One of my narrow interests is conlanging (the art of constructing languages) and linguistics in general. I never get around to making much of a conlang of my own -- I just read about others and think about what I would do if I ever got around to it.
I took a look at the
autlang project here, and -- there's no nice way to say it -- it's not very well done as conlangs go. It's essentially a cipher for English, containing very little new at all. It's not, as described, logical, because natural languages are often redundant and ambigous and illogical, and this language seems to be based on one particular natural language -- English.
A language has some parts, and sadly the autlang project seems to lack them. Languages have phonologies, which consist of stuff such as:
* Phoneme inventories. Phonemes are roughly the sounds that make a difference in the language. For instance, in English the th-sound in
thin, the voiceless dental fricative, is a phoneme. In Norwegian, my native language, it isn't. The sound is not a phoneme, and so Norwegians can have difficulty distinguishing it from other sounds. Many Norwegians pronounce it [f], which it sounds like (to them), or [t], which it reads like.
* Stress.
* Intonation.
* Accent.
* Syllable structure. Why isn't sgfdsfghfdj allowed in English, for instance?
Sadly, autlang lacks anything in the way of this.
Further, a language has morphology, which is concerned with what many would call grammar -- the bits and pieces of words, the morphemes, that have meaning, and how they're combined, and stuff like that. Tenses and cases and clitics and all that jazz. Here, there's a little bit in autlang - mostly mirroring English.
Then there's syntax, where autlang seems to borrow everything implicitly from English.
Then there's semantics and pragmatics and so on. Here again, we find nothing with autlang.
This turned into a critique of autlang in particular, but I'm not really trying to attack anyone. I'm not saying I would have done better myself -- I'm saying I still haven't made the effort, because I don't want the result to be something like autlang: a cipher of another language, such as English.
If you want to make a logical language, have a look at a language constructed for that purpose, such as Lojban. Lojban is based on predicate calculus, which is a logic, and not on someone's vague intuition as to what logic might be.
As you may have gathered, I have a narrow interested that I decided to share. I'm a little embarassed that some real philologist might come by and correct glaring errors in what I've said, but anyway, there you have it.
I like old english...it sounds cool.
