[zeemonkee3]

To what extent are many languages today "artificial"? Modern Hebrew was resurrected from a language unspoken for millennia outside of religious services and given an up-to-date vocabulary. Shakespeare and Elias Lonnrot invented thousands of everyday words used today in English and Finnish respectively. Standard German and Italian are products of their unification/nationalist movements, supplanting old regional dialects, as is the Greek Katharevousa (official language until 1976).

Esperanto and other conlangs are more an extreme case, but there's surprisingly little that's "natural" about the "natural" languages either.

[pmontra]

A few words in case somebody interprets that as if Italian is an artificial language.

The drive for unification in Italy was big in 1800. The language a unified Italy would speak was decided long before because poets and writers already standardized on one of the language of Tuscany, the one of Florence. That was the "standard Italian" since 1200. Not that many people spoke it. Everybody spoke the language of it's area, sometimes not. All those languages derived from Latin but people could not easily understand each other, especially over long distances (even 30 km.) Only priests and literates had lingua francas, Latin and standard Italian.

Some samples from famous authors:

Ariosto, 1500, can be read quite easily nowadays [1]

Petrarca, 1300, is a little more difficult and it takes a little to get accustomed with. [2]

Dante, 1200, is also difficult sometimes but high school students read it with little help. [3]

[1] http://www.orlandofurioso.com/testo-completo-dei-canti/1706/...

[2] http://www.italica.it/canzoniere.html

[3] http://www.filosofico.net/ladivinacommedia.htm

[moray]

We study the Divina Commedia in High school (for three years, one "cantica" per year) and it is not actually that easy, not only for the language (that it is still a dialect of the time) but also for the interpretation of the text that is full of references to the political and social situation of the time (beginning of 1300 btw). Most of each page are actually notes...

Dante is usually credited for having chosen the Tuscany/Florence dialect to be the future Italian, later adopted by many writers and poets (that also contributed to the evolution of the language), so yes, I wouldn't say it is artificial at all, maybe the only artificial thing is the choice of a dialect over another.

And as I guess many already know many of the regional dialects survived, and in some regions more than others are still spoken. In fact an Italian is often bilingual in a sense. And if you happen to be in a book store in Italy it is not at all that rare to find a book from a contemporary author written in his local dialect.

BTW we study all of the three authors you mentioned at school ... not an easy task I assure you :P

[hawkice]

Mandarin Chinese is a curious example of this because it's at an almost perfect intersection of constructed and natural (which aren't opposites). It was defined as the language spoken in Beijing but limited to the vocabulary shared between all the Chinese languages. Which is not a language anyone was technically speaking at the time -- Beijing slang was and is pretty common -- and we can confirm it was constructed because we know who, when, and where Standard Chinese began. But it is still obviously a natural language.

Simplified Characters are another example. A lot of the simplifications had been around for a very long time, so they existed as part of a natural language, but saying, X is traditional, Y is simplified, and standardizing the simplified version, is fundamentally the act of language construction. [The lack of such a deep history is probably why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi... never caught on.]

[gkya]

Most standardised languages are sorts of conlangs. I can be a testimone for Turkish, where the language was cleared from persian and arabic loanwords by very oppressing revolutionary govt action. So much so that one generation had difficult time talking to grandparents, they say.

[brian_cloutier]

To add to this, I met someone who claims she cannot read Neitzsche because she doesn't know most of the terms recent Turkish translations use and can't find any older translations.

[gkya]

She's right, especially in philosophy, every translator invents his own language, and never care enough to inform the user with a translator's note or whatnot. I had my worst experience till now with translations of Lajos Egri and Schopenhauer. Sometimes it's easier to just learn the original language...

[brian_cloutier]

This is a little odd but I stalked you a little and think you've made some cool comments. I'm also in Istanbul, would you be down to grab coffee sometime? I would send you an email but your profile doesn't have any contact information.

[zeemonkee3]

Moving to the Latin alphabet must have been quite a shift as well.

[gkya]

Certainly, though widespread literacy was a thing of the republican era. And the old script and the language was abolished and not taught in the schools, so it only lives among historians (unlike latin and ancient greek which is studied a bit in European tertiary schools).

[eivarv]

I'd argue that this is because "natural" and "unnatural" or "artificial" are poorly defined (and usually useless) terms.

