What would a modern (i.e., based on cognitive science) constructed language look like?
de yyaann, 29 de maig de 2016
Missatges: 34
Llengua: English
bartlett22183 (Mostra el perfil) 1 de juny de 2016 20.28.29
erinja (Mostra el perfil) 1 de juny de 2016 20.52.15
robbkvasnak (Mostra el perfil) 1 de juny de 2016 21.10.51
Our brains are marvelous instruments for creativity and any language used by humans must remain human and creative. The desire to create a truly "scientific" language is the desire to devoid humans of humanity. Language is not math and never will be - though math may be explained in language, language may not and cannot be explained by math, at least not in its entirety and in its usage by all speakers.
Fuzzy brains are human - non-fuzzy brains are not.
lagtendisto (Mostra el perfil) 2 de juny de 2016 20.36.03
bartlett22183:Concerning Esperanto forms which are very close acoustically, such as 'mi/ni' and '-as/-is' (depending on context), I wonder how much Zamenhof genuinely designed his language to be spoken and how much written.He simply didn't have these tools available which are available today. I.e. he had no computer, no digital recording facilities, no headset, no IPA-keyboard & no access to linguistic databases (retrieval of IPA coded assets; TTS).
bartlett22183 (Mostra el perfil) 2 de juny de 2016 20.40.06
erinja:I suspect that he did not think much about the possible confusion between sounds, {...trim for brevity}Well, obviously we cannot go back in time to ask Z
![ridulo.gif](/images/smileys/ridulo.gif)
lagtendisto (Mostra el perfil) 2 de juny de 2016 20.42.11
robbkvasnak:Any language without some "slack" (Spielraum) becomes robotic hence "non-human", metalic.I got your point but TTS technology is getting better and better. For my ear, Mandarin sounds staccato-like. But it seems to be prejudice by myself because I found again lot of Asian vocabulary (including Mandarin) inside some other conlang. There it is was included due its phonetic shortness. And there it doesn't sound that staccato like I heard it first time.
Sepe (Mostra el perfil) 4 de juny de 2016 4.12.26
Zvoc47 (Mostra el perfil) 6 de juny de 2016 17.57.42
Kirilo81 (Mostra el perfil) 6 de juny de 2016 20.12.17
I can only speculate that Z wanted to have them marked uniformly and at the same time short, and he - rightly from a 19th century perspective - thought first and before all about the written use of the language, where there is no problem.
I cannot confirm any problem with estA/I/Os. As soon as you learn that all vowels have to be pronounced clearly also in unstressed syllables there will be no trouble.
yyaann (Mostra el perfil) 6 de juny de 2016 22.17.32
English, with its messy spelling system, is also doing just fine.
Japanese, with its Byzantine writing system, is also doing just fine.
Russian, with its complicated case system, is also doing just fine.
Chinese, with its sophisticated tone change system, is also doing just fine.
But most Esperantists would argue that these aspects of natural languages are unnecessary in an artificial language.
Zamenhof wanted his language to be learner-friendly. That's why he didn't think these aspects were necessary either.
So maybe it's not unreasonable to think that the current knowledge on the human mind's reliance on redundancy would have been taken into account had Esperanto been created today.