[conlang_learners] Food for thought

[Jim Henry]

2009/6/23 kate rhodes <masukomi at masukomi.org>:

> the inflexibility is precisely why i didn't bother to keep up with Toki
> Pona. I appreciate its philosophy but the fact that there are problems (like
> the total inability to indicate the center of a circle)  but you have zero
> hope of the language growing or changing to compensate for them, is very
> frustrating. All languages have failings, but all living languages evolve to
> handle problems and new concepts.

With Toki Pona, it's the conservatism of the speaker community as much
as or more than any intransigence on the part of the creator that's
kept it fairly stable.   Most of the people who learned it did so
because it's small and simple and they want to keep it that way; they
don't feel a need for it to become a general-purpose auxlang, as there
are already plenty of those.

On the more general issue: other things equal I'd prefer a language
that looks to be adaptable by a nascent speaker community to one where
the creator reserves all rights to coin new vocabulary, extend the
grammar, etc.  But that's "other things equal": there are other
qualities I care more about, such as how fully developed the language
is, whether the creator can speak it or at least read and write it,
how large a corpus already exists for us to learn from inductively by
reading it, etc.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/