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Q: What is Acadon?
Q: Who can use Acadon?
Q: What then are some of those advantages and uses?
Q: Why should anyone learn Acadon instead of English?
Q: Isn't the idea of an international auxiliary language an unrealistic dream, one that has already failed?
Q: Isn't it a fact that "conscious language creation" goes against human nature?
Q: Couldn't the Acadon vocabulary have been made more "neutral," with less from Latin or from other European languages?
Q: Isn't English already the international language?
Q: How is Acadon any different from past projects like Esperanto, Ido, or Interlingua?
Q: Is Acadon designed to be a perfect language?
Q: Why should someone who knows English go to the trouble to learn Acadon?
Q: Why should, say, a Chinese learn Acadon rather than English?
Q: Wouldn't even a global language soon tend to break up into mutually unintelligible dialects anyway?
Q: How long does it take to learn Acadon?
Q: Isn't a good deal of the design of Acadon -- including some of its vocabulary -- rather arbitrary?
Q: Couldn't Acadon be simpler, have fewer letters of the alphabet, etc.?
Q: Doesn't the story of the Tower of Babylon tell us that we are fated to have many languages -- and that maybe that is a good thing?
Q: Is it true that Acadon is patented? If so, how can a language be patented?
Q: Aren't people too lazy to learn a whole new language?

Q: What is Acadon?

A: Acadon is a language designed for access to data and more efficient communication, specifically on the Internet. It falls in the category of "international auxiliary languages" (IALs). A IAL is a language that can be used as a second language for communication between persons belonging to differing linguistic cultures. It is not designed to replace any natural language. A fuller description of Acadon is here. (#34)

Q: Who can use Acadon?

A: The simple answer is that anyone can use it to some advantage. Acadon has many potential uses. Not all users of Acadon will have the same goals.

Q: What then are some of those advantages and uses?

A: To begin with of course, Acadon give access to all digital data available in the English language. And it is far easier to learn than English, with fully regular spelling, regularized grammar, built-in keys to sentence structure, fewer separate word roots to learn, and only about half as many sounds that must be distinguished.

Acadon not only eliminates most of the difficulties of learning and using English, but also does many things that English does not do. Some examples:

1) It provides ways for casting words and sentences into less ambiguous forms than possible in English.

2) It is capable of being much more precise than English in a variety of ways that support scientific communication.

3) Acadon provides several mnemonic systems of considerable usefulness.

4) Acadon integrates its mnemonic system into a new keyboard that in more efficient and easier to learn than the QWERTY keyboard.

5) Acadon more effectively supports computer interface, particularly speech recognition systems.

6) It has a recognized system for expressing certain complex shades of meaning (for example, degrees of probability) much more effectively and naturally than English.

7) Acadon more naturally avoids many sexist and ethnocentric usages common in English.

8) Acadon better integrates certain non-English words and concepts into its lexicon than does English.

9) For the hearing impaired, Acadon is designed to be easier to lip-read than English.

10) It provides a concise way to integrate mathematical formulae and symbolic logic into normal spoken sentences.

Q: Why should anyone learn Acadon instead of English?

A: Acadon provides easier access to the vast amount of information stored in, or transmitted via, the English language. It is at the same time as neutral and international a medium as can be designed for its purposes. Above all, Acadon can be learned in a fraction of time that it takes to learn English. Acadon eliminates many of the difficulties that are encountered by anyone wishing to master English in the following ways:

1) Acadon words are much easier to pronounce than English, and the dangers of making confusing or embarrassing mistakes are reduced.

2) Acadon sentences are much easier than English to understand when heard -- by machines as well as persons.

3) The spelling of Acadon is completely regular, in sharp contrast to that of English.

4) The vocabulary of Acadon is much easier to master than that of English. Words are more regularly derived. Roots are more international.

5) Acadon grammar is far more regular and predictable than that of English.

Because of the many difficulties of English, many students of the language around the world end up unsuccessful at mastering the language in any useful way. The success rate for Acadon will be much much higher.

Q: Isn't the idea of an international auxiliary language an unrealistic dream, one that has already failed?

