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I've thought of two more goals.
LEARNABILITY. -- The lang shd be easy to grasp the principles of
and easy to remember.
ICONICITY. This can manifest itself in various ways, such as
seeking a nonarbitrary association between morpheme and meaning,
or in seeking a wide ranging system whereby words with similar
meanings have similar sounds.
Below I list the goals mentioned so far in order of their
importance to Livagian.
Regarding Mike's SEMANTIC PRECISION goal, I found his characterization
a bit unclear. It could be construed as any of these:
(i) Avoidance of semantic ambiguity, so that every sentence has exactly
one encoded meaning, even if it is a vague one.
(ii) Avoidance of vagueness.
(iii) Making it possible to express very precise meanings.
I choose to treat (i) as falling under LOGICALITY. (ii) does not
strike me as a particularly common or defensible goal. So I will
construe SEMANTIC PRECISION as (iii).
Regarding Mike's SIMPLICITY (REGULARITY) goal, I think we
need to distinguish between
A. GLOBAL/FUNCTIONAL SIMPLICITY. Minimizing the overall size
of the grammar, if necessary by stripping out certain
functionalities.
B. LOCAL/FORMAL SIMPLICITY. Making a given function or
construction as simple as possible.
These two types of simplicity are familiar from other design
fields.
I. Primary uncompromisable goals:
LOGICALITY. Every sentence determinately encodes a single (possibly
incomplete or underspecified) logical formula.
SYNTACTIC NON-AMBIGUITY
II. Major compromisable goals:
PARSABILITY. Complications to the basic simple parsing algorithm
are allowable in special circumstances.
REGULARITY. No unmotivated exceptions. (-- which means total
regularity, in effect) [NB In conlanging, regularity is easier
to achieve than irregularity, so this goal does not loom very
large for the engelanger. OTOH, it tends to loom larger for
the naturalistic artlanger, who has to make the effort to
introduce irregularity.]
III. Major driving forces.
ICONICITY. There is a pervasive desire to avoid arbitrariness in
the sound shapes of words.
SEMANTIC PRECISION.
LOCAL/FORMAL SIMPLICITY.
IV. Secondary goals.
FLEXIBILITY.
CONCISION.
COMPENDIOUSNESS. The addition of extra very nonbasic vocabulary
with very specific or nuanced meaning, so as to give the
language greater expressiveness.
A major source of grammatical complexity is the addition of extra
devices to increase flexibility and concision.
V. Marginal goals.
REDUNDANCY. Great care is taken to ensure sufficient redundancy
in the phonology. But OTOH beyond that, much effort is taken
to *avoid* redundancy.
AESTHETICS. The aesthetics really resides in the other goals,
and aesthetics never forms an independent goal (not even when
none of the others apply). But striking the balance between
the other goals requires bringing into play certain aesthetic
judgements, such as the avoidance of monotony.
VI. Non-goals.
LEARNABILITY.
NATURALNESS.
GLOBAL/FUNCTIONAL SIMPLICITY.
--And.