Re: On the design of an ideal language

On 5/1/06, And Rosta <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.

I have spent probably more time than is good for me
on the AUXLANG mailing list, and have observed that
people who agree about the desirability of an auxiliary
language can't agree about the criteria for an ideal
auxlang or their relative importance when they conflict.
And that's when considering conlangs with a relatively
narrow range of purposes and design goals.  For an
"ideal language" in the abstract with no further specification
of language's purposes and uses, agreement is probably
even more illusory.

That said, a fair amount of the stuff in Sai's essay
is insightful and probably useful to other designers
of engelangs and auxlangs.

> 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."
One corollary of this might be that an engelang or auxlang
intended for spoken use shouldn't violate known or strongly
suspected universals, even statistical universals.  But
of course an ideal language for investigating the nature
of the human language faculty needn't be bound to this...


> 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."
My development method (recently outlined here) for my new
engelang is designed to converge on this though several
iterations -- using actual corpus analysis rather than a priori
guessing about what words are going to be more or
less frequently used.  But:

> 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".
Sai seems to be saying (correct me if I'm misreading you, Sai)
that the language should, in its most concise mode, use almost every
possible word within its phonotactic limitations; and it should
use this concise mode in non-noisy conditions, and a
less concise mode with redundancy in noisier conditions.
Actually, I suspect that even in the least-noisy real-world
conditions you would still need a lot more redundancy
than Sai seems to allow for (he appears to throw out a
ballpark figure of 1% of unused space).  My engelang is
designed so that no two morphemes differ by
less than two phonemes.  I may back off from this extreme
redundancy in a later revision -- for instance, perhaps
no two morphemes *in the same distributional category*
will differ by less than two distinctive features.  But in any
case some criterion for a minimum degree of redundancy
will figure in any future phase of this engelang.

> 4. Principle of Default Simplicity
> "The more complex the idea, the more correspondingly complex its expression."
Generally good, but how to measure the complexity of an idea?
An idea that can be expressed concisely in one language
may require more words or more complex structure in another
not because language one is inherently or generally more concise
than the other, but because its speakers have optimized it
for talking about this particular kind of idea.

> 5. Principle of Iconicity
> The form of the utterance should resemble the meaning.
Sai seems to be suggesting use of phonaesthemes in
devising or selecting vocabulary, if I understand correctly.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what this means at levels
above the lexical.

> 6. Principle of Cross-Modality
> "Anything should be expressable in any/all available means."
I agree with this w.r.t. ensuring that the written language
can express the nuances of the spoken language; so, as in
Lojban or Ithkuil my gzb, having attitudinal particles and affixes
etc. that make modes explicit which would be implicit
in tone of voice in spoken English (etc.) and lost in written
transcription.  On the other hand, w.r.t., sign language,
I am not qualified to judge; but my guess is that making a
sign language which is a relex of a spoken language, or
vice versa -- or indeed, simultaneously designing a
spoken language and a sign language that are
semantically and grammatically isomorphic - would lead
to significant inefficiency in one mode or both; and if
the modes are not semantically and grammatically isomorphic,
you're no longer talking about one language but a cluster
of loosely related languages, and the difficulty of learning
the whole set of languages would be greatly increased.
But I would be happy to be proven wrong.


> 7. Principle of Semantic Conservation
> "There should be no such thing as a "nonsense" or "incorrect" phrase."
Paul Bennett has already said plenty about the problems
with this.

> 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
This seems to suggest a high phonological density -- a large
phoneme inventory and phonotactics that allow a large number
of possible syllables.

> 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 reckon this goes without saying for any general-purpose
conlang.

> 10. Principle of Variegation
> The language should be as textured, variegated and many-flavoured as a natlang
> (benchmark: English).
This also seems to suggest a phonology that allows a wide
variety of syllable shapes; what does it means on the grammatical
level?  I would suggest that Esperanto, for instance, is pretty
variegated and many-flavored grammatically (in it's Perlish
"there's more than one way to do it" ethos); but one could
go even further in, for instance, making various inflectional
categories available and optional, and allowing a lot of leeway
in trading off between cases and adpositions (perhaps for
more and less precision)...  Semantically,
I guess this might mean allowing the speaker a wide
degree of latitude in selecting vague or pecise words.

> The principle of Semantic Density, I hold to but with certain caveats.
> (i) Speech and writing is primary, and the Principle of Cross Modality must be
> respected. Therefore the expressive resources of, say, graphic and gestural
> mediums are underutilized.
> (ii) A high degree of robustness of contrast is required.
In other words, you don't in fact agree with Sai.  He seems to
want to dispense with robustness of contrast at least in the
most concise mode.

I'll note that neither of you mentioned one criterion:
ease of learning.  Indeed, Sai's implied cluster of several
languages (at least one per mode plus variations with
more or less redundancy for more or less noisy conditions)
would probably be as difficult as learning, if not a whole
family of natural languages, at least several regular conlangs.
And you both seem to imply a complex phonology that
would be difficult for adult learners of many native languages,
and (perhaps) a large root vocabulary that would take a
long while for anyone to learn.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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