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ENGELANG DESIGN GOALS Partially to sort out the hierarchy of goals for my own loglang, and partially just to kick-start a conversation, I have composed a list of nine possible design criteria that might be considered when designing an engelang. While reading, you might wish to consider the order you would rank them in importance in your own creations. (I have listed them in my own *approximate* order). Another thing to consider is their degree of relative importance, e.g. do logical languages need to favor logicality everywhere? Do IAL's need to insist on naturalness above all else? Or is balance in itself a worthy goal? Comments, questions, additions, etc. are openly invited. I'd like to collect all your ideas and revise this as an introductory overview to engelang design goals, so if you have any thoughts, do offer, please. 1. LOGICALITY An expression is logical if it evaluates to either true or false but not both (or in fuzzy logic, something in-between but not just anything. This requires more elaboration than a brief overview permits.) All natural languages are logical for the most part, but not rigorously. A language designed for logicality will pay careful attention to the logical implications of its constructions and will attempt to make the rules for logical evaluation straightforward and consistent. Logicality clearly subsumes syntactic non-ambiguity and, to a lesser extent, semantic precision, but these two items are worth discussing as separate design goals. Logicality may conflict with naturalness, simplicity, flexibility and concision. 2. SYNTACTIC NON-AMBIGUITY In the most basic sense, this means ensuring that the syntax always makes it clear which heads are being modified by which dependents. Thus, constructions like "I saw the man in the room", which is ambiguous as to whether the phrase "in the room" refers to where the man is or where the seeing took place, would not be allowed in a syntactically unambiguous language, or would be given a clear default interpretation. Syntactic non-ambiguity may occasionally conflict with simplicity, flexibility and concision. 3. SEMANTIC PRECISION Semantic precision can be applied at several levels. At the lexical level, semantic precision means ensuring that all words have a single, clear, well-defined core meaning. At the syntactic level, it means setting the minimal allowable level of semantic precision in syntactic constructions. For example, in the expression "the boy's gift", it is unclear whether the boy is the giver, the recipient, or whether there is some other vaguer relationship (he may be a courier). A more precise language might employ argument tags which indicate the role of the boy with regards to the gift. Finally, precision bears on derivation and metaphoric constructions. Unlike syntactic non-ambiguity, semantic precision is generally a matter of degree rather than a matter of "yes or no". Semantic precision subsumes syntactic non-ambiguity, but the reverse is not true. Depending on degree, it may occasionally conflict with simplicity, flexibility and concision. 4. UNIVERSALITY (NATURALNESS) Optimizing a language for universality means designing it with characteristics that are in accordance with the majority, or at least the plurality of the world's attested languages. It also means carefully avoiding characteristics which are likely to present non-trivial difficulties to significant minorities of the world's speakers. As the famously strenuous debates among auxlangers attest, this is far from a straightforward goal. In a narrower sense, naturalness means designing within the limitations of actual or perceived language universals, and avoiding, whenever possible, characteristics which are very uncommon, and avoiding completely those which are vanishingly rare or unknown. Universality may conflict most notably with logicality. 5. SIMPLICITY (REGULARITY) Simplicity and regularity are related enough to consider a single goal. Regularity means avoiding unnecessary exceptions to rules and simplicity means reducing the overall number of rules. The effect of these goals is to make the language easier to learn. Combined with universality, simplicity and regularity have the greatest impact on overall accessibility (the ability of the greatest number of people to learn the language). Excessive simplicity may conflict with flexibility and semantic precision. 6. FLEXIBILITY Flexibility means the language's semantic, syntactic, and lexical adaptability. Semantic flexibility is the ability to connect words in unusual ways; syntactic flexibility means the ability to use or derive words for different functions (parts of speech); lexical flexibility means the ability of the language to adopt and create new words. All of these forms of flexibility equip the language with the means to express new or unusual concepts. Languages that (over)emphasize semantic precision and syntactic non-ambiguity run the risk of being too rigid. A language should be flexible enough to express both the cloudy and the novel; it should also allow some mechanism for admitting similes--at the very least marking them as non-literal constructions. If there is no relief valve built-in somewhere, it is inevitable that any future speech community will build them in for you. Flexibility may conflict with directly syntactic non-ambiguity, semantic precision and simplicity. 7. CONCISION Concision means conveying the necessary information using as few syllables as possible. The most obvious method of achieving concision is bringing one's lexicon into conformance with Zipf's law--making the most frequent morphemes the shortest. A more sophisticated approach would involve examining the most frequent combinations of morphemes and giving these shorter forms, e.g. although "woman" means "human" + "female" + "adult" (and the tempting thing to do for some of us logical types is to create a three-morpheme compound), it almost certainly serves concision to coin a separate word for "woman" rather than use a compound. Concision does not impact only lexical design, it also must be taken into account when considering discourse and anaphora. In discourse, new statements inevitably build on context. Repeating the same information over and over after it has been established is not only unnatural, it overtopicalizes the repeated information, and it's annoying. As for anaphora, they must be designed to refer unambiguously to their antecedents (assuming that syntactic non-ambiguity is a design criterion). In particular, discourse is a matter of concern for loglang designers because there may be a temptation to want every statement to evaluate in the same way independently as it does in context. In other words, a truly logical language might somehow mark whenever contextual information is omitted. As difficult as this may seem, such marking could possibly be accomplished variously through the determiner, anaphoric and voice-operation systems. Suffice to say that if concision is overly neglected during language design, it will almost certainly be installed by the speech community, should one appear. As implied, concision conflicts with semantic precision, syntactic non-ambiguity, and logicality. 8. REDUNDANCY (CONTRASTIVENESS) Redundancy means building in enough contrastiveness to keep words and phrases distinct from one another. This is primarily a phonomorphological concern--the goal is to make the words sound differently. This is an important practical concern. The goal is to increase the likelihood of correct communication in noisy environments. An over-rationalized language may run the risk of reducing redundancy below the acceptable minimum. Redundancy may conflict with concision to a certain extent. 9. AESTHETICS This may seem unexpected to include on a list of goals for an engelang, which are supposed to be a relatively objective. Nevertheless, I feel that if everything else is equal, why not consider aesthetics? It may turn out well to be a selling point if you can remove any avoidable ugliness (as subjective as this may be).