#kotava

As I may have implied here sometimes, I’m rather lukewarm towards International Auxiliary Language projects, for practical and political reasons. However, that doesn’t mean that I cannot be interested by some of them in a purely linguistic and/or aesthetic angle.

On my French forum L’Atelier Philologique, I heard some years ago of the Kotava language, an a priori IAL launched in the 90′s by Staren Fetcey (Canadian linguist). It has some interesting features:

A system of agreement similar to noun class/gender but triggered only by the phonetic form of the end of nouns

7 descriptive affixes (small, big, medium, good, bad, excessive, insufficient) applicable to every open word class

Paradigmatic attitudinals and evidentials

It has some things I don’t like too, like a personal conjugation, allomorphs for the modal prefixes, no clearly defined phonotactics and an a priori logic pushed a bit too far sometimes (‘mother’ is gadikya).

Despite a relatively high volume of activity (40 translated novels and short stories), I have remarked that it is virtually unknown in anglophone corners of conlanging; the Wikipedia page about it was even deleted once for lack of notoriety. Several reasons for this: the official forum is closed to simple visitors and almost all the material is in French, with the consequence that activity is restricted to Canada, Western Europe and Western Africa.

But this state of affairs comes to an end, as there is now a translation of the official grammar in English, to which I had a hand. I hope it can foster a bit of interest among you. Let the critics flow!

An online dictionary (Ravlemak) exists, but only the French database is updated for the time being.

Great news: the forum for Kotava, an IAL I’m moderately invested in, has been made read-only for casual visitors. That means it is no longer needed to subscribe to get a glimpse at the language in action.

Kotava is an a priori auxlang developped by Canadian linguist Staren Fetcey. The community around it is primarily French-speaking, and the bulk of the current efforts is the translation of works of literature, plus a linguistic encyclopedia.