Re: The Great Sundering (was Re: basic morphemes of a loglang)

Hallo!

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 17:25:38 -0800,
Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...> wrote:

> I think your understanding is quite correct. It
> is true many of us do not talk about even the
> design of auxlangs here, for the simple reason
> that the Politics of Auxlanging is very much
> bound up in the design of the language.
Very true.  Designing an auxlang means choosing features of a language
guided by the opinion that the choice taken serves to advance the
general design goals of an auxlang, namely ease of use, cultural
neutrality, full expressive power including capability of handling
scientific and legal matters (an issue often missed by auxlangers;
but an auxlang where you can't express more complex notions than
"How much is the fish?" is a bad auxlang), and nowadays also
computer tractability.  Whichever choice you make, people will
judge your choice against the design goals mentioned above, and
some of them *will* have a different opinion than you have.
Voilà, auxlang advocacy has crept in, and the crowd will (justifiably)
shout: "Take that to AUXLANG!"

The logical conclusion is not to discuss the design in CONLANG
in the first place, but to go to AUXLANG from the start.

>       About a
> year ago, we had someone trot out a
> "philosophical" language, which I think turned
> out to actually be an auxlang.
I remember.

Well, most philosophical languages I am aware of were designed
more or less with the purpose of an auxlang in mind.
And designers of philosophical languages usually have quite whackish
ideas about which kind of language is best - otherwise they
would not design philosophical languages ;-)

>       That was all well
> and good, but it wasn't long before the
> perpetrator was preaching his wares as the Answer
> to all our problems. The usual auxlang spiel.
Not all auxlangers make that bold a claim, but all of them
believe that their auxlang will solve at least *some* of the
major problems of modern society, otherwise they wouldn't
take the trouble of working out an auxlang...

> While loglangs and auxlangs may be discussed
> here, it should be noted that authors of same who
> spew their politics here are subject to righteous
> flaming.
Exactly.

> It's a matter of prefering to keep this area
> happy and friendly; the price may be to
> vuluntarily exclude some topics. Auxlangs being
> one such.
Yes.  They are *practically* off limits, because the design issues
can hardly be divorced from the "political" issues, as I have pointed
out above.

But then there is a sort of "grey area" between auxlangs and artlangs,
which is where the loglangs roam, amongst other rare beasts such
as BrSc and Rick Morneau's Nasendi (formerly Katanda) language from
his famous "Lexical Semantics" book, and where auxlang advocacy
is lurking in the undergrowth.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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