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

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:57:58 +0100, Ina van der Vegt wrote:
>
>> But Auxlanging isn't fun anyway. I am most likely some sort of mix
>> between funlanger and artlanger, and as long as we have English as our
>> Auxlang, I won't have to worry.
>
> I can understand that someone finds pleasure in tackling
> the intellectual challenge of designing an auxlang which
> offers a good trade-off between the various criteria of
> quality, but like you, I find artlanging much more fun.
I suppose my old Eklektu and Ludireo projects would fall into that
category, although not intended as auxlangs. The natlang-derived
vocabulary, the simple, regular grammar. I pretty much ended up getting
overwhelmed by the number of possible word choices I had with dozens of
languages to pick from for source material. Maybe a similar project with
a more limited scope could be an interesting project.

> Indeed.  By "private language", W. meant a language that
> was constituted in a way that nobody but its inventor was
> possible to understand it, and he concluded - rightly -
> that such a language is logically impossible.  This does
> not mean that conlangs don't work, but that conlangs are
> *never* private, and are thus equally capable of
> functioning as means of communication as natlangs (if
> certain requirements regarding "completeness" are met,
> of course) - which is the *exact opposite* of what
> my brother thinks Wittgenstein had said!
Interesting. Yes, it helps to have context -- I might have brought up a
language I created once for writing notes in class that no one else
could read -- but that's a completely different meaning of "private".
Nothing about it would be impossible for others to understand -- it had
an alphabetic script, a grammar unlike English but not violating any
universals as far as I know, and a very limited vocabulary that grew as
I needed new words.

> English has its "weak spots", mainly in phonology and
> especially orthography, but also in having irregular verbs
> and all that - yet it is the language most widely used in
> international communication worldwise.  But indeed, the pros
> and cons of various auxlangs is a touchy matter :)
Well, it's hard to beat English for vocabulary (but mainly because of
all the borrowings from other languages).

>>> I have seen such proposals at least for Quenya.
>> That doesn't surprise me one bit.
>
> Me not, either.  Indeed, Quenya has some strengths: it is
> beautiful (OK, that is subjective, but I guess many people
> will agree with me), with little difficulty in prounciation,
> it is culturally neutral because it is a priori, the grammar
> is mostly regular; yet, it is not an optimal IAL because
> many things could be simplified, especially its Latin-like
> grammar with 10 or so noun cases.  But indeed, Volapük wasn't
> any better!
Tolkien certainly had an aesthetic sense for the sound of words, both
Quenya and Sindarin. I'd think the state of documentation would be a
problem though.

> I would say that two streams met in my mind.  It was also
> about 1980 when I first time heard of Esperanto (though
> without having an idea what it actually looked like), and
> started dabbling with artificial languages.  Also, 1980
> was the year when my elder brother started learning Latin
> in school - and curious as I am, I browsed through his
> Latin grammar and saw all those beautiful inflectional
> paradigms, and wanted to do just that kind of thing!
I don't remember if I knew about Esperanto when I started Olaetian back
in 1978-1979, but I did a couple of years later. Olaetian grammar (not
vocabulary) was more influenced by natlangs, mainly French and Spanish,
but after learning about Esperanto one of my languages was a more
regular, artifical language with some similarities to Esperanto.