[vidarh]

"Norwegian" is two languages - Bokmål ("book language") and Nynorsk ("new Norwegian").

Both are constructed, and not just bits and pieces, though they were constructed from "natural" elements.

Bokmål came into being through a series of drastic reforms of a combination of Danish (which was the administrative language until the dissolution of the union with Denmark in 1814) and urban Norwegian dialects, which were heavily influenced by Danish.

The reforms were aimed at removing a lot of the Danish influence, and continued well into the 20th century (well, in a sense they are still continuing, though making Bokmål less Danish is no longer an explicit goal). Many of the changes took decades to take root as most adults didn't really change but school children were taught and graded on the new forms.

E.g. the change from Danish word-order in numbers ("fireogtyve" - 24 - "fire-og-tyve = four and twenty") to uniformity with less formal spoken Norwegian dialects ("tjuefire" - "twentyfour") is one that was still for all intents ongoing at least well into the 80's (you'll still find older people using the old forms today) despite being introduced by a language reform in 1951. My parents learned the new form in primary school in the late 50's yet still regularly reverted to the old form around me while I was growing up in 70's and 80's, and as a result I used to switch back and forth between the two at least into my 20s (in the 90's)

(Incidentally these reforms also means that for Norwegians learning German, spending some time reading old Norwegian books is highly helpful to get used to German word order and even recognizing vocabulary, as the reforms that moved Bokmål away from Danish also moved it further away from German)

Nynorsk, meanwhile, was explicitly created as a form of unification of a number of very different rural Norwegian dialects. This included synthesising a grammar, creating a bunch of new words that tried to find forms that were "close enough" to the widest possible range of dialects, and combining a lot of other elements from different dialects.

Bokmål is used as the written language of the vast majority, despite most spoken dialects probably in many ways being closer to Nynorsk (though more so in some parts of the country than others - Norwegian dialects are extremely varied). In some parts Bokmål - particularly spoken Bokmål - has a tendency to be seen as more refined, as a remnant of their historical origins. An unofficial dialect - Riksmål - is basically Bokmål sans a number of the reforms, and remains much closer to Danish. It sees very little use, though well into the 80's one of the largest conservative newspapers stuck to a lot of the Riksmål forms.

Bokmål and Nynorsk are mutually intelligible, and successive language reforms over more than a century have aimed to bring them closer (largely by creating optional forms of many words that are consider valid in both languages), but having to learn both is a frequent cause of discontent at Norwegian schools (it annoyed me immensely, because unlike most Norwegians I speak very close to pure Bokmål, and a relatively conservative form of it, as a legacy of my dads upbringing and reading a lot of old books growing up, which made Nynorsk harder)

While the reforms do take into account natural language shifts to some extent, large parts of the current modern structure of both languages was effectively created by academics.

[larsiusprime]

"Bokmål and Nynorsk are mutually intelligible"

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I contest this :) I have an easier time understanding spoken Swedish (and written Danish) than Nynorsk. I think unless you grew up in an area with a dialect very similar to it, or had it drilled into your head in school, it's basically a foreign language.

Context: I speak Bøkmål and Trøndersk (for you non-Norwegians, that's the regional dialect in the greater Trondheim area), and was raised primarily abroad, though we primarily spoke Norwegian at home.

[vintermann]

No one really speaks Nynorsk (or Bokmål for that matter), they write Nynorsk and speak dialects. Though it's true that if you come across a dialect that you don't understand at all, it's likely that they write Nynorsk as well.

Trøndelag used to be a Nynorsk core area, by the way. Around 1940, half the population there used Nynorsk.

[IndianAstronaut]

Urdu was much the same way. Derived from native dialects combined with some Turkish/Arabic/Persia words.

[znpy]

You just literally answered yourself: natural languages have origins, roots,history and heritage, while artificial languages do not.

[zeemonkee3]

Zamenhoff lived in a part of the world where the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires intersected, and Esperanto reflects that. Although the vocabulary is largely Romance, there are words of German/Yiddish and Slavic origin and the grammar is more agglutinative in character, like Hungarian. It's very much a product of the roots, history and heritage of its creator and his homeland.

[yoplait_]

they do. They don't just pop out of nowhere from nothing.