Re: NPR interview

I liked the interview a lot. Although there are always nits to pick, I'm
just in awe that this very obscure hobby of ours could be presented soundly
and respectfully in such a short space of time. It was a joy to hear
Sally's readings, and I think they did a lot to overcome the preconception
that many listeners would have about the sophistication of constructed
languages. Most people probably imagine some very trite re-glossing of
English or whatever their native language is, but the readings gave a sense
of the sophisticated phonetic and morphological texture of the conlangs used.

Like others, I'm not really sure what I think of the model ship analogy. I
guess I find the emphasis on scale somewhat distracting. To me the
difference between a conlanger and a field linguist is parallel to the
difference between a novelist and a journalist. I'm sure some of our
projects are actually *larger* than the documentation of some real
languages (though not larger than the languages themselves).

But overall, a wonderful segment. Three cheers for Sally and the NPR folks
for putting together an informative and positive glimpse of what we do and
sharing it with the world.





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Tom Tadfor Little            tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA)
Telperion Productions        www.telp.com
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