I wonder if we could at least have a consensus about what the ideal conlang would be like. The history, as far as my limited knowledge goes, seems more like a random walk than progress towards a specific goal.
I agree that making communicating some fact (such as gender) optional is better than making it required. Too bad Zamenhof didn’t speak Hungarian.
Easy to learn? Toki pona beats Esperanto. But its goal of “simplifying thoughts” is perhaps the opposite of what we’d want.
Unambiguous grammar? Lojban is supposed to have it. I’m not sure how useful that is, but it seems better suited for technical writing—things like engineering, contracts, programming and mathematics—than any ambiguous language. But only the grammar is unambiguous. The vocabulary leaves some room for interpretation. Poetry is still possible.
Terseness? Supposedly, Chinese speakers have an advantage over English speakers when doing mental arithmetic. They can fit more digits into their auditory loop because their words for numbers are shorter. But you have to learn tones.
Natural languages vary a lot in their phonology. Taa has over a hundred phonemes, including tones and clicks. A language with more consonants, vowels, and tones can pack more information into fewer syllables, and thus more information into sentences of reasonable length. But the more complex your phonology, the more difficult it is to learn, and the easier it is to mishear over noise, unless there’s some other redundancy. Languages developed in noisy tropical environments (like Hawaiian) have a much simpler phonology with an emphasis on sonorous vowels. Silbo Gomero is a whistled language that works over even longer distances. Morse code works over a simple on-off channel. (It could also work whistled.)
The optimal phonology would seem to depend on the available bandwidth. Perhaps an ideal language would have different modes depending on the situation. Maybe you could “spell out” a complex word using “letters” with names restricted to a simpler phonology, like one simple enough to whistle.
And spoken languages are not the same thing as written languages, although some of them are closely related. A written language need not be limited by human speech organs, although human eyes still matter. Mathematical notations can be highly specialized.
APL is notable example. Originally developed as a math notation, it is also “A Programming Language”. Adherents emphasize that APL’s extreme terseness allows them to effectively understand more code at once. Rather than coming up with a good name for a complex function, they can just use its whole definition in even less space.
Unambiguous grammar? Lojban is supposed to have it.
The goal is good, but the implementation is not.
From what I learned briefly, in Lojbal you need to memorize a list of parameters that go with each verb. Parameters are things like “walking home”, “walking from school”, “walking at 3 PM”. Then you need to place the parameters in the right order. Any of those parameters can be a word that itself has parameters, but you know how many, so the parsing is unambiguous (it’s a prefix syntax).
Example (fictional, but realistic), the word “walking” has 5 parameters, first is “from where”, second is “through where”, third is “to where”, fourth is “when”, and fifth is “with whom”; so the proper way to say “walking home from school at 3 PM” would be: “walking school unspecified home 3 unspecified”.
My objection is that the choice of parameters is quite arbitrary. (Why is there “when” and “with whom”, but not “in what mood” or “in what weather” or “how fast”?) And you need a way to express “in what mood” or “how fast” anyway, so now you have two different methods to express parameters. Why not have one method only, so that you do not need to memorize the order and meaning of parameters for each verb separately. And now I’m kinda reinventing prepositions...
I think it is worth designing how to make prepositions (or their equivalent) parse unambiguously in complex sentences. But the idea that there is a fixed set of prepositions for each verb seems completely unrealistic.
I looked up the real example: cadzu means “x1 walks on surface x2 using limbs x3”. I think I see your point. Lambda calculus (and close derivatives, like Haskell) seem to do fine with only unary functions. To be fair, the definition of any word is kind of arbitrary, but it seems more elegant to build these up from smaller pieces.
After studying Iverson’s J (itself an APL derivative), I think one could make a good case for arity-2 verbs taking only a subject and object, with adverbs remaining unary. From briefly skimming parts of a Lojban crash course just now, it appears that the places are usually more regular than you give them credit for. They tend to go in the order subject, object, destination, origin, means, although not all verbs have all of these, which does seem confusing.
I also stumbled across Ithkuil, another conlang which seems to have that terseness quality I was looking for, as well as claiming to be a logical language. But it’s so difficult that nobody speaks it fluently.
It seems to me like the amount of work that went into new conlangs is very little. It’s not like there’s a random walk but that there’s little walking.
I do think we saw some process. Esperanto works better then Volapük. It’s easier to learn and more powerful.
Interlingue does have a benefit of being readable by Europeans who haven’t learned the language in a way that Esperanto isn’t but it loses the advantages you get from combing stems to form new words. Novial focuses on both being understandable and have the advantages of the stems.
It’s unfortunate that Interlingua which was pushed by the International Auxiliary Language Association which was actually an effort into which more resources were invested dropped the usefulness of having the stems and was more like a recreation of Interlingue.
It also didn’t have any thinking about how it could be more powerful then existing language.
More recently you have a project like Lingwa de planeta which tries to build on a structure similar to Novial while being less Eurocentric and more open to having words that sound like those speakers of major world languages already know.
However the idea that a constructed language could be superior to a natural language for a specific usecase and thus be adopted by speakers doesn’t seem to be in the awareness of the people who created more recent conlangs.
