Talk:Engineered language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Constructed languages, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, and easy-to-use resource about constructed languages, aka conlangs. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

If listing this article for deletion or if there is an active edit war, please post a note here.
Constructed languages
Portal
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the class scale.
High This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.
Socrates
Philosophy Portal
This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.

Contents

[edit] Knowledge representation?

Does the "knowledge representation" section really belong in this article? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the topics described. — Gwalla | Talk 19:32, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This page hardly mentions anything about how a logical language operates...

[edit] Split, rename, move?

I suspect this article may be defining "logical language" too narrowly. Ithkuil for instance seems to me like a logical language of some sort, though it's not based on predicate logic or another formal logic system. Maybe we need a separate article on Philosophical language that would describe languages like Ithkuil, Ro, John Wilkins' "Real Character", etc.

Ithkuil was deleted once before and is probably going to be deleted again, but I think it deserves a paragraph or so in a more general article on logical or philosophical languages. --Jim Henry | Talk 01:38, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I suspect Ithkuil is an example of what they call "engineered languages" or "engelangs" on Conlang-L: languages built around a guiding practical princliple. Logical languages are a subset of engelangs where the guiding principle is propositional logic. — Gwalla | Talk 07:19, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
So, do you think we need an article on Engineered languages with subsections on Philosophical languages, Logical languages, and Miscellaneous? Anyway, if Ithkuil doesn't fit here, then Láadan certainly doesn't. Láadan might be loosely described as a philosophical language, in that it is based on feminist philosophy, but (unlike Ithkuil, Ro, Wilkins' Real Character, etc., as well as Loglan and Lojban) its grammar and semantics are very naturalistic; it's somewhat more regular than the typical naturally-evolved language, but it has nouns, verbs, adjectives, and a fairly standard case system. Lojban, Ithkuil and the rest all depart from the way natural languages work far more radically than Láadan or most of the IALs like Esperanto (some of which could also be described as engineered languages). --Jim Henry | Talk 16:27, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
I think that's a good idea. And yes, from what I know of it, Laadan doesn't qualify as a logical language. — Gwalla | Talk 21:30, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Since one person agreed and no one objected, I'm going to move this to Engineered language and create subsections as outlined above. --Jim Henry | Talk 15:53, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
Nice job on the refactor. — Gwalla | Talk 19:34, 6 May 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Voting on conlang policy has started

Voting has started on the conlang notability/verifiablity criteria at Wikipedia:Conlangs/Votes. --Jim Henry | Talk 15:17, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Overly broad definition of philosophical language

Almost every reference I've seen to philosophical languages has been to the categorizing or taxonomic languages, not to languages that espouse a particular philosophy.

http://talideon.com/concultures/wiki/?doc=philosophical%20language has a good example

These two languages really don't seem to belong here: "Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan is designed to lexicalize and grammaticalize the concepts and distinctions important to women, based on muted group theory. Sonja Elen Kisa's Toki Pona is based on minimalistic simplicity, incorporating elements of Taoism."

Does anyone disagree? And, if so, can you give citations to a broader use of the term? --Jeffrey Henning 05:32, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Russian lawn?

This page mentions a Russian lawn experiment, but I was not able to find any reference to "Russian lawn" in Wikipedia or in Google - which of course does not mean that Russian lawn experiments do not exist, merely that they need to be written up.

The only place I've seen the term "Russian lawn" used was in Mark P. Line's page about Classical Yiklamu -- he used the term as though it were in common usage, and I recognized what he meant although I had not heard the practice called by that name before. The idea is that you start a new building project with all lawns and no sidewalks, and you wait for a year or two of usage to wear paths in the lawn and show you where the sidewalks need to be when you put them in. Classical Yiklamu was supposed to follow a similar design methodology, starting out with no derivational morphology and observing how the language is used at first to decide what derivational morphology is needed, or something like that. Maybe there is a more standard term for this method? --Jim Henry 13:39, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 03:58, 10 November 2007 (UTC)