16.3461, Review: Artificial Lang/Typology: Libert (2002)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3461. Sun Dec 04 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3461, Review: Artificial Lang/Typology: Libert (2002)

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1)
Date: 02-Dec-2005
From: Dirk Elzinga < dirk_elzinga at byu.edu >
Subject: Mixed Artificial Languages 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2005 19:45:48
From: Dirk Elzinga < dirk_elzinga at byu.edu >
Subject: Mixed Artificial Languages 
 

AUTHOR: Libert, Alan Reed
TITLE: Mixed Artificial Languages
SERIES: Languages of the World 29
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2002
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-3194.html 

Dirk Elzinga, Department of Linguistics and English Language, 
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA.

INTRODUCTION

Artificial languages are languages which have been consciously 
invented rather than arising naturally and spontaneously among a 
community of speakers. Well-known examples of artificial languages 
include Esperanto and Klingon. An artificial language can be created 
for a number of reasons: as background for a fictional world, as a 
private code, as a vehicle for personal introspection, or as an 
international auxiliary language.

Among artificial languages intended as international auxiliary 
languages, there is a traditional tripartite division based upon the 
relationship of the artificial language to national or ethnic languages. 
_A priori_ languages are languages whose vocabulary and grammar 
are created from scratch with little or no borrowing from natural 
languages. _A posteriori_ languages are languages in which 
vocabulary and grammar are drawn from one or more natural 
languages. Of course, a priori and a posteriori represent endpoints of 
a continuum rather than discrete categories, and one can also speak 
of _mixed_ languages--languages which lie between the two extremes 
in grammatical and lexical material.

This book is the second of a series of three which discuss artificial 
languages from a descriptive and typological perspective. The first 
book in the series (Libert 2000) deals with a priori languages; the third 
book (Libert 2004) deals with a posteriori languages whose source 
vocabulary is drawn primarily from Latin and its daughter languages. 
The present book treats languages of the middle or ''mixed'' category.

SYNOPSIS

Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to the languages which provide the 
material for discussion including the sources of information on the 
languages. These languages include: Balta, The Blue Language, 
Bopal, Dil, Dilpok, Gilo, Menet's Langue Universelle, Nal Bino, Orba, 
Pan-kel, Qosmiani, Spelin, Tal, Vela, Veltparl, and Volapuk. The 
sources which Libert uses are not always first-hand and he makes 
copious use of Couterat and Leau (1903/1907), a compendium of 
artificial language descriptions. Internet sources are also used for 
many of the languages.

Chapter 2 presents the sound inventories of the languages under 
discussion together with their orthographic conventions. At least one 
of the languages, Gilo, can be represented using non-Roman 
characters as part of its design, but all examples of the language are 
presented in the romanization found in the original source material. 
There is a section on suprasegmentals, but since the source materials 
available for the languages under discussion have very little to say 
about suprasegmental properties, this section is correspondingly brief. 
There is also a section on phonotactics.

Chapter 3 deals with issues in the creation of the vocabulary of mixed 
languages. Mixed artificial languages are, by definition, drawn not only 
from natural languages but also from their makers' imagination; the 
choice of vocabulary items is guided by several sometimes competing 
principles including brevity (e.g., a preference for monosyllabic roots), 
internationality, neutrality, ease of pronunciation.

Chapter 4 discusses properties of the inflectional and derivational 
morphology of nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, 
adpositions, conjunctions, interjections, and other particles.

Chapter 5 discusses syntactic features of the languages under 
discussion, so far as they can be discerned from the source material. 
Libert includes discussion of basic word order in the sentence and 
noun phrase, binding, pro-drop and object drop, and asyndeton.

Chapter 6 summarizes what can be gleaned from the source materials 
concerning the semantics of the languages under discussion. Topics 
include synonymy, ambiguity and homonymy, idioms, and metaphor.

Throughout the book are short discussions relating the descriptive 
material to language universals. The statements of universals are 
drawn from the online _Universals Archive_.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Libert's goals in writing this book are both descriptive and typological. 
On page 2 he states: ''I hope that this book will give an idea of the 
nature of this interesting group of languages.'' He is also clearly 
interested in the typological profile of these languages as a group, 
and he provides some discussion of how well these languages 
conform to postulated universals of human language.

The structure of the book lends itself well to typological discussion. By 
dividing it into chapters concerned with phonology, morphology, 
syntax, etc, Libert provides himself a framework for discussing the 
typological characteristics of these languages. The pattern is set in 
the chapter on phonology; there is ample discussion of the 
phonological inventories of the languages in question, and a nice 
section on how these languages compare to universals of 
phonological inventories. Unfortunately, Libert does not maintain this 
pattern in the other chapters, where discussion of the conformity or 
nonconformity of these languages to postulated language universals 
tends to be rather cursory, and there is no consistent place from 
chapter to chapter where typological observations are made and 
discussed.

The languages discussed in the book were chosen on the basis of 
their having appeared in Couterat and Leau (1903, 1907) under the 
heading of ''mixed languages'', but much of Libert's source material is 
taken from World Wide Web pages. Without the ease of online ''self-
publication,'' many constructed language projects would be completely 
unknown, and there is a lively online constructed languages 
community. But as with most online communities, it is rather transient 
and Web sources are notoriously short-lived. In this respect, Libert's 
book is potentially an important source of documentation for some of 
these projects.

The descriptive aims of the book, however, are seriously hampered by 
the book's brevity and organization. It might have been more effective 
to provide short grammatical sketches of the languages profiled in the 
book and then proceed to discuss the typological properties which 
these languages show. This would, of course, have made for a longer 
book, but one which would have more descriptively satisfying.

One other complaint is that there are no translations of foreign 
language passages; in particular, the French quotations from Couterat 
and Leau are frequent and occasionally lengthy. This is off-putting to 
a non-French speaking reader who is nonetheless interested in the 
topic, especially since some of these quotations provide important 
parts of the description of the languages in question.

REFERENCES

Couterat, L. and L. Leau. 1903 and 1907 (1979). _Histoire de la 
langue universelle_ bound with _Les nouvelles langues 
internationale_. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.

Libert, Alan. 2000. _A Priori Artificial Languages_. Languages of the 
World 24. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Libert, Alan. 2004. _Artificial Descendants of Latin_. Munich: Lincom 
Europa.

_Universals Archive_. World Wide Web pages at URL 
<http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/proj/Sprachbau/introduction/>. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dirk Elzinga is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics 
and English Language at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 
USA. His primary research interests are Numic (Uto-Aztecan) 
languages and English phonology. He has been active in the online 
constructed languages community since 1993.





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