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John Cowan: > Rick Morneau scripsit: > > > As I understand it, an engilang is simply a language that is completely > > regular in all aspects of its grammar, including semantics, syntax, > > morphology, and pronunciation. > > Not necessarily. Engelangs could incorporate irregularity if there > something resembling an engineering justification for it. In Old Loglan, > for example, the process of forming compounds was irregular: one chose > small chunks of the source words and formed them irregularly into a > compound. The justification, of course, was brevity. > > In the end it was discovered that regularity had an advantage that justified > the lack of brevity: it prevented two different compound-creators from > creating the same compound from different source words. It has been argued (I can't remember whether it has been psycholinguistically proved) that where regularly inflected forms are phonologically discriminable from uninflected forms, there is an advantage to having some frequent words have irregular inflected forms that in form appear to be uninflected. An example would be _bent_, which could be monomorphemic, in contrast to *bended, which couldn't. The engineering rationale is that (supposedly) forms whose phonological shape shows them to be inflected are morphologically parsed before the word is looked up in the lexicon, whereas forms whose phonological shape is such that they could be monomorphemic are looked straight up in the lexicon. For frequent words, bypassing the parsing stage saves time and effort. I mention this not to endorse it, but to give an example of another rationale for irregularity. --And.