Re: Conlang labels (wasR: Futurese, Chinese, Hz of NatLangs, etc.)

Raymond Brown writes:
 > At 8:55 am -0400 11/5/02, Jeffrey Henning wrote:
 > >"J Y S Czhang" <czhang23@...> comunu:
 > >
 > >> - like the "attractively ugly" Klingon or "serious linguistic fun"
 > >conlangs
 > >> like Tunu, Vorlin, Ludeiro <sp?> or Dublex. Gotta have fun, ya know...
 > >> serious fun ;)
 > >
 > >We need a word for languages like Vorlin, Dublex and BrSc.
 >
[...]
 > For sometime now some of us have been using what And has nicknamed the
 > 'Gnoli triangle' ever since Claudio Gnoli suggested that conlangs tend
 > toward one of three apexes of:
 >                          artlang
 >                            / \
 >                           /   \
 >                          /     \
 >                         /       \
 >                  loglang ------ auxlang
 >
 > Note that 'loglang' is not the same as the generic noun 'loglan'  :)
 > For example, And's Livagian is a loglang (a language where logic is the
 > [primary] aim, but it's not, as I understand it, a loglan).
 >
 > The theory has been that conlangs map onto this triangle.  I've often
 > imagined the BrSc (both BrScA & BrScB :) come more or less in the geometric
 > center,
 >
[...]
 >
 > It has seemed to me that this more of an 'experimental language'.  Can
 > these aims be reconciled?  I've often wondered if we oughtn't to have a
 > category of 'experimental languages' (experilangs??) for conlangs such as
 > Tom Breton's AllNoun.  Dublex is, isn't it, an _experiment_ to see if a
 > language can be expressive with a small vocabulary.  Srikanth's Lin is most
 > certainly an experiment in compactness.
 >
 >
 > And recently suggested 'engelang' (which I assume is 'engineered lang') -
 > and certainly I would not argue that BrSc is not engineered. Would that
 > cover these experimental langs?
 >
 > I think we need to extend the 'Gnoli tiangle' into the 'Conlang quadrilateral:
 >                          artlang
 >                            / \
 >                           /   \
 >                          /     \
 >                         /       \
 >                  loglang        auxlang
 >                        \        /
 >                         \      /
 >                          \    /
 >                           \  /
 >                         engelang
 >

The problem with a quadrilateral is that it makes the qualities into a
pair of polar opposites, and I'm not clear if this is your aim.  The
more of a loglang a language is, the less it's an auxlang, and
similarly for the artlang/engelang distinction.  Certainly it would
appear that loglang is not the opposite of auxlang.

I'm not sure what you mean by an "engelang" - "engineered" to me
implies a kind of methodical, rational design, which you would expect
in a loglang or auxlang and can't rule out in an artlang.  The extent
to which a conlang is engineered seems to be totally orthogonal to the
triangle.  What I mean is - the point of one of these triangles seems
to be that while there's no special relationship between these
categories, they are to some extent in conflict, so that you can take
a language and assign it 3 percentages that add up to 100.  Every set
of values corresponds to a point on the triangular plane.  It seems to
me that any point on the plain could have any value on the engineering
axis - so it's a seperate value coupled to this set of three, rather
than 4 percentages that add up.

If you do identify 4 characteristics that add up like this
(complementary, maybe?) you could map them to the space of a "conlang
tetrahedron".  For 5 we'd need a hypertetrahedron, and I'm not even
sure what the 3d projection of that looks like, so I'm guessing it
wouldn't prove an effective means of expression.

Possibly more productive would be to provide two or more triangles,
with different values at the corners, and one or more mars indicating
the position on a line.  (If you have two of these, you can make them
into a quadrilateral.)  Maybe triangles labelled "purpose" and
"features" or something of the kind.


Beyond "auxlang" "artlang" "loglang" I can see two main other points -
"experimental" (which you've already mentioned) and "ideological"
(something like Suzette Haden Elgin's Ladaan - I'm not aware of any
other examples worked out into viable conlangs, except maybe Toki
Pona, which at least _calls_ itself ideological, and maybe lojban's
commitment to cultural neutrality comes under this heading also).
Artlang, also, seems to cover a wide area - most artlangs are natural
languages spoken by fictional people, but this doesn't seem to be
inherent in the name "artlang", so maybe something like
"pseudonatlang" is required.

I can't yet generate any kind of classificational diagram from this,
as I need to further study the way in which these categories
interrelate.  For example, an experimental language could easily be an
experiment in logicalness, or ideological qualities.

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