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

Hallo!

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:54:32 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
> >
> > On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:24:36 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
> [...]
> >> I marked the auxlang box, however, because (a) the majority of my
> >> teenage creations were auxlangs
> >
> > Ah, teenage creations.  I tried an auxlang in my teens, too.
> > It never went anywhere, and no written records of it are in
> > existence any more.
>
> I tried a lot more than one     :)
>
> 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)
was never codified on paper.  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'.  Much like
Novial, which, however, we hadn't even heard of back then.

> > I did not check the auxlang box because
> > serious auxlanging is something I have completely and utterly
> > left behind.  I may one day come up with a *fictional* auxlang
> > or a *parody* of an auxlang,
>
> Parodies are so easy! Indeed, some actual proposals give the appearance
> of parodies of earlier attempts    ;)
Yes.  The best auxlang is of course Diphthongalo (see
http://www.geocities.com/raredata/conlanghumor.txt )!

> > or an attempt to flesh out the design issues I laid down in
> >
> > http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/auxlang-design.html
> >
> > 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.

> > but I am not going to seriously
> > propose any of my creations to be used as an auxlang.
> >
> > The race is already over, at least for the next few centuries
> > to come (nobody can say what will be in 1000 years); English
> > is the winner, like it or not.
>
> 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).

> > Most auxlangers would probably find fault in Piashi, for
> > which reason ever.
>
> Of course - when I left Auxland, the different Neo-Novalist factions
> were finding fault with one another's version of what it considered
> Novial to be. Piashi would get flamed to cinder in Auxland     ;)
Certainly.

> > I don't think it is a good idea to
> > present it as an auxlang.  You *could* of course make it
> > into a fictional auxlang in some fictional world, but
> > I think Piashi could stand very well just as what it is,
> > namely an experimental engelang, and doesn't really need
> > a fictional background to it, nor a proposal to use it
> > as an IAL.
>
> No, I'll not give it a fictional background since, in truth, it's
> background is not fictional. I think you are right, it is an
> experimental engelang.
What else is it?  Promoting it as an auxlang makes more
trouble than sense, and as a fictional natlang it would
be a failure because it is not naturalistic.  It would
have to be a fictional auxlang or a fictional engelang,
but why invoke a fictional setting for it at all?

> >> Piashi BTW seems to be taking on a life of its own - and I'm not
> >> altogether happy at the way it's going!
> >
> > 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.

> > On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:03:41 +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> >
> >> I'd like to disagree on the Klingon front; its vocabulary is much too
> >> limited to be useful as an auxlang, and the vocabulary canon has
> >> traditionally been considered closed, with new coinages not being
> >> licit.
> >>
> >> (I suppose some kind of Neo-Klingon might be elaborated by a kind of
> >> Klingon Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, but that would be a separate language.)
>
> Oh dear, I shouldn't have chosen Klingon as an example. What I meant is
> that any language could be used as an auxlang if people so wished it.
> Vocabulary can always be expanded. May be I should have picked some
> other conlang as an example - Lojban?
AFAIK, while Lojban is not originally intended as an
auxlang, the suggestion that it be used as one finds
support from a sizeable part of the Lojban community.

(I don't think it is a good idea, though.  Learning
Lojban requires understanding formal logic, which is
way too "mathematical" for most people.  You cannot
treat millions of tourists and businesspeople to
learn formal logic just to learn a *language*.
But enough of that here; this is not AUXLANG.)


>      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.

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