Re: Most developed conlang

Jim Henry wrote:
> On 4/25/07, Edgard Bikelis <bikelis@...> wrote:
>
>>     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...
>
> Corpus size was one of the criteria proposed for the draft
> Wikipedia conlangs policy.  I would tend to agree that however
> complete a language appears to be from its grammar description
> and lexicon, its having a tiny corpus or no corpus at all would make
> me hesitate to call it "complete" or "well developed".  But most of this
> discussion has centered on how to count the size of a language's
> vocabulary or lexicon, a different issue altogether, and perhaps
> a more interesting one, because different decisions about how
> to count words, morphemes, idiomatic phrases, etc. probably have
> a more dramatic impact on the lexicon size than on the corpus
> size.
It seems to me that corpus size is mainly an indication of widespread
interest in a language -- like Klingon for instance. If you compare the
actual documentation on the Klingon language with some of the more
well-developed conlangs, I think you might get a better feel for the
difference than just comparing the number of words in the Klingon
translations of Shakespeare (the work of numerous Star Trek fans) with
the amount of text that a lone author has written in their own langauge.

It's clear that widespread interest in a language is an obvious
criterion for the usefulness of featuring the language on a site like
Wikipedia; it makes sense that that would be one of their criteria. But
even as complete and nicely done as Klingon is, it doesn't seem that it
would be too hard to outdo it in completeness and well-development, if
that was your goal. No doubt some of the list members' own langs
approach or surpass this level of development. But I'd be surprised if
anyone here has written as much text in one of their languages as the
collective efforts of Klingon fans.