A: No. There have been many IALs that have succeeded, often for hundreds of years, even millennia. Many were in large part artificial. The Greek koine served as a IAL for much of the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and the Near East two thousand years ago. Classical Chinese served as a written IAL for China, much of Central Asia, Korea, Japan and Vietnam for well over 1500 years. Sanskrit, in the form designed by Panini, long played a similar role on the Indian subcontinent. Classical Latin was used as the IAL for much of Europe for a thousand years after anything similar was colloquially spoken as a native tongue. Two hundred years ago, French was used by the elite of Europe as their IAL. Arabic has been used for auxiliary communication within the Islamic world from Spain and Morocco in the West to what is now western China and Indonesia in the East, north to the Urals, and south to Zanzibar. Today there may be more people who use English as a second language, i.e., as a IAL, than there are native speakers.

Such auxiliary languages seem a natural phenomenon of all human civilization. They have met a need since the days when Sumerian, long gone as a spoken language, continued to play an auxiliary role throughout the Mesopotamian region.

Q: Isn't it a fact that "conscious language creation" goes against human nature?

A: There is no natural or innate human language. All have been created by persons over time. It is true that this process is usually rather unconscious, but not always. Terms are continually being consciously coined, from those of scientific nomenclature (Homo sapiens, H2O), though technical and trade terms (plate tectonics, Fujifilm) to slang expressions. Most major literary languages have a significant artificially standardized element, and were never spoken as they have been written. The Greek koine, Classical Chinese, Latin, Sanskrit, et al. were the result of such labors.

Modern Italian and Norwegian as well as many of the now written languages of Africa were the work of scholars bringing together quite disparate dialects to make a whole. Modern Hebrew was consciously created from linguistic forms that had not been a colloquial language for millennia. The creative force of early writers (often poets) typically have given much of the form to modern languages: Shakespeare for English, Cervantes for Spanish, Dante for Italian, Luther for German, Pushkin for Russian come to mind.

Q: Couldn't the Acadon vocabulary have been made more "neutral," with less from Latin or from other European languages?

A: Yes, but to do so would have been to violate the basic Acadon goal of seeking vocabulary that is in fact the most worldwide as possible. Several of what some people still call "European languages" are spoken more widely beyond Europe: particularly Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French. These languages form the core of the "WENSA distribution," so-named because it covers most of Western Europe, North America, South America, and Australia. Four continents, not one. (On the distribution of vocabulary items see: SOURCES #18*)

An artificial language could have a totally new vocabulary, but the memory burden of such an (a priori) approach has made it less popular than picking from widely familiar roots. Artificial languages such as Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Occidental, Novial, and Interlingua have purposefully centered on Europe. The earlier examples were founded in the high age of European Colonialism, and their proponents often went so far as to denigrate much of the world as "uncivilized" and not worthy of consideration.

Recently, there have been some efforts to correct this situation by creating IALs with vocabulary pools that were more closely reflective of world populations. But a new error often crept in: selection was very arbitrary, picking words rather randomly to give representation to Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, etc. The result of such a process is to create a melange that is almost as unfamiliar to the average person as the a priori method would be. (See #31)*

The ideal of Acadon is to look at each root-word (or morpheme) to be represented, note its form in all major languages (often down to all languages spoken by more than a million persons) and pick that form that is used by the largest number of people today. (See #16)* Often this leads to Latinate forms or to other forms that have been spread by means of originally European languages, but it may lead to prehistoric Indo-European roots, or to forms that were spread by the high culture of Islam, by Sinitic culture, or by other means. But Acadon is unapologetic when this process leads to more words that are familiar to the average Italian than to the average Tibetan. This is simply a reflection of the reality of present-day word distribution, not of any bias in favor of one region or another.

Q: Isn't English already the international language?

A: English is surely the most widely used international auxiliary language today, and has been since (perhaps) the end of the First World War, replacing French.

But there is no demographic evidence that English-speaking populations are growing more rapidly than those speaking other languages such as Chinese, Spanish, or Hindi. The rest of the world is simply not being absorbed into the English-speaking world; to the contrary, there is considerable resistance to the very idea of English predominance; and the non-English-speaking part of the Internet is now growing far more rapidly than the English-speaking portion.

