Re: Average life of a conlang

Hallo!

On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:44:56 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> [...]
> > I sincerely hope that this sort of thing won't befoul you and your
> > language.  Novial is not the only case of that.  Look at places like
> > TolkLang or Elfling, and you see the same.  Quibbles about
> > reconstructions of unattested Quenya and Sindarin words all the time,
> > with many scholars taking the position that such reconstructions are
> > overall illegitimate.
>
> Groan - I forgot that one. I cannot imagine that JRRT would've been at
> all pleased. I remember seeing him interviewed on the TV many years ago
> and saying how he would not want to meet with fellows and talk High
> Elven all afternoon. It seems to me that he regarded his languages as
> part of his literary creation and that they belonged there, and not *here*.
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, but what happens in
the TolkLang and Elfling lists is certainly not at all what he
wanted to happen.

> > Avoiding this alone is a good motivation to develop a conlang to a
> > fair degree of completion before you pass away.
>
> Though I guess it depends to some extent on the language concerned. I
> suspect most conlangs would simply be left to rest in peace, unless
> there was something other about it that made people want to continue or
> resurrect it. In the case of Sindarin & Quenya it was the whole appeal
> of the LotR and Middle Earth.
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.

Most conlangs will probably fall into oblivion after the death
of their authors.  There are, however, a few classics of the
genre which will likely be studied by future conlangers, such
as Teonaht or Verdurian.

>       It is just possible that Briefscript/
> Piashi might be 'finished' if I failed to develop it any more in that
> (a) some people have ever since Dutton's day shown interest in the idea
> of an international briefscript, and (b) I have received private emails
> expressing interest in my project.
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), it is as legitiamte an
intellectual challenge as any other kind of conlanging, and
I am indeed interested in seeing which way Piashi will develop
in the future.  It would also be a pity if those 50 years of
work on it failed to bear fruit ...

> I have no similar fears about mu experimental loglang. If that's not
> finished, people can do what they like with it. As for rival camps
> flaming each other over it - extremely unlikely, I think   ;)
Same to my sister project of it, X-1, which doesn't seem to
have garned much interest - much less, in any case, than
Old Albic.  X-1 is also not a matter of much importance to me,
while I definitely want to develop Old Albic further.

> [...]
> > Good to hear that you make progress with it.
>
> Thanks - I hope I will have got some stuff into a form that I can put
> onto my website before the end of the year.
Good.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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