Re: Men vs Women on Conlang

Sally Caves <scaves@...>:

> As for gender and conlanging, I think that more men in 1990 had access to
> computers, but as that changes we'll see how many more women are drawn to
a
> public display of their inventions.  As for Jeff Henning's statistics,
aired
> a few days ago (showing how many invented languages were known to the
> world), it seems so completely obvious to me that the great number of
> conlangs he reports appearing in public after 1990 is directly due to the
> formation of the Internet listservs.  When we didn't have that, how could
> such a uniquely private art get aired except through novels or special
> interest groups that happened to get some publicity?  (This observation is
> in my on-line article)  So the five or the seven known conlangs that he
> reports in this or that pre-nineties year may be no indication whatsoever
> that private language invention was rare.
*waves to you* [At this moment -- 3:51 EST -- I'm flying above upper-state
New York. Clear skies. :-)]

It's actually more complicated than that.  Here's the raw data:
http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_index_year.htm

Note that you are one of the three entries for 1962, Sally.  Now, without
the Internet, Teonaht wouldn't be listed.  Paul Hoffman and Mark Rosenfelder
both have languages listed in 1978.  Again, without the Internet, we
wouldn't know that.

Hypothesis 1:  Since Internet usage is demographically skewed towards the
younger generations, as more people come online, we will see more and more
"older" languages added to the index, beefing up the numbers for the 1960s,
1970s and 1980s.

Hypothesis 2:  The ability to communicate with each other has acted as a
catalyst to encourage much more language creation.  Many of us have sketched
out more languages than we would have otherwise because we are inspired by
each other's work and by the many resources now available to assist us.

Hypothesis 3:  We're enjoying a Renaissance of langmaking (following the IAL
explosion of the late 1800s) in popular culture.  Next week you can go see
three movies with invented languages:  Parseltongue (Harry Potter & The
Chamber of Secrets), Romulan (Star Trek X: Nemesis) and Quenya (The Two
Towers).  We've come a long way since 1951.

BTW, the "0" on the year page means no year is provided.  If you know the
year for any of those languages, click the link for that language, then
press the Update This Information button and add the year to the form.  And
we will have even better data.  And thanks to the dozens of you who have
already submitted your language and year.  If any of you have a list of IALs
from the 1800s with the year they are created, I'll add those as well.

Best regards,

Jeffrey
http://jeffrey.henning.com
http://www.langmaker.com

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