Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

En réponse à Tristan McLeay :


>How many years does a normal French primary/secondary education go for?
12 years. Primary school is 5 years, Junior High 4 and Senior High 3. To
this you must add the three years of "Maternelle" (a bit like Kindergarten
except that it's considered to be a school and is I think mandatory).

>(Thirteen here, and the norm is to finish at 18, unless you were born in
>the early part[1] of the year, when it'd be 17. Seeing as I'm sure the
>same amount of people are born in the first half of the year as the
>second, it seems odd that 17 would be your norm.)
Yet it is, and that's logical considering it's one year less than you.

>[1]: When I started school, that was Jan-June. Since, they've been cut
>some months off. I think it's down to Jan-March.
It probably is the same in France, I don't actually know where the cut-off
is. In any case, what I know is that most people become 18 when they are
already at the university.


>What's a cursus? You seem to like the word, but it isn't in my
>vocabulary or dictionary.
Really? It must be my Dutch contaminating my English again :(( . What I
mean is a direction of studies (i.e. Literary, Economic and Social,
Scientific, Technical - the last one with many subdirections possible -)
which influences the whole package of classes, mandatory and optional, that
you will take. In my time, you were directed to technical studies pretty
early (sometimes at half of Junior High, most often just after Junior High)
and those who took a non-technical direction made their choice at the end
of the 1st Senior High School year. Today, it has a bit changed, and
everyone has to choose a direction at the end of Junior High, but each
direction has more subdirections than it had in my time (the system is a
bit like a tree, with the student as an ant which slowly walk from the
trunk to one branch, and then another branch stemming from the first one,
etc...).

>And the only compulsory subject in the VCE is one unit (semester) of
>English or ESL (English as a Second Language) and four units of one of
>English/ESL, English Language or Literature; one also has to do at least
>one group A (arts/humanities in a broad sense) and one group B
>(maths/sci in a broad sence). The VCE is the last two years of secondary
>school, but only the last year really counts.
Strange system. Here we don't count in semesters, but in trimesters, and
that's only for the scheduling of various exams. Courses themselves all
last the whole school year, whatever the course and your direction.
Whatever the direction, the bulk (around 35/40 hours a week) is mandatory.
The amount of options you can take vary depending on the direction you
took, but is usually no more than three possible options (with usually one
"mandatory" in the sense that you have a choice of possibilities, but you
are obliged to take at least one of them) for an amount of 4 to 10 hours a
week. Like any other course, options last the whole school year.

  To give you an example of how that looks like, let's see what I had in my
last year of High School (scientific studies) ... My mandatory courses were
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),
History (the whole second half of the 20th century, including WWII.
Everything before had been studied since the beginning of Junior High),
Geography (and a bit of Geopolitics), Physics (Mechanics and Dynamics,
including a bit of Special Relativity, Thermodynamics, Fluid and Solid
Mechanics, Optics, Electricity and Magnetism, Waves, etc...), Chemistry
(Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Solutions, Ions, Reactions, etc...),
Biology (I can't remember much of this one but I think it was mostly about
the way cells work ;)) ), Philosophy (French literature studies end at the
second year of Senior High, with the "Baccalauréat de Français", the
end-of-year exam, which will count in the final count the year after. In
the last year, you get an introduction to Philosophy instead. You don't get
more because it's scientific studies rather than literary ones) and English
(6 hours a week IIRC). My optional courses were Spanish (4 hours a week)
and Latin (2 hour a week). The whole thing ended with the "Baccalauréat",
i.e. the end-of-year exam and diploma (one week of written and oral exams
on everything you've learned during the year. All marks obtained are
combined with a system of weight to give a final mark given over 20. You
need 10 or more to get the diploma). it's the only thing that counts, the
marks obtained during the year have no influence at all (except for people
whose final mark is just below 10 (i.e. 9.5 or more). For those, the whole
year and sometimes the years before will be put into account by a comity
before considering whether that person passes or not).

Of course, this is only for my case. The system has now slightly changed,
but I don't know exactly how it works now. The principle stays the same,
but the organisation of the directions and the options is just a bit different.

AFAIK, the French system is much more demanding than the English one, with
more hours a week for more subjects (to the hours at schools, you must add
about two to three hours of homework every evening and a few hours more in
the weekend. Teachers ask a lot of us :(( ). The fact that the French
mandatory education lasts one year shorter than the English one hardly
compensates :(((  (especially since University studies are quite long and
heavy in France too).

Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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