If people are intrigued by this corner of human endeavor, I strongly recommend Arika Okrent's <i>In the Land of Invented Languages</i>. Okrent is trained as a linguist and knows what she's talking about. (There is no relationship between her and Marc Okrand, the linguist who invented the Klingon language.) On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 12:42 PM, Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com>wrote:
Yet another famous mathematician who created an artificial language: Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932). His was merely an improved version of Latin.
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Having reviewed the history of this, my conclusions:
1. If you think human-computer communication is desirable/feasible via a new language, then something with the unambiguity properties of lojban, BUT it needs to be greatly simplified, would be desirable. (Get rid of, for example, the "emotional tags" feature of lojban. The full grammar of lojban is described in a 600-page book, which is far too much; and about half the lojban sentences even on the lojban.org web site are incorrect as one may verify using their own "jboski" lojban-to-english translator and syntax verifier program!) Is this possible? I do not know. The techniques the lojbanists developed do seem sufficiently powerful to achieve their claimed properties. But the structure of many real-world sentences is simple so that for them those techniques are overkill and waste time and space. I doubt any language can or should be popular if it is (say) 200% inefficient. I think a good language design would have to involve a lot of computer simulation and optimization; mere unaided human designers would not be able to do a good job and/or be sure they had.
2. Esperanto is by far the most popular one, with about 1-3 million who know it at some level and about 1-2 thousand who speak it as first language; and it seems clear such a language would help humanity immensely if it really became universal; but there seems to be zero hope of that.
3. Freudenthal's "Lincos" language designed for communication with space aliens seems of some interest as providing a mathematical model of how it can be that an entity like a human baby, could learn language.
-- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
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