Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

At 1:39 am -0500 12/6/99, Tom Wier wrote:
>Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>> Tom Wier wrote:
>> > There's no objective way to say
>> > one way is or is not better than another.
>>
>> Well, there are objective ways of saying that when it comes to
>> auxlangs.  An auxlang should be expressive and easy to learn.  Part of
>> ease is, of course, the language background potential speakers are
>> coming from, but another part is objective: one declension is easier to
>> learn than 5.
Yes - but no declensions are easier to learn than 1!

[snip]

>> Exactly, but conlanging is different than auxlanging.  In conlanging,
>> the intended speakership is (usually) only the creator, so you can do
>> what you like best.  I like agglutination, another likes isolating, or
>> fusional, or whatever.  I like gender, another might not.
>
>I consider auxlanging a subset of conlanging.
...and so it is if by 'auxlanging' is meant the _construction_ of potential
IALs.

Nik seems to me to be defining conlanging very narrowly as 'artlanging'.  I
was once told in no uncertain terms that _any_ type of conlang is open for
discussion on this list - it is not restricted to artlangs.  (I also don't
disagree with that either, I just once expressed caution about conIALs :)

The loglans are discussed here from time to time & at least one of them,
lojban, claims IIRC that it could be used (and I believe to some extent is
used) as an auxlang.  Indeed it could.

Another interesting type of conlang is the 'experimental' type, e.g.
AllNoun, and here the author is deliberately restricting herself/himself to
certain forms and excluding others they may personally like.

And where does one place a language like NGL which, if I understand aright,
aims to go further than the traditional auxlangs and to become the L1 of
its next generation of international speakers?  Yet few here, I think,
would say NGL is not a conlang.

And, it seems to me, the boundaries between these different types are
fuzzy.  Klingon, I guess, would be put in the artlang camp; but it has
attracted quite a following & has even has a modest corpus of Klingon
written works.  As its users do not all come from the same nationality or
even from speakers of the same natlangs, it can claim an auxlang status.

>Auxlanging has a specific
>audience and a specific set of intentions (generally speaking), but auxlangs
>are, afterall, conlangs.
Yep - indeed, they are (at least the planned or constructed ones, as
opposed to those of natlang origin like the Greek Koine, French, Spanish,
English etc - but I guess the use of these would not be considered as
'auxlanging').

[snip]

>> > I think he [Zamenhof] knew fairly little about agglutinating
>>languages, and he
>> > felt that they would make grammatical processes clearer than
>> > either isolating or inflectional languages.
>>
>> I wonder if that was by accident?
I think not.

Although Z began his efforts IIRC as a schoolboy starting from the
languages he knew - Hebrew, Polish, Russian & German and Latin & Greek (& I
think French) from his schooling.  But at some during his schooling he was
taught English and this was quite a revelation & his language became much
simplified.  Indeed, the whole thrust of his language planning was surely
towards simplicity & regularity.

(OK - the guy could've done better on both accounts. But maybe we should
not judge him by the standards of linguists at the end of the 20th cent,
living in a world where global communication is easy).

The young Z would surely have noticed agglutinating tendencies in the Latin
verbal systems, e.g. canta-ba-m, canta-ba-s, canta-ba-t.  (Indeed, several
years back I wrote a Prolog program that can successfully parse practically
all Latin verbs correctly one it knows the verb's 'principlal parts'; the
program makes full use of such tendencies).  It would certainly have
occurred to him to entend and regularize this principle.

Also it is my understanding is that as an adult he had become aware of
earlier attempts to produce auxlangs and these, e.g. Volapuek, had adopted
the agglutinating principle.

No, although Z probably knew next to nothing about 'typically
agglutinating' natlangs such as Finnish, Hungarian & Turkish, he almost
certainly deliberately chose the agglutinative model as one which, in his
opinion, would give both maximum regularity and maximum flexibility.

Ray.