The disappeared conlang (and: Character sets)

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>
> So as a rule of thumb, let's restrict ourselves to 7-bit ASCII as much as
> possible, by making for instance special transcriptions for mail (after all,
> that's what Greek speakers do on a daily basis), use Latin-1 as little as
> possible, only when we feel it's necessary (I tend to do it automatically when
> I write French, sorry :( ), and with explanations for the signs that may not
> pass correctly. Ban Unicode, UTF-8 and other fancy encodings. There will always
> be people at the other end who cannot receive them corectly. If you really want
> to use those, make a webpage and post the URL. It's not as difficult as you
> think (and I speak of experience :)) ).
>
As Lars and I found out, the listserv itself mangles Unicode (and
utf-8, and I thought even Latin-1). Nobody's mailer is going to
magically solve the bug in the listserv...

Ob conlang: I've now arrived in my novel at a point where I needed a
nice stretch of classical Charyan. I started rummaging in my files
(which stretch back to the halcyon days of my first PC-XT), and found
nothing. I thought I had made a grammar for the language, once, and I
do have a lot of words... Then I went back to my paper archives. Those
occupy (together with Irina's) a whole wall in the guest room. No
grammar either, only a short note that was obviously written when I
was much enamoured with Classical Chinese, and which is completely
opaque to me, now...

So there I am -- Manxu is teaching Murxao classical Charyan, and I
have to fill in the examples with XXX! This conlang appears to be
no more -- it's a goner -- it's giving the glottal fricatives -- it
won't go SOV if you put a thousand volts in it.

And now I have a difficult choice -- continue writing a pace of 5000
words a week, or take an undefined period of time to re-construct
it.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org

Replies