You are ritght, of course, but I think it might be sometimes difficult with some word lists to find the boundary between words that are "structural" and words that have "content". Take the word "nosotrus" in Spanish -- is that structural or does it have content? It is structural in the sense that it represents a group of two or more people but the only thing we know about the group is that the speaker is included (except in the case of the "editorial we" where the speaker is only vaguely included or where the speaker may be speaking in his own behalf and glorifying his position by posing as a group.) One thing seems obvious that if you want a language to be concise and yet avoid ambiguities you need to make your purely structural words as short and uncomplicated and easy to pronounce as possible and try to have them serve double duty or triple duty without ushering in too much ambiguity. The word "up" in English is an example of a word that is used structurally in a variety of ways that are unrelated to its meaning that is the opposite of "down". I am just a beginner in the study of linquistics and, though I have studied the history of language and detailed structure of some languages like Navajo and Basque, am still monolingual and with only a rudimentary skill in Spanish and Russian. I am currently studying Spanish (with its extravagant ar, er, and ir infinitives and, along with many other languages, its senseless personification of objects into genders.) I suspect that at some point in history all languages had an element of deliberate construction in determining their formation so I am thinking about looking at a few "successful" constructed languages to see what kinds of thinking bring about a language. I do not feel anyone (such as myself) who is monolingual is qualified to be involved with the construction of a language. So only after I become fluent in Spanish and American Sign Language will I attempt to construct a language ... and only after I have studied some important languages constructed by others. I think that Toki Mono seems to be an important one to consider. I do not consider Esperanto a genuine conlang. It is (in my opinion) a futile effort to create a language that will be adopted as a world language and it makes too many compromises to be useful for my purpose of learning the process of how primitive languages may have evolved. Human nature being what It is, it's my opinion that those prehistoric conlangers would have been more apt to create languages that others would NOT understand rather than try to make comprises between separate languages to bring people together. I am very much an outsider in my opinion on the origin of language and feel that it did not start with modern man and that "written" language evolved side by side with "spoken" language and played off each other rather long before protohumans had fully developed organs of speech. The brain is the first organ of speech and that would have been the first organ to get a "linquistic" facility and would not have waited until the other organs of speech were pefected to start manifesting itself. Many people need to move their hands today in order to talk fluently and it is my guess that some combination of "grunts" and sign language were the first vestiges of languages. As far as I know I am alone in these radical opinions -- but the first place to explore their feasibility would be among conlangs -- that is why I am here. -RJL

November 26, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

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[Edited]

October 17, 2010 by Sagari Epotova

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