Re: On the design of an ideal language

And Rosta wrote:
> I was interested & delighted to come upon Sai's page called "On the
> design of an ideal language"
> (http://community.livejournal.com/conlangs/14524.html), as my primary
> conlanging goal has always been to create what is, by my lights, the
> ideal language. I'd be interested to hear from other conlangers with the
> same goal, and to find out what for them characterizes the ideal language.
Hmm. Most of my langs are intended as fictional natlangs, especially
non-human ones, which for realism necessarily fall short of being
"ideal" languages in any way, but Minza shares some of these goals.

> Sai's goals are as follows [there is much explanatory elaboration on his
> page]:
>
> 0. Principle of Good Representation
> "All forms of language use should be as representative as possible of
> the actual thinking of the target population."
I tried once to create a "representative" Zireen language, but I never
got very far with it. Minza has a somewhat different but related goal.
Minza is intended to be equally applicable to human and non-human
languages. So the basic color terms, for instance, are based on an
arbitrary logarithmic scale, but this scale was carefully designed to
include as a subset the basic colors of Human and Zireen color vision.

> 1. Principle of Least Effort
> "[T]he language should *start* with simplicity in mind. This means that
> things should be "regular" (linguistic term, meaning "hopefully the
> rules don't have many exceptions") as much as possible, that vocabulary
> should be as dense as possible (long words for oft-used concepts,
> especially when shorter words are not "taken", *will* be broken down
> with natural use), etc."
Yes, simplicity in this sense has always been one of the central goals
of Minza (which distinguishes it from its predecessor Lindiga). I wanted
to make Lindiga more naturalistic, with quirky declension classes and
irregularities.

> 2. Principle of Semantic Density
> "Any medium used [...] should be used optimally." 'Optimally' means in
> accordance with the other principles and such that "all available
> mediums are used to their fullest potential".
Minza is terse, but not quite optimal. I'm not interested in using all
possible combinations of phonemes. Vocabulary is mostly borrowed
(largely from my own fictional languages), with few original words.
Still, I try not to make words unnecessarily long.

> 3. Principle of Desired Clarity
> Every 'sentence' should be no more or less semantically precise than the
> sender wishes.
This seems to me like a desirable goal, and one compatible with the
general plan of Minza.

> 4. Principle of Default Simplicity
> "The more complex the idea, the more correspondingly complex its
> expression."
Not necessarily the case in Minza. I have distinct words for "deer",
"buck", "doe", "fawn", even though they could be represented as "male
deer", "female deer", "young deer". This is one of the more natlangish
features of what is otherwise a very artificial language. But the more
"simple" ideas tend to be represented with words that at least aren't
any more verbose than the words representing "complex" ideas. Minza
doesn't have the situation we have in English where we can say "cow" or
"bull", but don't have any simple gender-neutral equivalent.

> 5. Principle of Iconicity
> The form of the utterance should resemble the meaning.
Not a particular goal of Minza. But I try to avoid words that don't seem
to "fit" the meaning.

> 6. Principle of Cross-Modality
> "Anything should be expressable in any/all available means."
Minza is defined by its written form; when spoken, I add inflections to
sound natural, but they don't add anything to the meaning (although they
may aid in parsing).

> 7. Principle of Semantic Conservation
> "There should be no such thing as a "nonsense" or "incorrect" phrase."
Not a goal of Minza.

> My goals are as follows.
>
> Goals not mentioned by Sai:
>
> 8. Principle of Concision. The language should be as concise as possible
> *on average*. As a benchmark, it should be able to achieve the average
> concision of the concisest natlang, without compromising the Principle
> of Desired Clarity. The rationale for this principle is twofold. (i) It
> is generally utilitarian, saving time, space, effort. (ii) Without it,
> the Principle of Desired Clarity is fatally undermined: the speaker
> should not be forced to opt for vagueness because the desired level of
> precision is not worth the effort of the degree of verbosity that
> expressing it would entail.
I find that I naturally tend to create more concise languages, unless I
make a special effort to avoid conciseness, so I haven't made this a
specific goal of Minza.

> 9. Principle of Expressiveness.
> Everything expressible in a natlang should be expressible in the ideal
> lang, with (in the main) no significant loss of concision.
I've thought about this as a potential long-term goal for Minza.

> 10. Principle of Variegation
> The language should be as textured, variegated and many-flavoured as a
> natlang (benchmark: English).
Now that seems like it would be a tough goal to achieve (not that any of
the others are especially easy!).