Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

Andrew Nowicki wrote:

> I could not find Singala on the web.
No, Singala isn't on the web yet (Real Life (TM)). :)  But I'm
thinking of participating in Joe's translation exercise to give
everyone a taste.  ("Long ago, in a quiet village in France...")

> All I could find was a web page made of dead links:
> http://www.avenned.com/eamon/ninfeano.html
If you click on the French flag, you'll get the French version.  It
works, I just checked it.  The non-French versions are not up yet
(Real Life (TM)).  The French version has everything except the
vocabulary (which I could e-mail you if you were that interested).
If you still have trouble with it let me know.

> The web page is dead: http://glhetg.talossa.com
There are others; you might Google around.

> By the way, most vocabulary sizes listed in LangMaker.com are > exaggerated,
> sometimes by several orders of magnitude!
Could be.  Or it could be that web pages just don't have all the
vocabulary online; how do you know?  Unless you look in everyone's
prized notebooks and on their hard drives, you're unlikely to get
every scrap of vocabulary that's been created.  To be honest, there
are Singala words I can't even find, scattered in various "Notepad"
files on my hard drive.

> Although I enjoy controversial topics, I am not trying
> to offend anyone.
No offense taken here.

> I agree that art does not have to be useful, but there is a question of > what
> is a language and what is merely name of a language.
Sticking with my own Singala, for example, I don't believe that it
is merely "a name" - by which I take it you mean a somewhat fanciful
impression of a language (and for some people, an impression is all
that's necessary for certain purposes: for use in a story maybe).

> An automobile without the engine does not deserve the name of > automobile...
What is the engine in a language then?

> Perhaps there is a need for a new name for something that
> is bigger than an alphabet, smaller than a language, and
> made purely for fun... What about "funlang". Now, how would
> we define a complete funlang? Maybe alphabet + complete
> grammar + vocabulary of 100 to 999 words?
Is it Jeffrey Henning who coined the term "model language"?  I
believe that is a great term for what you are discussing.  A model
language would be the rudiments of language used to create names for
a fictional universe or to give a few lines of dialogue in a novel.

"Funlang" wouldn't quite work because a lot of us create elaborate
languages - for fun.  Languages with grammars and large
vocabularies.  Victor Medrano refers to his languages as "serious
fun."

Oh well, I'll let others flesh out a definition of "real language."
But I was thinking... have you ever created a language just for fun
or as art?  Ygyde, to me, is quite sophisticated and shows a great
deal of work.  Have you ever done something like that as art or
simply for the fun of exploring language?  I think you would
probably come up with something quite interesting.

Cheers,
Eamon
____________________________________________________
Robert Eamon Graham              robertg@knology.net

Anugraha banana shundarata dengan bisri bastu-bastu.

                                -- U2, "Grace"

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