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

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Saturday, December 13, 2003, 0:23
From time to time, as we can all recall, someone asks for data about all our
conlangs, with the idea of putting it all together into a book of some sort.
(Nothing ever seems to come of it, that we know of, but that's another
matter.......)

Still, it would be an interesting idea to produce a "Inventing Languages"
book; after all, there are a couple "World Building" books out there, and I
assume they sell (I bought one!).... The recent series of questions on
Conculture, too, are worthwile and could be expanded, or included, since
building a language and building a culture are, or can be, intimately
related.

Clearly, Rosenfelder and Flores have already stolen a lot the thunder, but
I'm sure it could be improved upon, and amplified.  For instance, individual
testimonies as to how one came up with given words for this and that; how
one decided on morphology ("I think I shall express the accusative with a
prefix") and various semantic ins and outs (cf. my recent posts about how to
say "except" or "as far as" in Kash).

Well, given the amount of free time I have, I suppose I ought to try
it..........(but don't count on that!!)--- with a lot of help from my
friends.  Any thoughts?

"Running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes," as we used to
say........

Reply

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>