Re: a 12th century conlang

On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Sally Caves wrote re: bricolage:

>   It's a real trendy word nowadays in literary criticism.  It appears to mean a
> mish mash of things, an eclectic collection, the kind of stuff you find on a
> collectors shelf, much of it "kitsh."  Don't ask me why everybody and his
> uncle's cousin in literary theory just has to jump at the word and replicate it
> to the point of banality.  At any rate, invented languages are collections of
> the parts of real languages.  It's supposed to show that he thinks of invented
> languages as doing violence to real languages, replicating them by taking them
> apart,
> or some such thing.  He talks about the "impoverishment" of natural languages
> and other such nonsense..
I'd like to read this, I think.  Merely for the p.o. factor.  Today I had
a linguistics student (defending his thesis this very day, in fact, for
his MA), tell me that artificial languages were impossible to create.  I
immediately brought up Esperanto and Klingon.  He speaks a little Klingon
-- horrible pronounciation from what little I know, but he *still* thinks
it's not a real language.

There is such a nonprofessional, nonacademic reaction to conlangs among
academics!  when I tell my collegues that I invent languages, they think
I'm insane.  But the truth is, when I'm sick of Beowulf, sick of grading
papers, and sick of Kenny B. (Branagh, that is), nothing is more relaxing
than inventing a few new roots, or lazily deciding whether to have a
voiced [l], an unvoiced [l], or both (both, I think).  And certainly the
work that people get paid for -- say, writing an index to the Wing STC,
which one of my professors has done -- is just as strange and dull to me
as conlanging must seem to him.

Sorry, I had a point, but lost it.  *rambles, talks to himself, and
dresses funny*

--Patrick