Re: CHAT: t-shirt

Raymond Brown wrote:
>
> At 9:05 am +0000 26/9/00, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> [....]
> >
> >BTW, Ray: How about Classical Latin and Koine Greek the conlangs?
> >
>
> Classical Latin can be regarded as a literary conlang.  it was no one's L1.
> It was consciously created from spoken Latin in imitation, to strat with,
> of established Greek models.
>
> But such a literary creation is rather different, I feel, from what we do
> here.  If we included Classical on such grounds, we would have to the
> English of the King James Bible which was also no one's L1 and consciously
> modelled on the English of a century before, i.e. Tudor English.  We'd
> have, similarly, to include literary Welsh and a whole host other literary,
> non L1, versions of natlangs.
Add to this list "High" or Standard German, and probably just about any
standard literary European national language variety.

This would get out of hands, and it's not what people normally associate
with the term "conlang".

> Koine Greek is a koine  :)
> As such I don't think it constitutes a conlang.  A similar process is
> currently happening to English as it is used daily as an auxlang between
> different communities.  Global, international English is becoming a koine.
>
> I did not like the inclusion of natlangs on the last T-shirt proposal.
> Someone is bound to feel slighted if this or that natlang is not included.
Exactly.  This is an even bigger can of wyrms than auxlangs.

> You can, in fact, get T-shirts with Latin on - I have one  :)
> I have no doubt that T-shirts exist with both ancient & modern Greek on.
>
> I think we're better sticking to what we all recognize as conlangs.
I whole-heartedly agree!

Jörg.