Re: Language revival (was Re: Which auxlangs? (was Re: I won't [to] start a flame war))

At 11:25 pm +0000 13/11/99, alypius wrote:
>>
>>And, in any case, katharevousa was not Ancient Greek but was an artificial
>>product created in the second quarter of the 19th century by progressively
>>'purifying' (hence the name) the demotic by introducing elements from the
>>Atticizing Koine of Byzantine culture which had been maintained by the
>>Church.  Katharevousa was a macaronic language, incongrously mingling old &
>>new, with quite a few false archaisms, hypercorrections & mere blunders.
>
>All true, but this list is the *last* place I expected to hear complaints
>about language artficiality!
I'm not complaining about artificiality per_se but about things like "false
archaisms, hypercorrections & mere blunders" and, indeed, the macaronic
nature of katharevousa.  I think if someone produced such a 'conlang',
s/he'd get a bit of critical comment on this list  :)

I've even known some conlangs get criticized simply for being
relexifications of natural languages - a little unfair IMO since people's
first attempts at conlanging tend to be just this.  (But if some one - who
ought to know better - makes extravagant claims for such a relex, then that
is another matter.)

>
>>One can hardly mourn its demise.
>
>Yet I have met Greeks who do.
I've no doubt there are.  I'd be surprised if no Turks earlier this century
mourned the passing of the Arabic script for their language (for all I
know, there may even be some who'd like to revive it).

But then, I tend to be a 'demoticist' - if I were a Cornishman, I'd be
supporting the 'Modern Cornish' version, not Kemmyn or 'Unified Cornish'
:)

Ray.




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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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