Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
Subject: Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?


> Still, you forgot everything those people *didn't* put on the web, and
> still didn't give any reason why we should do that. A lexicon is the worse
> way to present a language on the web you know, because a language is much
> more than a lexicon, and we prefer to work on the meat of things rather
> than the skin. By the way, your metaphor of the car was completely wrong:
> in a language, the engine is the grammatical structure, while the body is
> the vocabulary, not the other way round.
Or perhaps one could say that a language is like a train, with the engine as
the grammatical structure and the cars behind as the vocabulary.  It can't
go anywhere without the grammar, and without the vocabulary, it's not very
useful.  The coal or electricity or what have you that fuels the grammar is
probably the intellect of the people using the language.  And the
passengers?  Um...they're there so we can make money off the ticket sales.
And if another person starts speaking the language, the train splits into
two smaller trains.  No, wait, the first person doesn't forget anything, so
it's more like one train giving birth to another.  All right, forget about
that analogy.