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

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 00:27:18 -0800, Sai Emrys <sai@...> 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.
>Please don't get into whether some criteria are better or worse than
>*other* criteria; that is definitely not what I am asking. I'm ONLY
>asking about how YOU evaluate languages; i.e. what YOU like in them
>(when choosing which you want to learn, how you want to make
>something, or what other conlangs you think are really cool and 'well
>done').
>- Sai
>P.S. ZBB thread on same topic here:
>http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=19983
>=========================================================================
Since I haven't made much progress on my own conlangs yet, I will just give
you my criteria for other people's conlangs.

(I'd _love_ to be able to apply "learnable and usable (=understandable,
speakable, readable, and writable)" as criteria, but it's really hard to
make a conlang satisfy those, and hard to tell how well anyone has
succeeded when they have.)

I have two criteria:
1) Do I understand the creator's description of his/her 'lang?
2) Does the 'lang "do something interesting"?

For most conlangs I look at, the answers are "yes" and "yes"; or, at least,
I _guess_ the answer to (1) is "yes", and _in_my_opinion_ the answer to (2)
is "yes".

-------
Is that a good answer to your question, or should I elaborate, or did I
leave something out?

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