Results of Poll by Email No. 10

        Apologies to all who expressed great distress after last Saturday came and
went without a poll. 'Twas the ides of May. :) Also, if you have a poll
suggestion, please email me off list--I cannot guarantee that I will catch it.
        In response to the question, "How many conlangs have you created (not
including sketchlangs)?", 29 of you answered thus:
        A. None - I'm still waiting for inspiration to strike. (1 response, 3%)
        B. One - I'm a monogamous conlanger. (6 responses, 21%)
        C. Two - I started with one, but... (4 responses, 14%)
        D. Three to Five - I like to dally with a couple of different conlangs. (10
response, 34%)
        E. Six to Nine - It used to be just a hobby... (2 responses, 7%)
        F. Ten to Fourteen - I can't stop! (3 responses, 10%)
        G. Fifteen plus - I need to check myself into Conlanger's Anonymous. (3
responses, 10%)

        And Rosta talked about love and marriage when answering "B": "Monogamy is
definitely the right analogy as far as I'm concerned. The marriage is over 20
years old. (Marriage with the conlang, that is; I've been with my wife a mere
16 years.)"

        Jesse Bangs tried to explain away his conlang dallying with this wave of the
hand: "This [D], technically, but really I'm monogamous.  Yivríndil is my
love and the only one that gets regular attention, although I have worked
enough on my other langs to make them more than sketches."
        Matthew Kehrt, in answering "D", gave a rather disturbing reason: "
I restart pretty much every time a hard drive dies." Ever heard of back-ups?
:)
        After Christophe Grandsire counted to "F" on his fingers and toes, he
remarked, "That's the problem when you don't want to change your former
conlangs to include some neat features you've just discovered: you have to
create a new conlang to satisfy your urge of using them :)) ."

        Maarten van Beek waffled between "A" and "G"; I counted him as "G" if for no
other reason than the sheer scale of his work: "I am actually more of a
conculturalist than a conlanger. That means that most of my conlangs are not
really fleshed out yet. I have about 80  languages which I am working on, off
and on, but none of them are anywhere near finisehd yet. Some have grammar
outlines and vocabulary, while others are not yet past the level of a
one-paragraph description of the type and general sound of the language."
        Jeffrey Henning wrote to say that he has created 16 languages, although his
favorite is Dublex, which has been receiving a fair amount of attention on
the list as of late.

        In response to the question, "Have you created related conlangs?", the
results were as follows:
        A. I have created dialectal forms. (6 responses, 21%)
        B. I have created sister languages. (1 response, 3%)
        C. I have created mother/daughter languages. (2 responses, 7%)
        D. I have created entire language families! (8 responses, 28%)
        E. I haven't created related conlangs (Whoops, forgot this one on the
original poll!) (12 responses, 41%)

        Again, Maartan van Beek describes his world-building activity: "While
creating my conworld and its conhistory, I evolved the languages on my world
from four independent original languages. Starting from then, and following
the lines of history, I described how these people and languages interacted
and which (but mostly not how) and to what measure these languages influenced
each other. I drew many diagrams with time-axes trying to indicate which
languages existed at each point in time, how they were related to each other
etc." Impressive, most impressive.
        Thanks to all who participated, and stay tuned for Poll by Email No. 11!
        :Peter

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