Re: CHAT: History of Conlang List

At 12:24 PM 3/25/99 GMT+0, And Rosta wrote:
>Tim:
>> I think some of your timing may be off by a year or so.  I joined the list
>> in September of '95.  (I'm pretty sure of the date because it was right
>> after I came back from the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow and
>> subsequent traveling in Scotland and England.  I first heard about the list
>> in e-mail discussions in preparation for the con, but I remember deciding to
>> put off joining until after the trip.)
>
>Did you meet the other conlangers who were there? (IIRC, Goran Topic, Lars,
>Nick Nicholas, Richard Kennaway, an American Lojbanist whose name
>escapes my recollection just now, ...)
I met Richard Kennaway.  In fact, I was on a panel with him, on "Invented
Languages in Fiction" or something like that.  (It was from him that I found
out about the list, in a pre-con exchange of e-mail in preparation for the
panel.)  But I didn't meet any of the others (of course I didn't know them,
because I wasn't on the list yet), and I didn't even really get to talk with
Richard except on the panel.  Things were pretty hectic.  If I had already
been on the list, I probably would have made more of an effort to link up
with other conlangers; at least I would have known a few of their names.

I met Bob LeChevalier (Lojbab) and his wife, Nora, at another worldcon; I
think it was the one in Boston in 1989.  And I met Marc Okrand through a
mutual friend at a Star Trek con in Albany, NY (my home town) sometime in
the early 90's.  (That was the only reason I went; I'm not really a Trek
fan.)  But overall, I wasn't really aware that there were other conlangers
out there (except the tiny handful who were also published writers) until I
joined this list.  Even though I was on panels about invented languages at
three worldcons, the other panelists (except Richard) were just people who
found the subject interesting, not people who were actually doing it
themselves.  (And how I got to be on those panels, even though I'm not a
published writer either, is a long and strange story that I don't fully
understand myself.)

>
>--And
>
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

Get your facts first and then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain