Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

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.  Regular agglutination is easier than completely fusional
> systems.
...which was not, unfortunately, my point.  Certainly, how baroque
the declensional pattern is can be objectively measured if there is no
apparent synchronic reason for their existence (as with, say, Latin), eve=
n
if historicly there may be one. I was speaking purely of morphology
versus syntactic wordorder as a method of conveying grammatical
information.

> > Which, of course, is what makes conlanging fun. :)
>
> 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.  Auxlanging has a specific
audience and a specific set of intentions (generally speaking), but auxla=
ngs
are, afterall, conlangs.  Only between artlangs and auxlangs is there any
real fundamental difference.

> > I think he 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?  In my first conlang, I had some
> degree of agglutination without even knowing what that was, I just
> didn't want to create a lot of suffixes, so I had things like -f-f =3D
> genitive; -=E1- =3D masc/fem singular, so that -f=E1f was masculine sin=
gular
> genitive.
Not really sure about that.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Things just ain't the way they used to was."
     - a man on the subway
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