Yet there remains great economic value in the access to data that English currently provides. What is to be done? The cost of teaching five billion people to speak "English as a second language" would run to many many trillions of dollars and be beyond the means of many of the economies involved. The cost of teaching five billion persons to master only the "English spelling system" would surely surpass a trillion dollars. Will the non-English speaking world want to waste their resources on this -- if there is an alternative way to access all the same data?

Q: How is Acadon any different from past projects like Esperanto, Ido, or Interlingua?

A: Acadon is designed to provide services of immediate value to its users; and many of those services are in no way dependent on a prior community of users. Everything now in English will automatically translate into it. Acadon emphasizes providing commercial, educational, and other services to users -- it does not rely on commitment to any ideology, vision of the future, or ism. It is a tool. Seven basic principles of Acadon design and promotion are always kept in mind.(#7)* Acadon is also a more global system, not centered on Europe exclusively -- as most of the earlier projects were.

Q: Is Acadon designed to be a perfect language?

A: Perfection is not a reasonable goal in language design -- nor is the creation of a "philosophic language" or a purely "logical language." Acadon is not designed to be perfect, only substantially superior to any existing language in design. This is sufficient cause to rejoice.

Q: Why should someone who knows English go to the trouble to learn Acadon?

A: Persons who already speak English lack one of the major rewards of learning Acadon, that of easier access to digitized data in English. But they are not without incentive in using Acadon. Since they can write in English, anything they so write can be seamlessly translated into Acadon by machine translation. In a sense, they do not need to learn to write Acadon to use it -- in either its written or aural form.

However, English speakers can use the Acadon system to become alert to the ways in which they can enhance their English texts directly by using MarkedEnglish, or by reviewing and enhancing the Acadon text before sending it out. Thus, they are issuing a "pre-edited text" of sorts, one that would be easier to translate to French or Japanese than would the unenhanced equivalent.

The LittleLanguage feature of Acadon can also be used by English speakers to send texts to non-English-speakers that will be easier to comprehend, less ambiguous, and better capable of an effective machine translation to yet another language. These functions replicate many of the advantages of "controlled languages."(#32)*

A few other advantages of Acadon to English-speakers follow:
1) English-speakers can very inexpensively create bilingual (English-Acadon) websites, capable of helping certain categories of non-English-speaking customers -- even those with very little exposure to Acadon.
2) English-speakers can use the MemniSystem.
3) By learning Acadon, they will learn a great deal about English and other languages -- as well as linguistic principles. (The "educational value" of Acadon is far more practical and broader than a course in Latin.)
4) By speaking Acadon to a computer, they will be able to create an error free transcript. (This is not possible in English because of its many homonyms, as well being made difficult by the confusion of the many sub-dialects of English, and by the characteristic slurring of much English.) The Acadon could be turned back into perfect written English, of course.
5) They will be able to be more clearly understood by others when speaking Acadon rather than English; and they will better understand non-English speakers who are using Acadon than those using English.
6) English-speakers can use Acadon to express themselves more clearly than is possible in English, and to resolve ambiguities in English.
7) English-speakers can use Acadon to incorporate logical functions into sentences, to speak mathematical formulae, and to do many things not readily possible in English.

It is true that an English-speaker already has direct access to much of the data that Acadon can unlock for others. It is not true, however, that the English-speaker can simply lean back and wait for others to learn her/his language. While it is true that the use of English is currently spreading in certain circles, the far largest portion of children brought into this world are arriving in families that speak no English; and they will probably never have much, if any, exposure to it.

English-speakers, like others, will need Acadon to communicate with those who do not speak their language. Despite the ethno-centric expressions of some naive English-speakers, English has not "already become the universal language," nor is it likely ever to become so. Statistics in such matters are difficult to establish, but it is probable that Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, and Bengali -- as well as several other languages -- are growing more rapidly than English in terms of total speakers.

Q: Why should, say, a Chinese learn Acadon rather than English?

A: A central objective is, of course, to gain access to the Internet and to all data digitized in English with far less effort and expense than learning all the irregular ins and outs of English. Also to communicate on the Internet (e-mail, personal web pages, et al.) with all who know either English or Acadon.

It is important to note that Acadon does many things that English does not do and, in some cases, cannot do. Some examples:

1) Acadon provides a world-wide communication system on a more level playing field. The international sources of Acadon, its neutral design, and the fact that it is intended only as a second language (and must be learned even by English-speakers), free it from the linguistic imperialism that marks national languages, including English.

