Mithridates

Yes, they're pretty much all related in terms of scope - intending to become the world's 2nd language, nobody has to give up their mother tongue, everybody can easily learn this language, etc. The history behind the IAL movement is actually really interesting, perhaps even moreso because it has still failed to succeed and a lot of languages will blame another one and external factors for its lack of success, so you can get a really different account of the history depending on who you ask.

The short story is this:

-In the late 19th century there was a language invented by a German priest called Volapük (the language, not the priest) that was successful for a time
-A bit later in the same century a Lithuanian Jew named Zamenhof invented Esperanto, and this quickly eclipsed Volapük in popularity
-Some Esperantists still wanted to see the language changed and in 1907 a reformed version appeared; it wasn't approved by the majority so it wasn't able to keep the name and instead went by the name Ido
-1914 one of Ido's founders got hit by a French army truck carrying orders to deploy troops to WWI and he died, and now the rest of Europe wasn't all that conducive to the idea of an IAL anymore
-1922 de Wahl creates Occidental, which is similar to Ido in some respects but looks much more like a natural language
-A few other projects, Esperanto's still going strong but it's pretty obvious that it's not going to achieve world L2 status anytime soon and Ido's kind of grabbing at its heels, then WWII comes around and a number of Esperantists and other IALers are killed by Hitler and Stalin, further weakening the movement
-After WWII another language called Interlingua is in development and is of the naturalistic school, looks a lot like Occidental to the untrained eye but is based on a different philosophy...Occidental changes its name to Interlingue and there's some talk that the two languages might combine to become one, but it never happens and Interlingua is developed, Interlingua's founder however doesn't really like the idea of seeming to be another "Esperanto" and doesn't really promote the language much, many Occidental people switch to Interlingua, some don't, English is on the rise anyway so nobody's really interested in the idea of an IAL anymore...
-Up until the invention of the Internet only a few IALs survive but are extremely weak: Esperanto is still maintaining its base of a few hundred thousand, Ido nearly dies, Occidental nearly dies, Interlingua nearly dies. All of these get a boost from the Internet, now Esperanto is in the lead, Ido and Interlingua have the second most amount of content, Occidental's behind there somewhere and other projects are mostly moribund.

It's a pretty fascinating subculture even if one doesn't agree with the concept. Idists (Ido speakers) mostly think Esperanto failed to succeed because it never reformed itself and that the six supersigned letters made printing hard, made the language look too artificial, and that the grammar and pronunciation were too hard. Esperantists however generally see the creation of Ido as a betrayal and that the splitting of the movement weakened it, that without the split it might have succeeded. Occidentalists saw both as deficient because they still have features that don't appear in natural languages and thus require too much effort to understand when first encountering the language (kind of like having to partition one's hard drive with Linux compared to using something like Wubi in Windows to install Ubuntu), Interlingua's founder looked down on all of that but the language didn't succeed anyway, and its outward similarity to Occidental caused quite a bit of friction between them. Interlingua thought Occidental held on too much to the idea of being an easy language to learn (an "Esperantist" idea) and focused on a natural aspect alone; Occidentalists viewed Interlingua as a more difficult, bloated-looking version of a language that worked just fine without another candidate around.



BTW here's a piece of land in Belgium that is pretty interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet

nooka

Are any of the AIL's truly phonetic? Or completely non-phonetic?

Mithridates

Esperanto would be the most phonetic, as it has a one-letter one-sound system. It's compromised a teeny bit when you have g after n for example, but besides that it's the most phonetic. Ido is slightly less in that it uses three digraphs (sh, ch, qu), Occidental is more like Spanish in how it's easy enough to pronounce if you know how letters work within a word, and Interlingua the least.

nooka

I was just thinking how sad it would be for a new language to be invented that was just as difficult for dyslexics as English, given the evidence that approaching languages from either a completely non-phonic or a pure phonic perspective reduces dyslexic type difficulties fairly comprehensively.

Mithridates

That's an interesting point. You don't happen to know of any studies on dyslexia in other languages, do you? If we were to compare the major IALs to natural languages, Interlingua would be along the lines of Spanish if the accent weren't indicated (i.e. you can't be certain of the stress of a word unless you've already learned it beforehand, as in English "I present you a present" or "he deserted them in the desert"), Occidental is comparable to Spanish as is with a standard rule for stress and an accent to indicate when it deviates from the rule, Ido and Esperanto are more like Turkish (which is almost completely phonetic) with a slight advantage to Esperanto for the lack of digraphs. If there are studies on dyslexia in those languages it would be pretty easy to ascertain what it would be like in a theoretical situation with one of these IALs as a common language.

nooka

I'm not sure. I know that there are comparative studies, but I'm not sure what languages they looked at. I knew much more about this a couple of years ago when my son was diagnosed with dyslexia.

Here's a comparative US/italian study
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3...?dopt=Abstract but that's about all I can find right now. You could try looking from the proponents of synthetic phonics' web-sites (eg http://www.rrf.org.uk). They make interesting reading in any case.

Mithridates

Okay, thanks for that. Italian is only a little bit worse than Spanish in terms of phonetics. I think I'll ask on auxlang to see what they know about the subject.

Wikipedia seems to sum it up pretty well too:

That is, that dyslexia is a pre-existing condition but that bad orthography can make it worse. I think I'll try to see what I can find on dyslexia and Turkish too since that should give an idea of just how much a phonetic language can help alleviate the condition.

nooka

Ah, should have looked at Wiki . I thought it might be a bit too obscure though. The theories about dyslexia that I find most interesting think that the symptoms are caused/exacerbated by the wrong sort of teaching. I read some interesting MRI stuff about it (eft brain/right brain theories)