Re: Most developed conlang

On 4/20/07, Ben Haanstra <kof@...> wrote:

> I'm actually wondering which language has it's uses. I mean specifally that
> you use it to simplify things in the world, like a language which helps you
> at math or something, or to express things that aren't really easy in your
> motherstongue or even impossible.
G.K. Chesterton said,

>>It is a good exercise to try for once in a while to express any
opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social
utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all
criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more
humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like
that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your
skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to jail and Brown to say
when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of
horror, that you are obliged to think.
<<
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/gkc.htm

I find sometimes that I get a similar benefit from trying to express some
complex thought in Toki Pona; or, more generally, that I sometimes can
get a train of thought unstuck by switching languages.


Claude Piron reports that he confuses the directions left and right
less often when speaking Esperanto than when using his native
French, or other languages he is fluent in.


One of my goals for gjâ-zym-byn was to be able to concisely express
distinctions that are not easy to make concisely in English.  I partially
succeeded, especially with respect to the spacetime postposition system
and the extensive vocabulary for emotions and mental states; but
on average gzb turns out to be more verbose than English, I think.

Attempting to learn and use early gzb's primes-based number system
probably improved my math skills some, though not so much that
I did not eventually feel a need to supplement it with a base-10 and
a base-16 system.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm