Re: THEORY: Language tech & conlang survival

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> On Wednesday, January 19, 2005, at 04:10 , Sai Emrys
> wrote:
> [snip]
> > How do you make a (con)language survive and catch
> on? What are the
> > factors?
>
> Unless things have changed since I was on the list
> several years ago - and
> I suspect they have not - there are a lot of folks
> on Auxlang that would
> just love to know the answer to those questions!
My two cents worth of answer is this:

There are two kinds of people in the world. The first
group consists of those who aren't interested in
languages and can't be bothered to learn an auxlang.

The second group consists of those who ARE interested
in languages, and they spend all their time finding
ways to modify or "improve" the auxlang so that in the
end their unique dialect of that auxlang is no longer
comprehensible to others who's modifications headed in
a different direction.

The end result is that the first group never learns
the auxlang and the second group learns  137,926
mutually incompatable variations on the auxlang and
the goal of ONE auxlang can never be reached.

And while all this is going on some natlang is growing
into that ecological niche.

--gary