Results of Poll by Email No. 11

        Last week's poll questions was, "What marks the extent of your conlang
endeavors?" 24 of you answered that you have created one or more:
        A. "Polished" a priori conlangs. 1
        B. "Functionally complete" a priori conlangs. 4
        C. "Functionally incomplete" a priori conlangs. 13
        D. My conlang(s) have not even made it to the editing room yet. 4
        E. I prefer a posteriori conlangs, you heartless brute. 2
        (Added later, after Raymond Brown protested. :)

        A couple of people waffled between "A" and "B", but most tended to fall back
to "B". Only David had the gumption (presumption? :) to answer "A". His
secret? Regularity: "It'll always need vocabulary boosts, but there's nothing
it can't translate.  It, however, isn't as natural as languages I create
should be.  It was my first, so I wasn't aware of the idea of creating a
language that actually looked and acted like a natural language.  Thus, it's
highly regular--it might make a good auxilliary language, were it not
enormously overloaded phonemically, and extremely irregular in the semantics
department."

        Roger Mills ended up in "B", perhaps due to his lack of presumption: "Kash,
I think, wavers somewhere between A (presumptuously)  and B (realistically).
The main problem in translating things like NYTimes editorials into Kash
(aside from vocab., as Aidan's weekly lists prove) is its lack of the passive
voice and dislike of really convoluted sentences.  A passive voice is
unlikely to be added, and convoluted sentences can be rephrased, albeit
awkwardly."

        What was interesting were the various reasons given for answering "C".
Christophe Grandsire suffers from tinker's syndrome: "The problem in my case
is that I'm really a mecanician of conlangs. I'm more interested in playing
with the motor than in polishing the coachwork :))) . Maybe it comes from my
education as an engineer :)) ."
        Keith Gaughan suffers from the "Ooo! Shiny!" syndrome: "Pretty much all of
them are C. It's all to easy to start working on a language and then get
distracted by a pretty little jewel of an idea that's just popped into ones
head. :-)"

        Tristan McLeay attributed his perpetually incomplete conlangs to
conlang-ennui in answering "D": "I've made some functionally incomplete and
even tried for functionally complete, but I've since discovered doing that is
boring and so I've recently started doing exclusively not bothering to get
them past the editing room."

        And of course there's Andrew Smith, whose language, Brithenig, I singled out
as an example of an a posteriori language: "Well that was easy, since
Brithenig is clearly identified as a posteriori language.  I did have a
priori language in my younger days, but I destroyed it in a moment of
religious mania.  There is not enough of it to salvage, and it is
decipherable as Linear A.  Since then I have stuck almost religiously to
posteriori languages.  Even my current conlang uses an IE lexicon."

        That's it for the results! Thanks to everyone who responded and stay tuned
for Poll by Email No. 11!
        :Peter