On Mar 27, 2009, at 9◊44 AM, And Rosta wrote:

> Rick Morneau, On 27/03/2009 16:06:
>>
>> I've never been comfortable with "engelang", partly because of its  
>> sound
>> but mostly because ALL languages are engineered, even artlangs.
>>
>> My own choice would have been "techlang", but I thought of it only  
>> after
>> "engelang" became the consensus.
>
> I wonder if you've misunderstood what engelangs are. There is  
> nothing intrinsically technical about them; I see no sense in which  
> "techlang" wd be apposite. Maybe you have in mind the idea that the  
> process of design is partly aesthetical and partly 'technical' (i.e.  
> what we might call the technics), and that engelangs focus on the  
> latter? But even that misses the point pretty much, and misleadingly  
> so (because interest in conlinguistic technics rather than  
> aesthetics is a real but different phenomenon).
>
> And in what meaningful sense are all languages engineered? (By  
> meaningful sense, I mean one in which artlangs are exceptional among  
> works of art in being engineered, since the general distinction  
> between art and engineering is clear.)
> The perfect word would be somewhere in between 'engineering' and  
> 'design', and would capture the essential element of finding  
> solutions to functional goals, without the overlay of aesthetic  
> decision that 'design' has when applied to stuff the user perceives  
> or directly interacts with (i.e. if one talks about designing the  
> innards of what to the user is a black box, then here 'design' is  
> being used in the desired sense, but if you talk about designing the  
> pattern on curtains or wrapping paper, then it's completely the  
> undesired sense).
>
> I guess one of the reasons why we keep returning to this is that  
> what we are describing is an important human impulse, indeed one of  
> the things that defines humanity, and one of the drivers of  
> Progress, yet there is no unambiguous term for it in English.

And...

On Mar 27, 2009, at 1◊04 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> An engineered language has nothing to do with science or technology.
> It's a language designed to meet certain specific, concrete,
> *objective* criteria above and beyond any aesthetic concerns, usually
> in order to test some linguistic hypothesis.


That is the crucial distinction.  An engelang will say set out goals  
something
like this:

-Language X is an attempt to create a human-usable language
that doesn't utilize pronouns of any kind.

That's a pretty silly example, but an example nonetheless.  It
reminds me a lot of the experimental writing of the early 20th
century, though perhaps in a different way.  For example, several
of the moderns like Joyce and Woolf set out to "prove" that one
could develop a full story and explore the entire range of human
experience while limiting the action of a novel to a single day.
That's an arbitrary constraint they put on their own writing, and
a claim which can be evaluated (though, admittedly, it's not as
concrete).

A suitable name, it seems, might come directly from what Mark
wrote: testlang.  The unfortunate thing is that calling something
a "testlang" makes it sound like a sketch, as opposed to a fully
fledged language.

Of course, this is often enough, isn't it?  If someone wants to test
a concept, they won't need a full language, or certainly a 10,000
word vocabulary; just a few will be enough to figure out if the
concept works or not.  It seems that a true engelanger wouldn't
need a full language (once I sketched out the TMA system of
Kelenala, that was enough for me; it proved that, basically, the
test worked, and I haven't done much with the language since.
If I do go on to develop it, it will be a kind of artlang, I suppose).
I'll leave that to others to discuss, though.

-David
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