What would a modern (i.e., based on cognitive science) constructed language look like?
从 yyaann, 2016年5月29日
讯息: 34
语言: English
bartlett22183 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月1日下午8:28:29
erinja (显示个人资料) 2016年6月1日下午8:52:15
robbkvasnak (显示个人资料) 2016年6月1日下午9:10:51
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 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月2日下午8:36:03
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 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月2日下午8:40:06
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 , and in general I would agree with your estimate of why he may have picked this or that form for these or those pronouns or other terms. However, later persons have assessed that some of the features of Esperanto, especially the pronouns, are what they would call sub-optimal. The authors of Ido considered this, and they devised a variant pronoun system. (They had other considerations as well, such as in the second and third person pronouns.) I am not advocating Ido over Esperanto in all matters, make no mistake, but I myself consider that at least theoretically the Ido pronoun system is significantly superior to that of Esperanto in several particulars.
lagtendisto (显示个人资料) 2016年6月2日下午8:42:11
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 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月4日上午4:12:26
Zvoc47 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月6日下午5:57:42
Kirilo81 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月6日下午8:12:17
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 (显示个人资料) 2016年6月6日下午10:17:32
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.