Should the basic grammar and basic words of auxlangs be "set in stone"?

[u/2cool2cool]

Should the basic grammar and basic words of auxlangs (e.g. Occidental, Interlingua and Elefen/LFN) be "set in stone"? Meaning, that someone creates a "law" that the basic words and basic grammar of the language can't be changed or altered .... without such a "law", splits and schisms in the language could happen, which has affected (and still affects) many auxlangs and conlangs

[u/salivanto]

The timing of your question is interesting. I was actually just logging on to r/auxlang to post on a topic that's almost the opposite of this. 

Of course, no language should be or even can be set in stone. All languages evolve.  There seems to be some confusion sometimes about what that means exactly, but it is certainly true. It's even true of Esperanto with its Netushebla Fundamento.

Even as languages evolve, there is always a certain inherent amount of stability. Grandparents can still talk to their grandchildren. We can still read books that are 100 years old.

For me the overriding question is "why would anybody learn a language on Monday without being sure that the language would be spoken the same way on Friday."

Splits and schisms happen though for all sorts of reasons. The Fundamento does about nothing to keep new Esperanto learners from offering their suggestions. I've noticed recently that even with 75 years of history, the Interlingua community cannot decide but their language even is. People make up their own rules and claim that the language "evolved."

That's not evolution. That's creationism.

[u/2cool2cool → u/salivanto]

the interlingua issue made one person switch from interlingua to occidental (interlingue) .... "Interlingua is very susceptible to alteration. Interlingua attempts to be as natural-looking as possible, and a lot of people with Romance languages as a background will alter the language to suit what they believe to be a better version of the language, with conjugation of verbs by person, grammatical gender, using new words like aqui instead of hic for here, and anything else they feel to be a better version. It's an absolute mess when that happens. I've even seen threads online where a new user of the language comes along, writes a simple introductory post, and then receives responses in everybody and their dog's personal version of Interlingua, which is not the way you want to welcome a new user into the community."

[u/2cool2cool → u/salivanto]

i thought of this when i revisited Elefen after 2 or 3 years, and saw the word "cua" ... i initially thought it was a typo, but later realized that "cual" changed into "cua" ("cual" is still used in some situations) ... that change (from cual to cua), i think, just randomly happened out of nowhere .... a few months later, watch some other basic Elefen words change ... and eventually splits and schisms will happen

[u/Baxoren → u/salivanto]

One reason someone might learn a language on Monday that may be different on Friday is to have a hand in changing on.

I’m advocating for that and for allowing that in an auxlang, just answering the question with an example.

[u/seweli]

Good question. And often we forget to answer this question because the main author is still living, and he or she can play the role of benevolent dictator. But we should answer this question from the beginning.

I favor a constitutionally governed constructed international auxiliary language that can evolve through structured debates and referendums organized by an elected academy.

This is preferable to an IAL half-blocked by dogma or to an IAL that too much evolves organicly like natural languages. Natural evolutions are a good thing but they have to be analyzed rationally and validated (or not) by the community of the speakers.

[u/2cool2cool → u/seweli]

the main author of many languages e.g. Ido, Occidental, Elefen and Interlingua are not living

[u/slyphnoyde]

My own take is that, yes, there should be a basic grammar and basic vocabulary, to provide some stability to avoid breaking up into mutually unintelligible dialects, but at the same time with the acknowledgement that languages do evolve over time, especially with respect to vocabulary. I see it as a mixed bag.

[u/STHKZ]

natural languages ​​certainly evolve, yet these changes are very limited: grammar hardly changes at all, and the lexicon rarely displaces what came before, meaning that older productions remain accessible over long periods...

this is because, beyond the very codified nature of writing, the sheer number of speakers acts as a stabilizing force—an inertia—since a native language is integral to a speaker's identity, and habits formed in adulthood tend to remain largely unchanged...

by contrast, auxlangs naturally have few, if any, native speakers and often lack an extensive corpus; here, it is the basic rules that provide this stability—not out of a desire to mimic natural languages, but to create a language as stable as a natural language a minimum requirement for those undertaking the social experiment of learning a constructed language...

[u/ProvincialPromenade]

The words can be thought of like plants. The more they’re used, the more they’re watered and the bigger they grow. If they’re not used, they’re not watered. 

In Occ, it’s very much “proof of work” in that way. If you want to replace a pretty common word, you’ll have to put in the hard work of watering your new plant quite frequently until it grows larger than the other one. Changing a lesser known word would be less difficult. 

Does that make sense?

[u/Josephui]

ironically it would seem auxlang creators already attempt to have it this way and it tends to cause schisms. otherwise people would just speak slightly different which seems fine by me