Re: CHAT: EU allumettes (was: Re: THEORY/CHAT: Talmy, Jackendoff and Matchboxes

On Sunday, May 2, 2004, at 02:22 PM, And Rosta wrote:

[snip]
> I was thinking rather that since this hypothetical EU language would
> be for official & legalistic use, it might as well confer the
> additional boon of being unambiguous, in which case some kind of
> amalgam of several dozen European languages would be quite the
> wrong way to go about it.
But isn't this precisely what 18th century conlangers like Dalgarno &
Wilkins thought & aimed for. Fortunately, neither of their conlangs, nor
any other similar 'logical, philosophic' conlangs of the time caught on.
Now 3 centuries later, we see that their philosophy & logic was a wee bit
mistaken.

But if unambiguity is the aim, there's always Classical Yiklamu   ;)

[snip]
> to an equal degree. The one wholly official language would merit
> its status by virtue of its superior qualities of unambiguity
> (superior for its legalistic purposes),
I fear this is like looking for a chimaera.
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On Sunday, May 2, 2004, at 04:54 PM, Frank George Valoczy wrote:

[snuip]
>>> "An independent Faeroe Islands or Greenland? And will Esperanto or any
>>> other
>>> IAL get widely accepted in the Union government, or will they just give
>>> up
>>> on that altogether...."
>>
>> I highly doubt that.
I highly doubt it also. Esperanto's had more than a century to get
accepted, and most other would-be competitors have been around for some
time - there's no shortage of proposals, and most have had plenty of time
to make their mark.

>> Altho soon they're probably going to have to find a
>> solution...
>
> Latin?
Probably the only practical solution at present if a single language
really has to be adopted - but not the Classical lang; it would have to be
IMO the medieval model.

Quenya would be quite nice.....    ;)

Ray
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