Re: Reinventing NATLANGs

Skrivet en doa Michael Adams:

Aside from Hebrew, the best exemple is Cornish. Cornish died out as a
spoken language during the late eighteeenth century but was 'revived'
during the twentyth century. The problem was that the corpus was small.
A lot of vocabulary was missing and a few grammatical features, so
revivalists used Breton to fill in the blank. Cornish is spoken to day
by a few thousands, which is undoubtedly  a success, considering the
sorry state it started from.
People learn Cornish (or Breton, or Manx) mostly as an identity marker
(or enhancer). You must understand, however, that western european
minorities are significantly different from what you have in Northern
America :
- they are larger - the smallest ones number in the tens of thousands -
so that even though revivalism is a minority position, it has still far
more ressources in both money and people than a small indian tribe can
muster.
- their identity is mostly territorial (some people disagree, of course,
but that's the majority position) so foreigners can integrate them and
learn the language as an identity marker. This far more difficult to
achieve in an indian tribe whose indentity is based upon ancestry
As for litterature, it is usefull for learning the language but nothing
more. If you want people to learn a language you need to give them very
god reasons : for dominant languages it is usefullness, money or
prestige, for minority languages it is mostly identity.

As for Esperanto, I suppose many conlangers toyed with it (I did) but I
am unsure about how many can actually use it (I can't). From a
conlanging point of view, Esperanto is rather dull. Nobody knows for
sure how many people speak it, but estimates vary between 500.000 and a
few millions, that is between Welsh and Zulu. As a linguistic experiment
it has some interest but let's face it, English is the de facto lingua
franca of this planet, at least until Mandarin takes over or Peak Oil
buries us.
So my two cents : have a look at Esperanto but use English

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