Re: artlang-blindness of linguists (was ...)

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 03:14:14 -0500 Jan van Steenbergen
<ijzeren_jan@...> wrote.

>>Fragments of languages... indeed true.  Few artlang projects ever
>>reach the stage of actual usability.  Makes it even more difficult
>>to take them seriously.
>
>Absolutely. Nevertheless, there are plenty of artlangs that díd reach such
>stage.
>OTOH, I'm not convinced that every auxlang listed in the index of the book
>has reached it; I've seen examples of Latin-based auxlangs with a
>vocabulary of much less than 2000.
[snip]
>>But there is a handful of artlangs which have reached a rather stable
>>mode of existence.  Andrew Smith's Brithenig is pretty stable;
>
>Yes, but isn't this stability mainly caused by the fact that Andrew
>abandoned it? Besides, I don't know the size of its lexicon. Has it
>reached "full usability"?
Why must lexicon size be required for "usability"? Some languages, notably
American languages (that I know of, e.g. Mattole) have very small lexicons,
and very many derivational operations, as well as resisting borrowings quite
strongly (for example, coining "make-write-tool-cylinder" (IIRC) instead of
borrowing "pencil"). They're far from unusable, and almost as for from
unlearnable, although that's a debate for another day.


Paul