Re: CHAT: University Advice (was Re: A bit of advice)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
"ObConLang: international relations in *your* concultures/conlangs: lingua
franca?  Pidgins/creoles?  (If I ever *have* enough languages sketched out,
I'd *love* to do a pidgin!  I've always thought they sounded Really Neat.)
General hostilities?  Host country or dominant country's language for any
given encounter?  No or limited history of diplomacy?  Special forms or
registers for diplomacy?"

    The people who speak Afer (whether you call them Berber, Chanani, Afari,
Africanes, etc) do just that.  Much like the inhabitants of the Barbary
Coast in the real world, they used The Lingua Franca, aka Sabir, a very
long-lived trading jargon used to "facilitate" (ahem) communications across
the Mediterranean (although, to be honest, it would seem that most
communcation in Sabir consisted of pirates barking at one another and their
slaves).  The Lingua Franca has also been described as an "archetypal
pidgin" - that is to say, speakers of LF would approach one another with a
model in mind and some basic vocabulary, and then fill in the gaps using
their native language (sort of like Occidental).  Somehow, they got their
meaning across (which is not so impressive when you consider that they had
"visual props," such as cutlasses and the lash, unlike the Occidentalists).
    It is precisely this reason which makes LF so elusive.  No two texts are
the same; you can see this for yourself at

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~haberl/corpus.html

    I've also posted a "primary text" in LF online, but the information
regarding it is in Interlingua.  I'm currently busy writing a brief articul
on the LF in Occidental, as well.
    One of my little projects (which will probably never be finished) is a
reconlang based upon LF.  Because it is impossible to talk of a standard
variety of LF, I'm electing to elaborate on the Venetian-Arabic variety
which was used by A.G. Giancarli in one of his plays.  His was, by far, the
largest body of text in any form of LF (and I would naturally have an
affinity for anything which mixed Venetian dialect and colloquial Arabic).
    In the world of Afer, Lingua Franca will never produce a literature.  It
will continue to be a quick fix for the communication needs of the
Mediterranean Babel (particularly the Northwest coast of Africa, where Old
Afer, several colloquial dialects, Berber dialects, Punic, and several other
languages are spoken).  I don't think that piracy is tolerated in the world
of Afer, so if Lingua Franca is to survive it will have to find another
niche (travelling salesmen? televangelists?).
-Chollie
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.