JARRAPUA a COMMON-SPEECH

Endnotes
1.  This is an endnote.  I will use these only and only these to comment on the reasoning and developmental history of various design features.  This prevents interruption of the presentation.

2. The use of only upper case Roman letters does several things.

a. It uses the world’s most common writing system. 

b. It reduces the size of the character set a native to some other writing system will have to learn. 

c. It makes JARRAPUA text stand out.

d. It makes typing easier, in more ways than one.

3. This is almost identical to the set Sapir recommended for auxlangs.  Almost  all languages have some phoneme close to these.  That means  less learning of unfamiliar sounds.  The small phoneme inventory has another couple of side advantages.
a. It makes vocabulary easier to learn and easier to create.  The less fine distinctions you have to create associations with the better.  An earlier attempt I made used a very large phoneme inventory and it was very easy to get confused between very close sounding words.  Also, it makes it easier to match up a given sounding word with some English word if the fit doesn’t have to be perfect.  In fact, it’s so advantageous it made the palindromes possible. 
b. It holds down the size of the core vocabulary.  If I’m using all possible CVC syllables, I don’t need there to be thousands of them.   The idea is to get the smallest vocabulary that will do what you need.

4. The tiny core vocabulary is important for two reasons.
a.  Simply less vocabulary to learn.
b. You can have confidence that you know ALL of it.  Once you know those 242, nobody can speak to you in JARRAPUA without using  words made of roots you know.   

5. I think they call this phonotactics.  The advantage of CVC syllables is that you can string them together and they are still pronounceable.  The largest consonant clusters, in compound words, are two consonants in size, and they are guaranteed to be surrounded by vowels.  With the small phoneme inventory there’s a good chance (1/9) those clusters will be two of the same consonant, which is even easier to pronounce.  You can even design your compound words to take advantage of it.  Whenever  two roots go together you have a CC cluster, so there’s no chance of confusion even if both of the doubled syllable aren’t pronounced.  There’s no such thing as JARAP, it has to be JARRAP.  The advantage of all the roots being the same (all CVC) is that you know when you’ve got a root. 

6. It’s amazing how often I was able to make the palindromes work, and it’s a major advantage both to learning and to recall simply on the basis of multiple paths to the memory location.  Also, I would imagine that many other languages, just by coincidence, will often have some word that can form a mnemonic hook for many of the JARRAPUA root vocabulary, and for each such match the palindrome get’s you two for one. 

7. JARRAPUA is a mixed apriori and aposterioi artificial language.  I used almost nothing but English as the aposteriori base for several reasons.

a. It is the world’s most broadly spoken language.  If the intent is to make JARRAPUA accessible to as many people as possible, it’s better to base the aposteriori aspect of the vocabulary on a language a lot of people already know.   Basing a language on 10 percent of 10 different national languages does nobody much good except linguists who may know several  languages already.  JARRAPUA is not for linguists, it’s for people with little language talent or training who want to learn a language anyway. 

b. English has a huge vocabulary.  Before I created the vocabulary, I knew what all the root vocabulary would sound like, and that every CVC would be a root word.  Knowing that task was ahead of me, I knew that a language with a very large vocabulary, one using a very large inventory of phonemes, would be more likely to be able to contain a word similar in sound to each root word. 

c. I am a native English speaker.  Sorry to be parochial, but that aided my task a lot. 

d. On the other hand, the approximation of English is loose and unthorough,  to say the least.  Much is apriori in a way.  FEJ is “vegetate”, so it’s “opposite”  is “animate”represented by the palindrome of FEJ, which is JEF.  JEF itself is not really evocative of anything to do with animals or lively activity, except in the sense that animals are the “chief” form of life.   Also, some is based on other languages (SES= six, kind of like the Spanish and PET=solidify, reminiscent of the Greek for rock.)  English is good for this since much of it is already from other languages. 

e.  The imperfect match with English is an advantage.  With something like Basic English, in addition to the extensive reliance on idiom, the problem is that you may be able to say things, or understand things written in English, but you will encounter real English and you won’t get most of it.  There is no possibility of mistake here, knowing JARRAPUA will not mean you have any chance of believing or making anyone believe that you know English.  It is as close to English as German is, definitely a different language, not a dialect. 

8. This is also close to Sapir’s recommendations.  There are adjectives and adverbs for anything you need.  They are all optional.  Want so say something is multiple, use an adjective to say it.  Want to say something is female, use an adjective.  Want to say something happened in the past, use an adverb.  Whatever other things are built into language structures, gone, put it in if you want.  There is one multitool for all grammatical structures, the modificational clause (a phrase I made up, I told you I’m not a linguist).  The syntax is always the same, there are no optional ways to do things.  There are no unnecessary elements. 

9. I’m not up on all the language taxonomy, but JARRAPUA uses both inflection and agglutination.  Just jamming words together leaves ambiguity about how components are related to each other, so the inflecting suffixes serve the role of clarification (essentially making each compound word a kind of clause).  But the inflecting suffixes in compounds do make words longer, so you can leave them out if you want, except the last one in each word.  They’re there if you need to spell things out and clarify for someone who doesn’t know the word or have the ability to figure it out otherwise.

10. Initially the pairs were almost exact opposites of each other and the vocabulary was slightly different.  But I  realized a couple of things.  I noticed that there are different ways for words to be opposites of each other.   If my pairs were not exact opposites the root vocabulary could cover more ground, yet still take advantage of palindromes evoking each other.  For example, initially KUS and SUK were “tighten” and “loosen”.    By changing SUK  to “depressurize” I could generate NANKUS (tighten) and NANSUK (pressurize).  Yet “depressurize” and “tighten” still evoke each other as sort of opposites, in addition to having approximate parallels in English (cozy and suck).   

11. Cases are against Sapir’s recommendations, but mine are essential to the whole scheme of word compounding.  I’m using accusative and nominative, which are implicit in language itself. Word order, ie SVO or whatever, is one of the descriptors of any language, implicit is the idea that you have a subject and an object, the roles  of the nominative and accusative cases, even if you don’t mark them.  My application of the notion of case to my inflections of adjectives and adverbs may be incorrect, but what I’m doing enables compound words and clauses to be making statements using a tiny multipurpose tool set.    The key is that I’m not using cases to escape syntax.  That’s what can be confusing.