Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

I'm going to separate your useful question from your highly offensive
statement here, Andrew, and reply to each in their turn.

> It seems to me that most of the languages discussed
> in this mailing list are not languages at all, but
> names of languages that exist only in the imagination
> of the person who invented the names. I doubt a
> language can be used for simple everyday communication
> unless it has a vocabulary of at least 1000 words.
> Has  anyone in this mailing list made a real conlang?
A great deal of us.  Perhaps you would find some of these 'conlangs of
magnitude' if you were to start looking around on the Web for them.  Let
me list you some names: Irina Rempt, David Bell (both currently inactive
on the list, but valued members of our community nonetheless), Matt
Pearson, John Coawn, and so forth.  You seem to think that we don't have
any material made for our conlangs, simply because we do not post
massive lexica to the list on a regular basis.  If you must make
pronouncements like this, do your research first.

> Making a real language is a huge effort, almost like
> building a pyramid. Team work is a necessity, and yet
> there is not much team work among the conlangers.
You just made a patently stupid statement.
A real language cannot be created - a real language is simply a behavior
pattern of humans that happens to have certain properties, including
being a social phenomenon.  To 'create a real language'. we would have
to do things that i'm sure are highly improbable or even illegal, such
as raising a colony of children who were exposed only to a conlang which
they would then creolize into a living language naturally.
We are not creating real languages, we are creating constructed
languages; much like painters paint pictures of grapes rather than
pulling grapes out of thin air.  It's well-known that artists do not
tend to work well in groups, and having multiple people make artistic
decisions on a single project is a quick way to make something ugly.

> Linux programmers have the opposite mind set - they
> love to work together, and often improve work of
> others instead of reinventing the wheel. Perhaps the
If you continue making statements that are so clearly based on nothing
outside your own imaginings, you will destroy what credibility you have.
Go to, say, download.com, and look in any one of the Utilities
categories.  You'll find countless implementations that have identical
purposes, many of which will have been created by single people working
alone, reinventing the wheel to their tastes.
In fact, you must be aware that there are even countless myriads of
implementations of Linux itself - reinventing the carriage, as it were.

> reason for the difference is that the Linux programs
> are tools, while the languages discussed here are as
> useful as the pyramids. The main purpose of the
Many of us do not share your view that conlangs are tools.  Perhaps you
would be happier on AUXLANG, where the community agrees with more of
your tenets of belief.  Here we are not always reformers - we are
artists and scientists, madmen and poets.

> pyramid is to say "My unique pyramid is sky high
> and made of white marble. I do not share it with anyone."
MY pyramid is an old house in Paris, covered in vines.  Inside it live
twelve little girls in two straight lines.  The smallest one was
Madeleine.

--
Shreyas Sampat