Re: Average life of a conlang

Hallo!

On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:24:45 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> [...]
> > He would certainly been severely displeased by what is going on
> > in those fora these days!  I don't know whether his statement
> > against real-world usage of his conlangs was meant against fan
> > usage, or rather against the possible misunderstanding that any
> > of his languages could be used as an IAL,
>
> Fan usage - I don't think it ever occurred to him or anyone else at the
> time that they could used as an IAL. Indeed, they obviously could not
> because they were not in a complete enough state.
Obviously.

>  From what I remember of the interview JRRT was not very keen on fan
> groups. He said he did not see that point and asked what they would do.
> It was in that context that he gave as an example that he would not want
> to spend an afternoon chatting with other fellows in High Elven.
Yes.  The whole thing, one must not forget, started as a deeply
*personal* endeavour; Tolkien did all that stuff *for himself*,
to the most part at least.

> Also I suspect by that time (tho I don't recall the date) he was aware
> of interests by New Agers and people of similar outlook which, as a
> devout Catholic, he was not at all happy about.
Amen.

> > Yes.  I once observed that if Tolkien had not written _The Lord
> > of the Rings_ but _A Historical Grammar of the Eldarin Languages_
> > (the book all the people in TolkLang and Elfling dream of), his
> > languages would have been forgotten by now: they would be seen
> > as a quirk of an eccentric Oxford linguist and nothing else.
> > Only the vast popularity of _The Lord of the Rings_ caused
> > thousands of people to take interest in the languages featured
> > therein.
>
> Also there's no doubt about that IMO. Similarly, _tlhIngan Hol_ would
> not have caught on as it has if it had not been for Star Trek and the
> Klingons. It's the conculture these languages were set in that accounts
> for their real world use. It shows, of course, that the life of an
> artlang can be affected by non-linguistic criteria; and this IMO makes
> the exercise of finding an "average" conlang life span fairly meaningless.
Indeed.  It is thus more or less the same as with natlangs, which
people learn because they (a) intend to visit a country where the
language is spoken (b) are going to engage into business with it
(c) are interested in the language community's culture (d) any
combination of the above.  Few people learn a language because
they are curious about its grammar or anything like that.  This,
ultimately, is the reason why artificial IALs failed: they are no
country's language.

> [...]
> > While I don't think any kind of briefscript (or any other kind
> > of artificial language) will have a chance to attain world
> > language status anytime in the foreseeable future (after all,
> > even Esperanto is far away from that),
>
> By _international_ I did not mean 'global'. I mean international in the
> sense that, say, _tlhIngan Hol might be considered international in that
> users of the language do not all come from the same nation and do not
> all have the same L1 (I think). If people of different L1s want someday
> to use Piashi as a medium of communication, then that's fine. But I have
> no interest in promoting it or indeed any other conlang as a global IAL.
Sure.  I know all to well that you do not wish to be involved with
auxlang politics.  Nor do I.  I especially won't ever propose using
Old Albic, for instance, as an IAL.  I wish, however, to develop the
language into a usable form and release the full documentation to
the public on the Web.  And I wish to evolve daughter languages
from it.

> [...] It would also be a pity if those 50 years of
> > work on it failed to bear fruit ...
>
> It would, I guess. Also I myself am sort of interested in how it will
> work itself out. The phonology did not turn out as I had for very many
> years expected it to do. Already as I make draft workings on the grammar
> and try out sentences, I feel the language taking on forms which I had
> not envisaged. The darn thing has a life of its own and is simply not
> allowing itself to die. "You conceived me," it says. "I've had far too
> long a gestation - now get me born and find out what I _really_ look like!"
I know very well what you are talking about.  It is similar with
me and Old Albic.  Whenever I find out something about the language,
it feels more like *discovering* something that has always been there
than like *inventing* something that has never before been anywhere.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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