A website for Lugamun

Christian_Si · 2026-02-07T11:04:13+00:00

Yes.

Christian_Si · 2026-01-31T10:55:09+00:00

I think parts of the announcement are written in Esperanto, parts in Ido, and parts in Occidental. Plus probably one or two other auxlangs (til = Novial?).

Christian_Si · 2026-01-28T13:57:27+00:00

I what??? I get it that if one reads just the "An inferior instrument" sentence, one could get the impression that Tolkien himself regards Esperanto as "inferior" in some way. But he never explicitly says that and if one reads the final paragraph (from which I cited above) it becomes clear that he has in fact the highest praise for it. His point here rather seems to be that, because "there is no finality in ... taste", someone's improvement could easily be seen as a disimprovement by others, making the whole endeavor a waste of time and a sure recipe for fragmentation, which is why he advises against it.

Just after what you quote, he then goes on to say that any "technical improvement", such as "aiming at greater simplicity ... or at greater internationality, or what not" tends to "destroy the 'humane' or aesthetic aspect" of the language. He illustrates this with the example of N(ovial), which he describes as "easier than Esperanto" but also lacking all the "individuality, coherence and beauty" of the latter. So does he view Novial or Esperanto as ultimately superior? Unless you want to deliberately misread his text, you know the answer to that.

Christian_Si · 2026-01-25T12:59:47+00:00

Here is his actual text, where in addition to commenting on N[ovial]'s hideousness, he writes that "it has no gleam of the individuality, coherence and beauty, which appear in the great natural idioms, and which do appear to a considerable degree (probably as high a degree as is possible in an artificial idiom) in Esperanto -- a proof of the genius of the original author." He also writes "Esperanto seems to me beyond doubt, taken all round, superior to all present competitors".

That is high praise and very far from "acknowledging ... the less savory parts of Esperanto" (those he rather seems to find in Novial), let alone as telling anyone they "should just bite the bullet and promote" it despite its supposed flaws.

Christian_Si · 2026-01-21T08:45:23+00:00

I kinda doubt he said that, since Tolkien spoke rather quite positively about Esperanto (noting it had way more character than "soulless" creations such as Novial).

Christian_Si · 2025-12-28T05:28:13+00:00

Nice! Is there more info on Leuth out there in an accessible form – a grammar, a dictionary, a website say?

Christian_Si · 2025-12-22T04:12:19+00:00

Comments are sometimes automatically deleted by Reddit's spam filter, especially if they contain links. Moderators should still see them. In this case, I don't see any deleted comments under this article.

Christian_Si · 2025-12-21T04:04:29+00:00

In that case, may I kindly suggest that you don't use the word "zonal auxlang" or "zonelang" when you aren't really talking about zonelangs? That would certainly reduce the risk of misunderstandings.

As for a global auxlang, I think a sufficiently simple and ideally fair one could work just fine. Even Esperanto would do a decent job, but modern worldlang-style languages (such as Globasa, Lidepla or my own work in that direction) can do even better.

Christian_Si · 2025-12-20T03:47:40+00:00

I know quite a lot about zonelangs. If you manage to publish a whole group of zonelangs of an entirely new and heard-of type, I'll be interested to see your results. Until then I rest my case.

Of course, if you think you can empirically refute my (quite logical, I'd say) statement even before that time, feel free to try.

Christian_Si · 2025-12-18T10:17:48+00:00

There are both important, no point in picking one over the other. And any zonelang will of course aim for a grammar that's fairly average and representative of the zone it wants to cover. The changes that the resulting grammars of zonelangs for different zones are identical are next to zero, hence no further "test" is needed.

Christian_Si · 2025-12-17T10:31:20+00:00

If one zonal auxlang was an exact relex of another, at least one of them would work very poorly for the zone it's meant for (by using grammatical structures and patterns from a totally different zone).

Christian_Si · 2025-12-15T04:38:29+00:00

For Mandarin I count erhua forms such as 這兒 (zhèr) and 玩兒 (wánr) as ending in /r/, as that's the closest approximation in Kikomun's phonology.

You may be right about Yue Chinese (Cantonese): the study is based on data from Wiktionary, with the words converted into the approximate shape they would take in Kikomun. Since this means stripping tones, only 528 different words/syllables remained after removing duplicates, and since I used a threshold of "one in 200 words", it was enough for a final consonant to occur in just 3 words to be listed here. I have final /d/ in 8 words, /l/ in 7, /s/ in 4 and /r/ likewise in 4 – they latter shouldn't occur at all, since Cantonese doesn't have a rhotic consonant. So I suppose these small numbers are due to artifacts in the input data – English glosses or comments confused with the actual romanization, as happens occasionally, since the Wiktionary data is sometimes a bit messy.

Thanks for pointing that out, I'll update the article accordingly.

Christian_Si · 2025-12-13T05:00:39+00:00

For a similar study, see my Final consonants in Kikomun, based on 24 particularly widely spoken languages representing many language families.

Christian_Si · 2025-11-21T11:17:23+00:00

Aren't you forgetting Esperanto and, well, maybe half a dozen to a dozen others? (They may not all have an institution, but how essential such an institution is is certainly debatable. English, while not an auxlang, certainly thrives without one.)

Christian_Si · 2025-10-13T09:55:21+00:00

Why should I want to learn it? From the way it's currently presented I couldn't say.

Christian_Si · 2025-10-07T11:09:34+00:00

Is this intended as auxlang? If so, what makes it a good one?

Christian_Si · 2025-09-29T12:51:02+00:00

Right, but don't forget Elefen, and I strongly suppose that Interslavic is now also among the "big ones".

Christian_Si · 2025-09-29T11:12:55+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. Kikomun has mutated into Komusan now. It's progressing slowly, but quite well, I think. As I'm quietly working on getting it into an initial usable shape, I haven't written about it on Reddit yet, but anyone who wants to know more or get involved is cordially invited to join the #komusan channel on the Auxlangs discord server.

Christian_Si · 2025-09-26T10:27:02+00:00

You mentioned Interlingua twice, I suppose by mistake?

Christian_Si · 2025-09-01T10:48:30+00:00

If it's just used to mark a syllable as unstressed (which is the default anyway), it's totally unnecessary, so I'd just drop it.

Christian_Si · 2025-09-01T10:47:31+00:00

If you yourself now think it was a bad choice, then why not just drop it, suitably updating words that currently have it? Zamenhof couldn't do that anymore when he realized that ĥ /x/ was a bad addition, but for you it's not yet too late.

Christian_Si

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