Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

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, 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 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 singu=
lar
genitive.

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