if a country changed its official language to a conlang (essentially a language made by one person) how would they go about teaching it on a mass scale?
what obstacles would they run into?
would such a thing even be feasible?
if a country changed its official language to a conlang (essentially a language made by one person) how would they go about teaching it on a mass scale?
what obstacles would they run into?
would such a thing even be feasible?
Massive language literacy campaigns.
That you have no organic community of speakers to fall back on.
Likely not.
The closest thing we got was the revival of Hebrew, except Hebrew was an existing tongue, and was atleast used liturgically for the past 2k years.
Yeah, I was gonna bring that up too.
>Hebrew was an existing tongue
No it wasn't. The primary israeli language was Yiddish, Hebrew was dead. Thats like saying Latin is an existing tongue because rhe bible was often published in if. That doesn't make it an exception to the rule kiddo.
All you neee for OPs claim are a culture and community of highly motivated people. Aka nobody you will find on 3chan.
But israelites learn some Hebrew for religious purposes even before the revival so it wasn’t as weird
Jews still had a tradition of reciting passages in hebrew at synagogue
>Thats like saying Latin is an existing tongue because rhe bible was often published in if
well latin was a lingua franca in europe long after becoming a dead language per se, and latin is still spoken in in the Vatican, but it's becoming more rare.
Not to say hebrew or latin aren't long dead languages, just that they still have a devoted community that learns it for religious reasons.
liturgical hebrew =/= modern hebrew
They're more-or-less the same, minus the modern loan-words.
the main difference is that modern hebrew got rid of the Wayyiqtol and Weqatal verb forms, which are kind of redundant anyways and are just an additional way to express future and past tense.
It's not only that; modern Hebrew also has phonological, syntactic, and semantic influences from the native languages of the initial settlers. The core vocabulary and morphology is certainly recognizable, though.
Grammar isn't my specialty but Modern Hebrew is basically Sephardi (spanish influenced) vowels and Ashkenazi (german influenced) consonants
Wouldn't have killed them to restore the Tiberian phonology.
That would've been interesting, even following mizrahi phonology but it's very hard to get people to pronounce pharyngeal and emphatic consonants
Yes, it was hard for a lot of the revivalists to pronounce the emphatic consonants. Though there's some evidence they might have been lost even in late stages of living Hebrew before it died, given things like speakers spelling foreign loans with /t/ and /k/ with tet and qof.
I don't know anything about that but it might have been like in arabic where that can happen because the non-emphatics are aspirated and the emphatics are unaspirated
You'd need a critical mass of the population to be so fanatically onboard with the plan that they're prepared to spend years studying to become fluent in the new conlang. The only other way would be to force it onto children for several generations and just hope that it catches on eventually. Neither will work in RL though.
Back when the ROC started attempting to standardize Chinese it was initially proposed that this one artificial pronunciation system be used which attempted to incorporate and unite features from certain Chinese varieties, but it never caught on and the plan was scrapped in favor of just using a Beijing-based pronunciation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_National_Pronunciation
I want to live in the timeline they chose Canto. It just sounds better than Mandarin.
As far as I know it was never a serious possibility. Mandarin was the plurality native language.
There was probably greater a portion of the population retaining diverse northern varieties, but the "officialist" variety had been the court standard for a while. When people see the figure for the total number of "Mandarin" speakers they probably erroneously assume they exclusively consist/ed of users of the government standard.
True, but speaking a variety that's closer to the standard helps you learn the standard, I'd think. Much like it's easier for a Scots speaker to learn English than it is for a German, and easier for the German than it is for an Icelander.
Yeah they're closer possibly though I don't think all of the northern varieties are intelligible with each other. In the past literacy was less than it is now. The CCP historically did not try to push the spoken standard as forcefully as the ROC did apparently, because they were more interested in establishing simple literacy in order to spread revolutionary thought rather than compromise the revolution in some manner.
Cantonese was seen as the language of the rich back when there were many people fleeing to Hong Kong. If I had interest in learning both I think beginning with Cantonese while learning to read is more conducive to providing sufficient motivation to learn both than if it is attempted in a reverse manner.
Most of this board is garbage but you can still find some cool, interesting stuff like this every now and then
The successful revival of the Maya literary tradition will be one of the great achievements of the 21st century.
That's my hope anyway. I'm 50/50 on it but I'm optimistic.
Modern Hebrew was able to be raised from the dead.
>they were more interested in establishing simple literacy
I don't know how simplified is supposed to be easier, maybe my brain is wrong but more complicated is more easily identifiable to me.
