Re: CONLANG jargon WAS: How to spell a gesture

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Bennett" <paul-bennett@...>


> On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:48:06 -0800, Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:
>
>> ... for the relatively new folk like me, could someone provide a list
>> of all the jargon & acronyms used on this list? (As in, conlang-l
>> specific jargon, not linguistic terms in normal use.)
>
> ANADEW - A Natlang Already Does it, Except Worse
    "Another Natlang Already Done it Even Worse."  Important to keep
    that spiffy grammatical spin in there. :)

> YAPT - Yet Another Pronunciation Thread, a generalisation from
> YAEPT - Yet Another English Pronunciation Thread
> AFMCL - As For My Conlang
> Maggelity - The property of being utterly horrific, yet allegedly regular
I thought Maggelity meant the property of being utterly horrific because
NOTHING is regular in the language; it only lures you into thinking it is
regular.  Based on Christophe's invention Maggel.  We're back to "Irish
Gaelic is Evil!"

> IB - Ill Bethisiad. An alternate Earth where a number of on- and off-list
> conlangs exist.
Paul, do you have any memory of who coined what?  I remember someone coming
up with ANADEW.  I'm not sure I'm the author of AFMCL, but I think I
suggested something like this in 1998.   When I was I committing it so
often.

> Types of conlang:
> natlang - Natural language (i.e. a real one)
> artlang - Any conlang that is not an auxlang
> auxlang - An intrinsically doomed project ;-)
 :)

> engelang - An engineered language. I'm not sure of the exact shade of
> meaning implied.
If John and And were still on board (I think And's nomail) they would define
these terms.  Here's something I found on the archives from And Rosta on May
15, 2002, replying to Garrett Jones.  The distinction is a subtle one:

AND:
'engelang' means an 'engineered language', one with explicit design goals
such that the degree of success in achieving those goals is objectively
assessable.

[Then, later:]


'Loglang' was coined to define a hypothetical class of conlangs based on
very much the same principles as the Loglans, but not restricted to the
Loglans (Loglans being Loglan and its descendants/versions).  In the case of
'Engelang', I perceived another natural kind (defined by me in previous
messages in these threads), and
after much discussion eventually managed to articulate a reasonably explicit
definition. I initially applied the definition to the term 'loglang', but
found that popular consensus held to the narrower definition of 'loglang'
that I have given above,
so this gave rise to 'engelang', which follows the clipping-compound pattern
of the other terms and derives from the obvious and optimal descriptive
phrase 'engineered language'.

JONES:
> I guess a better definition would be this:
>
> [language term] n. a language with one or more experimental features
> (optional: that do not occur in natural languages).
>
> the reason the strange languages would fit in this category is that they
> would have features that don't occur in natural languages.
In that case, 'does not occur in natural languages' is an integral
rather than optional part of the definition.

But the features 'experimental' and 'nonnatural' seem to me not
to define a natural class. Some naturalistic conlangs enjoy
typologically interesting experiments with natlang features.
Some conlangs with nonnatlang features are not in any meaningful
way engaged in experimentation. And I'm not conscious of any
marked tendency for the two properties to go hand in hand.
END

See also Jeffrey Henning's definition on Langmaker: "A conlang designed to
achieve pragmatic rather than artistic goals,"; but I think in And's case,
Livagian is also deeply invested in artistry as well.

See also And's page:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-print.php?page=And%20Rosta


> lostlang - A conlang that could concievably be real, and which is
> presented as such
> loglang - A logical language
> toylang - A gedanken plaything, usually pretty ephemeral
> romlang - Latin-derived Conlang
> ielang - PIE-derived Conlang
> Most of the other names for languages derived from real languages are
> fairly transparent.
>
> ... and many more!!!
Thanks, Paul.
Sally

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