Re: Con-prescriptivism

In message <36FBEF54.74F9D550@...>, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
writes
>The recent flameskirmish (I don't think it's quite a *war*, more like a
>brief skirmish) around prescriptivism, etc., as well as a joking remark
>by someone about having a "haughty" register in conlangs got me to
>thinking about conprescriptivism.  I seem to remember that Elet Anta has
>a fictional language academy, but does anyone else have one?
Yes, Elet Anta has the Curthas Elecwaa, the Council of the Language,
which has a number of committees, of which the Tolonaldye Chacri, the
Lexicon Committee is the only which has appeared so far.  Actually, I
invented it mainly as a kind of joke.  Their main function is to issue
denunciations of new usages, pronunciations, etc.  Of course, I document
all these, and the Curthas heartily disapproves.  Only the "pure"
language should even be mentioned.  For example, what is the word for
"television"?  The answer, according to the Tolonaldye Chacri, is
"urfayceltisac" - "far seeing machine".  The word everyone uses is
"fayac".  Then there's the pronunciation of the combination "-nc-".
"Correctly", this is /n/+/k/, so that "yencwa" (person) is /jenkwa/.  In
fact, reading between the lines, everyone says /jeNkwa/, a pronunciation
which the Curthas has called "doroshye la-cawl-blavadsu anty' eliany'
eleccwaye salaythsuu" - "a dreadful rotting away of the beauty of our
sacred language..."  In fact, that's an example of another thing that
worries them: the subject of verbal nouns, which according to the ruling
of the Curthas should take the definitive form, whereas everyone in fact
uses the attributive (eg, "salaythsuye" in that example).

Occasionally it issues trivial rulings of one sort or another; such as
the use of an apostrophe in the middle of a compound word, where the
first element is in the attributive form, and the second starts with a
vowel;  for example (see Sally's list) "alepyen" - "partner", which we
used to have to write "alepy'en", though reading between the lines I
don't think anyone did.

They also make up words from more-or-less nothing sometimes; such as
"ishcwa" - "chemical element", the stem of which is used to form the
names of elements; eg, "Yacor" - "the planet Uranus"; -> "yacorish" -
"uranium".

--
John Fisher   john@drummond.demon.co.uk   johnf@epcc.ed.ac.uk
Elet Anta website: http://www.drummond.demon.co.uk/anta/
Drummond ro cleshfan merec; fanye litoc, inye litoc