For example, the word for the complex script "繁体, the 繁 is fine, but I (used to) get 体 confused with 本, where as 體 is unmistakable. Also merging of characters causes confusion "infront of the noodle shop." "面店面" in simplified, "麵店面" in traditional, merging the two characters unifies two entirely different things here.
Maybe it's purely to do with writing which is the only advantage I can see.
Esperanto has native speakers, so such a thing is possible in theory. People won't learn a language if they don't have any good reason to though or if a language they already know suffices for them. Your best bet would be to start with children who don't yet speak a language and fully immerse them in the conlang. Everything they read, everyone they talk to, all media they consume should be in that language. Or at least a significant proportion of it. You'd also need to give them some motivation to keep speaking it as adults. Accomplishing this on a nationwide scale would be very difficult, maybe if your population was homogeneous and you were trying to resurrect a dead language they felt strong cultural ties too. For a totally engineered conlang, it would be impossible without draconian laws to enforce it.
Seen as Esperanto was devised to be simple with a limited vocabulary and grammar are people who speak it natively intrinsically less able to understand and comprehend complex subjects than someone who knows the biggest words?
Well, first of all, no one is a native speaker of only Esperanto; they acquire the language of the area too, you'd have to isolate them from society to prevent that. Second, while Esperanto is simpler in the sense that it's far more regular and builds words from consistent components where most languages have separate words you have to memorize, it's still a fully expressive language, and probably even more expressive in some ways.
Do you speak it?
Yes, and I'd like to think pretty fluently, though not quite at a native level.
I mean the brute force way to do it would be to gradually switch more and more services from first being bilingual to eventually being conlang only. Essentially frog-boiling the populace into having to either adapt and start learning the language or get basically shut out of government positions and some public services. (maybe more) That would be a way to do it.
Same with academia.
First make it bilingual, then switch it to conland only.
>what obstacles would they run into?
People not wanting to waste their time for one thing. Conlangs are an absolute meme. Even the world's best conlang can't do a single thing a real language can't.
You have better luck if it somewhat related to the language they already speak like standard Italian or Indonesian
Not a conlang but a con-script if you will, but mid-19th century Utah tried to pass the Deseret alphabet in place of the Latin alphabet as the way to write English, it is more phonetic, and completely different visually. It didn't work because the railroad reached Salt Lake City so the required insularity necessary for getting such a project off the ground dissolved. They did get some books and materials published though, like Deseret alphabet Book of Mormon copies. Honestly if Mormons reached the Great Basin just 100 years earlier they could have become a fully distinct culture by now, but they were 100 years too late.
>ctrl+f "hangul"
>0 results
Really?
Also some African languages are turning to conscripts rather than shoehorning Arabic and Latin
Also also Hungarian and Turkish rune alphabets were conscripts similar to Hangul, taking the framework of Iranians and expanding it tenfold (only 3~4 characters blatantly taken)
Hangul's a pretty piss poor example considering it was made in the 15th century, shunned by the entire literate society in favor of Hanja for centuries, and then only became popular after WW2, arguably in an attempt to forge their own identity separate from both China and Japan.
It WAS successful at the end of the day, albeit from a foreign impact or not. Alas, the Hungarian runes were used by the locals well up to 18th century despite literate circles using Latin exclusively for a millennia - it's about the usage of the script by the laymen that matters, not the intellectual class (1~3% of the population).
Do you know anything of how widespread literacy was in Korea between 1450-1900? In either Hanja or Hangul.
I just know in Japan a good deal of the peasantry understood hiragana and that was used as a gateway drug to kanji literacy.
Hangul is a script, not a language. Scripts are not languages. Adopting a new script and adopting a new language are very different.
>changed its official language to a conlang (essentially a language made by one person) how would they go about teaching it on a mass scale?
Two great examples of this are Basque and Hebrew. Modern Basque is an artificial dialect that exthusiasts of Basque consider to be a conlang, yet it is becoming the most popular form of spoken basque and is replacing the dialects. Modern Hebrew is also nothing like ancient Hebrew since it's grammar and pronunciation have massive amounts of Slavic influence.
Where there is a will, there is a way. These people clearly wanted to forge unique identities for themselves and a language is a great way to do so. Public schools are a great institution wherewith a government may mold the next generation into it's ideal image. More emerging examples are Manx, Cornish, and Cherokee, although theyre a little more organic than the first two. Immersion schools are really the best tool. As evidenced by these.
At least in the case of Irish, I've heard that the "Irish" produced by immersion schools often amounts to English reskinned as Irish, and I can't imagine it would be too different for Manx or Cornish.
Sort of how Hebrew became the dominate language of the modern state of Israel. For a time, there were no native speakers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language