Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

En réponse à John Cowan :


>The nearest North American analogues are "track" (in secondary school)
>and "major" (in tertiary school).  The former, however, also implies
>a judgement about students' competence (they are often known by number),
>whereas the latter does not.
At my time, there used to be an unofficial hierarchy of directions, with
the scientific one at highest position, the literary and econonomic ones
just under, and the technical and gestion ones at the bottom. The reform
was supposed to put a stop to this hierarchy but in effect it just
transferred to the new configuration. Normally, this unofficial hierarchy
doesn't provoke problems, but it does create strange situations like my
sister who had to take the scientific direction just to study Law at the
university, while the economic and social track was meant to bring you
there. The problem is that she was advised to choose the scientific
direction because the economic one is too weak on maths for future Law
students. Go figure...


>How much of this is what you choose, and how much is what is chosen for
>you, either directly or by setting cutoff points on tests?
There's no such thing as cutoff points on tests, but at the end of each
trimester (and of each school year), all the teachers you have meet to
discuss each student's case, and give advice. The advice can be extremely
strong :)) , but it never becomes an interdiction as such. On the other
hand, to enter some direction you need to have a profile that fits the
direction, so the interdiction may come from above :) (and when you stay in
the same school, it often means that the same people are the ones from
below and the ones from above :)) ). But there's no such thing as cutoff
points. It's all a matter of negociation between the different parties
(when needed. But in most cases the parties all agree already anyway :) ).
I've seen a person who was completely discouraged to enter a scientific
direction, and yet did it by changing school (the parents insisted :(( ).
Needless to say, he failed :((( .

Of course, there is always the tendency that the ones with low grades will
be pushed to choose a technical direction, while the ones with high grades
will be pushed to go scientific :)) (and the literary direction is often
forgotten :)) ). But on the whole, I can say that the choice is by 75% to
the family (the parents have a big part too, when they decide to interfere.
Luckily mine didn't). It's just that the teachers try to interfere in this
choice as much as possible :)) .

> > Mathematics (containing all the Maths subjects we studied, i.e. algebra, a
> > bit of geometry, functions, with derivation and integration, limits and
> > series, complex numbers and functions - but not the derivation of complex
> > functions -, statistics and probabilities, and I must be forgetting a
> > few),
>
>Plane and spherical trigonometry, surely?
Of course :)) . But I included that in algebra, geometry, functions,
complex numbers, etc... ;))) It is not as such a separate subject as an
application of other subjects to special cases.


Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.