2) Acadon is designed to provide its users with a quickly-learned minimal sub-form (far better than "Basic English" for example); this sub-form can be used for Internet communication with those who know no English.

3) Acadon is designed to be capable of greater precision than English in a variety of ways that support scientific communication. It has, for example, a recognized system for expressing certain complex shades of meaning (for example, degrees of probability) much more effectively and naturally than English.

4) Acadon more effectively supports computer interface than does the English language, particularly speech recognition systems.

5) Acadon provides several valuable mnemonic systems.

6) Acadon more naturally avoids many sexist and ethnocentric usages common in English.

7) Acadon better integrates certain non-English and non-Western words and concepts into its lexicon than does English.

8) Acadon provides a concise way to integrate mathematical formulae and symbolic logic into normal spoken sentences.

9) Spoken Acadon is a far clearer language, easier to hear. It does not have the disadvantage of varied pronunciation by different dialect groups. For the hearing impaired, Acadon is designed to be easier to lip-read than English.

Q: Wouldn't even a global language soon tend to break up into mutually unintelligible dialects anyway?

A: Languages do change, but linguistic breakup is usually the result of a breakdown of intercommunication. The process would take centuries, and a degree of isolation between regions. If we assume new dark ages sweeping over earth, languages like English and Spanish might split into unintelligible regional argots. But as long as we have television, the movies, radio, et al., this is not going to happen rapidly, if at all. Nor need it happen with a language like Acadon.

Sumerian, Akkadian, Hieroglyphic Egyptian, Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, have all shown staying power beyond a thousand years -- and under conditions that rendered communication much more difficult than today.

How much time must we project for an auxiliary language to last for it to have been useful?

Q: How long does it take to learn Acadon?

A: This depends on where the learner begins, and where he/she intends to go.

A learner who knows some English will find it especially easy to learn Acadon; one who also knows, say, Spanish or French or considerable scientific vocabulary, will find it even easier. In practice, this will make the attainment of competence in Acadon far easier to accomplish for such people than learning any prior-designed international auxiliary language.

A monolingual Swede, Romanian, or Argentine will find Acadon easy for different reasons. Sight recognition for reading web pages and gaining access to data will be very rapid for over two billion of the world's population. For most of the rest of the world's population, Acadon will be far easier to learn to master than any other major language (with the possible exception of a language very similar to their own, such as Spanish to Portuguese, Danish to Norwegian, Urdu to Hindi, or Indonesian to Malay). English spelling takes several hundred times the amount of learning time as that of Acadon. English grammar may take ten times the effort as that of Acadon.

We must, however, be realistic; a Korean who speaks only Korean will have to make a major effort to learn to read, write and speak Acadon at a highly competent level. This effort will, however, be only a fraction of that which would be needed to learn English (or Russian, Japanese or Chinese). Pronunciation will be far easier, there will be no spelling problems to face; most irregularities of verbs and plurals will be gone; sentence structure will be clearer; vocabulary will be more transparent, etc.

Yet Acadon will supply the same Internet access to data, and means of communication that English does. If our Acadon-competent Korean were to write an Acadon e-mail message to send to a contact in Australia, he/she would be able to convert it to English prior to sending. The message arriving in Australia would show no sign that its sender knew not a word of English. It would arrive translated into perfect English.

Q: Isn't a good deal of the design of Acadon -- including some of its vocabulary -- rather arbitrary?

A: Decisions at many points involved complex considerations. Many factors go into choice. For example, a root word should not only be widespread, but it should not be too similar to other root-words, should not have an offensive meaning in any major language, should not be too long or too short for its semantic realm, should fit the Acadon phonetic system, should not appear composed of other words, etc. etc. Perhaps it would not be unrealistic to say that about 15% of Acadon is in fact a-priori or close to it. But these elements have been chosen to fit into the whole. In that sense they are not arbitrary.

Q: Couldn't Acadon be simpler, have fewer letters of the alphabet, etc.?

A: Yes, it could have fewer letters. But all 26 basic letters of the Latin/French/English alphabet are used in chemical equations and other scientific nomenclature worldwide. A truncated alphabet with very few letters and letter patterns can create reading problems by making too many words look too similar to each other. Any effort to reduce the available alphabet would destroy familiarity and in fact add a new form of complexity -- words may have to be longer and more repetitious. This is not a gain.

