Which are the most elegant known languages?

By elegant I mean:

* not based on ideograms
* self-consistent
* minimum number of verb conjugation patterns and exceptions
* minimum number of non-phonetic spellings
* minimum number of borrowed foreign words
* minimum number of words with multiple meanings
* minimum number of words with same meaning
* minimum dependency on diacritical marks
* no silly concept of nouns having gender

All right GW, 

Perhaps this will work for you.

Hungarian.

The nouns are neutral. 
It's not similar to most languages.
 As a Finno-Ugric language, it's related to Finnish and Estonian.
While it does have some words from the latin, and is rapidly picking up English,
the language is still pretty much intact. 
The spelling is phonetic, so it's essentially easy to learn.
It uses the same alphebet as English, so it's easy to read. 
There are two primary accents or diacritial marks. 

And speaking of elegance, the greeting for 'hello'
translates to "I kiss your hand."

"Your welcome" is "with my heart."

Very gracious and romantic.

Best wishes

TaxMama-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by gw-ga on 09 Sep 2002 21:50 PDT

Hello,

I would appreciate it if you could provide a few additional candidate
languages, instead of just one.

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Clarification of Answer by taxmama-ga on 10 Sep 2002 05:26 PDT

Dear GW, 

Frankly, based on your specifications, I don't know of any other
languages that qualify. You've eliminated all the oriental languages,
by excluding ideograms.

You've eliminated Middle Eastern and Romance languages, Russian,
Greek, Slavic, German and most of Europe by the concept of gender. So
that effectively eliminates several continents - South America, North
America, Asia, and Europe, North Africa.

What's left? Let's see - The Artic and Antartica, Africa and the
various Islands.

Hawaiian might meet your standards. It has fewer letters than most
languages.
All of the words are phonetic. No diacritical marks. But, these days,
it has borrowed a great deal from the Japanese and American languages.

If you want to really go into depth on this you may want to pursue
this and do some research yourself. Here is a fabulous site to work
from - Ethnologue

Take a look at their Ethnologue country index
http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp

Look at the detail they have about the multitude of African Languages
alone!
http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Africa

There might be some languages that meet your criteria in the Pacific
http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=The+Pacific 

There are hundreds of languages spoken by small populations in the
world.
To research them all would take years.

I've heard that the French resist borrowing words from other
languages, and many international legal documents are written in
French to prevent ambiguities.

Dear gw,

I'm afraid I do not understand your concept of elegance. For example,
why should nouns having genders be "silly"?

Scriptor

To meet those qualifications, an "elegant" language would almost have
to be one that's artificially constructed.  Esperanto meets most of
those requirements, but it's certainly not a language I would call
elegant.

secret901 said --

"..the French resist borrowing words from other languages.."

Yes, now. 

But given that it is a "romance" language, it's nearly ALL borrowed from Latin ...

Which perhaps brings us to our answer: LATIN

http://www.orbilat.com/Proto-Romance/Proto-Romance.html

-K~

Scriptor-ga:

I consider noun genders (feminine/masculine nouns as in the
Latin-based languages) to be "silly" because noun gender is
meaningless (why are tables masculine and desks feminine, for
example?).  No extra information is conveyed by the gender, so it's
pointless to memorize which nouns belong to which gender.

I am surprised by the comment that Esperanto is not an elegant
language.  It is a highly flexible language.  I find it possible to
express nuances in Esperanto which are not possible in English,
although I am a native speaker of English.  For example, you can say
things like "the night blacks", and be perfectly grammatical.  Much
wonderful poetry has been written in Esperanto using these
possibilities.

However, Esperanto does not fit your criteria, because all words have
been borrowed from one language or another. The borrowed forms are
used to creat word "roots" which, by the addition of endings to
signify the part of speech, can be used much more freely than in the
original.

For a quick description: http://www.esperanto-usa.org/about_eo.html
For a free course: http://pacujo.net/esperanto/course/

As a native speaker of English, I used to think that it was "silly"
for other languages to ascribe gender to inanimate objects. However, I
have heard comments from Europeans to the effect that the
"gendrification" of common nouns adds a nuance of meaning which is
missing in a language such as English, where all things other than
persons and animals are described as "it."

Similarly, the heavy use of the subjunctive in languages other than
English may seem foolish and unnecessary to some; yet I've heard
native speakers of other languages say that they feel the lack of it
when they speak English, and feel that their expression is somehow
limited.

"Elegance" is in the view of the perceiver. I can imagine that an
Eskimo might pity me for being afflicted with a language so barren
that it has only one word for "snow."

Actually, English has dozens of words for "snow."  Here's an
interesting article on that subject:
http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd/mymusings/eskimo.html

But you're right about the subjunctive.  In Spanish, at least, it does
provide nuances that aren't available in English. So does the ability
to place descriptive adjectives before or after the nouns they modify.
 The difference isn't always translatable into English, but it's
there.

Modern Turkish is a rather ideal language. Each letter has only one
sound. There are no double-letter sounds. Because it is so simple and
consistent, once you learn the basic rules, it's hard to mispronounce
or mispell a word in Turkish. Irregular verbs and nouns are extremely
rare. In fact, Turkish grammar is so sensible, that the grammar of the
artificial language, Esperanto, was based on Turkish. Turkish is quite
different from English, so it can be difficult for a native English
speaker to learn. It features agglutination. There are no articles.
There's only one pronoun (that covers he/she/it). But taken by itself,
I think Turkish is very elegant.

Here's a link to a brief synopsis of the language:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/t/turkishl.asp

... and a beginner's guide to Turkish:
http://www2.egenet.com.tr/mastersj/