I wonder if we could at least have a consensus about what the ideal conlang would be like. The history, as far as my limited knowledge goes, seems more like a random walk than progress towards a specific goal.
I agree that making communicating some fact (such as gender) optional is better than making it required. Too bad Zamenhof didn’t speak Hungarian.
What goals are we optimizing for?
Easy to learn? Toki pona beats Esperanto. But its goal of “simplifying thoughts” is perhaps the opposite of what we’d want.
Unambiguous grammar? Lojban is supposed to have it. I’m not sure how useful that is, but it seems better suited for technical writing—things like engineering, contracts, programming and mathematics—than any ambiguous language. But only the grammar is unambiguous. The vocabulary leaves some room for interpretation. Poetry is still possible.
Terseness? Supposedly, Chinese speakers have an advantage over English speakers when doing mental arithmetic. They can fit more digits into their auditory loop because their words for numbers are shorter. But you have to learn tones.
Natural languages vary a lot in their phonology. Taa has over a hundred phonemes, including tones and clicks. A language with more consonants, vowels, and tones can pack more information into fewer syllables, and thus more information into sentences of reasonable length. But the more complex your phonology, the more difficult it is to learn, and the easier it is to mishear over noise, unless there’s some other redundancy. Languages developed in noisy tropical environments (like Hawaiian) have a much simpler phonology with an emphasis on sonorous vowels. Silbo Gomero is a whistled language that works over even longer distances. Morse code works over a simple on-off channel. (It could also work whistled.)
The optimal phonology would seem to depend on the available bandwidth. Perhaps an ideal language would have different modes depending on the situation. Maybe you could “spell out” a complex word using “letters” with names restricted to a simpler phonology, like one simple enough to whistle.
And spoken languages are not the same thing as written languages, although some of them are closely related. A written language need not be limited by human speech organs, although human eyes still matter. Mathematical notations can be highly specialized.
APL is notable example. Originally developed as a math notation, it is also “A Programming Language”. Adherents emphasize that APL’s extreme terseness allows them to effectively understand more code at once. Rather than coming up with a good name for a complex function, they can just use its whole definition in even less space.
The goal is good, but the implementation is not.
From what I learned briefly, in Lojbal you need to memorize a list of parameters that go with each verb. Parameters are things like “walking home”, “walking from school”, “walking at 3 PM”. Then you need to place the parameters in the right order. Any of those parameters can be a word that itself has parameters, but you know how many, so the parsing is unambiguous (it’s a prefix syntax).
Example (fictional, but realistic), the word “walking” has 5 parameters, first is “from where”, second is “through where”, third is “to where”, fourth is “when”, and fifth is “with whom”; so the proper way to say “walking home from school at 3 PM” would be: “walking school unspecified home 3 unspecified”.
My objection is that the choice of parameters is quite arbitrary. (Why is there “when” and “with whom”, but not “in what mood” or “in what weather” or “how fast”?) And you need a way to express “in what mood” or “how fast” anyway, so now you have two different methods to express parameters. Why not have one method only, so that you do not need to memorize the order and meaning of parameters for each verb separately. And now I’m kinda reinventing prepositions...
I think it is worth designing how to make prepositions (or their equivalent) parse unambiguously in complex sentences. But the idea that there is a fixed set of prepositions for each verb seems completely unrealistic.
I looked up the real example: cadzu means “x1 walks on surface x2 using limbs x3”. I think I see your point. Lambda calculus (and close derivatives, like Haskell) seem to do fine with only unary functions. To be fair, the definition of any word is kind of arbitrary, but it seems more elegant to build these up from smaller pieces.
After studying Iverson’s J (itself an APL derivative), I think one could make a good case for arity-2 verbs taking only a subject and object, with adverbs remaining unary. From briefly skimming parts of a Lojban crash course just now, it appears that the places are usually more regular than you give them credit for. They tend to go in the order subject, object, destination, origin, means, although not all verbs have all of these, which does seem confusing.
I also stumbled across Ithkuil, another conlang which seems to have that terseness quality I was looking for, as well as claiming to be a logical language. But it’s so difficult that nobody speaks it fluently.
It seems to me like the amount of work that went into new conlangs is very little. It’s not like there’s a random walk but that there’s little walking.
I do think we saw some process. Esperanto works better then Volapük. It’s easier to learn and more powerful.
Interlingue does have a benefit of being readable by Europeans who haven’t learned the language in a way that Esperanto isn’t but it loses the advantages you get from combing stems to form new words. Novial focuses on both being understandable and have the advantages of the stems.
It’s unfortunate that Interlingua which was pushed by the International Auxiliary Language Association which was actually an effort into which more resources were invested dropped the usefulness of having the stems and was more like a recreation of Interlingue.
It also didn’t have any thinking about how it could be more powerful then existing language.
More recently you have a project like Lingwa de planeta which tries to build on a structure similar to Novial while being less Eurocentric and more open to having words that sound like those speakers of major world languages already know.
However the idea that a constructed language could be superior to a natural language for a specific usecase and thus be adopted by speakers doesn’t seem to be in the awareness of the people who created more recent conlangs.