Fiat Lingua Title: Ma'alahi: Use of a Simplified Language to Test a Linguistic Hypothesis Author: Jeffrey R. Brown MS Date: 12-09-2014 FL Date: 01-01-2015 FL Number: FL-000028-00 Citation: Brown, Jeffrey R. 2014. "Ma'alahi: Use of a Simplified Language to Test a Linguistic Hypothesis." FL-000028-00, Fiat Lingua, <http://fiatlingua.org>. Web. 01 Jan. 2015. Copyright: © 2014 Jeffrey R. Brown. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Fiat Lingua is produced and maintained by the Language Creation Society (LCS). For more information about the LCS, visit http://www.conlang.org/ Maʻalahi: Use of a simplified language to test a linguistic hypothesis by Jeffrey R. Brown Abstract Maʻalahi is a constructed language derived from a single source language, Hawaiian, with a ruthlessly simplified Polynesian grammar. This makes it an appropriate candidate for investigating hypotheses about the ease of L2 language acquisition. An exploratory study was performed to determine whether grammatical features or external factors (social or personal) are more significantly correlated with perceived ease of learning and correct performance on translation tasks. Only external factors were shown to be significantly correlated. (Please refer to glossary for unfamiliar terms.) Hypothesis The hypothesis of the study was that the ease of learning a language, whether a natural or a constructed one, is not significantly related to the simplicity or regularity of its grammar; rather, it is related to three other factors: Cognacy: The similarity of the lexicon, and to a lesser extent, the grammar, to a language already spoken by the learner; Polyglottism: The number of different languages, especially from diverse language families, spoken by the learner; and Metalinguistic Awareness: The degree of linguistic knowledge of the learner, and the ability to conceptualize languages abstractly. To test this hypothesis, a study was done in which the participants were asked to learn a grammatically simple conlang, Maʻalahi, which was based on Hawaiian – a language whose grammar and lexicon differ markedly from any European language, and which would likely be unfamiliar to the participants. After studying the language, the participants were asked to perform translation exercises from Maʻalahi to English and from English to Maʻalahi. Ease of learning was evaluated by scoring the correctness of the translation exercises, and by asking the participants to report on how easy they felt the language was. Maʻalahi 1 Other questions in the questionnaire were used to assess cognacy (familiarity with any Polynesian language); polyglottism (number of languages spoken and reported competency in them, as well as: [a.] number of language families, and [b.] number of auxlangs spoken); and metalinguistic awareness (as based on: [a.] formal education in linguistics, [b.] the number of auxlangs constructed by the participant, and [c.] the number of artlangs constructed by the participant). The Background of the Study For a long time, I have felt that Hawaiian was the most beautiful natural language in the world. I have regretted occasionally that Mozart hadn’t written any operas in Hawaiian, as lovely as Italian opera is. Admittedly this is a subjective, aesthetic opinion. In January 2014, David Peterson, Sylvia Sotomayor, and I were invited to be on a panel of conlangers for the student linguistics club at University of California – San Diego. One of the questions posed was this: “If you had to choose one single natural language for the entire world, what would it be?” Both David and I answered “Hawaiian” immediately. (Sylvia, I believe, was somewhat dumbfounded by the alacrity of our replies.) I decided the next day to create a conlang with the same sound (phonology and phonotactics) as Hawaiian.1 I agonized over what specific features of Hawaiian phonology gave it its particular phonoaesthetics. Then, I had one of those rare “aha!” moments of obviousness: the language that would sound the most like Hawaiian, was Hawaiian. The problem with learning Hawaiian, though, is that its grammar is quite complex: two categories of possessives (volitional and non-volitional), close to three dozen pronouns (if one counts all the possessive forms), complex syntax for relative clauses, odd word order shifts for topicalization, and inscrutable rules (still debated by linguists) governing the ellipsis of markings for nouns and verbs. It’s a hard language to learn. I decided to create a conlang called “Maʻalahi,” which means “simple” in Hawaiian. I retained the Hawaiian phonology (with one change: letting /k/ and /t/ function as separate phonemes, rather than allophones in complementary distribution), as well as the entire Hawaiian lexicon, thus preserving the exact sound of the language. I then drastically simplified the grammar, removing all but the most common forms, coalescing types wherever possible, and regularizing the syntax and the rules concerning markings. The result was a grammar no more complex than Esperanto’s, and which, I hoped, would be as easy to learn. 