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

Given that a conlang would have a limited practical advantage for
learning, it has to be relatively easy to learn for me to engage into
this task. If it is overwhelming, I give up. So, I prefer conlangs
which have either a regular grammar with simple rules or a vocabulary
which I can mostly recognize at first sight (IALA Interlingua comes to
my mind). Not that I do not appreciate other conlangs, but you also
asked which conlangs I would be willing to be fluent in...
I also value lack of grammar genders, simple verb use and phone*ic
alignment between the written and spoken forms.
Another issue I value is the simplicity of the alphabet. For instance,
if it does not contain diacritics, the language earns more points.
Moreover, the symmetric treatment of sex is valued. Unless the conlang
is very naturalistic, I do not appreciate that the masculine and
neutral forms are the same while we have a different form for the
feminine.
Finally, everything should be documented in a comprehensible way. The
quality of the tutorial materials is one of the most important
extralinguistic quality factors of a language.
I think it is because of this that I prefer conauxlangs, pidgins and creoles.
However, Jörg is right in his opinion that any conlang ought to be
measured against the
purpose or design goals set by the creator. The quality criteria I
have put here just reflect my bias to conIALs. But I also have
analysed some "pure" artlangs, and I find some of them fascinating.

Antonielly Garcia Rodrigues

On 12/6/06, 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
>