Re: [engelang] What is the domain of engelangs? What's on topic for this mailing list?

Well, you know that I say sometimes that all conlangs are engelangs, differing only in their blueprints.  But practically we can divide (and subdivide and ....) the blueprints by purpose.  If you plan to byuild a language that the whole world (or the important portion of it) learns along side their L1, so that they can talk together without further intermediaries, then you are in the auxlang business.  If you want to poohbah a story about some imginary locale by throwing a few words of the supposed local language, then you are at one end of one branch of the artlang game (at the other end, you write the whole story in Xardooseish).  Along the other branch are languages created purely (or at least mainly) for the joy of it or the hoped for beauty of the results, or the intricate history that gets built up in a collection of languages, or to hide you deepest thought from your prying baby sister.  Then there are engelangs, which typically have a "scientific" point, a design to test a theory, show that something can be done, and so on.  Logjam started out as a way to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothsis and continued with varying other goals, which come down to making a language which keeps intact the monoparsing and logical form of some logical symbolism (Montagovian intensional logic with additions as the best current guess).  toki pona is a case of trying to find how small a language you can make to do some (unspecified) range of things and also how to make a cheerful language (skipping known critiques of that part).  Philosophic languages, while also thought of as auxlangs for the really rational (by their creators, who clearly include themselves), are designed to give everything its proper name (given some usually claimed to be be nonarbitrary initial conventions) so that it is always clear exactly what you are talking about, what you mean to say, and (this is yet a bit more speculative) whether what you say is true.  So, if you are not writing a novel or a diary or a work of art and don't want the world (or at least a coherent subcontinent) to speak your language, this is probably your place.  But notice that languages move more than occasionally, especially if they get second speakers.