Re: Most developed conlang

> 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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