Re: On the design of an ideal language

On May 1, 2006, at 4:52 PM, Jim Henry wrote:

> 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.
If noise resistance is the primary criterion, distinctions are more
desirable within a distributional category than between them - e.g.,
under normal circumstances, nobody would think of a furry animal when
they heard the phrase, "I just can't bear it anymore".  On the other
hand, maximizing redundancy within a distributional category, and
minimizing it between them, is a great idea if you want to make the
grammar itself audible (acoustically salient).  As natural languages
are most definitely not cut out for this task, this is a great reason
to construct one (it's certainly one of my primary motivations).

So a constructed language is ideal relative to its purposes -
different purposes may imply diametrically opposed properties.  The
most common purpose in this community, it would seem, is to play a
role in what I would call synchronic fiction.  Beyond that, it seems
to me that we're testing limit cases that natural languages don't
provide - for instance, a) minimum/maximum phonemic inventory, b)
minimum/maximum agglutination, c) minimum/maximum derivational
morphology, d) minimum/maximum grammatical meaning (ie. number,
person, tense, etc. either all expressed with function words or
inflection, or on the other hand only through paraphrasis), e)
minimum/maximum homomorphism between any two components of the
grammar f) saturation or elimination of the workload of a given
lexical category or syntactic device, et cetera.  If David Hilbert
enumerated the most pressing unsolved mathematical problems of his
time as a challenge to the mathematicians of the twentieth century,
we could make a list of unattested limit-case languages as a
challenge to the conlangers of the twenty-first.

Jackson

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