Story of JARRAPUA

This is where I will write about how I developed JARRAPUA.

What's needed for the world to have a universal lingua franca is for people to agree on one and support it by learning it.
Not for more and more proposed auxlangs to proliferate. I get that.

But I think the problem with the task of getting people to learn an auxlang is that the right one hasn't been designed yet. It really is a design problem, not just a social one.

Why do I think I'm qualified to design one? I'm not a linguist (I have an unused BA in Psychology, took two years of German ("it's the same language family, it should be easy!"). In fact I have very poor language learning ability. And that's exactly why I'm qualified to design one. It seems like it must be pridefulness to want to promote MY language, but honestly I have designed the one I think is best. I've thought that before, though, so I might be wrong.

It's been a project of mine for decades actually, something I piddled with for a long time. I had been impressed by a mass market paperback about Esperanto. According to the thesis of it, that one book should have made me fluent, but obviously it didn't because the book ended by admitting that it was just an introduction, and pointed to resources for further study. That shouldn't have been. While it used many clever tricks, Esperanto simply didn't go far enough with them and made some bad choices. So I embarked on finding something better.

My life experiences, among other things, have emphasized to me how great a universal second language would be. I was a laborer in Texas, often working with immigrants who knew no English, and I knew no Spanish. I finished a career in the US Military, during which I travelled the world and encountered every kind of language barrier. I interacted, and had to work with, speakers of Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Thai, and German. Often we shared just a few words and used those plus pantomime and gesture to communicate. That gesture, pantomime, and handful of words, is what JARRAPUA is designed to replace.

All throughout, I carried around a little dictionary and was always trying to redefine words in terms of other words, to refine the word defining words down to the smallest possible set needed to generate all the other words. I knew that had to be the key. My grammar I had already worked out, for the most part, from the very beginning, other than adjusting a few details. The vocabulary was the hardest project, and it's one that I have been shining and polishing for a long long time.

Earlier I designed a language with about 30 basic sounds, each of which had an apriori meaning. The idea was that you would only have to learn those 30 sounds and then you would be able to discern words made of them. The idea was good, but didn't really work. It was fiendishly difficult to really learn the vocabulary built of the basic sounds. There was just too much similarity of sound between words with very different meanings, and despite the totally random assignments of meaning, I found that the memorization process involved association with known words that the vocabulary reminded me of.

I shared that attempt, and got feedback on it, criticizing my large phoneme inventory and the apriori vocabulary, and based on that I started over. About five years later, I'm back with JARRAPUA. It was actually fun learning it, it felt right, and I actually am proficient in it.