Re: Constructed natlangs

On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Brian Betty wrote:

> Which brings me to the issue of other 'constructed natlangs.' How would we
> conlangers rate attested languages like women's languages (as in Chukchee)
> [is this then a 'femlang?] or Eme-sal (some kind of 'constructed natlang'
> or perhaps a 'femlang')
>From what I can see, the so-called "women's language" of Chukchee is a
matter of a single regular phonetic alternation, and 2-4 other
alleged-but-not-very-convincingly-documented ones -- but _no_
morphological, syntactic, or lexical differences.  This, to me, seems an
unfair stretch of the term "language".  This style has been dying out
rapidly since the 1950s, but was already moribund at the turn of the
century.  It's also interesting that loanwords from Chukchi into
neighboring languages are all "standard" pronunciation -- despite the
large amount of marriages and residences among linguistic communities;
this makes me (at least) wonder if the "women's style" was a recent,
short-lived innovation.

Kenji