Language of the Day, a memento of past geekery

[muckefuck]

Guosa is an interlanguage, an artificially constructed language designed to serve as a vehicle of intercommunication between people with different native languages. The most popular and famous (or infamous) interlanguage is Esperanto, which was cobbled together from various European tongues. Guosa is, if anything, even less linguistically sophisticated and draws instead from the major languages of Nigeria. The basic principle is that words for concrete objects come from Hausa, whereas abstractions are from Yoruba, Igbo, or one of the many smaller languages spoken in the south. (I think that abstractions include all verbs, but the text isn't as explicit on this point as it could be.)

To give you an idea of the creator's naivete in such matters, his method for choosing between Yoruba and Igbo alternatives is which comes first in alphabetical order! What a perfect recipe for unbalancing the distribution of sounds in your vocabulary, thus creating confusion between many similar-sounding words. (By contrast, Lojban, another constructed language, uses an algorithm that weights various phonemes according to their appearance in five of the world's major languages, including Chinese and Arabic.)

Yesterday, I came across the book Teach yourself Guosa language, which is suitable for anything but. It's just a slim phrase book whose longest text is:

Kudi ti moni, kinshe nke ijakpa. Ẹso fun oyen ijakpa kọ-gbe ijakpa tẹfi.

(Translation: The money that I have is not for the purchase of tortoise. Tell the tortoise dealer to go away with his tortoise.)

Yeah, you'll use that a lot. There's not a word on grammar in the book. I suppose, like Zamenhof, Igbinewka assumes that you can just import your knowledge of the source languages. What about the numerous cases where these languages differ? The book is 22 years old, so I did a websearch to see if the project is still alive. Not only is it, but the Guosa African Cultural Center is located on American soil, in Richmond, VA! Bring us your idealistic nutbars, yearning to teach for free.

This isn't my first encountre with Guosa. I first saw a book on it years ago when I was working at That Other Place and was so amused that I worked it into a game setting. This was the campaign with such a vaguely-sketched background that it was prosaicly known as "the space game". As part of an attempt at collaboration, princeofcairo encouraged us to design our own homeworlds. Part of the background was a golden age of low-budget space colonisation in the early 21st century that saw a lot of wacky little groups settling other worlds. One character has a Quaker homeworld. My character came from a nomadic tribe of spacefarers, but that didn't stop me from designing one or two worlds where they had left settlements. One of these was originally settled by a group of idealistic pan-Africanists who founded a communal society with Guosa and Swahili as interlanguages. They soon became outnumbered by later settlers of east and southeast Asian origin who spoke a pidgin Chinese of my invention and were later partly assimilated into their society with the exception of a hard-core group of refuseniks.

It was all very fun, even though it ended up being left out of the game completely. I still have the notes somewhere and, when I find them, I'm sure I'll add a few corrections.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Frequency of use and practicality are two different things. I would say the overall practicality of interlanguages is near zero. Esperantists will bang on about all the doors Esperanto has opened for them, but the same is true of almost any hobby you leap into with both feet. You can meet interesting people from different cultures through the UFO Abductee Network if that's what you want.

There are no hard-fast numbers. Some Esperantists claim 1,000,000 speakers. More realistic ones like to say, "1,000,000 with some knowledge, 100,000 speakers, 10,000 fluent speakers, 1,000 native speakers". Could be accurate as a first approximation, but that doesn't change the fact that the figures are pulled out of someone's anuso.

And, of course, we know from America's Finest New Source that Klingon speakers now outnumber Navajo speakers. So there you go.