Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)

Hallo!

On Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:39:31 -0400, Rick Harrison wrote:

> Tuesday night I fell into a pond and nearly drowned. Since it was warm
> stagnant water, there is a remote chance that I may have been infected
> by Naegleria fowleri amoeba; if so, I could be dead within a couple of
> weeks.
Let's hope you didn't catch it - it appears to be rare enough anyway,
and I have spent enough time in warm stagnant water to catch it but
never caught it.

> Obviously that's a personal problem of no importance to anyone else,
> but it brings to mind the question of preparing for death as a
> conlanger, because the human body is very vulnerable and you never
> know when your number will come up in the lottery.
>
> If you have a personal language that you've never revealed to
> anyone else, for example: would you want to write a description of
> the language ahead of time, and make arrangements to have it
> published after passing away? How would you make such arrangements?
Actually, I haven't spent much thought about it so far.

> If you have web pages that you want to stay online after you can
> no longer pay the hosting bill, what options are available? The
> Wayback Machine at archive.org doesn't catch everything and it might
> not be around forever.
I have a grammar sketch of Old Albic on FrathWiki, which would
probably survive at least a few years if I died tomorrow.  When
I put it up there, I did so because I didn't have a web site on
my own, not because I thought it would survive better that way
if I happened to die.

> The conlangers of ancient times published their ideas in books,
> which has preserved them to some degree, although some of the old
> books are scarce collectors' items, unavailable from libraries and
> never webified.
Books are a somewhat more durable matter than web pages - but as
Carsten Becker has said, books whose subject matter doesn't
interest their owners tend to get discarded and recycled quickly,
too.  Yet, keeping a hard copy of your conlang is certainly a good
idea and is worth trying.

> Is it arrogant to want some of your ideas to live on after you die?
I don't think so.  Most people want their work to survive their
own death, I think.

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