CONLANG: assorted topics

[hrick@gate.net]

Some belated responses to comments that were made in January...

Phil Hunt wrote:

> People don't learn IALs because not many other people can speak them. 
> This vicious cycle can only be broken if an IAL is useful despite 
> having few speakers. This could be done by it being similar to existing 
> natlangs as in Interlingua or a simplified version of English.

Well, I disagree about how to make an IAL useful.  Making it "similar
to natural languages as in Interlingua" introduces irregularities, makes
the IAL easier for some groups to learn than for others, and reminds
the student constantly that he could instead be studying the "real"
language(s) of which the auxlang is a less useful imitation.  I suggest
that the way to make an IAL useful is to publish some useful or at
least interesting information in the IAL.  This apparently revolutionary
concept seems to not occur to many people.  I am not going to learn a
language if the only material I can ever hope to read in that language
is crossword puzzles, a translation of "The Three Bears" and other
childrens fables, and/or the Lord's Prayer.  (For more of my ranting
on this topic, see http://members.aol.com/langsource/vor212.htm)

Mark L. Vines wrote:

> I went back to Morneau's ftp site & downloaded his monograph on 
> lexical semantics.  The work -- not to mention the linguistic 
> knowledge -- he puts into this stuff is amazing.  Yet I wonder:  
> Can any language as highly inflected as he recommends really be 
> easy to learn?  He marks nouns for class & verbs for damn near 
> everything imaginable, all in the name of reducing the number of 
> basic roots which must be memorized; but I suspect it would be 
> easier to memorize a few more roots than to perform his fascinating 
> brand of semantic analysis on every utterance that requires 
> translation.

I have wondered about this too.  Rick Morneau once asserted that Lojban
is not especially suitable for use as an MT interlingua because of the
amount of understanding and interpretation needed in translating even
a relatively simple natlang sentence into correct Lojban.  It seems to
me that RM's system could be vulnerable to the same criticism.  But
perhaps I should not have an opinion, since I know nothing about MT.

The system proposed in RM's essay is certainly a masterpiece of 
internal consistency and originality.

Paul O. Bartlett wrote:

> more than once I have read that Zamenhof himself proposed
> modifications to Esperanto (what these were I 
> have never been able to determine)

I believe they are summarized nicely in Couturat & Leau's _Histoire de la 
Langue Universel_ (see my bibliography at http://members.aol.com/harrison7/
for the correct spelling ;-).  

-- Rick Harrison