From owner-conlang@diku.dk Mon Feb 5 21:50:20 1996 Received: from odin.diku.dk (daemon@odin.diku.dk [130.225.96.221]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id VAA23846 for ; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 21:50:18 -0500 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by odin.diku.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) id CAA15728 for conlang-outgoing; Tue, 6 Feb 1996 02:56:59 +0100 Received: from osceola.gate.net (osceola.gate.net [199.227.0.18]) by odin.diku.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id CAA15716 for ; Tue, 6 Feb 1996 02:56:44 +0100 From: hrick@gate.net Received: from hopi.gate.net (hrick@hopi.gate.net [199.227.0.13]) by osceola.gate.net (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id UAA77250 for ; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 20:54:51 -0500 Received: (from hrick@localhost) by hopi.gate.net (8.6.9/8.6.9) id UAA22378 for conlang@diku.dk; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 20:50:49 -0500 Date: Mon, 5 Feb 1996 20:50:49 -0500 Message-Id: <199602060150.UAA22378@hopi.gate.net> To: conlang@diku.dk Subject: CONLANG: assorted topics Sender: owner-conlang@diku.dk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: hrick@gate.net Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 2807 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