1 I should point out that David has already done this in his conlang, Kamakawi. Maʻalahi 2 Around this same time, there was one of the recurrent arguments taking place on the Brown University Auxlang list: What factors led to the adoption of an auxlang? One contingent pointed to sociological factors, whether political, economic or socio-prestigious. The other contingent emphasized the ease of learning the auxlang. This branched off (as usual) into a secondary argument as to which inherent attributes of an auxlang contributed primarily to its ease of learning: Was it the simplicity and regularity of its grammar? Or the recognizability of the words of the lexicon, because they were cognate to words in a language already spoken by the learner? That question had never been studied quantitatively. After a thorough search through the literature, and wading through unsubstantiated claims made by devotees promoting one auxlang or another, I found only these few published articles [see Bibliography for complete citations] peripherally related to this question: Folia et al, Artificial Language Learning in Adults and Children Lindstedt, Native Esperanto as a Test Case for Natural Language Montúfar, The Contemporary Esperanto Community Roehr-Bracklin & Tellier, Enhancing Children’s Language Learning: Esperanto as a Tool None of them addressed directly the issue of cognacy (the degree to which the words in the auxlang’s lexicon resemble words in a natlang spoken by the learner)2. However, one intriguing discovery was that Esperanto could function as a tool to increase children’s metalinguistic awareness, thereby accelerating their acquisition of foreign languages.3 I felt that it would be a boon to auxlangers to know which inherent linguistic factors led to the ease of learning, and hence likelihood of adoption, of an auxlang (regardless of the extent to which external factors are critical to that adoption). Most of the auxlangs in circulation today, such as Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Sambahsa, etc, are based on European source languages, and their speech communities are drawn heavily from people whose natal and/or second languages are also European. This makes it difficult to disentangle which of the two factors, simplicity or cognacy, is primarily contributive to the ease of learning. My first thought about testing this was to consider the feasibility of evaluating the ease of learning of Esperanto among the Quechua who live in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia (where I 2 Or, also, grammatical cognacy: The degree to which grammatical forms resemble those of a natlang spoken by the learner. 3 As an example, British middle-school children who studied one semester of Esperanto followed by three semesters of French, learned more French than those students who studied four semesters of French without exposure to Esperanto. This may indicate that the purposeful construction of simplified languages can be a useful pedagogical tool to enhance second-language acquisition. Maʻalahi 3 had visited), as there is no commonality between Quechuan and the source languages of Esperanto. The logistics of, and resources for, such a study, however, would be prohibitive. Additionally, most of the Quechua speak Spanish as a second language, which might invalidate any test results. My second idea was to test the ease of learning of an auxlang that was derived exclusively from one or more non-European source languages, among speakers of European languages. It was then that I realized that I had already constructed such a test vehicle. It was Maʻalahi, a language with a simplified and regularized grammar whose lexicon (and grammar) is derived from a single source language: Hawaiian (which is definitely not Indo-European). Only those familiar with Hawaiian, or some other Polynesian language, would be likely to recognize any words or grammatical forms. This was origin of the study which is presented in this paper. Status of the Hawaiian language The readers of this paper may find it helpful to know a little about the Hawaiian language and its status today. Hawaiian is a language of the “Eastern Polynesian” family. According to Wikipedia: The Polynesian languages are a language family spoken in geographical Polynesia as well as on a patchwork of “Outliers” from south central Micronesia, to small islands off the northeast of the larger islands of the Southeast Solomon Islands and sprinkled through Vanuatu. They are classified as part of the Austronesian family, belonging to the Oceanic branch of that family. Polynesians share many unique cultural traits which resulted from about 1,000 years of common development, including common linguistic development, in the Tonga and Sāmoa area through most of the first millennium BC. There are approximately forty Polynesian languages. The most prominent of these are Tahitian, Sāmoan, Tongan, Māori and Hawaiʻian. Because the Polynesian islands were settled relatively recently and because internal linguistic diversification only began around 2,000 years ago, their languages retain strong commonalities.