Re: CHAT: t-shirt

Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > Date:         Sun, 24 Sep 2000 11:02:48 -0400
> > From:         Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
>
> > On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, The Gray Wizard wrote:
>
> > If more venerable and wiser list-members were amenable, I like David's
> > B-extension suggestion.  It seems almost shameful to exclude Tolkien (and
> > others of whom I probably haven't heard, being fairly new to this)
> > because of auxlang issues.  Would an auxlanger by offended by Tolkien?
>
> I think some are, from the standpoint that working for the universal
> adoption of an IAL is a moral duty, and any effort spent on Quenya (or
> Klingon, or amman iar) is diverted from that project --- so Tolkien
> should have used his energy on writing propaganda tracts for $IAL. For
> the oldtimers: remember Ewan Boyd?
Those auxlangers who claim that people building languages just for the
fun
of it are offending the IAL movement by diverting forces that ought to
be dedicated to the IAL mission, should ask themselves where the rabbit
runs!  Most of them are anyway what Ed Heil called the "Guardian" type,
people who bicker about rules and terms and hardly ever design
languages.
Such people are hardly in the position to claim they are "conlangers".

> On the other hand, we offend people of that persuasion just by being
> here; including Tolkien won't make any difference in their opinion of
> the T-shirt.
Very true; on the other hand, excluding Tolkien would mean cutting off
our own roots!  So put Quenya and Sindarin on the t-shirt, but not
Esperanto.

> My personal opinion, in the view of what happened last, is that an
> official CONLANG project should officially exclude _all_ IAL projects,
> whether succesful in the modern timeframe or not. No Lingua Ignota, no
> SolReSol, no volapük, no Esperanto, no Glosa. No Novial, Speedwords or
> NGL either, even though some list members may be working on them. (Of
> course we could put in a footnote explaining that IALs are waiting for
> AUXLANG to agree on a list).
I second this opinion.  Keep the auxlangs aside!  (Actually, my personal
definition of "conlang" explicitly excludes auxlangs, even if this is
technically incorrect.

IMHO, the auxlangers have blackballed themselves by their childish
bickering.
And how many auxlangers are offended by ignoring them on our t-shirt?
To the archetypical auxlanger, we are a bunch of people wasting time
with
useless games anyway; and many an auxlanger probably would feel
more offended by finding his beloved One True Language to Cure All
Problems Caused by Confusion of Languages (TM) among all those "useless
toy languages", than by finding it completely ignored.

> Lojban is a special case --- I don't see it as an IAL project myself,
> but I don't know whether AUXLANG sees it as a competitor anyway.
>
> The alternative is that someone takes the financial risk of offending
> too many conlangers, and simply includes a list of well known IALs on
> the shirt without telling anyone else until it is printed. Not to say
> that suggestions shouldn't be solicited, but there should be no public
> or private discussion.
I think auxlangs are a can of wyrms that is better left unopened.
Auxlangs suffer what I like to call the "Highlander syndrome"
("There can be only one") by the essence of their nature:
an auxlang is intended to be *the* single international language;
the mere act of designing a new auxlang amounts to claiming that
all previously existing auxlangs are inappropriate to their purpose.
That is of course completely boggledydocks, but it is the way auxlangers
tend to see things.

The best way to deal with auxlangs and auxlangers is to ignore them.

Jörg.