New language apparently not a cod/KOD statt Esperanto

Die Süddeutsche berichtet über die neue Sprache, KOD, von Johannes Vielberth (72) aus Regensburg.

A German report on the new artificial language KOD includes a sound clip. The website of the inventor also has English pages (the Spanish and French pages are not ready, which may explain why KOD is needed). Just for fun, it looks as if the language even has a new alphabet.

The language has no grammar of its own, however. That is, the speaker uses the grammar of his or her own language.

It seems the name Kod has a D sound at the end, which the Germans are bad at, leading to the Kot sound (= excrement). The name Eufo-Institut also uncomfortably recalls UFO, a word used in German as well as English.

According to the Süddeutsche, Kod is not a new language, but the sum of the most fundamental common features of fifteen languages spoken by 4,8 billion of the total of 6.3 billion people on earth.

(Via Persistent Illusions, which I now quote again. There is a reference there to Sommerloch, literally summer hole, the silly season). PI also gives excellent links to Wikipedia in Esperanto and in Interlingua.

6 thoughts on “New language apparently not a cod/KOD statt Esperanto

  1. That’s ridiculous. You’d have to KNOW the grammar of the speaker’s language to understand him. Does the language have particles, intonations, and affixes corresponding to all possible grammars?

    Putting English words into the grammar used by the language of my blog gives you:

    teacher likes because doctor happy child

    who likes whom? what caused what?

    The teacher likes that the doctor made the child happy? No.

    The teacher likes the doctor because the child is happy? No.

    Would you guess: “the child is happy because the doctor likes the teacher”? That’s what it says.

  2. Qov: It does sound ridiculous. From my own knowledge, I think an English speaker would probably understand Chinese grammar, because English and Chinese have similar word order, but not Turkish. I don’t even know how someone with an agglutinative language would begin to put the words together.
    I wouldn’t be inclined to judge a new artificial language on the basis of Klingon, though. That _would_ be ridiculous.

  3. I’m unsure in certain situations correct grammar is abs. necessary. Like the pidgin-Eng. question ‘Where you from?’.

    Also I recall an example of a warning shouted to a British soldier in the India Raj days: ‘Mr. Soldieer. Please b… off quick. Hungry Bengali tiger on roof and jump now.’ Not syntatically perfect, but conveys an urgent message very effectively, nevertheless.

  4. Has there been any test that this “system” works? Any proof, whatsoever? I haven’t heard or read of such. Sounds like a bored elderly man who has definitely no idea what is menat when someone uses the expression “language”. Total flop, I’m sure (I showed this my professor in linguistics, who nearly couldn’t stop laughing)

    Cheers!

  5. Well, Tomas, you get the general idea. I don’t have any intention of disproving his theories. Perhaps someone younger and more energetic that I am might think it a good use of time. However, I doubt he’s bored!

    I am closing comments here as this comment has been targeted by spammers. If anyone wants to comment further, they can email me and I’ll post the comment here.

  6. Email from Robert Maier received on October 15 2004:

    a few comments/flames?! from someone who – for his own taste – knows way too much about the thing…

    New language not a COD… well it used to be; aber auch dort hatte man wohl so eine Art Rechtschreibreform. (Although COD was quite o.k. IMHO, theres sth very fishy about all this new language/un-language business…)

    Tomas points to the issue of empiricity & testing, and quite rightly so… but his linguistics prof might be made aware of the fact daß seine (und mithin auch meine) Zunft ganz fröhlich an der ganzen internationalen Planspracherei mitgebastelt hat. Otto Jespersen gab der Welt Novial – http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novial – , André Martinet war in den Vorstufen von Interlingua – http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua_%28Plansprache%29 – beteiligt, und selbst der Name de Saussure taucht in den Annalen der Interlinguistik auf – allerdings nicht Ferdinand, sondern sein Bruder René; der dafür aber recht umtriebig auf der Esperanto-Seite der Dinge: http://www.fenetreeuropetv.com/forum/read.php?f=1&i=13456&t=10984

    Das bei persistent illusions erwähnte Sommerloch… genau, das war auch mein erster Gedanke. Das passt auch, da gehört das auch hin – just like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the Yeti… :)
    (“Persistent Illusions”, actually – true true true… seems like the world of science has been hunting for THE international language ever since the early 17th century… and before that for the philosopher’s stone. Genau dasselbe, genau den gleichen Realitätsgehalt…)

    Incidentally, you mention the UFO content of the institute’s name… actually, the acronym is meant to indicate the equivalent of R&D – or rather D&R: Entwicklung Und FOrschung… die Überlegung, ob das denn die richtige Reihenfolge ist, überlass ich jetzt aber dir… (but sure *does* remind of one song of Schwaben’s finest (of 1979 vintage), “Schwoißfuaß”: “Guck, guck, i han E UFO gsäa…”)

    Und was Qoh angeht: Klingonisch, warum nicht? Once the fundamental auxlangers’ (auxiliary language proponents) postulate of “we need an artificial language to ease communication between people of differnt languages” is accepted… there is nothing, absolutely NOTHING, that would make one language preferable over any other (which is my huge heresy against them all, right).
    [Und von daher nehmen diese Leute in Regensburg auch ihren Stolz von wegen, no grammar. Vielberth apparently assumes that it is grammar which causes the worst difficulties when learning a language – und darauf fußt das ganze Ding. Daß das Vokabular notwendig anschwillt, wenn man (wie dort betrieben) die ganze Morphologie lexikalisiert… tja! Oder? “The real intrinsic difficulty of learning a foreign language lies in learning to master its vocabulary.” Henry Sweet, 1899 – not a word about grammar…]

    Anyway, das brannte mir so am Freitagabend grad mal noch so unter den Nägeln.
    Happily far from Regensburg,
    viele Grüße –
    Robert

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