When Xu Jie came across a book introducing Esperanto while browsing in his university library years ago, he had no idea of the exciting journey that lay ahead.
Someone should construct an auxlang based on Mandarin. At least then we have simple, regular grammar as a base. They've got some uncommon phonemes and need a damn alphabet, but "try to apply Spanish pronunciation rules to Pinyin" is already better than your favorite auxlang. (Unless your favorite auxlang is Toki Pona, of course).
I'm sure the Korean Alphabet, which is damn near perfect, could be modified for use. (given I believe it started as a training alphabet for Chinese and then became common, much like Hieratic in Egypt.)
Hangul (Korean writing system) wasn't a training alphabet, it was a replacement for chinese characters which used to be used to represent written korean iirc. There was a lot of classism/sexism about it back in the 1400s when it was rolled out lol, nobility insisted on continuing to use Chinese characters for a long time.
There are already some places in China (specifically the province that borders Korea) that uses some Hangul as well although I think that may be for a different dialect. It really is an ideal alphabet, I've been torn between trying to learn mandarin because it's more useful and Korean because the alphabet is way easier and I'm exposed to it more
It's extra cool for watching Korean musical performances and stuff (esp rap) even if you don't know any Korean cause you can visually see all the rhymes when there's subtitles
No problem, I'm glad that time my adderall kicked in when i landed on the Wikipedia page for Hangul and spent hours reading about it actually came in handy lol
Haha, my original draft of that comment also had that option. Yeah, stuffing Mandarin words into Hangul works too. Korean has a bunch of uncommon vowel sounds, but I think they mostly disappear when trying to using the intersection of it and Mandarin, so that should work.
I’ve been thinking this alot lately as I learn mandarin. Maybe just re-lex mandarin with Esperanto words? My hope from hearing about Chinese learning Esperanto is that they’ll ‘mandarin-ify’ esperanto or create an esperantido that is.
If we're putting actual effort in, my international conlang would be:
Use Mandarin grammar, but drop the counting words.
Use Latin characters because computers.
Use a regular pronunciation/spelling system that doesn't include globally uncommon sounds, so anything you manage to write in the language is generally pronounceable by everyone. Toki Pona does this well, though I think it's a little too restrictive.
Make a small official vocab of grammatically essential words (is/prepositions/time/questions), probably drawing from Mandarin since it's where the grammar came from.
Everything else is a loan word / every word you manage to spell in the spelling system is valid vocabulary. Try to use an English word if you know one (since it's already Like This), but use one from your native language or any other language, whatever, it's fine.
Use Mandarin grammar, but drop the counting words.
Seems like Mandarin is kinda already dropping a lot of counting words, opting for just 个 a lot (though I'm still fairly new and still see lots of other counting words in the training material). I'm fine with that if it's separating out counting from 'number of' type constructs. But yeah, sometimes those counting words seem redundant.
Use a regular pronunciation/spelling system ...
Yeah, I really like this about toki pona, which I've also been tinkering with in parallel (and esperanto). I like that toki pona allows p, t, and k to sound more like b, d, and g too.
Everything else, yeah, I agree. I wondered why toki pona didn't have more particle words like Mandarin though since it uses li, e, pi, etc. Might as well have something like "...吗?" and 的. And I really like the pluralization of pronouns with 们 (and how all pronouns are at least voiced with the same sound) so I wondered what toki pona would like with those.
Regarding adding words not part of the core, i'm sure you could morph loan words from english to be more regular in this language, kinda like how both toki pona and esperanto do to varying degrees (or other natural languages like Mandarin itself does, at least for proper nouns) (edit, oops, i guess you did say if you can spell these loan words in this language which covers this).
Someone should construct an auxlang based on Mandarin. At least then we have simple, regular grammar as a base. They've got some uncommon phonemes and need a damn alphabet, but "try to apply Spanish pronunciation rules to Pinyin" is already better than your favorite auxlang. (Unless your favorite auxlang is Toki Pona, of course).
I'm sure the Korean Alphabet, which is damn near perfect, could be modified for use. (given I believe it started as a training alphabet for Chinese and then became common, much like Hieratic in Egypt.)
Hangul (Korean writing system) wasn't a training alphabet, it was a replacement for chinese characters which used to be used to represent written korean iirc. There was a lot of classism/sexism about it back in the 1400s when it was rolled out lol, nobility insisted on continuing to use Chinese characters for a long time.
There are already some places in China (specifically the province that borders Korea) that uses some Hangul as well although I think that may be for a different dialect. It really is an ideal alphabet, I've been torn between trying to learn mandarin because it's more useful and Korean because the alphabet is way easier and I'm exposed to it more
It's extra cool for watching Korean musical performances and stuff (esp rap) even if you don't know any Korean cause you can visually see all the rhymes when there's subtitles
Thanks for correcting me, it's a really awesome language.
No problem, I'm glad that time my adderall kicked in when i landed on the Wikipedia page for Hangul and spent hours reading about it actually came in handy lol
Haha, my original draft of that comment also had that option. Yeah, stuffing Mandarin words into Hangul works too. Korean has a bunch of uncommon vowel sounds, but I think they mostly disappear when trying to using the intersection of it and Mandarin, so that should work.
I feel personally attacked
I’ve been thinking this alot lately as I learn mandarin. Maybe just re-lex mandarin with Esperanto words? My hope from hearing about Chinese learning Esperanto is that they’ll ‘mandarin-ify’ esperanto or create an esperantido that is.
If we're putting actual effort in, my international conlang would be:
Use Mandarin grammar, but drop the counting words.
Use Latin characters because computers.
Use a regular pronunciation/spelling system that doesn't include globally uncommon sounds, so anything you manage to write in the language is generally pronounceable by everyone. Toki Pona does this well, though I think it's a little too restrictive.
Make a small official vocab of grammatically essential words (is/prepositions/time/questions), probably drawing from Mandarin since it's where the grammar came from.
Everything else is a loan word / every word you manage to spell in the spelling system is valid vocabulary. Try to use an English word if you know one (since it's already Like This), but use one from your native language or any other language, whatever, it's fine.
Seems like Mandarin is kinda already dropping a lot of counting words, opting for just 个 a lot (though I'm still fairly new and still see lots of other counting words in the training material). I'm fine with that if it's separating out counting from 'number of' type constructs. But yeah, sometimes those counting words seem redundant.
Yeah, I really like this about toki pona, which I've also been tinkering with in parallel (and esperanto). I like that toki pona allows p, t, and k to sound more like b, d, and g too.
Everything else, yeah, I agree. I wondered why toki pona didn't have more particle words like Mandarin though since it uses li, e, pi, etc. Might as well have something like "...吗?" and 的. And I really like the pluralization of pronouns with 们 (and how all pronouns are at least voiced with the same sound) so I wondered what toki pona would like with those.
Regarding adding words not part of the core, i'm sure you could morph loan words from english to be more regular in this language, kinda like how both toki pona and esperanto do to varying degrees (or other natural languages like Mandarin itself does, at least for proper nouns) (edit, oops, i guess you did say if you can spell these loan words in this language which covers this).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages
Lojban is the superior constructed language