Re: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs (was Re: Poll)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:54:32 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> They never went anywhere because none were ever published. Yes,
>> practically no written records of any of these youthful compositions are
>> AFAIK in existence any more. I write 'AFAIK' because a year or so back I
>> did come across some notes I made in January 1953 for a language I named
>> 'Voldapeko.' Who knows? I may discover other juvenalia some day.
>
> As far as I can remember, the auxlang my brother and I were
> desigining (yes, my brother was involved back then; now he
> tells me that conlanging was meaningless because, quoting
> Wittgenstein, "private languages are impossible"; if you ask
> me, W. didn't speak of conlangs at all when he said that)
I think you're right. I understood that W was claiming that a language
understandable by _only a single individual_ is incoherent. Clearly an
auxlang, unless it is *extremely* badly designed, does not qualify as a
private language. the whole point surely is that it should be
understandable by as many people as possible and to be, above, _public_!

> was never codified on paper.
All mine were    :)

> It never went beyond a few rules
> of grammar.  I remember the gender endings -o for masculine,
> -a for feminine and -u for neuter, and that they were assigned
> English-wise: only biological males were masculine, only
> biological females were feminine.  No vocabulary, but I think
> we were going to use Latin roots, e.g. _homo_ 'man', _homa_
> 'woman', _homu_ 'human being of unspecified sex'.
Rather more enlightened, I am sure, than Voldapeko was. My extant notes
do not say this, but I am sure that, following the Esperanto model,
nouns referring to living beings were by default masculine, and that the
feminine was formed by suffixing -in-o (Yes, all nouns ended in -o, and
all adjectives in -a - Now where did I get that idea from?). You must
excuse a youngster in 1953 who had only just turned 14 and attended an
all-boys school from being blind to the male chauvinism inherent in this
scheme   ;)

> Much like
> Novial, which, however, we hadn't even heard of back then.
Yep, it wasn't till Christmas of that year that I got my hand on 'Novial
Lexike' and I became more enlightened. I think from then onwards nouns
denoting living beings were epicene by default, and maleness was marked
by an appropriate suffix.

But my extant notes on Voldapeko show that, despite the obviously
Volapük influence of the name, the morphology of the language was very
Esperantine, including accusative case and noun-adjective agreement as
well as the whole battery of participles. Indeed the actual endings were
practically the same, the main difference being that /j/ was spelled
|y|, not |j|!

The improvements? I got rid of the nasty /x/ sound, and gave the
language the 'nice easy' English sounds of /T/, /D/ and /3/ - written
|þ, ð, ö| respectively. Oh, the folly of youth!

[snip]
>>> as an intellectual exercise,
>> Indeed - that is exactly what Piashi is: an intellectual exercise. On
>> reflection, may be I should've ignored youthful exercises (altho they
>> were certainly serious then) and not check the auxlang box.
>
> Sure.  But then, they were part of your conlanging career,
> and if they went farther than the above-mentioned juvenile
> auxlang I invented together with my brother almost thirty
> years ago, you can indeed say you invented auxlangs.
Thanks - yes, they (nearly?) all went much further. I even wrote stuff
in some of them (the later ones were much better than Voldapeko).

[snip]
>> Indeed - right throughout history people have used natlangs (or
>> internalized natlangs) as auxlangs, e.g. Akkadian, Aramaic, Koine Greek,
>> Medieval Latin etc., etc
>
> Yes.  And English is the current leader, and much more of a
> world language than any language before.  It is the de facto
> standard of international communication worldwide.  I have
> once heard of a linguist who predicted that English will
> become the sole language of humanity somewhen in the middle
> of the millennium (but I doubt that).
I doubt it also. People do not easily give up their own languages.

[snip]
>>> At least it is alive.  Don't despair; many projects
>>> happen to turn out somewhat differently than originally
>>> intended.  But if a project goes into the wrong direction,
>>> there is usually the option of saying "Stop!" and guiding
>>> it back onto the right path.
>> ...which is what I'm attempting to do at the moment   ;)
>
> Sure, it isn't always easy.  Often you have things in
> your project where you don't know whether you should
> change them or not.
Very true - and asking other conlangers doesn't always help as advice
from different individuals tend to be contradictory - but that's the fun
of conlanging. Heck - if it was easy, it would be boring, wouldn't it!

[snip]
>
> AFAIK, while Lojban is not originally intended as an
> auxlang,
My understanding is that it was originally intended as a development of
James Cooke brown's Loglan, i.e. a language based on formal logical in
order to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

> the suggestion that it be used as one finds
> support from a sizeable part of the Lojban community.
So i believe - but I'll not get into an argument as to whether that
would be a good idea or not. There are theoretically many features of
English that make it unsuitable as an auxlang, but that doesn't stop it
being so used.

  [snip]
>>      Even Sindarin or Quenya could be
>> expanded to serve as an auxlang if UN so wished it (now there's an
>> interesting alternative history    ;)
>
> I have seen such proposals at least for Quenya.
That doesn't surprise me one bit.

I remember several years back some auxlanger asked on *this* list for
our top three (or was 10?) conlang candidates to serve as a global
auxlang. The request annoyed me, as I thought it inappropriate for this
list, and made sure none of my candidates were any of those that had
actually been designed by their authors as auxlangs. IIRC my top three
were: Quenya, Tepa, Kinya     :)


--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Frustra fit per plura quod potest
fieri per pauciora.
[William of Ockham]

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