On 8/22/05, Antony Alexander <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>  >> exclusively. Every one of them has limitations - so that some things may be said more
> >> elegantly and succinctly in another language. The day of a single fully-comprehensive
> >> universal mother tongue (for the entire human race on Earth) which can express every possible
> >> thought with matchless euphony and efficiency (so that no auxiliary languages are necessary)
> >> is still a long way off (probably several centuries at least).

> > I'm not sure such a language is even possible.
> > Every feature a language might have involves
> > trade-offs; for instance, just to take two
> > properties you mentioned, I suspect that euphony
> > and efficiency can't be both maximized at the same
> > time.  (Take a look at Ithkuil (very efficient, and, I suspect,
> > often non-euphonious), for instance, or Toki Pona
> > (very euphonious and fairly inefficient for expressing
> > most complex concepts).)

> > I suspect that it is possible for a constructed language
> > to improve on every existing natural or constructed
> > language in _some ways_ --- but not in all ways at
> > once.  Of course, decades or centuries more
> > of experimentation with conlangs -- preferably
> > by teams of people with diverse linguistic
> > knowledge, not just by individuals working mostly
> > alone -- will be necessary to prove either you
> > or me right.

> Yes, certainly in national languages there are what you call trade-offs. In "Lango":
> 
> http://bahai-library.com/books/lango/lang11.html#z
> 
> Robert Craig and I called this the "shibboleth effect", in view of the observation that national
> languages are designed to exclude as much as to include. 
<snip>

This is all fairly interesting, but it seems to be 
irrelevant to what I wrote.  If exclusivity is one of your criteria,
it will present a trade-off with other criteria like ease 
of learning and use, but I wasn't contemplating exclusivity
as a criterion and I doubt any auxlanger is.  I'm talking
about features that are generally acknowledged 
to be desirable in a conlang and which may be 
incompatible to some degree; I specified efficiency
and euphony, which you mentioned before, and your
reply said nothing about them.  Other criteria requiring
trade-offs probably include _neutrality_ and _recognizability_, 
_expressivity and flexibility_ vs. _ease of learning and use_,
etc.


> > And to take a more fundamental example, it
> > seems that some kind of grammar is necessary
> > to distinguish statements, commands and questions.
> > Relying on tone or stress to distinguish them
> > is a kind of grammar, just like word order or
> > affixes or separate particles to indicate mode.
> 
> Grammar certainly lends itself to brevity and economy of expression, which is desirable in itself -
> but this must be set against ease of learning / average linguistic ability. In practice it's normally
> possible to explain things quite exactly in a roundabout way. Circumlocution and simple
> unembedded sentences using anaphora are often found in pidgin/creole grammar and I would
> expect to see something similar in an initial IAL. The grammar could be gradually tightened up
> later.

OK, but this is still a matter of simplified grammar
rather than no grammar at all.


> Possibly
> there are two occasions when we use language: [1] when thinking [2] when not thinking - or
> perhaps it is a continuum between these two extremes. Anyway, in the latter case (with which I am
> personally very familiar) I think we maybe go down a chakra or two and enter a culture in which we
> become an actor with a script. I believe every language has this culture, and tapping into it can fill

You lost me here.  Feel free to restate your meaning
in other words if you think it was important.



> [Excerpt from Plato's "Cratylus"]
> >> .........gamma,  in which the tongue is detained, combines
> >> with lamda to express the notion of stickiness, as in "glue, glutinous, glucose"."
> 
> > Would you extend that to other plosives, or only
> > other voiced plosives?
> 
> Plato wrote that - not me! I don't know who the translator was. I shouldn't imagine Plato would
> have any objection if the same principle was extended to other speech sounds including plosives.

It sounded as though you were paraphrasing Plato
rather than quoting him, actually, because of the English
words cited as examples.

So anyway: any of the phonemes /k/, /g/, /t/, /d/, /p/, 
/c/, /?/ can indicate stickiness?  That covers a lot
of territory.  Thomas Alexander in his reply to you said all I would
care to say about the limitations of this phonaesthetic
theory.  Such associations often hold within languages,
but maybe not across languages or language families.

> > I've made some use of such phonaesthemes
> > for gjax-zym-byn, and I reckon a loglang or
> > auxlang could do the same, but I question how
> > scalable such an approach is compared with
> > other methods of deriving vocabulary.

> You might not have seen that I suggested other methods for deriving vocabulary:
> 
> http://bahai-library.com/books/lango/lang04.html#R

OK, I've read it now.  It looks as though you are
advocating this phonaesthetic approach as a last
resort when there is no majority opinion among
the source languages as to what form a word
should take -- as best as I understand you.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field