Hallo conlangers!

On Saturday 26 October 2013 09:12:38 R A Brown wrote:

> On 25/10/2013 21:37, emil wrote:
> > There has recently been a bit of discussion on this list
> > of presenting one's language to others. Some remarks of
> > Padraic's and Dirk's have gotten me wondering: how does
> > one evaluate a conlang?
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > So, how do you evaluate conlangs? Do you think there are
> > some ways of evaluation that are better than others?
> 
> As conlangs cover quite a variety, I'm not sure they can all
> be evaluated the same way.

Indeed, they cannot; it depends on what they have been designed
for.

>       Of course, if it is a language
> then it ought to be usable for communication between humans
> this can, if one gets other interested people involved, be
> tested.

Yep.  This, of course, is not only relevant for auxlangs or
other languages designed to be practically used in this world;
it also matters for fictional human languages, as they wouldn't
be realistic if human beings could not use them.  Of course,
languages of fictional non-human beings may have features that
would render them unusable for humans (i.e., use of ultrasonic
sounds), if the fictional beings can cope with them.
 
> But apart from that, it surely depends on _why_ a particular
> language was developed.  Does it meet the aims and
> objectives of its designer?   To evaluate, for example,
> Tolkien's Quenya and Srikant's Lin (to achieve maximum
> spatial compactness, e.g. ki Q#4f = "The child fears to be
> asked") by the same criteria would IMO be silly.

This would indeed be utterly silly.  The design criteria are
very different.  Both are successful with regard to their
respective design criteria; both would be considered failures
if one was to flip the design criteria between the two
languages, but that kind of criticism would be *meaningless*.

> I set out the Objectives & Design Principles of Bax (Piashi) on:
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Briefscript/ObjAndDesign.html
> 
> It was because I was failing to meet these satisfactorily
> that I eventually abandoned the project.

Piashi is in my opinion not a complete failure; it was worth
trying out, even if the result was disappointing.

> TAKE was an experiment to produce an ancient Greek based
> language that has no grammatical inflexions.  Well, it uses
> ancient Greek roots and it has no inflexions, so it meets
> those objectives.  But how one further evaluates it, I don't
> know.

One could question TAKE on the ground of: "Why should one
want to have a language based on ancient Greek but without
inflections?  What is to be gained from such a project?"
But as an experiment, it is just fine.
 
> How does one evaluate Outidic?  We'd probably not rate it as
> an auxlang now.  But it was supposed to the product of a
> fictional 17th century Dr Outis?  Is it something that a guy
> in the 17th century might produce?

These are indeed the right questions to ask about it.  Would
a 17th-century scholar come up with a language like this, or
does it involve concepts that weren't current at that time?
We know that most 17th-century auxlang attempts were either
polygraphies (i.e., mechanical word-by-word translation
schemes, which of course turned out not to work at all), or
"philosophical" (i.e. taxonomic) languages (which turned out
not to work particularly well), or combinations of both;
but there have been schemes like Labbé's, too.
 
> I recall during my few years on Auxlang, some people were
> quite certain what criteria an auxlang should meet.  The
> trouble was that they not always agree with one another, and
> arguing over the criteria could itself lead to flames (I'm
> told Auxlang is more civilized now).

It is indeed more civilized now than it is said that it once
has been; as far as I can tell from my brief looks at it (I
am not on AUXLANG right now), people still discuss design
criteria of auxlangs, but in a more polite way. 

>       Interestingly, the
> current de_facto global auxlang, i.e. English, failed nearly
> all the different sets of criteria     :)

Yep.  Which shows how much such criteria matter in practice:
not very much!

> To recap: it seems to me the important questions are "Why
> was the conlang constructed?  What were the aims and
> objectives of its designer?  How well does it meet those
> aims and objectives?

Just that.

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