion and thence Occidental. Despite the existence of definite 1902 and 1912 versions, Idiom Neutral was always a language in flux, with the early manifestations resembling Volapük and the late manifestations resembling Occidental/Interlingua. The "true" version must presumably lie somewhere in between, but anyone who holds up the 1902 manifestation as this true version must face the fact that even before the ink was dry, the then Neutralists had lost faith in it and were scrambling to redress its defects. I tentatively suggest that the true form of Idiom Neutral may be actualised via a careful, non-radical reform of the 1902 version, one that corrects the genuine flaws without pushing the language too far backwards (Volapük) or forwards (Occidental).

I enumerate Couturat's criticims of 1902 Idiom Neutral as follows:

(1a) Lots of roots are visually mangled, when compared to their natlang originals.
(1b) There are bloated consonant clusters in roots and compounds, which as well as being hard for some people to pronounce, will often require the insertion of schwas, which different speakers place differently.
(2) There are no definite or indefinite articles.
(3a) There is no part-of-speech marking for root nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
(3b) There is no direct derivation between these parts of speech. He remarks that "-asion" could be replaced with the noun form of the verb root, if such a form existed.
(3c) The possessive adjectives are not derived from the personal pronouns.
(3d) When a noun is used as a verb, there's no way of inferring what the verb means exactly.
(4) There is extensive ambiguity, apparent and actual, caused by the choice of roots and suffixes.
(5a) Some derivatives are mangled/ugly, and in places there are new roots instead of derivatives in order to avoid this ugliness. These surplus roots mean there's more to learn.
(5b) The "-ik/-al" conflict could be solved by means of a "neutral" suffix.
(6a) The prefixes "ne-" and "no-" are too similar, and are inconsistently used.
(6b) The prefix "re-" has the meanings of repeating and redoing; these meanings should be distinguished.
(7) There are compounds that are confusing because of having been directly copied from natlangs.
(8) Ambiguity between subject and object is possible in relative clauses due to there being no accusative marking.

At the end, he opines that the language tries too hard to be naturalistic/romance, and that the more naturalistic an auxlang becomes, the more complex and irregular it becomes, and thus the harder to learn, especially for people unfamiliar with romance languages.

[xabadiar]

Dear rpbm...@gmail.com,

I am a lover of constructed languages. I made a handful of websites, one of which is about Idiom Neutral. It was a very hard task, quite exhausting, but I managed to transcribe most of the Diktionar de Idiom Neutral (1902), excepting the Neutral-English section of the dictionary. It seems there is a website out there (at archive.org, I found it via Wikipedia) which already has the full handbook transcribed, although pretty full of mistakes to correct. So, dear companion, we may collaborate to correct them. The thing would go like this: I will begin right now by correcting page 33 (a - absurd). In case you will collaborate, you have to announce a certain page and then correct it.

Greetings,

xavig...@gmail.com

[rpbm...@gmail.com]

Hello, Xavigotsky! I was curious how long it would take before someone replied - if at all - and I'm a bit surprised it happened so soon. I've actually used your Diksionar site a few times, and I thank you for it, and I did think it was a shame the IN-Eng section wasn't there. Regarding continuing with the project, yes, why not, I haven't got much else to do for the rest of August. But there's a lot to get through...

Bobby.

[xabadiar]

Well, Bobby. I just put page 33 on the site (https://sites.google.com/site/diksionardeidiomneutral/home#dictionary1). Today I will do pages 34 & 35. If all is alright we may get the job done in a month.

Greetings.

Xavi.

[rpbm...@gmail.com]

I've emailed you the next page.

Regarding the book as a whole, I think the material in the Supplement and the Errors at the end should be added to their relevant places in the dictionary (and the Supplement section itself should probably be retained for the historical record).

[rpbm...@gmail.com]

For the record, I have deleted a post in which I made several reform suggestions related to the criticisms in the OP. This is because I believe Neutral should mostly be left as it is, and that its notorious ambiguity isn't nearly as bad as people think when they're new to it. But I will say this: if I could make one grammatical change, I would put an (acute) accent on the I in the suffix -ERI to avoid confusion with the plural of -ER. My justification is the following example words: banieri, duaneri, kanseleri, libreri. And if I could change one root, it would probably be IPSE into ETIAM or just ETI.