Re: What criteria do you have for your own or others' languages?

Sai Emrys wrote:
> This is in prep for an essay I'm writing - to revise my /On the design
> of an ideal language/ essay into something more clearly meta and
> complete. (And also address the question of 'conlanging "schools"',
> etc.)
>
>
> Please list, in your own words (preferably detailed) what criteria you
> apply to conlangs to judge them to be (in your opinion / for your
> purposes) "better" or "worse", or more or less "likable" or
> "impressive" etc etc. They can be subjective, objective, or both.
I can't think of any consistent criteria that I use, but there are some
general tendencies. Languages that have more realistic features (i.e.,
not seeming too artificial) are the most appealing -- keeping in mind
that the amount of regularity in natlangs can vary greatly from one
language to another, so you can't just use regularity as a criterion.
But even in a more regular language, some commonly used words are likely
to be irregular. Minza, which started out as regular as I could get it,
now has irregularities in the declension of pronouns (kam, kae, köy "I,
me") because I got tired of the more regular forms (kam, kame, kamon).

One criterion I think is important is that similar sounding words should
have meanings that can't be easily confused. This becomes more of an
issue with languages that have a smaller number of different word
patterns (numbers of syllables, phonotactic patterns of consonants and
vowels, stress patterns, etc), so a language with a larger variety of
possible word patterns should score more highly. But lately I've been
criticizing Minza for having too many forms of words that don't seem to
have a consistent character to them -- as if they don't belong in the
same language (a consequence of how vocabulary for Minza was selected in
the first place).

It's important for a language to have a consistent "flavor" in a way
that's hard to put into a fixed formula. So lately I've been replacing
some Minza words, including many of the earliest words inherited from
the Lindiga project, in favor of new words created for Minza
specifically or borrowed from other languages (the Nimrína color
vocabulary, for example). Oddly enough, the Nimrína words have more of a
Minza flavor than some of the older Minza words.

Most importantly, a language has to sóund nice. That doesn't just mean
pleasant soft sounds -- I have a taste for voiceless lateral fricatives
and moderately crunchy consonant clusters -- but a language needs to
have the right sort of rhythmic flow and texture to it. Too many similar
sounding syllables in a row can be monotonous.