Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

On Sunday 27 April 2003 09:28 pm, you wrote:
> Joe wrote:
>
> J> I think the most important thing about language
> J> is it's flexibility and ability to add new concepts.
> J> By that token, pheronomes are not languages,
> J> and Conlangs are.
>
> Latin does not change, so according to you it is not
> a language.
The focus was I think, on flexibility - it is possible to express
"self-powered road vehicle" = "car" in good classical Latin.  Ditto for
"self-propelled flying vehicle".

I mean, to give an example, Latin was used for over a millenium as the
language of culture.  During that period of time an Empire rose and fell, a
"high civilization" arose in northwestern Europe and spread out to the
mid-European and eastern European communities.  The Latin that was used back
in in the early days of the Roman Republic would not have been understood by
the likes of Voltaire and Goethe, but it was the same language - the
difference was that it added words for concepts, and adapted its syntax and
phonology to the spoken languages of the people using it.

You find the same thing occuring in any Classical language, Sanskrit for one,
Arabic for another, Chinese for yet another ...  And I am currently finding
out just how flexible Te Reo Maori (the New Zealand Maori language) is at
expressing ideas that it could never have expressed when it was reduced to
writing and used to translate the Bible.

What separates a language from a code or cypher is that a code or cypher or
some similar form of signalling such as the dog's vocal communication, is
that the language is a symbolic form of communication, therefore the
correspondence between a word and an object exists only in the user - much
the same sort of thing occurs in programming languages, of course:

void main(void)
{
int i = 0;
for(i; i < 200; i+=2){
printf("How do I love thee, let me count the ways\n");
printf("Woof!\n");
}
printf("Well I tried of course to tell her\n");
printf("Of the thousand rainy days since we first met\n");
printf("It's a big enough umbrella\n");
printf("But it's always me that ends up\n");
printf("Getting wet!\n");
}

is completely symbolic - there is no necessary connection between the symbols,
eg, int i = 0;
and what is happening in the machine.  it is an arbitrary correspondence,
that's all, and it can be used to mean all sorts of things, eg:

library IEEE;
use IEEE,std_logic_1164.all;
entity Vchap1mux is
port ( A, B, S: in   STD_LOGIC;
                Z: out  STD_LOGIC);
end Vchap1mux;
architecture Vchap1mux_arch of Vchap1mux is
begin
Z <= A when S = '0' else B;
end Vchap1mux_arch;

which describes a multiplexing circuit in "Digital Design" - an AND circuit if
my memory and understanding of the logic serves me right - if the circuit
line S is HIGH/ON/whatever, A connects to Z, otherwise B does.  But A, B, S,
Z are all arbitrary referents, as are the words "entity", "architecture" etc.
Nothing except the existence of the logic and the implements of that logic,
eg, the VHDL compiler, the simulator, etc, connect what I have typed out, to
real-life circuits and computers.

Hope this helps.

Wesley Parish
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."