The Mold

If you're new to these arts, this is the place to ask "stupid" questions and get directions!
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Zontas
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The Mold

Post by Zontas »

Zompist's guide to crating a lang is kinda vapid and I need to find out what features does a conlang have to be considered a language and what are my options on creating each feature?
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Thakowsaizmu
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Re: The Mold

Post by Thakowsaizmu »

Can you be a little more specific?
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Zontas
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Re: The Mold

Post by Zontas »

I mean what features make up a language (nouns,verbs,prepositions,etc.) and what are the possibilities of difference for each one.
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Re: The Mold

Post by Trailsend »

Helios wrote:what features does a conlang have to be considered a language
Exactly one:

It must allow information to be transferred from one entity to some other entity.

That's it.

Seriously.

Helios wrote:I mean what features make up a language (nouns,verbs,prepositions,etc.) and what are the possibilities of difference for each one.
None of the things you mentioned are necessary for a thing to be a language. My conlang does not have any nouns, others have made conlangs that do not have any verbs, and it's quite easy to create a language without prepositions. And among languages that do have them, the possibilities for each feature are similarly endless.

But since that's not very helpful, check out this presentation I created for a "how to make up languages" seminar I've taught a couple of times at my university and elsewhere. Some of the slides have additional notes which you can display by clicking the face-and-bullet-points button in the lower right corner.
任何事物的发展都是物极必反,否极泰来。
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Micamo
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Re: The Mold

Post by Micamo »

I would expand Trailsend's condition a bit. His definition makes UDP a "language." Yet, at some intuitive level, it's clear to me that UDP isn't a language in the same way English or Navajo is.

I would add that in order to qualify as a language, it must be learnable and usable by (at least somewhat human-ish) children without them needing to make any changes to it in order to learn and/or use it.

What are the edges of this? Well, nobody really knows for sure, unfortunately...

The LCK isn't an end-all be-all guide though. It's mostly just a starting point for people to start learning more about how language works. I think it does that job well, but you're going to quickly break out of the area where the LCK can help you. What's the next step? Well... I haven't found it myself yet. Sorry I'm not of much help.
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Trailsend
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Re: The Mold

Post by Trailsend »

Micamo wrote:His definition makes UDP a "language."
True.
Micamo wrote:Yet, at some intuitive level, it's clear to me that UDP isn't a language in the same way English or Navajo is.
It isn't.
Micamo wrote:I would add that in order to qualify as a language, it must be learnable and usable by (at least somewhat human-ish) children without them needing to make any changes to it in order to learn and/or use it.
I avoid phrasing my generalization this way, because it is conceivable that someone might create a language to be used by alien parrots with much simpler nervous systems than humans--such a language would probably not be able to handle human day-to-day use. Indeed, UDP is a language invented by a person, so it can be viewed as a conlang designed to allow computers to describe sequences of bits with origins and destinations to each other.

But you are right in that the moment you decide what your conlang is to be used for, the rules change a bit. If your language is intended to be used by a particular group of humans in their day to day lives, then now the one criterion it must meet is to allow information which this particular group of humans wants to convey to be transferred from one member to another member. UDP does not meet this criterion, nor would the alien-parrots language, but it does not mean that the alien-parrot's language is not a conlang.
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Re: The Mold

Post by Micamo »

Trailsend wrote:I avoid phrasing my generalization this way, because it is conceivable that someone might create a language to be used by alien parrots with much simpler nervous systems than humans--such a language would probably not be able to handle human day-to-day use. Indeed, UDP is a language invented by a person, so it can be viewed as a conlang designed to allow computers to describe sequences of bits with origins and destinations to each other.

But you are right in that the moment you decide what your conlang is to be used for, the rules change a bit. If your language is intended to be used by a particular group of humans in their day to day lives, then now the one criterion it must meet is to allow information which this particular group of humans wants to convey to be transferred from one member to another member. UDP does not meet this criterion, nor would the alien-parrots language, but it does not mean that the alien-parrot's language is not a conlang.
But most conlangers don't deal with "languages" like the alien parrot one or even something like UDP. When we conlangers talk about conlangs we're almost always referring to things like Sindarin, Na'vi, or Interlingua. Your generalization matches more with the concept of an encoding scheme than any of these. Encoding schemes are all well and good, but I like to think that there's something to conlanging just a little bit deeper than that.
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