Hallo conlangers!

On Monday 20 January 2014 15:50:41 R A Brown wrote:

> On 20/01/2014 13:44, Leonardo Castro wrote:
> > 2014/1/15 And Rosta wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> That's right. Xorban had the potential to be a
> >> state-of-the art loglang, and the first ever loglang
> >> whose design is not patently a failure. (No disrespect
> >> meant to Liva or its creator.)
> 
> I hadn't noticed that reference to Liva.  But is Liva
> _patently_ a failure. In his introduction to Liva, Claudio
> Gnoli wrote: "Liva is constructed mainly for fun. It has no
> practical aim."
> 
> It seems to me to have been successful in that regard   :)

Right - how can something fail that doesn't even have a goal to
achieve?

> He also wrote: "It is conceived as a very unambiguous and
> logical language, at all its levels."  I guess it is in this
> that And regards Liva as a failure. Yet I would be
> interested to know in what respect Liva was not unambiguous
> and/or not logical at all levels.  This is a serious request.

Sure.  If Gnoli says that it is meant to be "very unambiguous
and logical", it is a valid question whether it actually is or
not.
 
> Thirdly, Claudo wrote: "It can be seen as an experiment,
> trying to satisfy both the requirements of logic and the
> aesthetic preferences of its author."  Indeed, the aesthetic
> preferences of its author do come through.

Did he ever come up with a manifesto in which he laid them out?
He seems to like cookie-cutter phoneme inventories that lend
themselves to binary encoding, though ;)

>       So it may be in
> this that And considers Liva failed: it did not properly
> satisfy both aims.
> 
> The latter is something I can empathize with.  It was the
> apparently irreconcilable aims of my Briefscript project
> that eventually led me to abandon it.

Fair.  It is a waste of resources to try to follow through a
project that has turned out not to work.  When you reach the
point where you know that any hope of success is illusory,
you just ought to stop.

> > IMHO, something that probably make Xorban intrinsically
> > less popular than Lojban (and similar) is its disregard
> > for some real-life-usage features such as ease of
> > pronunciation (with very frequent 4 consonants in a row
> > and in any possible order).
> 
> Yikes!!! If you want people to use a language then it's got
> to be _usable_!

Very much so!  You can't treat language learners with something
they can't use.
 
> [snip]
> 
> >> For reasons I lack time to explain in this message, I
> >> suspect that a viable loglang design is a mathematical
> >> impossibility
> 
> That thought has occasionally occurred to me   :)

I don't know whether loglangs are unworkable or not, but I feel
that they are so far removed from ordinary human languages that
they are at least very hard to attune to for human beings. Also,
language and formal logic just *do not serve the same purpose*,
which is why I consider it meaningless and misguided to demand
that a human language ought to be based on formal logic.  Using
a phonetically encoded system of formal logic to *converse* is
nothing else than using a tool to an end it is not made for.
This is also the reason why I consider Lojban or any other
logical language a poor choice for an IAL (apart from the point
that the auxlang race has been run already, and English is the
winner).
 
> We have rather arrogantly dubbed our species "Homo sapiens."
>   Yet you have only to look at recent past history or our
> contemporary world to seriously question the epithet
> "sapiens."  In my experience logic does not play a major
> role in human communication  ;)
> 
> Meantime, Liva is one of the conlangs I like.    :)

This is a point where our tastes differ.  I do not consider Liva
particularly beautiful.  It is, well, too obviously engineered
and mechanical.  Elegant, yes, but brutal and not evocative of
the beauty of a natlang.  But that is, of course, a matter of
taste, and I respect your liking of Liva!

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