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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
i would prefer a language which was synthetic, and not fusional/flectional, but which used affixes sparingly (as necessary only to disambiguate the relationships between words/roles of words) and had minimal mandatory grammatical categories.
grammatical categories that i like:
grammatical categories that i don't like:
rather than using the sort of affixes we have in English to point words at other words, why not use what i term "relative addressing" (affixes that say things like, "the target of this word is the word which is 4 words after this one) (i bet the answer to this is just that our brains don't like to do that, because it can only be determined via a "global" (whole sentence) compilation step, rather than separately for each sentence part), or "color" (an arbitary but meaningless marker, such that two things with the same "color" go together; you could still have roles attached to the color markers, so that, say, word A and word C are both "red", but word C is marked inferior and A is marked superior, so that means that A is over C; i don't mean for these to actually be colors, though of course they could (would that give synesthetics trouble? should ask)).
see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenberg%27s_linguistic_universals (note that Greenberg's list doesn't explicitly give an ontological basis set for human grammar, which seems to be assumed) (and, heck, this doesn't belong on this page, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal is interesting as well, and could serve as a minimal checklist for KnowledgeRepresentation? and ArtificialIntelligence?)
for some reason, in human languages, possessives always seem to be used both for both "inalienable" possessions, i.e. my fingers, my thougts, and also "alienable" possessions, i.e. my axe, according to http://www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/universal_people.pdf .
interesting language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language
modified from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
a book about this (which came out of a workshop?) is "Studies in evidentiality" By Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna? Aĭkhenvalʹd, Robert M. W. Dixon.
random note: in the Matses, the evidential is connected to time; you can report something as experiential but uncertain, provided that the data you got that made you think it was happening came to you "simultaineously" with the event you are talking about (page 402, pdf page 424, of A Grammer of Matses, the PhD? thesis of David William Fleck).
other | a priori constructed languages tend to have interesting vocab, at least:
And
interestingly, there is value in making the words with most similar meanings very different in pronounciation, frustrating attempts at lexical regularity:
"A common criticism of Ro is that it can be difficult to hear the difference between two words; usually one consonant makes the word different in meaning, but still similar enough that the intended meaning often cannot be guessed from context. " -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro_%28language%29
perhaps this could be dealt with simply by more redundancy, i.e. multi-syllabic morphemes?
icon (ideographic) languages:
see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages#Engineered_languages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_languages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language (see also the Constructed Languages box), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_languag , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_language , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_language , http://www.langmaker.com/.
Esperanto is notable for its popularity, if not for its semantics (mb that too; i dont know any of these languages).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_language
Out of constructed languages, Esperanto is currently the most popular.
Novial sounds ok too; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Novial_compared. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages#Auxiliary_languages claims it is "naturalistic", though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_%28Esperantido%29 sounds ok, although apparently it was only created "for amusement" according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperantido . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosa sounds OK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idosounds cool, although I worry that its vocabulary may not be as a priori as possible, and the accent rule is more complex; also Wikipedia implies that Ido is obsolete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido#cite_note-11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Ido says that Ido further regularized derivation, which i like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Ido_and_Novial says that Novial is more isolating, which i like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Franca_Nova sounds ok. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English sounds ok. "Esperanto sen fleksio" is my favorite so far; it simplifies Esparanto's grammar, making it (more?) isolating, but retains the vocab.
Interlingua seems to be insufficiently schematic for my taste (i.e. to favor similarity to existing languages over regularity and learnability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Interlingua_compared )
a hardcore esperanto partisan offers criticism of Ido's regularity: "The surface differences between Ido and Esperanto are relatively minor. It is often said — correctly — that a person who can read one language can read the other. But the structural differences are major. Ido, like French and English, is a language with a relatively strict word-order; Esperanto is not. Esperanto has added some extra letters to ensure that it is phonetic; Ido uses only the standard twenty-six, and is not. Esperanto has an agglutinative word-formation system that allows easy creation of new words; Ido has a complex word-derivation system that does not. " -- http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/EBook/chap03.html#ido (i briefly note that i don't think a complaint against the phoneticity of Ido would be important, since Ido resolves this with 3 digraphs; in order to write Esperanto in ascii, you need to use digraphs anyways, and you need 6; i don't care about restricted word order; leaving only the word-formation differences as a possible complaint, and i don't understand this bit). However http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Ido_compared makes it sound ok.
i particularly dislike the privilage of masculine gender in esperanto (as comparted to Novial and Ido). But this can be fixed without other changes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_reform_in_Esperanto .
Glosa may be interesting.
I would like to see a comparison between the regularity and ease of learning esperanto vs. standard mandarin chinese. i think the latter is an isolating language, so shouldn't that make it regular and easy to learn? as noted above, i would like to get rid of singular and plural affixes
it's worth noting that the most popular languages are english and chinese, followed by hindu/urdu and spanish, perhaps not in that order. so perhaps the more relevant question is, which is better, english or chinese or esperanto? my impression is that english is the most irregular of these three, so let's eliminate it from consideration. so we have chinese or esperanto.
" 1. Letters map into one and only one sound. 2. Words are constructed with unique permutations. 3. A word maps into one and only one meaning. 4. Words within a sentence do not contradict. 5. A sentence maps into one and only one meaning. 6. Sentences within a text do not contradict. 7. Sentences outside of a text which contradict the text can be identified. " -- http://lingvo.jtusz.com/arch/ (see that page for links to more explanation)
note: i probably don't really understand these words and the defns i give are only copied off other web pages
some useful words/phrases that English adopted from elsewhere:
see also my Delicious bookmarks for "untranslatable"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage#Role_in_metaphor
Michael Reddy claims that when we discuss language, two metaphors are more common than others:
the most common one (he calls it the "major framework"): language is a sealed pipeline between people, words are containers (eg "Try to get your thoughts across better", "That sentence was filled with emotion")
the next most common one (he calls it the "minor framework"): Speakers and writers eject mental content into an external space (eg "That concept has been floating around for decades")
key pronouns: i/we, you, he/she/it, another one
words should be direct productable, ie type-1, type-2, type-3 as alternative to type, class, sort
