Grammar

Seems you left out of this list what I would think would be the most important grammatical function in this language: the imperative. From the video it sounded like you form it by leaving out the subject, kind of like in English. Some languages use the second-person future tense.

Along the lines of the previous commenter, if you leave out the prepositions, how can you tell the difference between a direct object and a prepositional phrase?

The vocabulary list seems to show a simple one-for-one relationship between English words and ROILA. That seems like a big mistake to me, since there is an enormous difference between words and meanings.

Part of the reason that you can say just about anything in those 850 words is that many of those words are useful in a variety of ways. A large number of them are simultaneously nouns, transitive verbs, and intransitive verbs.

If you make no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, you will run into problems.

Fosit bubas!
Fosit fipuko!

Other than the possessive, what construction do you use to modify a noun with another noun? Like, “Where is Omar’s history book?

Apart from sexism there is another good reason to avoid gendered pronouns: they aren’t useful and complicate things.
If you really need to say “he/she” you could simply say “man/woman”, like in “give the book to the men”, instead of “give the book to him”. This allows further improvements in identify a person.

If in the same room there are a man and a woman you could still use “man/woman” instead of “he/she”, if there are two people of the same sex you could use ” exactly the same structure to indicate one of them: “give the book to adult”or “give the book to child”.

In fact you don’t even need a genderless pronoun for the third person. A word for “human being” and one for “robot” should suffice, and their distinction would be more meaningfull the a “he” or “she”.

Keep the good work!
(and sorry for the bad english, I hope I made myself clear)

How do you handle aspect? Aspect conveys a lot of information in English sentences. For example–

I eat pizza.
I’m eating pizza.

Both of these are the present tense of the verb eat, but they mean vastly different things. How do you convey this information in Roila? Keep in mind this is just one simple example. Take a look at Grammatical Aspect in Wikipedia. The end of the article provides — “Examples of various aspects rendered in English” and they list about two dozen categories of aspect.

With no grammatical aspect and a highly limited vocabulary, I’m afraid Roila is going to result in lots of very ambiguous sentences.

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To those who asked about prepositional phrases. It does look like the language does have some prepositions so you can differentiate between

“He painted the house for an hour.”

and

“He painted the house in an hour.”

Also using “IT” allows you to use pronouns to refer to objects, which according the rules are neuter, as well as people.

Existing languages are inadequate because with current technology it is VERY hard to get a program to work out what you are saying reliably. For instance, try using the speech control system on oyur computer, you keep having to confirm things and re-spell words. Those systems are relatively easy because you use control words for it to recognize “Begin”, etc. For day to day use, commands of a robot style, these limitations are insufficient, especially as you would have to learn to phrase “Go home now” as something along the lines “Move to location home time now”

Even if you could make a program understand commands in english, there are simply too many words that are hard to distinguish. The consonant/vowel/consonant system means that the robot can easily distinguish each sound (combination of consonant & vowel) and so work out the exact spelling of the word easily.

So yes, real languages have evolved over time. This has made them inaccurate, we require context and many other details to understnad what is going on. The robot doesn’t even have a system as powerful as the human brain to try understand the language, and we take years of our life to learn it.

In Tenses, it is written….
“Past will be represented by the addition of the word “jifi” and future by “jifo” before the verb in question.”
…but in the examples the tense marker appears after the verb.

Which is right, the examples or the explanation?

Museum = Not new house
Ha!

Museum of natural history…

Not new house of natural past tense marker

I agree that the language should not have any gender distinction, especially in the pronouns. Many of the world’s major languages (e.g., Chinese, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish) don’t distinguish gender except by word semantics, i.e., “mother” and “girl” are inherently feminine, but the pronoun and grammatical forms are identical to those used by “father” and “boy”, inherently masculine words. If it ever is necessary to distinguish between male and female, simply add a word for “male” or “female” when needed.
A distinction between animate and inanimate might be useful, but not male vs. female.
The gender distinction is important in the real world, of course, but it shouldn’t be part of the grammar. — stevo

What advantage does this have over IALs? The well-established Esperant(id)o, Interlingua and similar are far more developed, with tested grammars and full vocabularies (recognisable to most IE-language speakers). However, they are not the ideal solution, given that they still carry some of the ambiguities found in any natural languages, and ROILA (non-logical connectives, lack of difference between questions and statements, lack of freedom to leave out unwanted nouns, ambiguity of pronouns…). We’d be far better talking in a logical language, Lojban being the most popular today. It’s designed to be machine-parsable, both from speaking to writing and writing to meaning. It’s grammar can be defined in BNF, as are programming languages.

You’ve got to see this in context. A robot is a simple machine that we would be giving orders to or requesting data from. There is no problem dropping a few of the things we all think of as so vital, because we aren’t going to use ROILA to write poetry or analyse art.

The sex thing is irrelevant – there is no need for the robot to distinguish all men from all women. In the situation where it matters, the man/woman solution would work. That said, it’s ONE extra word, and robots don’t have opinions or emotions, so do you REALLY care if IT thinks of you as a specific sex or another IT? Are we so obsessed with what a plastic box “thinks” of us?

I would like to learn ROILA, and then drop big chunks of it into social situations just to tease those of you who think English is so sacrosanct. As a bilingual person, although English is my home language, I am acutely aware of how hard it is for people who use it as a second language to really get to grips with its complexities.

As for “I eat pizza / I’m eating pizza.” meaning “vastly different things” – c’mon, really???? How subtle does a difference have to be? In Afrikaans, you would say “Ek eet pizza” for both. NOBODY would look at you skew, and ask if you didn’t mean “Ek is nou besig om pizza te eet” or whatever other weird thing you’d have to say to make a distinction between “doing”, and “do”.

This debate really pulls the linguocentric alterphobes out of the woodwork.

Love it.

I speak finnish as my mother tongue so I can tell you really don’t need gender-specific pronouns anywhere. In english, gender-specific pronouns cause much unnecessary work for programmer. How many web forms have input field for gender just for handling correct pronoun in automatic responses? (+ backend code + needed extra database field for person records…) Much more easier to have just one, gender-neutral pronoun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun tells that “Most languages of the world do not have gender distinctions in personal pronouns.”

I don’t see a reason to avoid choosing words that are similar to the roots that already exist in natural languages.

It should be possible to have a CVCV, CVCVC and CVCVCV words that similar to existing language. You might look into how lojban gismu words were made by making words easy to remembers for speakers of the 6 major languages.