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

On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 12:27:18AM -0800, Sai Emrys wrote:
[...]
> 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.
[...]

This may sound vague and indefinite, but I like conlangs that have
"character". By this, I mean that it should have a "flavor" or "feel",
(be it sound flavor, or idiosyncratic choice of phraseology, etc.) that
is consistent, and unique. I dislike conlangs that feel like they are
mass-produced, e.g., auto-generated vocabulary or completely rigid
grammatical rules. (Not that I am not guilty of the latter myself.) Good
music composers write in a "style" or "flavor" that often immediately
identifies who the composer is, whereas mediocre composers write
mediocre pieces that leave no lasting impression. Similarly with
conlangs.

On a more objective level, I like novel features in conlangs, such as a
novel phonology or syntactic feature, say an unusual typology, or a
clever way of expressing something that can only be expressed in a
verbose way in another lang. But the over-arching criteria over all
these is that these features must "fit", must form a coherent, workable
system (not a hodge-podge of cool ideas the author chanced upon).
Moreover, this system should bear the mark of its uniqueness,
characteristics which immediately identify it, as opposed to some
standard average non-descript twice recycled system.

In general, I've found that having a conculture helps a lot in these
criteria, even though strictly speaking having a conculture isn't really
a requirement in my evaluation. But too often, not having a conculture
results in a bland, generic lang that has nothing memorable to speak of.


T

--
Ph.D. = Permanent head Damage