Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

>> A perfect language should be easy to pronounce, easy to understand, and
>> easy to learn.
I am thinking, for a change, to make a perfect language of the opposite
cathegory : hard to pronounce, to understand, and to learn. by taking a lots of
uncommun features from lots of language, to be sure that even if you are
familiar with some part of the language, there will still be something to
trouble you.

for example include all the folowing:

several tones
and complex tone sandhi

many vowels
vowel harmony
diphtongues
vowel clusters
nasals


many consonants
heavy consonants clusters
voiced/unvoiced
aspirated/non aspirated
clicks

unusual phonological constraints, to be sure to distord loanwords

lots of words sounding similar
lots of fossilized idioms which do not fit modern grammar

Liaison
heavy inflexions
case system which is neither accusative or ergative
verb tense
verb aspect
verb mood
verb voice
lexical and grammatical differences from politness differences (like in japanese)
versatile word order
slightly aglutinant, so you can never clearly tell what is a word
lots of irregularities
ambiguities on common vocabulary
male/female speech differences
genders
classes in addition to genders
several numbers  (eg: sing/dual/plural/undetermined)
non decimal number system. maybe 23, it can be quite terrible.

some mixed writing system (like japanese, but even more twised)


I guess one like this could be hard for a lot of people.

Or maybe an other way to be hard, is to make a language missing the features most
people consider as essential. (this list is not just a list of "no" i try to
keep in mind something that is still possible.)

no adjective
no pronoun
no demonstrative
no negation
no tense
no mood
no aspect
no voice
no gender
no number
no irregularity
no relative clause

gaps in "essential" vocab
no greetings
no word for yes/no
to verb for "to have"

no tone
no accent
no pitch
no consonants?

i think the "No" language could be fun to make. find out ways of saying things
without using what we consider essential.

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