Talk:Zonal auxiliary language

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There is wrong link on the page. Link "Mezduslavjanski jezik" lead us not to Mezduslavjanski jezik page but to Mezhdunarodny Nauchny Yazyk page. I new for this site, so I can't fix it yet. Nice big guy (talk) 09:12, 16 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nice big guy (talk • contribs) 09:05, 16 May 2010 (UTC) I corrected it. Now "Mezduslavjanski jezik" lead to Mezduslavjanski jezik page. But the page is very short.Nice big guy (talk) 03:37, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Definition?[edit]

I've removed several languages from here and the category because they don't match the definition in the lead of a zonal language being an interlanguage for closely related lects. Their inclusion gave the impression that the people living in the country [sic] of Africa speak African dialects [sic], which shouldn't be in a linguistic article. If one could created a zonal language for Slavic, Romance, Hungarian and Basque, then those might be returned, but this article would need to be corrected. — kwami (talk) 05:14, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You're making an excellent point here. In my own classification scheme (soon to be published, I hope) I make a distinction between zonal and regional constructed languages, based on linguistic and geographic proximity respectively. I'm not sure if there's currently any serious literature to support this, though. The whole idea of subdividing auxiliary languages is a relatively young phenomenon anyway. —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 10:26, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, even if we were to follow this subdivision, there would be interesting borderline cases. Take for example the Pan-Uralic language Budinos: can a language based on such remote language groups as Finnic, Permic and Ugric still be called "zonal"? And how about Slovio, which is essentially a Slavic relexification of Esperanto? —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 11:18, 24 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely not Budinos, no more than Indic-Albanian-Slavic-Celtic would be 'zonal'. I supposed we could have a very broad definition of 'zonal', but if there's no hope for intelligibility among the source languages, how it that effectively any different from a regional conlang? As for Slovio, Esperanto is essentially Slavic to begin with. I'm not familiar with Slovio, but the affixes look Slavic, so I think I'd call it zonal. It'd be different if it kept Esperanto affixes. — kwami (talk) 01:11, 25 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What I actually meant to say is that both examples rather belong to a gray area between zonal, regional and global. Indeed, there is no hope that Budinos would be intelligible to speakers of all its source languages (nor, for that matter, of any of its source languages). However, you can't call it "regional" either, otherwise it would surely have included Russian. And for the record, I can't really see a Pan-Germanic language being simultaneously intelligible to speakers of English, German and Icelandic either!

The case of Slovio is even less transparant. The way affixes work in Esperanto is indeed similar to Slavic, but it is equally similar to f.ex. Latin. And Slovio syntax is not even remotely similar to any Slavic grammar, even though most of its building blocks are Slavic calques from Esperanto. Besides, during its first years, Slovio was presented explicitly as an alternative to languages like Esperanto and Ido, not as an alternative to English or Russian as a Slavic lingua franca. The latter element appeared four years later, when its fanbase was already being drained by other projects. Worth mentioning is also that Slovio claims to be mutually understandable with Latvian and Lithuanian (which, of course, is obvious nonsense).

The practical problem with purpose-based classifications like "zonal", "regional" and "global" is that some languages intended for global use are based on one language or language family only, and that in other cases the purpose of a language is not always clear. For that reason, I'd rather use a division based on the origin of the vocabulary, which brings us back to the old scale: a priori --- mixed --- a posteriori (based on: heterogeneous source languages --- homogeneous source languages --- a single language). —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 11:22, 25 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose Budinos is more of an attempt to support an ethnic identity, of the Uralic peoples as a people. That might be an additional classification. Germanic is a bit more distanct than Slavic or Romance, but it should still be possible to come up w a lexical base that's mostly recognizable to speakers of all in writing even though it wouldn't be intelligible when heard. Like an artificial Germanic Dachsprach.

Yeah, I'm not voting for any particular classification scheme, just would like us to be consistent with whatever we claim. — kwami (talk) 17:47, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]