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Re: Conlang Flag Design

From:Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon) <dragon@...>
Date:Thursday, September 2, 2004, 16:13
Roger Mills wrote:

> The Indonesians call their flag "Sang Merah Putih" = (Honorable) Red White. > The official (Alma Mater, not Fight) song of the Univ. of Michigan ends with > a reference to the school colors: Hurrah for the yellow and blue. So I > guess we could in time wax rhapsodic about "the purple and the black".
Yeah, but on Barry's flag the colours don't _mean_ anything so far as I'm aware. On the other designs, the purple and black represent the fact that while a conlang is a created and imaginative thing in the real world, it is something that the fictional inhabitants of the conculture don't think about much, any more than the average English-speaker who isn't particularly interested in linguistics thinks about English grammar. However, the conculture inhabitants can _use_ the language creatively. I don't see how one can possibly argue that Barry's design expresses the same thing, because the above is too complex an idea to be represented except by a combination of shape *and* colour. I want to hear Barry's explanation of what his design, particularly the colours, represents in his own mind, and how the design stands up on its own merits. To say that colours were chosen as some kind of abstract gesture towards the other designs does *not* constitute a rationale. Whatever my own feelings about the design I'll gladly add it to the others, but I strongly feel that first of all a rationale is owed. Adrian. [P.S. Every time I copy something from a Conlang message on the Brown website and paste it into an email, all sorts of wierd things happen with double spacing and so on, which is a real pain, and I mean a *REAL* pain, to get rid of. Most frustrating.]