responses on Livagian (was: Re: Was Tolkien a good conlanger? (was: Re: Good Books)

Jörg:
> (There is also no clear-cut boundary between artlangs
> and engelangs.  Is a fictional machine-translation interlingua
> someone designs to be used by characters in his science fiction novel
> an artlang or an engelang?  Is Livagian an artlang or an engelang?)
& BP:
> Having a conculture -- however vaguely or sketchily defined or worked
> out -- also helps a long way towards making an artlang realistic, although
> it is not necessary or sufficient in itself, and in that respect even
> Livagian is artlangy -- perhaps to the horror of And! :)
Livagian (a nonnatural but human language) is an engelang at its core,
but an artlang in its peripheral twiddles and in that it has a
conculture. However, since one of the engelang design criteria is
that it should have sufficient poetic expressiveness that I
could write in it without yearning to revert to English, it is
kind of artlangy -- at least, it's not a robotic language like
Lojban is. I've nothing against artlangs -- I'm very fond of
those that appeal to me -- but in my case the impulse to create
a language is motivated by a desire to create a language that I
like better -- that I opine is better --than any other. (Given that
I am fair besotted with English, that is a tall order.)

> (I'm on record as arguing that a lang totally devoid of the possibility of
> ambiguity is hardly usable by humans.  I think ambiguity, or at least
> unspecificness, has a function to fulfill in human communication!)
> It is often alleged that Tolkien abhorred ambiguity -- especially
> homonymy -- in his Elvish, although his practice denies this assertion.
> IMO the absence of at least a modest degree of ambiguity and homonymy
> would greatly detract from realism -- unless of course the abhorrence
> of homonymy be ascribed to the taste of the elvish lang engineers and
> prescriptivists Tolkien tells us existed! :)
Livagian lacks homonymy (except in the onomasticon), and I do view this
as one of its most unnatural characteristics. (Actually, no: there's
loads of homonymy, but never in such a way that it gives rise to
ambiguity.) It allows as much vagueness as you could possibly want, but
has no ambiguity of any sort (in the technical sense of a finite number
of distinct alternative readings). On balance, and speaking as a
committed writer of poesy myself, I think that the lack of ambiguity
is a literary advantage, not a disadvantage.

--And.