CONLANG: Glosa

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

pobart:
>    Definitely.  A charge one often encounters is that Glosa is merely
>"relexified English."  I dont't think this charge is 100% so, but I
>think there is a substantial degree to which Glosa _does_ resemble
>relexified English.  But so what?  Suppose it were a regularised,
>schematised, and relexified English.  I think is it simple intellectual
>prejudice to criticise an IAL on the ground merely that it resembles
>this or that European natlang.  There are respectable grounds on which
>one may criticise such an IAL (and I am having second, third, and
>fourth thoughts about Glosa), but one must criticise the IAL itself
>taken as itself, and not merely glibly and shallowly dismiss it as
>"relexified whatever."

acadon@aol.com:
>   The grammar that Glosa does in fact have seems very close to that of
>English. in some cases pidgin English. Now this is not bad, but the fact that
>the authors of the project do not even realize this makes it difficult for
>them to teach Glosa to anyone who does not already know English. It is not
>surprizing that the Glosa moment is pretty much limited to England. Other
>than also being an analytical language, I see no evidence that Glosa's
>grammar reflects any real-world knowledge Chinese, only an idealized and
>totally imaginary one. 

I will add to this that several of the samples of Glosa I have seen not only
resemble pidgin English, but the words embody English semantic space in
such a way that Glosa is really "pidgin colloquial English".  I wish I
could present some examples.  But one problem with IALs in general is the
need to avoid inappropriate semantic mapping to the cognate words of another
language.  I have mentioned for example, how the Russians do not have a
distinct word for "hand", but use the same word for "hand" and "arm".
Different cultures mean different things by their language-word for
"morning".  When a conlanginvented by an English speaker uses the semantics
of English "morning" (e.g. I worked all morning, up until lunchtime), I am
immediately suspicious.  In the case of Glosa, the example that bugged me,
whatever it was, was worse than this - it relied on using a derived/applied
meaning rather than a basic root meaning of one of the words used - an 
example of this is to refer to "running a machine" using the word for "run"
rather than the word for "operate".

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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