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It seems that the major constructed languages are heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, but not other language families. I find they lack creativity,

It seems that the major constructed languages are heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, but not other language families. I find they lack creativity, and stick to all sorts of complicated grammatical structures that the creators took for granted. If you're trying to create a simple language, you don't need verb tense, you don't need the plural form, you don't need articles, definiteness, ... You'd be surprised how much grammatical complexity you can strip out of a language without losing the ability to express the same meanings.

rimliu 4y ago
I guess you can make words simpler by using more of them. Not sure if that's preferable.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  Chinese lacks tense, articles, plural form, and a lot of things that are taken for granted by speakers of Indo-European languages, yet it's fairly terse. It turns out that you can infer a lot from context. "Cat catch three mouse yesterday" is completely understandable, even though it's been stripped of tense, articles and plural form.
tokai 4y ago
You know of Tokipona? It might interest you.
adrian_b 4y ago
You are right about the lack of creativity in grammatical structures, but I assume that wherever you have said "you don't need X" you have meant that you should not express X in the irregular ways typical for IE languages, but you should express X in a simple and regular way. For example, a verb can be just a name of the action, without having multiple forms to express tenses, but then, whenever the action does not have the default tense and aspect, e.g. a present and habitual action, you must accompany the verb with some adverbial particle expressing the intended tense and aspect of the action. In a similar way, a noun can have the meaning of one or more entities of some kind, of unknown gender. Whenever you have to express that there are 1, 2, few, many or another definite number of entities, or when you want to mention the gender, you should have to add to the noun a numeral or adjective expressing that information. So you need to express tense, mood, aspect, number, gender, definiteness and so on, but it is possible to do this in a simpler and more systematic way than in any natural language. Creating the large set of adverbial/adjectival particles that are required to express all these meanings, in such a way that all of them will be short, preferably monosyllabic, while being easy to pronounce and to remember, and while not suggesting undesirable meanings to the speakers of the most widespread natural languages, requires considerable creativity. Simplifying the grammar would also get rid of a lot of redundancy that exists in the natural languages. In a time when the largest quantities of information are communicated in written form, that redundancy is no longer useful. Nevertheless, in the original spoken form of the languages, the redundancy was more useful than today. For example, when listening to a story, one might already forget some details about what was said a little while before, so repeating a part of that information in the form of various kinds of agreements between words was more important than when reading the same story, when you can look back at the previous text line, when something is confusing.
vintermann 4y ago
You mean "The constructed languages over a 100 years old"? There have been countless constructed languages that strived to be less European, more logical/minimalistic after the first two big ones. What sunk Volapük, and nearly sunk Esperanto too, was the creators' inability to leave good enough alone. They kept reforming it, to the frustration of the people who had actually trusted them enough to learn it (not a small investment, despite the PR). Esperanto at least was community-driven enough to reject Zamenhof's later reforms.
poulpy123 4y ago
Well all "major" constructed languages were made in the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  Why won't we invent a new major conlang given all the advancements in the linguistics, neuroscience and related areas? Perhaps now we could base it on some objectively optimal solutions rather than just the creator's judgement.
  - klez 4y ago
    Mainly because you can't make it major.
    - qwerty456127 4y ago
      I believe you can make anything major if you make it good enough - much much better than what's already available. There were many great things which failed to achieve wide adoption but they mostly had some flaw making them not suitable for sufficiently wide audience. The advancements we have achieved since the invention of Esperanto can probably let us engineer a language a lot better and also learning tools much more efficient. I believe the only reason for lack of practical progress in this is lack of interest. Nobody really needs a new language, English is Okay for everyone for whom their native language is not enough. You have to learn English anyway if you want to go international so why bother...
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    Mainly because there doesn't seem to be an optimal language in any meaningful way. Communication seems to work fairly well regardless of language, so it doesn't seem like optimising the language itself really solves any meaningful societal problem. And if there's no clear advantage for one language over another, then people are going to stick with their own. The big selling point of most of these languages has historically been the creation of a global language, which a hundred years ago might have been a more pressing need, but at this point it's become clear that English is fast becoming the biggest global language, with a handful of additional local trade languages where necessary. So now even that selling point has gone.
samatman 4y ago
Conlangs have tiny communities so it's hard to make definite statements about popularity. Other than Esperanto, Interlingua, and some fictional languages, there's pretty much just Lojban and Toki Pona, neither of which are at all based on Indo-European languages.

rimliu 4y ago

I guess you can make words simpler by using more of them. Not sure if that's preferable.

