Re: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs (was Re: Poll)

Philip Newton wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 19:01, deinx nxtxr <deinx.nxtxr@...> wrote:
>>>   [snip]
>>>>>      Even Sindarin or Quenya could be
>>>>> expanded to serve as an auxlang if UN so wished it (now there's
>> an
>>>>> interesting alternative history    ;)
>>>> I have seen such proposals at least for Quenya.
>>> That doesn't surprise me one bit.
>> Me neither given that Klingon has been brought up too.  The only
>> problem with these are they are artistic creations so not really
>> designed to be easy to learn and use.
>
> Heh. Wasn't Klingon even specifically designed to be "unnatural" from
> the point of view of "common" Earth languages? (For example, in having
> odd gaps in its phoneme grid, and an unusual word order; possibly
> other things, too.)
So was Loglan and, hence, Lojban    :)

James Cooke Brown's wanted to create a language that would be
_different_ from "common" earth languages! The idea was to see if a
language with a different structure from normal natlangs would influence
thought (which is what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says it should do) -
so he choose clausal form logic as a model.

Nevertheless, despite its 'innaturalness' many people do seriously
propose Lojban as an auxlang. It seems unnaturalness is not per_se a
hindrance to the advocacy of a language as an auxlang. Indeed, SolReSol,
which had quite a vogue at one time, doesn't exactly conform to the
'natural' mold     :)

--
Ray
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