Re: Additonal features for CALS

On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 03:21:08PM +0200, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> kaleissin writes:
> > Lets have a round of brainstorming about new features for CALS. The
> > ones from WALS cannot be changed due to the license chosen, so it is
> > also relevant to make replacements for existing features. ...
>
> I think some of the conlang overviews here had interesting questions.
>
> - A priori / a posteriori?
I agree. This is *the* most important distinction in conlangs that does not
apply to natlangs. But I do think we need to come up with a proper definition,
lest it come down to each language author's gut feeling.

It seems to me that the a priori/a posteriori is most well-defined when it comes
to vocabulary, because the set of all possible grammatical features is much
smaller, so it is more difficult to show that a conlang grammar does NOT have
any real-world inspiration.

On the other hand, Alan Libert's book _A Priori Artificial Languages_ includes
Lojban, which is unusual in that, while it has a (supposedly) a priori grammar,
a large part of the core vocabulary is algorithmically derived from the
vocabulary of six different natural languages, although these words are for the
most case not recognisable as such.

>   - Romlang/Germaniconlang/...
Or perhaps we could have a field named "Based on", where you could input any
number of natlangs, living or dead. Brithenig would then be based on Latin (and
possibly Welsh), Esperanto would be based on Latin, German and Russian, and Ro
would not be based on anything at all.

--
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
<JohnCowan> Can someone poke Shawn?
<JayKominek> next meeting, electroshock devices go under everyone's chairs.
<MarkShoulson> Just send an EOU to their terminal (end of user.  Makes
terminal explode)

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