A DISTURBING proposal! (was Re: Personal langs and converse of aux)

Brian Phillips <deepbluehalo@...> writes:

> hello all,
>   first off to introduce myself, I'm Brian, live in DC, am a medic and
>  a student.
>   I am rather new to the "secret vice" and I look forward to being able to
> toss questions out on the list and hopefully get some ideas and guidance
> from those that have been playing this wonderful game for some time.
>   My primary interest in conlangs is in artlangs.  I am working on Esperanto
> but mainly as a means of teaching myself applied linguistics before I start in
> on the construction of
> a conlang of my own.
>   The natural langauges I am most interested in are variants of English (my
> native tongue), Mandarin, and sign/ASL. The conlangs I find most interesting are >
> Esperanto, Loglan(et
> al), and Laaden.
>   I will call the conlang I am envisioning the "PPC" or personally perfect
> conlang. (stress on the "personally"!!)
>   The PPC has two purposes..1.) It's a personal or journal language suitable
> to expressing my own (somewhat odd)worldview, and
This is a fine use of a conlang.  I guess quite a number of people
around here do that.

>       2.)it's designed to be an
> excellent "first" language for my kids.
You are really going to do THAT???  Have your children grow up with a
language that no-one else speaks outside their core family?  I consider
this MONSTROUSLY unadvisable, as it might result in SEVERE mental
development disorders.  (I am not a pyschologist, but common sense alone
tells me that this cannot be good for your children.)

>   Lots of the IALs tend to stress similarity to natlangs as positive
> features for a given tongue.
>   The PPC to me would be a "anti-IAL" in that it would have similarities to
> natlangs, but it's designed not to be easy for native speakers of those
> languages to learn, but rather to include most or many of the common
> features of as many languages as possible so that the kids are familar with
> them.
I seriously doubt that this would work out.  This sounds like a *VERY*
dangerous and unethical experiment.

>       This way they won't be in the position of an English speaker trying
> to master use of tones found in the Asian langs when they try to learn a new
> language.
Chances are rather that the lack of people other than their siblings or
parents to talk to will throw your children so badly off the track that
their talent for learning foreign languages (which is doubtful to
actually arise from such an experiment) won't help them.  They will be
so thoroughly alienated from the world around them that they will be
unable to lead normal lives.  They are likely do develop severe forms of
paranoia, "Caspar Hauser" syndrome, or whatever.  A one-way ticket to
psychiatric ward, I'd call this.

>   The PPC would also be an "anti-IAL" in that it would (likely) be the exclusive > tongue
> of a family group (not even a micro-community!).
What is your intention behind isolating your children from the rest of
humanity by having them grow up with a first language no-one else
speaks?

>       It could thus be
> super-specialized in
> ways no widely spoken language could afford to be.
>   Would someone care to suggest a top ten list of features found most
> everywhere that are very difficult to master
> if they aren't found in one of your native languages?  I will be asking the
> list questions about phoneme selection and phonology in the future. :)
>   How would a conlang such as I am theorizing be categorized? Is this a
> "philosophical" one..or just "other"?
>   Similarly I would include Sign/gestural components into the PPC,
> infant-signing/gesture being one of those things that fascinate me, and it
> would prep them for mastering ASL.  I would try to include as many
> "developmentally-enriching" traits as possible.  Has anyone else thought
> about this sort of thing?
Yes.  The Nazis, Scientology, various "transhumanists"/"posthumanists"
and similar sociopaths that ought to be turned in, drugged silly and
safely stowed away from humanity.  This is what forensic psychiatry is
for.

If that boggard already has children, they should be taken away from him
and cleared for adoption, for the sake of the children.  If he has none
yet, he ought to be castrated and NEVER ever allowed to adopt any!

This is really disturbing.  But even more disturbing to me is that I am
apparently the first on this list to point it out how monstrous it is,
while the rest of the list happily replies giving that monster ideas
what kinds of difficult sounds to build into his Mengelean experiment.
I am ALARMED by the apparent obliviousness of the conlang community
towards such wickedness.  It was people like YOU, fellow conlangers, who
made Auschwitz possible!  Sorry to offend you, but this must be said.

That guy deserves to be locked away, sedated and securely strapped down.

Jörg.