New to the List, too

Oskar wrote:
"Dear list-members of Conlang,
My name is Oskar Gudlaugsson and I'm 20 years old from
Iceland. I'm a polyglott and linguistics-enthusiast
who uses conlanging for personal expression. Sound
familiar?"

    All too familiar.  I'm also a refugee from
AUXLANG, although it sounds like you had even less
tolerance for the bickering and fighting than even I.
    Allow myself to introduce ... myself to the list.
My name is Chollie Häberl and I'm a 23 year old
amateur linguist and less amateur philologist.
Currently I'm working towards a degree in Semitic
languages, both alive and dead, with a primary focus
on Aramaic and the larger NorthWest Semitic Language
family.

J. Chang wrote:
    "When I was on the Auxlang list, a few very vocal
people there "dissed" & dismissed my interest(s) in
pidgin & creole languages."
    Wow, I feel like I've joined a group for
recovering alcoholics and battered spouses.  I wonder
just how many people entered CONLANG via AUXLANG.
    A great deal of the information that I posted to
AUXLANG was about pidgin and creole languages.  Quite
a few people - I won't name any names - commented that
I was wasting their time and being unproductive by
dedicating my time to studying these languages.  I
wrote quite a bit about the Lingua Franca or "Sabir,"
some of which will be appearing on Alan Corré's
website when he comes out with the fourth edition.
For the time being, those interested in seeing a large
amount of texts in Sabir should take a look at:

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

    I have to say, though, other people on AUXLANG
were very supportive of my interests.  In the near
future I hope to work on constructing something called
"le grand Sabir," a linguistic bugaboo which was
briefly described by a pair named MacCarthy and
Varnier in the spring of 1852: "le grand sabir, c'est
à dire le sabir revu, corrigé et considérablement
augmenté... se fait remarquer par sa licence."

    Other conlanging interests of mine include a
version of Hebrew called "Ameriqit," based on the
grammar of Puritan texts composed in Hebrew and the
persistent legend that Ben Franklin called for Hebrew
to be adopted as the language of the new Republic.  A
fellow named Judah Monis, who wrote the first American
grammar of Hebrew back in 1735, created a quirky
romanization system for Hebrew which I'm planning to
adopt (The title of this book is "Dickdook leshon
gnebreet" -- it has some interesting features, such as
the use of "ng" for 'ayn.  Apparently this is
characteristic of the pronunciation of Hebrew in vogue
among Dutch Jews even to this day).  I'd like to carry
this project out by sketching the development of
American Hebrew to the current day, augmented the
vocabulary with distinctly American words
characteristic of American English (eg. those borrowed
from Native American languages, for example) modified
to fit Ameriqit phonology.

    As far as IALs go, some friends of mine and I have
been discussing a tentative Arabic "interlingua,"
(something much more comprehensible and easy to use
than fusHa, based on modern colloquial dialects) but
that project hasn't even entered a planning stage.

Lars Henrik Mathiesen writes:
"(And it is a lasting source of pleased wonderment to
me that simply making a separate list has pretty well
kept all such discussions out of this one)."

     One of the more prolific members of the AUXLANG
list recently described Ido as a "vaccination" for the
Esperanto movement; that is to say, he considers
reform to be some sort of virulent disease, and the
continued existence of the Ido movement provides a way
for Esperantists to vaccinate against the more
reform-minded elements that might threaten Esperanto's
integrity.
     I guess one could make a case describing AUXLANG
as such a vaccine for CONLANG's woes.

-Chollie


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