--- <deinx nxtxr> skrzypszy:

> > What really distinguishes an auxlang from an artlang is not always 
> > easy to say. Libor Sztemon presented his languages as "auxlangs", 
> > but my guts tell me that he was an artlanger who enjoyed creating
> > languages like all of us do, but felt somehow obliged to justify 
> > his efforts by attaching this "higher purpose" to them.
> 
> That's sort of like Sambahsa.  It's creator likes to offer it as an 
> auxlang, but in reality it's just too complex to make be a practical 
> auxlang.  OTOH it's a very well done naturalistic artlang drawing 
> primary from Indo-European.

Well, yes. But on the other hand, I have a feeling that the current perception of auxlangs is about to change a bit. We know by now that easy learnability is a nice idea, but it doesn't work. It's no longer a question of: language A has 12 endings and language B only 10, and therefore language B is "better". 

You all know me, or last least those of you who have been here for a while... I'm not much of an auxlanger at all. Never believed much in auxlangs, probably never will either. But in the case of Slovianski, there was actually one thing that fascinated me nonetheless:
a) is it possible to create a language that is at least for 90% understandable to all speakers of a Slavic language?
b) and if so, would that make any difference?

Surprisingly, it does. Even though nobody has ever done much to promote it, people starting coming. First only a few, but now we have a userbase of well over one hundred (in fact, those are only the people I know about - there might be more, since Slovianski was never meant to become the language of a community or something). And that in spite of the fact that compared to other auxlangs Slovianski is not so very easy at all. Heck, I remember the times when people called me crazy for postulating gender and cases. Now it's an accepted phenomenon.

Let me quote Vojta:

> My Neoslavonic language (Novoslovienskij jazyk) is not so generally 
> universal, but our aim was to cover by neoslavonic as well as all 
> possible grammatical features that occur within the group of Slavic 
> languages. It contrast to other Slavic conlangs, it does not have very 
> simplified grammar, because our way was not reduction of everything as 
> much as possible, but fixing or thinking about symmetries, mutually 
> intersected declension and conjugation patterns and reduction of 
> exceptions.

Yep, I agree with that. Slovianski goes a bit further with simplification than Novoslovienskij, but the idea remains the same. My hypothesis was, and still is: people will not learn an auxlang because it is easy, but because there's some benefit in it for them. One such benefit is the ability to communicate anything to people who have never even heard of the language or seen it, the second one is that it gives you a fairly decent ability to passively understand the living Slavic languages. Well, my experience with language learning (having learnt two-and-a-half Slavic languages from zero) is that it's not gender, cases or declensions that make it hard. What really complicates things are tons of phonological rules, exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, variable stress, etc. A language without those can have gender and cases, but will still be easy, especially for those who are already use to gender and cases anyway. I think the current success of projects
 like Slovianski proves that other things are much more important than simplicity.

Jan