[...]
Anthony McCarthy
Sun May 4 12:07:46 49558,
I'd have to see what it was, the active, using community it attracted, the ways
it is USEFUL and the literature it produced. One person doesn't determine if
one conlang is better than another, a community that adopts and uses it does.
That is if it isn't something ridiculously impractical such as Loglan or Toki
Pona
The history of Esperanto "improvements" is a long one but the only ones that
have been successful are minor points which have changed in the century + of
its use by a community of users. The basic structure of the language has,
already, passed the test of time in users whose native languages have been from
many different families of languages around the world. Several of the best
writers in Esperanto grew up speaking such non-Indo-European languages as
Japanese and Hungarian.
Mike S.
Sun May 4 12:07:48 49558,
Loglan is often presented as a "logical language", but actually it was a
homebrew project putatively designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That
needs to be fully appreciated if you wish to understand why the language was
designed the way it was. Starting in 1955, the creator seems to have been
working mostly on his own, with minimal input from others, and never
incorporated the various advances in transformational grammar, formal
semantics, case role theory, etc that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. Along
the way, innumerable kludges, patches and just plain bizarre design decisions
found their way into the language over the time of several decades. Suffice
to say that Loglan and Lojban should not be presented as IALs. However, just as
with Toki Pona,some enthusiasts did not get the memo that the language was NOT
designed to be an IAL. I will say, however, that a properly reformed loglanoid
language could probably be used as an auxlang. Such a language might be useful
in clearing up ambiguities that might arise between people of different
cultural backgrounds in conversation, arguably helping to avoid
misunderstandings. Whether a properly reformed loglanoid would ever attract a
significant following and a movement is, of course, an entirely different
question.
[...]
