Re: [engelang] Re: Hello? Anyone here? Q about engineering stability into a conlang - engelang messages

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 4:17 PM, MatthewDeanMartin <matt@hidden.email> wrote:

re: language learned from books get "reset"
Ah, good observation. I'm reading "The Last Lingua Franca" and this phenomena is accredited for why lingua francas seem to be more stable, especially where they are being used outside of the range where that language is a mother tongue. [Taglish certainly looks like a counter example, I'm not trying to say this is a law of physic or anything]

re: noisy room & redundancy
Hmm. Maybe these are all the same problem. The problem of language change over time is not unlike language change as it goes through a noisy telephone connection.

As you've already mentioned, redundancy is one way to minimize the noise problem. I don't like redundancy in my conlang projects, but they haven't been thoroughly tested.

The ultimate in engineered protocols would be a sort of check sum. I've been trying to think up a checksum that could be applied to language, but I haven't though of one.

I also have been noticing how certain mistakes in toki pona are recoverable, i.e. if you make the mistake the meaning isn't lost, but other mistakes, if you make the mistake, the sentence is gibberish. But I don't have thing to generalize yet.

I'd like to hear what you find about this, i.e., what kinds of errors are major, and which are minor.

As Esperanto example would be eroded "n", which can be dropped without too much loss because people use SVO ordering in addition to accusative marking.

This is why in Ido the accusative '-n' was dropped unless the word order is unusual. For Ido, it's a trade-off: either use strict (SVO) word order or mark the object.

My projects all use strict (VSO) word order, so there are no cases.

stevo