Alan

you rise a very interesting topic

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Alan Kay wrote:
> 
> English itself is a Creole (from various invasions, especially the 
> Norman Conquest), and I'm told by linguists that if not for this that 
> our language would be very much like Frieslandisch (a regional 
> dialect of Dutch).

Yes, Frieslandisch is said to be the language most close to English.

> So absorbing words from elsewhere is one of the reasons that English 
> thrives (including its very forgiving grammar (or almost lack of one )

Actually this is not correct - many non-mother-tongue user of English are
aware of this. What you mean is that in English the morphology is not very
complex, i.e. speaking of inflection and derivation. However strictly
speaking this statement is not precise.

Grammar means phonology, morphology and syntax and English is not 
lacking grammar :-). 

Leaving this terminology question aside you raise a very interesting
point: 
English tends to be an isolating language.

Explanation of the term: 
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm

This was the first link which showed up in google when searching for
"isolating language". The second link there is worth checking as well

http://www.geocities.com/finis_stellae/ng/lng/how/how_grammar.html
Title: How to create a language

It mentions isolating, agglutinating and inflecting languages and gives
some considerations.

A further link is from the UCLA language materials project on the Chinese
language (an example of an isolating language):
http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profm02.htm

and I quote:
>Although this profile speaks of "Chinese languages/dialects" the Chinese
>themselves refer to all forms of spoken Chinese as "dialects" even though
>some of them are as different as Spanish and Italian and are not mutually
>intelligible. The fiction of a single Chinese language--despite the many
>historical forms, styles, and regional variants--persists because of a
>_common writing system_ with deep historical roots and because of 
> a common ideal of cultural unity.

Emphasis on 'common writing system' added by me.

This brings me to my point: In an isolating language the "keywords" are
immutable and may be represented by icons (or logographs). The acoustic 
representation may be different.

This transferred to Squeak and etoys specifically: 
The keywords are symbols which have a specific meaning, 
they can have an icon or an English, Frisian, French, German,
Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanisch or Swedisch tag on it. (I
tried not to forget any mother tongue of Sqeuak list contributors I'm
aware of). 
It is possible to create a powerful language this way respecting the
importance of word order (a part of syntax).

I would be interested to learn more about your considerations
and goals constructing the etoy language. May I ask you  to give me 
a link to a paper or a copy  of a paper on this?


Regards
Hannes Hirzel


ALI Akan and ALI Swahili project 
ICT/ University of Zurich