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"And Rosta" <a-rosta@a...> wrote: > I've thought of two more goals. > > LEARNABILITY. -- The lang shd be easy to grasp the principles of > and easy to remember. This goal, I believe, subsumes naturalness, simplicity, and regularity, but in addition could be the motivation for other design choices, e.g. the selection of an a_posteriori vocabulary. Thus, it is a goal in its own right, and a good addition to the list. > 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. This is a goal I clearly did not have in mind for my language, except that certain series of closed-class words are formed with same starting consonants. This is arguably a form of aesthetics in that it adds conceptual elegance, although it can be said to augment learnability too. Taken to extremes, this goal would definitely conflict with redundancy. It's an interesting goal; reminiscent of the philosophical languages, it does make me wonder whether and to what degree such a language would facilitate the thought process. Another one to add to the list. > 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. This seems to refer to avoidance of homonyms, which I feel is more related to either MSS/syntactical ambiguity or to logicality as you suggested. Kaliputra has described the essential differences between precision and non-ambiguity. I have been endeavoring to use these terms, well, precisely. > (ii) Avoidance of vagueness. Well of course this goal as stated is simply quite impossible. What I had in mind was selecting the degree of vagueness, or, if you will, the minimum level of precision. Partially, I think, the designer will have an impact in this area when the lexicon is first assembled--the more primitives with finer distinctions, the more precision. For example, we could choose eleven primitives for color terms or only three. However, what I really had in mind were specific situations regarding syntax. My idea is that if a modifier is connected to a head, and the relationship is not only crystal clear semantically (a case role for example) but also the most frequent construction form, then it makes sense to prescribe this minimal level of precision for the briefest/simplest construction. Another construction can and should be made available in the event that the default case is too preceise, but this should be the positively marked construction, insofar as it is the less frequent construction. Mulling my comments about the lexicon, perhaps I should have called this category "Semantic Precision & Expressiveness". > (iii) Making it possible to express very precise meanings. I also had this in mind. But as I just described, I think the language can not only make possible but actually encourage, to some extent by offering conveniences in the way of simplicity and brevity (when it makes good statistical sense to do so), and primitive lexicon. > 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 This comes as no surprise :-) > 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.] Indeed, that's a good point. > 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. I agree. > VI. Non-goals. > LEARNABILITY. > NATURALNESS. > GLOBAL/FUNCTIONAL SIMPLICITY. > > --And. A very interesting and revealing list. What surprises me most about your list is the placement of naturalness in the non-goal slot. Although I have no intention of ever offering my loglang as an IAL (I'm afraid I don't really have much interest in the "language problem" --better called, IMO, the "language inconvenience"), I did want to build-in a goodly amount of IAL character simply to make the language more widely accessible in case I ever achieve a baseline and decide to publish it. Regardless, as uncompromisable logicality is also a design goal for my conlang (although I may ultimately be tempted to introduce clunkiness in order to achieve minimal naturalness) I have to say my curiosity in your creation could not be more piqued, and I would be very grateful to see how you have implemented uncompromising logicality as I myself continue to study the problems of quantifiers, natlang syntax, etc. Regards --- Mike