Re: proposed conlang database & my classification

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002 09:40:05 -0800, Garrett Jones <alkaline@...>
wrote:

>http://conlang.alkaline.org
>
>changes:
>1. I bulleted the design motivation list - reorganized the artistic list,
>added the 'naming language' category. I want to try to get most languages to
>fit into one of the sub-categories. Are there any other subcategories under
>these four that i didn't list, that languages fit into?
I haven't been following the discussion, so I might be missing something,
but the two main languages I'm currently working on, Tirelhat and Ludireo,
don't seem to fit well into any of these subcategories. I'd classify
Tirelhat as personal or artistic, certainly not auxiliary or experimental.
But it's clearly not intended as a secret language (or I wouldn't have it
on a web page), and it isn't designed to be the language of a fictional
population. Currently, I've only used it for translations, but eventually
I'd like to do some original writing in it. So it's really not easy to
categorize.

Ludireo would probably end up in the artistic category, but it really
belongs in the international subcategory. But it's definitely not an
auxiliary language. Who'd bother learning words borrowed from 40 different
languages?

Also, what would you do with auxiliary fictional languages that are spoken
both by humans and aliens?

>a posteriori
>-simplification
>-phonological modification
>-spelling reform
>-natural evolution (descendent)
>-blend (multiple language sources)
>-unaltered (grammar modifications only)
"Multiple language sources" can mean two different things: individual words
from different languages (like Esperanto or Ludireo), or words created by
blending the sounds of words from more than one language (like Lojban). It
might be nice to distinguish these, although there are probably few enough
languages of the second kind that it wouldn't matter much.

>So, esperanto would be a blend, and Ido would be an 'unaltered'. Fictional
>languages like Klingon and Quenya would be a priori, random generation.
"Random" implies generating vocabulary or assigning meanings automatically,
by computer or analogous methods like rolling dice or shuffling decks of
cards. My own language Tilya is an example of this approach, as is Mark
Line's Classical Yiklamu. I think the word you're looking for is
"arbitrary".

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