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OT: Auxlangs (was Re: "Esperanto V.2")

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Friday, March 24, 2006, 9:32
>For auxlang design, however, I would think the >starting point should be studying the existing auxlang >projects -- especially those that have some small >community involved in them -- to decide whether yet >another one is really truly needed... but this is a topic >for the other list (auxlang@listserv.brown.edu). > >
I'm not planning to make one, but I think one is.. and auxlanging is not (IIRC) banned from this list, merely trying to convert people to specific auxlangs. The reason I think an auxlang is an interesting project is that I can only think of one intended auxlang (Lojban) that aims for power and expressiveness instead of simple easiness to learn. Now, I'm not a major fan of how Lojban does that, but at least they don't take the attitude that the only attribute an auxlang needs is to be easy to learn... it seems to me that you only learn an auxlang once, but if it's successful you have to use it for years and years. So what you want is not as simple as possible, but a powerful expressive language well suited to expressing intricate nuances of the business and political world especially. I'd like to see auxlangs with interesting new ideas and features, instead of all the bare bones clones of European languages that everyone else seems to favour. In other words, I'd like to see the occasional UNIX in the world of auxlangs, not just the Macs and Windows XPs everyone feels are perfect to the task (which are easy to learn to use, but make it a pain to do things that the designers didn't anticipate you wanting to do). A steeper initial learning curve can pay dividends at a later stage.

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Larry Sulky <larrysulky@...>