AYOLA FORUM

You say ‘Saluton,’ we say ‘Aloa.’ ‘Saluton!’ ‘Aloa!’ ‘Saluton!’ ‘Aloa!’ Let’s call the whole… – well, you know how the Gershwin song goes. Despite the differences between Esperanto and Ayola, an important event last week showed the Ayola Research Group that speakers of other constructed languages can appreciate a newcomer like Ayola.
 

On Friday, February 15^th three of us from the Ayola Research Group attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, MA to partake in the session, “English Only Science in a Multi-lingual Society: Costs, Benefits, and Options” which addressed concerns about the dominance of the English language in the communication of scientific research across the globe – something we’ve long believed Ayola might serve to alleviate. Panelists including Esperantists José Antonio Vergara of Puerto Montt Regional Hospital in Chile and Humphrey Tonkin, President Emeritus and Professor of the Humanities at the University of Hartford discussed the problems with this “English only science” and suggested solutions to them, one of which included the use of constructed, international languages like Esperanto to aid in international translation. We had the opportunity to converse with the panelists as well as the other Esperantists in the audience about the problematic usage of English in the contexts of science and translation and were able to share information about Ayola with them. Both groups were interested to hear about the others’ languages, and the Esperantists understood some of the Ayola we shared with them. We exchanged contact information with some of these individuals and hope to maintain correspondence with them in the future.

 

Most importantly, the AAAS session has prompted us to try writing and translating science-related articles in Ayola in order to test its effectiveness at precisely expressing concepts which we presume may be interpreted ambiguously when translated through English and even Esperanto. Though we credit the natural languages and artificial ones like Esperanto with inspiring the Ayola grammar and vocabulary, our chief objective in designing Ayola is to create a language essentially void of ambiguity and thus ideal for international translation, particularly in the broadcasting of scientific information. We plan to publish some such articles in Ayola here in a new section of our website entitled Siensay Nuzoy (Science News). Stay tuned!  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.