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On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 10:57 PM, Leonardo Castro <leolucas1980@hidden.email> wrote: > > I agree that it is a wise choice to start a conlang with few words, > unless one is sure that his/her language will have lots of adherents > (and it is not easy to get them in a list where everybody has his/her > own conlang). Otherwise, it might be an enormous waste of time. If we > had a consensus, we could create it together. The vast majority of the possible students of any of these proposed languages are people who aren't already thinking about any of these questions, but might like to learn a language that's fun or useful to them somehow. What will cause a language to have students isn't really the quality of the design decisions-- students, not knowing anything about the language, can't really appreciate those at first-- it's the quality of the teaching materials available. I think you could get a community of people to learn absolutely any language, even and especially one that's completely absurd and useless, if you just make good teaching materials. The main problem with reaching a loglang consensus is that there's already a consensus on our silly friend Lojban. Any new language anywhere in the vicinity is just going to have to put up with the rivalry and comparisons. > It's funny to note that a native anglophone, whose language accept > very complex syllables, would probably find more difficult to > pronounce some of these words than speaker of languages with simpler > phonotactics, because native anglophones pronounce final "o" and "e" > of foreign languages as /ou/ and /ei/, and this would mess the > word-break detection of a conlang with the above mentioned rules. Yes I've been struggling for years based on many traumatic experiences learning and teaching Lojban to make a system that's anglophone (and everyone else, but, realistically, especially anglophone) friendly. Trying to teach anglophones to make less sloppy vowels is both difficult and pretty irrelevant to the properties of language we're actually trying to explore here. I experimented with various seven-vowel systems, but finally I decided I had to get it down to five to reduce the number of imaginary future vowel-related conversations in my mind to a tolerable-seeming level. <3, mungojelly