Re: CHAT: Anyone see the irony?

At 12:20 PM 11/3/98 +0200, you wrote:
>Karol Conlangdjien! (Dear Conlangists)
>
>I'm probably not the first or only one to sense a certain irony here.
>Some people who just want to talk about languages, especially Conlangs,
>to each other manage to have nice and interesting conversations and
>enjoy themselves, thus bringing people closer together. Some other
>people are out to save the world and end up yelling at each offensively.
>Strange, innit??
>
What I find most ironic is that, at bottom, both artlangers and IALangers
end up achieving the same thing.  An IAL, by definition, intends to be
both international (i.e., spoken by people in most countries of the world)
and auxiliary (spoken by large numbers of regular folk as a normal part of
international relations).  I will state categorically that I believe that
_no_ conIAL will _ever_ achieve this goal (short of something unforseeable,
like the mandate of a world dictator). So, in my opinion, no conIAL will ever
meet its design goal. All it can hope for is a larger or smaller
community of interested users.  This is precisely the situation with artlangs,
too (assuming an artlanger even wants a community of users).

Someone stated that you have to be a real idealist to champion an IAL.  I'd
say you have to be out of touch with reality, if you think it will ever achieve
its stated goal.  So, accept this fact, and enjoy using the conIAL among your
community.  There's nothing whatsoever wrong with that. Just realize that this
makes you no different from a devoted community of artlang users.

>And BTW: I was stunned by the flood of responses from young people to
>the earlier message from Beorn - wulf. Just for example, Steg, I'd never
>have thought you were 17. Not that it matters, of course, it was just
>interesting suddenly to change my mental image of all these people whose
>contributions I read.  I'm 35, by the way, so the messages left me
>feeling positively senile.
>
I'm 45, so measure me for my shroud!

-- Terry