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Re: How to evaluate a conlang

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 28, 2005, 13:12
Hi!

Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> writes:
> Staving João Ricardo de Mendonça: > >How do you evaluate a conlang? How do you define a "good" or a "bad" > >conlang? I understand this is a personal criteria, so I'm not looking > >for a definitive answer. I just wanted to know other people's opinions > >on this. > > I personally would start by reviewing the artistic aims of the > creator. Are his or her aims interesting, or coherent? Are they flawed > in some way (e.g. setting a goal that cannot realistically be > achieved)? Does the conlang achieve its stated aims, and how does it > go about doing so? e.g. Kélen aims to be a convincingly alien > language, and does this by abolishing the large open class of verbs, > found in all human languages, with a small, closed class of > relationals. ...
I'd say in *most* languages. The counterexample I will cite without knowing much about the language is Basque, which was claimed here to have only very few real verbs. Wrt. the original question: I do essentially the same: look for what the author's goals were and see how nicely they were achieved. Additionally, I can't help but also apply my own ideals to a conlang I read about. I usually find languages nice that are original -- they don't need to be very alien. This is very hard to formalise, of course, and just pure personal taste. When designing a conlang myself, I start making a list of goals. Usually, those goals have developed over a certain time, then trigger the start of a new conlang, and only need to be formulated. Sometimes, however, this process leads to unsolvable problems because the goals are contradictory, and then it either becomes a funny conlang, or none at all. :-) **Henrik