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I've been following this and the discussion of logicality with
interest. Scungric has two versions currently in more-or-less
parallel development, one an outright artlang that is based
largely on the more interesting bits I've gleaned from various
natlangs and conlangs; the other, Scungric-Prime, is going to
be a more engelangy process, with the ultimate goal of eventually
merging the most interesting/useful parts of the two.
At present, Scungric-Prime is envisioned as having a basic
head-first, head-marking structure, probably relatively high
on the agglutinative/synthetic/polysynthetic scale with a large
number of productive derivational processes, including apophonic
changes to the stem (more like Semitic binyanim than like Germanic
ablaut).
That said, the order of design goals for Scungric-Prime previously
proposed by And and Mike is roughly as follows:
FLEXIBILITY. I'm thinking more of semantic flexibility, than
syntactic, as Scungric-Prime will likely be relatively rigid
in word-order, allowing fronting/raising of focussed phrases.
CONCISION. I may be wrong here, but it is my impression that one
can either have concision or simplicity, but not necessarily
both - given the choice, I'll spring for concision.
SYNTACTIC NON-AMBIGUITY. Provisionally clausal and phrasal markers
will serve to mark verb complements, relative clauses, etc.
SEMANTIC PRECISION.
ICONICITY. Using a quasi-Semitic model of lexical stems should
assist in introducing a level of iconicity for semantically-
related lexical items.
PARSABILITY.
COMPENDIOUSNESS.
AESTHETICS. More in the phonology and in the morphological structure
than in the overall syntax/grammar.
LEARNABILITY.
REGULARITY. As And said, this is relatively easy to achieve in
a conlang, so is relatively low on the scale, though it will
be a consideration.
REDUNDANCY.
LOGICALITY. My background in logic is spotty at best, so this is
not really a very important goal for me at present.
NATURALNESS.
LOCAL/FORMAL SIMPLICITY.
GLOBAL/FUNCTIONAL SIMPLICITY.
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The order of these may shift as work progresses, but this is my
initial list of preferred characteristics.
Bfowol