Lojban

Hey, guess what! There are single-syllable cmavo for doing exactly this! fa, fe, fi, fo and fu, respectively. Although the docs warn against using them too much because they might be hard to parse.

True or not, here's a very practical line of reasoning:

* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in one's first acquired natural language takes about four years.

* It's generally accepted that gaining reasonable fluency in each subsequent acquired natural language takes about two years.[0]

* Learning a clean "constructed" language is reasonably efficient. Fluency in Esperanto or Lojban, for example, can be attained in as little as one year.

* Thus to learn, say, Swedish, it's fastest to learn Lojban first in one year, and then Swedish is a subsequent acquired language and only takes an additional two years.

* Conclusion: It's faster to learn "(Esperanto|Lojban) Swedish" than it is to learn Swedish alone.

I don't entirely subscribe to this theory, but it's an interesting speculation.

For me, I learned some constructed languages because I wondered if they would provoke the Sapir-Whorf effect. Anecdata: They did.

[0] The rationale is that the first requires un-learning things you've always taken for granted with regards your cradle language. Learning subsequent languages doesn't require that "un-learning, and so is quicker."

As an English speaker who once spoke a little Loglan (the 1978 dialect!), I think you're mistaken. Knowing "blue" definitely helps in remembering "blanu". Occasionally there was a word that didn't take a lot of its phonemes from English, and those were definitely harder to learn.

Obviously the benefit is going to be smaller if you don't speak one of the major source languages, but it still seems like a reasonable strategy to me for selecting vocabulary in an artificial language.

If everyone used Lojban, I wonder how it'd evolve? Surely people would develop slang and shortcuts, until new dialects formed.

The polyglots I know all agree with a moderate form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that the language(s) you use affect what and how you think. In fact, when I say that some linguists find it controversial they look at me as if I'm demented. They just take it for granted that it's true.

BTW, this is often confused/conflated with "linguistic relativity"[0] and I'm not going to get into where one ends and the other starts. More, it seems that the effects are different for coordinate multilinguals versus compound multilinguals.[+]

Pinker says in "The Language Instinct"[1] that careful experiments show that it's nonsense. On the other hand, more recent work suggests that the effect is real, and that speaking a different language can result in measurable differences in your modes of thought, perception of time, and even your personality.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

So I was curious, but I didn't have time to learn an entire new language. But then I heard of LogLan, and subsequently Lojban, which was originally designed specifically for the purpose of testing this idea. The reasoning goes like this:

* Design a language that has something specific that is not present in any known "natural" language.

* Learn to speak it, and preferably raise some children with it as (one of) their cradle language(s)

* Measure their thinking and see if there are differences

* Use that to design a careful experiment to test the hypothesised effects.

So I learned (some) lojban in the hope that I would see some changes in my thinking. And I did. Specifically, after the weekend I spent learning the tense (spatial and temporal) system I found myself using tenses that I don't believe I'd ever used before. Someone asked if I'd enjoyed a party, and I started my reply with:

  "I would have had been having a good time,
   except that ..."

So I strongly believe that studying another language affects how you perceive things, and how you think about things.

[+] It is suggested that coordinate multilinguals[8] do not experience the same effects as compound multilinguals[8], even if they are equally fluent. A friend of mine, now sadly deceased, never completed his PhD, but his work showed an extremely clear split between coordinate and compound bilinguals (English/German) wherein the compound bilinguals showed a clear change of personality as they shifted language, but the coordinate bilinguals showed no measurable change. He never published, I only have a copy of his thesis without the data, and I promised I would never release it.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct

[2] http://www.communicaid.com/business-language-courses/blog/bi...

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/uc/2014/06/c...

[4] http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/language-time.pdf

[5] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3004943/Being...

[6] http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingual...

[7] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117485/multilinguals-have...

[8] http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631...

Edit: Note to self - extract this as a blog post.