Re: CHAT: Back on the list; Anti-conlanging bigots

On Thursday, December 6, 2001, at 01:00 , Matthew Pearson wrote:

> Another UCLA grad student, John Foreman, was recently awarded special
> funding to teach a special honours seminar on constructed languages as a
> window to understanding the structure of natural language. Here's the
> website, in case anyone's interested:
>
>
> http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/jforeman/collegium/collegium.
> htm
>
> He sent me a list of the contents of the course reader:
>
Wow.  I want to track down those books...thanks for sharing.  I have
_Aliens and Linguists_, which is a fascinating read for those who like
science fiction *and* linguistics <G>.  I believe the actual title of H.
Beam Piper's story is "Omnilingual," which Meyer does allude to in his
book.  It's a fun piece that it seems NASA took to heart ;-) even if the
ending is a bit anticlimactic from a storytelling viewpoint.  Is
"Pinnochio" another piece of science fiction?  There's a man by that name
who's been editing _Analog Science Fiction and Fact_ since forever (well,
okay, I'm a young squirt, but...).  _The Language Instinct_ is fun reading
though I have no clue how "accurate" it is (and a fellow student in my
audited phonology class last year felt that it was a very "irresponsible"
work).  And Newspeak...how could I have forgotten about Newspeak even 10
years after reading _1984_...

Sorry to gush...it's just that I become excited when I see a reading list
with a lot of things on it that I really liked, because then I have hope
that the other items will also be things that I'll really have fun reading.
..

> Aliens and Linguists by Walter E. Meyers
> "Pinocchio" by Stanley Schmidt
> "The Signals" by Francis A. Cartier
> "Omnilinguals" by H. Beam Piper
> Chapter 2 of The Language Imperative by Suzette Haden Elgin
> Chapter 3 of The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
> "The Principles of Newspeak," Appendix to 1984 by George Orwell
> Chapter 7 of The Language Imperative by Suzette Haden Elgin
> Afterword by Stanley Edgar Hyman for A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
> "Uncleftish Beholdings (from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)" by Poul Anderson
Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

The grass is always greener on the other side of the timeline.--Alex Kay