Re: Con-phonologies (was: Zaik! (Hi there!) - Description of Lyanjen)

Raymond Brown wrote:

> At 1:38 am -0500 31/8/00, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> >Raymond Brown wrote:
> >
> >> At 12:54 pm -0400 30/8/00, John Cowan wrote:
> >> >On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> <c> for /S/ does have precedents -- Onondaga uses that.  There are no
> >> >> conlangs AFAIK that do that, however.
> >> >
> >> >Lojban and Loglan do: "c" = /S/, "j" = /Z/.
> >>
> >> Yiklamu and Vorlin also use "c" and "j" the same was.  Didn't Ro also use
> >> the symbols that way?  I was under the impression - maybe mistakenly - that
> >> this was not an uncommon practice among north American conlangers.
>
> >I had just completely forgotten about Lojban (although I never
> >paid particular attention to the phonologies of auxlangs anyway, since
> >they're usually so contrived).
>
> I don't really see how they are, generally, more or less contrived than
> other conlang, really.  I mean - aren't all conlangs to some extent
> contrived?  And, surely, among conIALs we get all sorts of phonologies just
> as among other sorts of conlangs?
Of course, of course, there's a continuum of ingenuity that's put into conlanging.
Most of the phonologies I've seen on this group, for instance, had a lot of
thought put into them; it was obvious some serious study had been done.
For auxlangs, however, the goal is often not so much the creation of a
language as the creation of a medium, and the two notions, while superficially
similar, result in very different approaches to creating the structure of a language.
The former sees the result as a holistic entity, complete in and of itself, whose
own existence justifies itself.   The latter sees the creation as a teleological tool
to accomplish some end, say, world peace.  It often suggests the idea that the
details are unimportant as long as the goal is accomplished. It is for this reason
that we see the bloody fields of the Esperanto Wars about structure, because
languages do not, and cannot, accomplish such a feat in the abstract without
a host of other sociological factors like a decent economy and political stability,
factors which have little if anything to do with language.

So, yes, in the philosophical sense, all constructed languages are contrived
qua constructed languages.  But practically speaking, auxlangs too often carry
about  with them religious airs that confuse what the language is supposed to
be about in the first place:  to learn it and to speak it. This confusion in general
can leak into the structure if it doesn't start out with the right person or group
of persons.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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