Topics currently under debate

1) 25.02.1997: In what we call "later Novial" (in other words, post-1930) , Jespersen had made some significant changes in the orthography, bringing Novial into to the "neo-Romance" end of the IAL spectrum and more like the better propagated and more widely used Occidental and (Peano's) Interlingua. This "Orthographic Novial" restored the letter C (with differing values before different letters as in the source languages), something which made it look "more natural" -- eg. aksepte became accepte -- but introduced complications which Jespersen himself had argued against when he first created the language. ON also introduced Y as a vowel, and even allowed accented letters (such as Ç). There were some grammatical changes as well, for example the passive voice particle bli was changed to fi, the future particle ve ousted sal, the past tense particle did seems to have disappeared, and the perfect auxiliary ha was used with the past participle instead of the basic form of the verb. There is now heated debate on NOVIAL-L as to whether such changes -- and if so, which ones -- ought to be implemented into Novial '98 as well.

3) 18.06.1997: The Novial verb system defies description; there seem to be several places where the only rule is "like in the source langs", though of course not as bad as some other languages. We're trying to come up with a consistent, easy set of rules which work in a relatively "natural" way.

4) 09.08.1997: Alphabet. It is not clear how to pronounce the letters of the Novial alphabet in isolation. Some have suggested an Esperanto style, with every consonant being followed by -e; others prefer to differentiate the letters better. Five proposals have been made; they can be referred to as "bo-cha-ex", "be-cha-ex", "be-che-xe", "be-che-ex", and "be-che-xu".

6) 28.08.1997: In N28/30, there is some irregularity in the relationships between nation, citizen, and language; for instance we have the language "Fransum", the person "Franse", and the country "Fransia"; but the language "Novial" and person "Novialiste"; the person "Amerikane" and the country "Amerika"; and even the language "Italianum", the person "Italiane", and the country "Italia"! Clearly this needs to be cleaned up, although it isn't clear how.

9) 24.07.1997: In AIL, J devotes a whole section to his choice about the sounds [S] and [tS] and how to use and represent them; his decision was that the two sounds would be absolutely interchangeable, as would their representation (CH or SH, equally). The objection is that this is bad from several standpoints, especially one-sound-one-graph, but also because some words will have multiple valid spellings. A proposed alternative was to abandon SH entirely, leaving CH as primarily [S] and secondarily [tS], and modifying some vocabulary to fit the new rule. Another alternative was to make CH /tS/ and SH /S/. 06.12.1997: Tabled until other questions are resolved.

11) 05.11.1997: At this point in the Novial process, we have two verb suffixes which have somewhat nebulous meanings: -nse and -ione. We need to clarify and codify their meanings.

18) 19.11.1997: Well, looks like we won't finish before the end of CY 1997; what should we call our project now? Novial 98? Novial 2000? The full list of suggestions: Novial98, Novial2000, Noviale, Vest-Novial, Novialese, Novial, Novial II, Lingue Franki Noviale, Sisteme Novial, Interlingue Novial, Nov Novial, NRK Novial, Novialingue, Grupe Novial

20) 30.11.1997: The beginnings of the N98 dictionary are starting to come online, as are the corresponding bits of Novial Lexike. See the dictionary project page for more details.

21) 30.11.1997: As the dictionary comes online, words are being reviewed for eventual inclusion in N98. 04.12.1997: Words in sections A-C which have not been disputed are under consensus check until 11 Dec. Other words are in a call for proposals. 07.12.1997: Words in section N are under rubberstamp check until 14 Dec. 16.01.1998: ABCN are done except for problem words; G is under vote.

22) 05.12.1997: An issue separate from but related to the region/inhabitants debate is how to capitalize such things; English capitalizes the country, the language, and all derivatives, French capitalizes countries only, and German capitalizes all the noun forms. This will be voted on as a separate issue.

28) 10.02.1998: In English we talk about "the word for X"; how should this be expressed in Novial? The prepositions por, po, and pri have been suggested, as well as the longer (but more descriptive?) forms representant and signifikant. Plus, of course, one could use a completely different construction "X signifikar Y novialim" instead of "Y is the word for X".

29) 12.02.1998: There are at least three other novialides under development. How should we cooperate with them?