Re: CHAT: Coming out of the conlang closet
| From: | BP Jonsson <bpj@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, June 3, 2002, 11:39 |
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At 22:33 2002-05-31 -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>I just had another "Conlanging moment" today. I was driving with
>my professor Gunnar Hansson,
An awfully Swedish-sounding name, that...
>his wife, and some classmates up to
>Northwestern University to hear a talk on Iterativity and Optionality
>in Optimality Theory (it turned out to be an hour-and-a-half long
>diatribe against OT). A fellow student complained light-heartedly
>that I never check out the links she sends me, and I retorted that
>with 50 some-odd emails a day, at least, I don't usually have the
>time to check all sites all the time. This, naturally, required me
>to explain what the Conlang list is, and who posts to it. It was
>met mostly with silence, but more in the sense that they were faced
>with something they had rarely or never contemplated before. Others
>in the department, though, definitely see Conlanging as odd or a
>waste of time, perhaps because it's a threat to their view of
>languages as objects purely of study and of contemplation, not as
>tools of creativity as we here mostly do.
I think this is so, and I find it strange. But then I find it strange to
see languages as "objects" detatched from the human beings that use them
and change them all the time. Since everybody is involved in language
change, what's so d****ed strange about deliberate linguistic creativity?
/BP 8^)>
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.net (delete X)
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