Re: A Conlang, created by the group?
| From: | Mathias M. Lassailly <lassailly@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, October 9, 1998, 21:29 |
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Charles wrote :
> I have been re-reading a very interesting
> critique of Esperanto; and in this section ...
>
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto.html#f
Hey, hold on, Charles : I didn't criticize Zamenhof. I don't like criticizing
others' works when I know that either :
1. I can't do better
2. Even if I think I do better, there is no standard to prove that my work is better.
That's why I will never criticize a conlanger, be he/she auxlanger or artlanger.
If I didn't like something in an auxlang, I'd try and do 'better' and convince
others it is better by showing them what they gain from it, but I would never
try to prove it's better because the original auxlang is 'flawed'.
> ... there occurs the following challenge:
>
> > F3: Simplicity
> >
> > This is the inverse problem, overlooked by Zamenhof.
> > Language learners want to be able to communicate
> > with as little rote learning of vocabulary as possible.
> > English is rather good at this,
> > as it is rich in "metonyms" - coverterms like "house" or "clothes",
> > usable as stand-ins for more specialised terms
> > like "palace" or "sou'wester" as well as in
> > self-explanatory compound words like "treehouse" or "nightclothes".
> > If the 850 words of "Basic English" are sufficient for encyclopaedias,
> > any language designed from the ground up
> > could in principle get by with a one-page dictionary.*
Maybe. But I feel slightly differently though : English nouns like 'cover' have two meanings :
one as generic noun (something you call a cover)
+ one as an agent, patient, result or instrument of a specific action :
cover = instrument > to cover = to use/to be used as a cover
prey = patient as a result > to prey = to make it a prey
damage = result > to damage = to make a damage
Who could say wether the generic derives from the verb or reversely ? They still
are different words from each other.
My point is that you're English so you know that 'cover' is 'easily' made a verb
with the meaning drawn from the symbol of 'cover' as an instrument.
But what about 'to dog' or 'to stone' someone ? :-)
Actually, why isn't a cover an instrument to smother ? Then we would have :
to cover = to smother ;-)
Objects have a certain obvious function to your European eyes so you make this object
a verb on the basis of that function, but other peoples have sometime a
different idea about what the function of that object should be.
It's easy to make a noun into a verb. But what does that verb REALLY mean ? To
transform into that noun ? To apply it ? To use it ? To behave like it ?
It's not fair for an English speaker to overlook that issue ;-)
Sometime 'difficult' forms of a verb are useful to show what the real meaning of that
verb is. I don't think it's the main flaw of Esperanto although I don't speak
it.
I develop that issue in my following pages :
http://members.aol.com/lassailly/ial.html
http://members.aol.com/lassailly/ial2.html
> I think a sub-goal of the project envisioned here
> would be, basically, F3 above;
I'd like it to be sure of that but I'm not sure. Are we auxlanging ?
What do the others think of that ?
and it would be
> at least a very useful word-list for conlang designers.
> Basic English has many known flaws, and is certainly
> not "the last word" in basic word lists ...
> The best I know of presently is EuroWordNet,
>
http://www.let.uva.nl/~ewn/corebcs/topont.htm
>