Re: "Theory informs practice" - OK?

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
> --- On Tue, 11/11/08, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
>> My question for you practising conlang creators is this:
>>   How much, if at all, do theoretical considerations like
>>   those discussed in the review (and of course, the
>>   book) influence your thinking and activity?
In designing an engelang, I'm apt to look for ways to mark
distinctions like the one you mentioned which seem logically
or philosophically important but which few if any natlangs bother
to grammaticalize.  In designing a naturalistic human artlang,
not so much.  For an exolang, probably somewhere in between
-- looking to theory (not just in linguistics but in philosophy and
math) for ideas about distinctions alien languages might make
that human languages don't, for instance, but still assuming
those alien languages will evolve ad-hoc into messy, irregular
sets of trade-offs between conciseness and expressivity
and not tend toward an extreme like an engelang.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article