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"Language contact and deliberate change"

From:Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
Date:Saturday, March 22, 2008, 1:16
I just found a very interesting paper by Sally Thomason that has some
items of interest to conlangers, as well as those interested in
diachronic change.

It doesn't treat what we think of as conlangs specifically, but it
does talk about secret languages - ones like Pig Latin that are based
transparently on the person's natlang - and has the quote "This
phenomenon is familiar to anyone who ever learned a 'secret language'
like Pig Latin or invented one as a child (and the percentage of
secret-language-inventers is probably higher among linguists than in
the general population)." It talks about one such language, called
Mokki, which was (at least at one time) even spoken as a first
language! It also talks about a language called Uisai in which the
speakers consciously switched their masculine and feminine agreement
markers to differentiate themselves from their neighbors, and the
case of the Estonian reform, in which 200 words were created a priori.

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Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>