Re: Toki Pona survey

Hallo!

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 19:28:54 -0400,
Jeffrey Henning <jeffrey@...> wrote:

> Joery Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> >> What do you dislike about it?
> >
> >It is yet another misguided closed-vocabulary scheme and probably
> >unable to express complex concepts, or at least very clumsy and
> >imprecise at doing so.
>
> What other misguided closed-vocabulary schemes have you seen?  (I admit they
> fascinate me.)
In fact, not all too many, perhaps five or six.

>      Have you seen any properly guided closed-vocabulary schemes?
Nope.  The misguidedness of closed-vocabulary schemes lies in their
vocabulary being closed.  Reality is too complex to capture in a
closed-vocabulary scheme.  Mark Rosenfelder put it bluntly:
"Ogden and Richards cheated"[1], and he is right in my opinion.
Closed-vocabulary schemes invariantly have to take recourse to
idiomatic expressions (the smaller the vocabulary, the sooner)
which have to be learned just like words.

>  What would they need to be properly guided?
An open vocabulary ;-)

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 19:46:32 -0400,
Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:

> Methinks a huge amount of linguistic study-- lots of uni degrees and the
> like-- are required to make a really good conlang like the one Jörg seems to
> be looking for (Ithkuil restricts itself to 3600 triconsonantal roots).
I don't really think so.  The only university degree I have is in
computer science, and it doesn't have a major bearing on my conlanging
(the only connection between computer science and conlanging is that
both deal with manipulating symbols, which is something that has been
fascinating me as long as I can remember).  What you need to come up
with a good basic vocabulary is common sense; what you need to come up
with a realistic phonology and grammar is some basic knowledge of
general linguistics, but far less than a university degree - work
your way through a textbook or two and Mark Rosenfelder's Language
Construction Kit, read a handful of grammar sketches from all
over the world (Lyovin's _Introduction to the Languages of the World_
has a good selection of grammar sketches), follow the discussions on
CONLANG for a while, and you have all the tools you need to craft
a good conlang.

And Ithkuil is not what I am looking for.  It's an ingenious
all-weather organ[2] of a language, but it doesn't give me much.
My interest lies in naturalistic artlangs, which Ithkuil is not.

[1] Mark Rosenfelder, _The Language Construction Kit_.
http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

[2] An "all-weather organ" is an enormous and absurdly complex
contraption (preferably a musical instrument), i.e. a Rube-Goldberg
device.  I found that term in a comic strip some 20 years ago.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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