So, tell me what you think of conlangs.
Garich i dhôl goll o Orch.
It's kinda fun, personally. I like to play around with language and the grammar of a language.
I think Auxlangs (the ones made solely to facilatate communication) are fun, but I've yet to see one get enough speakers to be truely useful. Most get about 10,000 mostly from the same country. There's really no point to making a language that won't cross cultures. And they're really all Eurolangs -- so they're easy if you're a eurofag, but no chinese, korean, or iranian is going to recognize anything.
I've been looking at hanzi and kanji and that seems like the best approach. An international WRITTEN system. Something like having a set of symbols that everyone recognizes, and could be combined with other symbols to produce new words. You'd see a symbol for many trees and know it's a forest, or a symbol composed of "house" and "medicine" and know you're at a doctor's office. Even if you're reading the sign and mentally saying "doctor" in swahili, you'd recognize it in Japan, the US, Malasia, etc.
>>3
Did you read the Diamond Age?
In it, mankind has developed a system akin to what you describe, called Logoglyphics. Alas, many uneducated people never learn to read because they can rely on the symbols to navigate life, and as a result the populace becomes inarticulate and petty.
Auxlangs are very silly things that will never see any meaningful success.
Conlangs as part of a greater creative work are kinda neat I guess, though it always disturbs me to think that many of such writers care more about making a world than a story, which isn't working with the medium. You aren't trying to write a series of fantasy novels, you're trying to write an atlas.
Other artlangs are all around rad. Particularly personal ones. I've been playing around with the idea of trying to make one, but I want to learn Sanskrit and Spanish first, and I want to have someone to talk to (so ronery ;_;).
No, but I was playing around with Blisssymbolics (http://www.blissymbolics.org/) and it seems as though something like that could actually work -- if you could have a standard system for combining compound words. Basicly something like how a Hanzi symbol is built from radicals and simpler Hanzi. If something like that could be made to work, and a standard international alphabet were adopted for names and places, it could be used anywhere.
Hopefully it wouldn't replace natural languages, just serve as a way to help forgeiners find the bathroom and the hospital.
But even if a form of international "Hanzi" were adopted, I don't think you'd be any less literate than a Chinese person today. They can read Hanzi, and they are pretty well informed about the world.
I think in some cases getting the world right helps you get the story right. For example, knowing that the people of Ja'lath don't speak language the same as the Khafen helps to settle the question of how or why they communicate, and even if they can. Knowing that those two groups fought several protracted wars over the last 200 years can help you to decide on conflicts and twists. History is a big part of who you are. I have certain beliefs because I was born in America, in a period of relative peace. I'd believe differently if I'd been born an Indian Hindu living in Kashmir when both nations have nukes. Language, Culture and History are a big part of our beliefs.
What is a "conlang", a thieves' cant? I think you mean planned languages.