Re: conlanger linguist

Hallo!

On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:24:17 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> Östen Dahl writes, at http://tinyurl.com/o2pub, of his being a conlanger in
> his youth, though it is implied that he later put away such childish
> things:
>   The word "nerd", graphically spelt "nörd", entered my native
>   language, Swedish, fairly recently. Nevertheless, and even
>   without access to computers, I displayed severe symptoms of
>   nördiness at an early age. In particular, I had an obsession
>   with languages, and spent quite some time making up what is
>   nowadays called "conlangs", i.e. languages invented for fun.
Most linguists, that's my impression, either don't are about conlangs at all,
or consider IALs the only kind of conlangs of relevance.  One frequently
finds definitions of the term "constructed language" or "artificial language"
in encyclopediae of linguistics that contain the phrase "for international
communication" or something equivalent.

On the other hand, many of us here in this list ARE linguists, though many
others are not (there is a disproportionately high number of computer people
here, I think - probably hardly coincinential, since computer programming
revolves entirely around symbol manipulation and artificial "languages").

>   (I suspect that such nördiness is really a benign form of
>   Asperger's syndrome.)
Yes.  I have also been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and know a few
others with it (in comparison to them, my version of it is rather benign).
I dimly remember a thread about Asperger's syndrome here in the list.
AFAICR, it turned out that there were several cases among list members.

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