Re: conlang classification and productivity

Patrick Dunn wrote:

> > The Legratec rating is a system, proposed by Dan Jones if I am not
> > mistaken, of rating how well-developed a conlang is.  The original
> > Legratec system has four categories:
> >
> > L - lexicon
> > G - grammar
> > T - text corpus
> > C - conculture
> > P - phonology
> > S - script
Tokana would be L-3.5, G-5, T-0, C-2, P-4.5, S-5.  (Here I'm construing the 5
rating in the sense of "complete" rather than "perfect"... :-) )

The syntax and morpho-phonology of Tokana have probably reached their maximal
level of complexity, although they'll never reach perfection (for the simple
reason that my conception of what is perfect keeps changing).  I would say
that Tokana is complex enough to be used in most natlang situations.  In terms
of its comprehensiveness, the basic grammar of Tokana has probably surpassed
Klingon, and is neck-and-neck with Esperanto (I'm bragging a bit here, I
realise.)

Things like the phoneme inventory, word order, and basic morphological
architecture (e.g., a preponderance of suffixes, an 'active' case-marking
system, a four-way tense distinction on verbs, etc.) are extremely stable.
The set of basic morphological categories represented by the affixes is also
fairly stable, although the affixes themselves keep changing (I just executed
a major overhaul of the suffixed pronouns, for example).  I'm not entirely
happy with the phonology, and there are some aspects of the phonetic &
phonological systems (intonation contours, for example) which remain to be
described, hence the 4.5 rating.

The basic design of the writing system (a syllabary based loosely on Amharic)
is stable, although the actual forms of the characters change occasionally.

There are no texts in Tokana longer than about a sentence, hence the 0 rating.

The vocabulary of Tokana is tiny by natlang standards, but probably fairly
large by conlang standards: I'd say about 2500 words.  3.5 seems a reasonable
rating.

The basic outlines of the conculture are there, but a large number of details
remain to be filled in.  My rating of 2 is perhaps a little high.

Overall, not bad for 9 years of work...

Matt.