Re: unnatural languages

gunananda wrote:

however the difference between a conlang and a natural language is
hard to tell.

There's a fundamental difference, and it's as follows:

- A language is not its description.

'Conlangs' are decriptions of invented languages. Whereas 'real languages' are languages. For a conlang to be actually used, there is an infinite amount of stuff that the user must provide to fill in the space - grammmars and dictionaries of the conlang will only provide a skeleton.

If two people learn any language (invented or not) from mere descriptions, rather than native speakers, independently, it's only by chance that they'll end up with the same, coherent language. Now it just so happens that conlangs don't have native speakers - why, some may have, but those acquired it as per the de novo process above, so they don't count -, and as such they're devoid of much that makes language interesting. Each individual may have their own, but the 'language' as usually considered does not.

Of course, the above problem may be partially corrected by abundant literature. But that only if literature is written by natives, so it's a chicken and egg situation.

Of course, some conlangs just happen to have an enthusiast base of very similar linguistic background. Cf. the idea that modern hebrew (which isn't a conlang but shares some of the above problem) may be yiddish relexified.
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am

laurus : rhodophyta : brethoneg : smalltalk : stargate

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