Killing your Conlang Cultures was Re: reality?

---"J. Barefoot" <lesfraises@...> wrote:
>
> As an aside to the whole thing, I've been watching this Twilight Zone
> Marathon and one episode got me thinking (at about one o'clock this
> morning becauses I couldn't sleep). It was about a man condemned to
the
> electric chair. He tries to warn everyone that when he dies they'll
all
> die too because the whole world that they think is 'reality' is just a
> dream he's having. Well it turns out that he's right and all these
> people's lives are really just his recurring nightmare. So it makes me
> think that maybe somewhere there's people who speak Yisian or
Teonaht or
> Nova or Brithenig (maybe somewhere in the Twilight Zone?) and that
> whenever we say "Allright enough of this nonsense for right now, I've
> got to do some actual work" perhaps it's an act of genocide.
> Remember, I came up with this at one this morning.
   Genocide? Too late. The native speakers of Enamyn (who lived in
Crimea) resisted millenia of foreign incursions, including the
Scynthians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Huns (who did a
very good job of wiping out a large number of Crimea's population),
the Khazars, the Pechenegs, the Polovtsians, and the Slavs. They had a
brief Golden Age during the 11th century, with a grand total of four
cities (the largest with a population of 10,000), which was quickly
squashed by the Mongol Hordes in the twelth century. In the fifteenth
century, with the Crimean Khanate and the slave trade, the Enamyn
population base began to erode, despite some resistance efforts. By
the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, there was only one
small village left. When Russia annexed Crimea in 1783, a Russian
Orthodox priest, Vladimir, following the Russians and Ukrainians
immigrants as they made their way into Crimea, discovered this
village, which had a total of 64 Enamyn speakers. Since they showed no
interest in learning Russian, he learned Enamyn and began to record
the language on paper. (Our good priest, however, was not entirely
altruistic in learning the language. The letters to his brother reveal
that he had his eye on a pretty young lass. They later married, since
Russian Orthodoxy did not forbid its priests to marry, and had two
girls that survived to adulthood.) Unfortunately, the entire village
succumbed to the Plague about ten years later. The last known native
speaker of Enamyn, Vladimir's mother-in-law, died on November 1, 1797,
ten days after her daughter (Vladimir's wife) similarily died.
Vladimir packed up and left with his three remaining children (one, a
boy, would die of pneumonia two months later) for Sevestapol. Sic
transit gloria mundi.
   :Peter
==
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