Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

‘fess up, Andrew – you just like stirring up things, eh

>I went paperless some 20 years ago. I still use a printer to
>print paper documents, but I never make any notes on paper.
>I hate paper books -- they take up too much room and it is
I LOVE paper books, and I have a library of 6000 volumes, many rare ones
which will never be on the WEB or e-books.

>difficult to find info when I need it. Paper faxes are
>sometimes illegible -- emails are much better. Two years
>ago I gave my film still camera to a cousin and bought
>Nikon Coolix 990. Now I take pictures of documents and
>copy them to my laptop. Adobe Photoshop can reduce one page
>of black on white document to about 50 kB, so 20,000 pages
>take up one gigabyte.
How nice for you. Please, feel free to buy Abode Photoshop and a
good-quality digital camera for each of us. Would you like my home address?
I prefer the software on CD, please.

>Are there any advantages of scribbling on paper?
Let's see:
1. It is a renewable/recyclable resource (trees->paper) with few lingeringly
harmful components.
2. It can be used one-handedly without special "software".
3. It keeps an on-going record of changes to drafts without having to create
full-copy backups or setting on strike-through options.
4. it can be used anywhere - home, office, bed, car (when passenger)
5. I don’t have to plug it in every few hours to renew the ink or lead for
further scribbling or to just view what I’ve stored there.

>If someone tells me that he loves to sing or to paint, but does
>not share his art with anyone, I am skeptical. Art is useful
>when it is admired by a large number of people.
In your opinion, Andrew, not as a universal fact. Here I fully disagree -
art for me is therapy and, in some cases, as close to a personal
religious/transcendental experience as I may get. And no, not everyone
believes they should/must force their experiences on another, no matter how
personally enlightening they might be.

>Unabridged Webster's dictionary defines language as "the words,
>their pronunciation, and the method of combining them used and
>understood by a considerable community and established by long usage".
By this definition, there can be no auxlangs like Interlingua, Esperanto,
Ido, etc. as they had neither long usage nor social/cultural evolution prior
to their invention..

Also, the word “considerable” is nebulous. Does it mean the number
considered by many linguists to be the indication of pending extinction?
Does it mean only those languages someone (who?) deems important (i.e., if I
don’t consider them, they aren’t languages)?


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