In today's world the needs for international communication have increased but people have less time to devote to studying languages. Thus, a single language, such as Ayola, which can express the full range of ideas needed in bussiness, politics, industry, etc and which is easily learnable can fullfill the increased need given the limited time available for study.
In addition, the information which must be communicated among speakers of various languages in organizations such as the European Union has proliferated enormously. Human translation of this material among many national languages is at present costly and time consumming, and threatens to become totally unmanageable. Here again, a single language such as Ayola could serve as a central hub from which translation to the national languages could proceed.
2. Why not use a natural language as an international language?
Learning any natural language, such as French, requires years of study in order to use it fluently. A language such as Ayola, whose grammar and vocabulary were simpler and more regular, could be mastered in far less time. Also it is often impossible to separate a language from its people's culture and the implications associated with it. Thus, by making a natural language as a medium of international communication, we automatically assume predominance of that culture over the less influential ones. Ayola, on the other hand, is not culturally imperialistic.
3. Why not use a regularized form of a natural language as an international language?
In our opinion, a language which looks and sounds similar to a natural language is problematic. First, it often appears to be a bad version of a natural language to native speakers. Once usage of a given language is established, it is very difficult and even disturbing for people to modify it. Second, even a modified version of a natural language still carries with it the potential for cultural and linguistic imperialism.
4. Is Ayola a revision of any other constructed language, such as Esperanto, Loglan, or Interlingua?
It is essentially impossible in creating a constructed language to produce a result that does not share some features in common with previous attempts. The term 'revision' implies a high correlation between the original and the revised version, i.e. a correlation coefficient of 75 -100%. The correlation between Ayola and other previous international languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua, and Loglan is considerably less than this range for the three principal grammatical categories of word endings, prefixes and suffixes, and roots.5. Why is Ayola better than other natural and constructed languages?
Individual features such as phonetic spelling, marking of parts of speech by word endings, and word building using prefixes and suffixes are shared with other natural and constructed languages. Previous constructed languages have usually been categorised into two groups: 1) a posteriori languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua, and Occidental, which take their vocabularies largely from the western European languages and 2) a priori languages such as Loglan and Lojban which build their sounds of a larger group of languages. The a posteriori languages are generally familiar to those who know at least one of the major Western European languages, but they have not concerned themselves very much with resolving the ambiguities and logical inconsistencies present in the natural languages. In contrast, the a priori languages have addressed these issues but have a much lower recognizeability to most people. Ayola has combined the strong points of both types of constructed languages to achieve a good combination of familiarity, low ambiguity, and logical consistency.
Thus, Ayola avoids logically inconsistent use of suffixes such as the use of -ic and -ical in the following English example: economic means 'pertaining to economics or business' and economical means 'thrifty', whereas historic means 'famous in history' and historical means 'pertaining to history'. Ayola also avoids ambiguity resulting from multiple meanings of a suffix such as the use of -tion in the following French example: invention may mean (1) 'act of inventing' or (2) 'thing invented'. Furthermore, the Ayola vocabulary has been chosen to provide maximum familiarity to those who know Romance and Germanic languages. For instance, the Ayola word for 'vocabulary' is vokabulario in contrast to Esperanto vort-provizo and Loglan purlista .
6. How was the vocabulary of Ayola created?
The Ayola vocabulary was largely derived from the vocabularies of six major natural languages, namely English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, and two major constructed languages, namely Esperanto and Interlingua. In constructing the vocabulary a candidate word had to fulfill the following requirements: (1) unbreakable phonetic structure, (2) non-duplication with any crosslinguistic combining form, (3) unambiguous meaning, and (4) familiarity . The essential meanings of a word were identified in the English dictionary and distinct Ayola words were assigned to each of those meanings. Differences in meaning requiring distinct words included the event vs object of a verb, transitive vs intransitive verbs, and nouns vs denominal verbs, etc.
7. Does Ayola resolve all the ambiguities encountered in language?
No. It does not. It eliminates the great majority of both syntactic and lexical ambiguities present in all natural and most constructed languages but not all of them. It is our own opinion, based on a number of years of developing and testing Ayola, that, in order to be learned and used easily by a large number of people, a language must tolerate some ambiguity or it will simply be too cumbersome. It has been our goal in the Ayola project to strive for a practical minimum of ambiguity rather none .
Here are two examples where words have more than one meaning in Ayola:
one cannot tell in Ayola any more than in English whether the students did the homework individually or collectively. In order to clarify this difference one may use the words wite (together) and aparte (separately).
Where Ayola does make the individual/collective distinction is in the two words for the connective 'and': ce (and individually), cwe (and jointly).
A system in which the individual/collective distinction was made in pronouns, articles and quantifiers, similar to that used in Loglan, was tried out by the ARG but universally rejected as being too cumbersome.
Both metaphorical and specialized usages must be allowed because, otherwise, the vocabulary would become impractically large to acquire.
8. How many people speak Ayola?
Because Ayola has only just made its debut to the world in 2004, the Ayola speaking community is limited to those who have developed the language and also to the students who participated in the two summer programs of 2002 and 2003. With the publication of this website the ARG hopes that the number of speakers will increase over the years.9. Is the ARG finished developing Ayola?
Ayola is still developing! After 10 years of research and growth, the ARG is still working to complete Ayola. Among the current tasks the ARG is completing are the Ayola-English and English-Ayola dictionaries.
10. Why should I learn Ayola? See answer