Re: How to evaluate a conlang

Hallo!

João Ricardo de Mendonça wrote:

> 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.
This is indeed an interesting question that has been discussed here
several times.

In my opinion, there is no absolute criterion what makes a "good"
conlang.  Any conlang ought to be gauged against its design goals.

An international auxiliary language, for example, is to be evaluated
by such criteria as international neutrality, easy learnability and
full expressive power (a jargon where one can merely express such
simple concepts as "How much is the fish?" is not enough - an IAL
ought to be capable of handling scientific and legal matters as well).

With artlangs, things are different, and it again depends on the
"school" of artlang the creator adheres to.  The greatest "school"
is probably the "naturalist" school, who seek to create languages
that resemble natural languages.  Such a naturalist conlang ought
to mimic the complexity found in natural languages, and should
by the same token not be a relexification of any other language.
If someone says, "This is the language of a tiny minority in the
Austrian Alps that survived the spread of Indo-European in Europe",
then the language should be a plausible pre-Indo-European language
of the Austrian Alps.  It should not have features that give away
its artificiality (such as a self-segregating morphology); it also
should not show features known to be restricted to an area which
it doesn't belong to (e.g., clicks).  Or to take another example:
a Romance conlang ought to be derived from Latin by a series of
*plausible* sound changes - not some bizarre and arbitrary
permutations of phonemes such as /n/ > /b/, but sound changes
observed in natlangs, such as /t/ > /d/ in intervocalic position.

But not all artlangs are naturalist artlangs.  There are those
among us who wish to explore the vast possibilities of languages
that lie beyond the limits of what is found in human languages,
either under the rationale of designing languages of alien
sapients, or as a piece of linguistic abstract art.  These people
set themselves a particular design goal, e.g., "a language that
doesn't involve any lip movement", or "a language that uses a
stack-based syntax and has nouns as the only open lexical class",
and proceed making a language that meets this goal.  You may like
the resulting language or not, it is a perfectly legitimate kind
of conlanging, and the resulting languages are often highly original.

And after all, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

Greetings,

Jörg.