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Re: Most developed conlang

From:Edgard Bikelis <bikelis@...>
Date:Thursday, April 26, 2007, 1:50
> I hadn't looked that closely at the list either, but I suspect you're > right. > However, some adjectives in |-ic| also have a variant form in |-ical|: > > economic/economical, electric/electrical, geometric/geometrical, > historic/historical, theoretic/theoretical > > While the alternants are not perfect synonyms, there doesn't seem to be a > consistent meaning or function contributed by |-al|. > > As Roger points out, adding |-ally| is phonologically > indistinguishable from > merely adding |-ly|. So why does the orthography insist on it? It's a > problem I think I'll look into ... > > --Ph. D. >> > Dirk >
Hi! Why not measure language development based on the size of its corpus? Provided it is meaningful, the language needs to be fairly developed to endure, say... twenty pages. But maybe I'm counting too much on the good senses of my hypothetical conlanger... If we just count words, we need to decide what exactly to count. If each possible thing between (written...) spaces counts, then synthetic languages will win by far, artificially; if we exclude what is paradigmatic, we still need to choose the limits of the paradigm: from the singular/plural to each possible suffix (i'm thinking indo-europeanly, sorry ; ) ). Counting suffixes is problematic, too... because they are not, synchronically at least, words per se. Will slices of words count as words/'lexical entries' too? I think they are not entities by themselves... they need something to be attached, and a meaningful result thereof. If this necessity is accepted, that of meaning, then only words arranged meaningfully on a text would be counted, as the true realisation of each word's meaning. The problem, then, is how to find meaning. A good problem, given that those texts are by nature in a language foreign to most of us. But even texts in languages I know are fairly meaningless to me, and still... I hope... the writer meant to say something. Alas, what to do, then? Cry ; ). And stick with words with 'meaningful meaning', and that's much easier to see: just count entries at the dictionary. The rest must be paradigmatic. Well, but that was about development. Ah, just count the corpus. If it's translatable, and the translation is anything with sense, let it be... Edgard. (yep, I concluded while writing.)

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Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>