Re: [lojban] Comparison to Ilaksh?

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

I used to be of Lojbab's mind on this, but a few years with the Language Creation Society has loosened me up quite a bit.  The requirement, that a language needs to be human-usable in real time, now seems to me to be too limited in several ways  -- besides being hard to test.  I know a handful of people who claim (and I am not going to get into trying to test them) to have used Ithkuil for communication, although I don't know how real-time it was (but then, I don't know many people who do Lojban in real time either -- more than formerly, to be sure).  And, of course, I see no reason to deny language to critters other than humans, provided certain formal constraints are met  (so, maybe no terrestrial cases, but ets are open), even if they are not languages a human could use (colored patches on the skin, say, or tentacle semaphore, to cite two cases from the last LCC).  Even the structural requirements may go by, at least insofar as our knowledge goes.  I
 was willing to believe that Klingon was a language even before Okrand came along and gave it structure and I do the same for Prawn even though there does not seem to be any information about it.  Maybe that is because I see humanoids using it obviously effectively for communication with others, including humans.  In this way, many "languages" from books and movies get in even though their structures are virtually unknown, some being represented by only a couple of (unexplained) expressions or even just by names (Cthulh -- that's from memory and seems too simple, Tlo"n, whatever it was that Gulliver got called in Liliputian).  But in this they are not that different from some natural languages, e.g., Etruscan, which we are still willing to call languages.  We can go further with this sort of analogy, to cases of "languages" where all we have are unreadable texts (Phaistos disk, frinstance), so why not allow things like the "Chinese book" that contains
 many character-like items but no real characters -- and has no translation.  That is, the analogies with our knowledge of actual languages allows us to let into the fold of conlangs a large number of items that are deficient or deviant in various ways.  And given that, it seems harsh to exclude a "language" with a fully specified grammar, phonology, and semantics, just because we can't imagine anyone using it in real time.  Most artlangs are at least capable of being put into some sort of context where they make perfect sense as languages and that may be enough to count, even if that context is not (even cannot be) realized.  Them damned thousand flowers again.



----- Original Message ----
From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, May 6, 2010 9:08:59 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Comparison to Ilaksh?

And Rosta wrote:
> * Lojban aimed to be human-speakable and to acquire a speech community. Ithkuil did not aim to be usable by humans in real-time. Ilaksh is less phonetically daunting than Ithkuil, but still does not aim to be usable by humans in real-time.

I guess this is something I'll never understand.  To me, if it isn't usable as a language, then it isn't a language.  It might be a language-related art project, as many artlangs seem to be, but I won't pretend to understand or appreciate art for its own sake.

To each, their own.

lojbab

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