In recent months the participants in the Auxlang list have been using the term worldlang to categorize a posteriori conlangs that borrow their vocabulary from a wide variety of language families, not just Indo-European. So, rejoice, now we have another one of these "lang" words in our jargon.
There is, of course, a Yahoo Group for fans and makers of these worldlangs. There has to be a Yahoo Group for every concept. It's a law of physics.
A Google search on worldlang brings up worldlang.org, the home of Kotava, which is an a priori auxlang. Kotava is somewhat mysterious; it's hard to get a picture of how many people are actually using it, and the English documentation is less than eloquent.
Google also points to several sites that use worldlang to abbreviate the phrase "world language" in its old-fashioned sense, meaning any language that has global importance. One of these sites is The World Language Institute, a very small site with a very grand name.
That's the best I can do for a blog entry today. I'm still a bit shaken up. I think I almost got shot this afternoon, and I think it was accidental, but who knows, the situation is ambiguous. The rural South has its good points and bad points, with the amount of hot lead flying through the air during hunting season being one of the bad points in my opinion.
28 December 2007
word of the day: Worldlang
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3 comments:
Is a worldlang specifically a definition of an auxiliary language or can it generally be used for a language that borrows words and grammar from existing language. I use eclectic language to describe the second type.
- andrew.
As far as I know only auxlangers are using "worldlang" at this time. But who knows how the term will evolve. "Eclectic language" seems clear and cohesive to me, but some people want all their terms to either begin with "con-" (lang/world/script) or end with "-lang."
Kotava is an a priori auxiliary language. There exists much of documentation, but mainly in French, Spanish, Portuguese or Lingala. It counts approximately 50 fluent speakers in Africa, France and Polynesia mainly. The diffusion in the non occidental languages seems to be the priority of its promoters, obviously like an alternative to the English. So, there is a kind of logic not to use the English. That shows simply that there are important phenomena outside of the knowledge of the english-speakers and that they don't have the monopoly of the communication.
Among the other sites treating of Kotava:
- http://www.kotava.be : Universal encyclopaedia in Kotava (2000 articles)
- http://www.tamava.org/avawiki/pmwiki.php : Linguistic and lexical thesaurus of Kotava
- http://www.international-language.org : Bilingual dictionaries Kotava (25 dictionaries, Swahili, Zulu, Malay, etc.)
- http://www.europalingua.eu/wikikrenteem : Library of texts in Kotava (1000 texts)
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