Much of the needed simplicity is in fact provided by Acadon's "Laws of Avoidance."(#35)* Also, the simple expedient of allowing some letters to stand for a sequence of two sounds allows for a full 26 letter alphabet and for only twenty (some might say twenty-two) phonemes. Thus the Acadon letter Z stands for the double sound [ts], as often the case in German.

One of the principles used in the design of Acadon has been to incorporate more diversity into the writing system than has been allowed in the system of spoken sounds. The difference can be roughly expressed by the ratio of 26 graphemes to 20 phonemes, although spelling conventions such as oe for /oi/, ae for /ai/, ph- for /fu/, and th- for /tu/ play a role in creating additional diversity to the eye.

In summary, there are two simple reasons for enforcing a greater degree of simplicity on spoken Acadon than on written Acadon.

1) Most people find it much easier to learn to
read a new language than to learn to speak one.

2) Diversity of form in written language can actually
speed reading and make it less error-prone.

Acadon's alphabet is thus designed to reconcile the following factors:
1. Phonemic simplicity is very important in any spoken language to be learned by adults with diverse language backgrounds. 2. An alphabet of very few letters would, however, be destructive of established international usages.

Q: Doesn't the story of the Tower of Babylon tell us that we are fated to have many languages -- and that maybe that is a good thing?

A: Acadon is not presented as a substitute for any existing natural language, only as an auxiliary (or "second language").

Languages that are "endangered" today are under pressure from natural politico-economic languages such as English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. The extinction of currently "endangered" languages might even be slowed by the availability of Acadon.(#36)*

In the past, religious faiths have characteristically played a key role in the spread of IALs. There is no religion that has opposed the idea of an IAL on the basis of "fate" or God's ordinance. On the contrary, evangelism has typically played a major role in such things. Medieval Latin, Byzantine Greek, Islamic Arabic, Hindu-Sanskrit, are among the more widespread examples. Classical Literary Chinese was surely central to both Taoism and Confucianism. Religions have very often played a major role in promoting education in specific IALs.

Q: Is it true that Acadon is patented? If so, how can a language be patented?

A: The "linked alternative language" technology involved in the design and machine translation software for Acadon is covered by a U.S. patent pending. Use of the Acadon language is not patented. Some aspects of the language, its documentation, and its software are covered by copyright. This is not intended to restrict use of the Acadon language as such.

Protection of the various innovative aspects of the Acadon system is intended to give commercial value to the project as a tool for access to data, for better communication on the Internet, etc. By rewarding those who may develop the many potentialities of the system, the Acadon Development Corporation (link)* will be a instrumentality for assuring that those potentialities do get implemented in the form of publications, software, hardware, and other products. The ADC Mission Statement is here.(#10)

It is, in fact, one of the innovations of the Acadon project that for the first time in world history the creation of an international auxiliary language has been linked to an entrepreneurial enterprise. The purpose in this is to make things happen, not to inhibit them.

Q: Aren't people too lazy to learn a whole new language?

A: No. Human beings have regularly learned additional languages, and learned them well, when there was sufficient motivation. To do so is nothing remarkable at all. A significant portion of all human beings in the past knew more than one language. A very large percentage of all high school students in Africa have command of at least three languages.

As the mechanical barriers to world wide communication are torn down by our new technologies, the linguistic barriers will be far more noticeable. The incentive to penetrate those barriers will be extreme.

There are few large zones on the surface of the Earth where people have not been acutely aware of the need to master more than one language. Today this is the case in much of north China and in large parts of North America. There are hundreds of millions in China who have no experience with any language but Chinese; some are not even aware that other languages exist! In parts of English-speaking North America there are others who have been almost totally unaware of anything but English. Though they know the names of several other languages, they see no value in learning any. This is not unreasonable -- there has been no motivation.

But the Internet, and other developments in the means of travel and communication, will bring such isolation to an end. What will they do? They will do what is routinely expected in places like South Africa, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Finland, Singapore, the Netherlands, or the cities of Nigeria. They will learn such language or languages as are needed.

Copyright (C) Leo J. Moser 1999