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
Chinese lacks tense, articles, plural form, and a lot of things that are taken for granted by speakers of Indo-European languages, yet it's fairly terse. It turns out that you can infer a lot from context. "Cat catch three mouse yesterday" is completely understandable, even though it's been stripped of tense, articles and plural form.

tokai 4y ago

You know of Tokipona? It might interest you.

adrian_b 4y ago

You are right about the lack of creativity in grammatical structures, but I assume that wherever you have said "you don't need X" you have meant that you should not express X in the irregular ways typical for IE languages, but you should express X in a simple and regular way. For example, a verb can be just a name of the action, without having multiple forms to express tenses, but then, whenever the action does not have the default tense and aspect, e.g. a present and habitual action, you must accompany the verb with some adverbial particle expressing the intended tense and aspect of the action. In a similar way, a noun can have the meaning of one or more entities of some kind, of unknown gender. Whenever you have to express that there are 1, 2, few, many or another definite number of entities, or when you want to mention the gender, you should have to add to the noun a numeral or adjective expressing that information. So you need to express tense, mood, aspect, number, gender, definiteness and so on, but it is possible to do this in a simpler and more systematic way than in any natural language. Creating the large set of adverbial/adjectival particles that are required to express all these meanings, in such a way that all of them will be short, preferably monosyllabic, while being easy to pronounce and to remember, and while not suggesting undesirable meanings to the speakers of the most widespread natural languages, requires considerable creativity. Simplifying the grammar would also get rid of a lot of redundancy that exists in the natural languages. In a time when the largest quantities of information are communicated in written form, that redundancy is no longer useful. Nevertheless, in the original spoken form of the languages, the redundancy was more useful than today. For example, when listening to a story, one might already forget some details about what was said a little while before, so repeating a part of that information in the form of various kinds of agreements between words was more important than when reading the same story, when you can look back at the previous text line, when something is confusing.

vintermann 4y ago

You mean "The constructed languages over a 100 years old"? There have been countless constructed languages that strived to be less European, more logical/minimalistic after the first two big ones. What sunk Volapük, and nearly sunk Esperanto too, was the creators' inability to leave good enough alone. They kept reforming it, to the frustration of the people who had actually trusted them enough to learn it (not a small investment, despite the PR). Esperanto at least was community-driven enough to reject Zamenhof's later reforms.

poulpy123 4y ago

Well all "major" constructed languages were made in the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th

qwerty456127 4y ago
Why won't we invent a new major conlang given all the advancements in the linguistics, neuroscience and related areas? Perhaps now we could base it on some objectively optimal solutions rather than just the creator's judgement.
- klez 4y ago
  Mainly because you can't make it major.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    I believe you can make anything major if you make it good enough - much much better than what's already available. There were many great things which failed to achieve wide adoption but they mostly had some flaw making them not suitable for sufficiently wide audience. The advancements we have achieved since the invention of Esperanto can probably let us engineer a language a lot better and also learning tools much more efficient. I believe the only reason for lack of practical progress in this is lack of interest. Nobody really needs a new language, English is Okay for everyone for whom their native language is not enough. You have to learn English anyway if you want to go international so why bother...
- MrJohz 4y ago
  Mainly because there doesn't seem to be an optimal language in any meaningful way. Communication seems to work fairly well regardless of language, so it doesn't seem like optimising the language itself really solves any meaningful societal problem. And if there's no clear advantage for one language over another, then people are going to stick with their own. The big selling point of most of these languages has historically been the creation of a global language, which a hundred years ago might have been a more pressing need, but at this point it's become clear that English is fast becoming the biggest global language, with a handful of additional local trade languages where necessary. So now even that selling point has gone.

samatman 4y ago

Conlangs have tiny communities so it's hard to make definite statements about popularity. Other than Esperanto, Interlingua, and some fictional languages, there's pretty much just Lojban and Toki Pona, neither of which are at all based on Indo-European languages.