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Yet another "IAL"

The author has the amazingly poor taste to go around sending the following email to Lojbanists:

Ygyde conlang is easy to pronounce, easy to understand, extremely easy to learn, and has unique ability to define all meanings in short (7 letters or less) compound words. Last, but not least, Ygyde is fun to work with. Some compound words are unintentionally funny. If you do not believe me, think of an English word, define it in Ygyde, and compare it with my definition. Is your definition better than mine?

He sent the same thing to esperanto-l: He then fails to listen to any rational comments, and responds with "Lojban is a religion".

Problems with Ygyde:

  • Very limited morphological space for compounding (uses 7 letter words only).
  • Very few roots to use for compounding.
  • Uses base 8 for really really bad reasons.
  • The pronunciation guide only works for people who speak english (and with the same dialect as the author). This is essentially pure evil for a supposed IAL.
  • No one speaks it. What's the point of an IAL which no one speaks?
  • The author has been rudely spamming USENET groups and various conlang mailing lists with that same mail. (And apparently now he's spamming individuals too).
  • It tries to introduce a new 'alphabet' made up of nonsensical characters (specifically non-Unicode ones)
    • In particular, the only difference between 'full stop' and 'octal point' is size, something which would be nigh impossible to get right by hand. (Update: now the octal point looks like a broken pipe, which means that a lot of cute smiley faces appear in everyday writing. For example, "differential" appears as :9 )
  • All of the color words are defined in terms of Red/Green/Blue, a notoriously horrible way of representing colors. For instance, what wavelength is the red?
  • The compounds he proposes are useless, "woman" is "pretty feminine person"? Are ugly women not women? Are attractive drag queens women? ("Pretty feminine person" is a name, not a word... so it's just like some names that already exist.)
  • Probably lots more...

Yeah, lots more indeed. The "compounds" problem above is common to all "philosophical conlangs" (Lojban at least faces it properly). It's Ro all over again... and aUI all over again... and possibly babm all over again... --mi'e .mark.

WikiMaster's Note: When someone designs an IAL, and they go and pick on Lojban in a context of "Mine is bigger/better/cooler!", the Wiki is an acceptable place to pick on their IAL.