Re: Yaguello [was: Re: LUNATIC again]

On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, And Rosta wrote:

> When I ventured to voice a rather low opinion of this book, you
> appeared to me to wish to defend it as variously meritorious. Have
> you changed your mind?
>
> --&.
Yes. It is variously biased and incompletely thought out.  I had read
"around" in the book, and it had seemed to me that she was praising lunacy
in the same way that lunacy has been praised in fools and wisemen.  But
then I read the whole thing from cover to cover, and she's very
condescending.  Interestingly, the graduate student to whom I gave this
book to critique read the whole thing from cover to cover and reported on
it quite favorably, having reached the conclusions I had in only a cursory
reading.  She was astonished to hear that the book was based almost
entirely on discrediting Nikolas Marr, and bringing down the whole lot of
conlangers with him.  Why does Y. need to have a whole chapter devoted to
"In defence of Natural Languages," as though she thinks that conlanging
threatens them?

How are you?  Why are you so behind in your mail?  This is an issue of
two weeks ago.  ;-)  I hope we don't resurrect the old "artlangs aren't
languages debate."  You missed some interesting heat.

BTW, my "Lunatic Survey" will be a paper at an F&SF conference in March.
Twenty minutes. Not much time to undo Yaguello.  Wish me luck, folks.

Sally
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Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html


Li fetil'aiba, dam hoja-le uen.
volwin ly, vul inua aiba bronib.

This leaf, the wind takes her.
She's old, and born this year.
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