Re: Conlang paper

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:29:42 -0800, Jonathan Lipps <jon832@...>
wrote:

>As you will note if you read it, most of it is simply my idea of what a
>conlang is and why I think conlangs are worth having around. I try to pull
>in more or less everything I’ve learned about the craft over the past 8 or 9
>years, but it is certainly possible or likely that many of the things I
>state factually are in reality erroneous. I’d be much obliged to anyone who
>would take the time to correct these sorts of errors, as ultimately I’d like
>to have the paper up on the website for my conlang when it is finished and
>I’d like it to have been “peer-reviewed” beforehand. Ha.
One thing you might want to note is that "diachronic" applies to the study
of language history; a fictional language may often have a great deal of
linguistic detail without necessarily having any historical background.
Klingon, for instance, has a detailed grammatical description and a fairly
good-sized vocabulary, but not much if anything has been written about its
history (as far as I know). Many fictional languages (including a number of
my own) fall somewhere in between the extremes of a simple naming language
and an epic work of art on the scale of Quenya or Sindarin. Some are only
adequate for simple dialogue and fragments of text, while others are more
fully developed, but not yet completely functional.

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