Re: Average life of a conlang

Herman Miller wrote:
> Jim Henry wrote:
>> Recently there's been a thread on the ZBB about the average life of a
>> conlang; that is, the average amount of time a conlang is under
>> continuing development by its creator, from initial creation to
>> abandonment of the conlang or death of the conlanger, not counting
>> auxlangs that continue to be developed by a speaker community after
>> the death or loss of interest of the creator.
>
> I don't have accurate figures for most of my languages, but the average
> would be misleading
Exactly my own feelings. I'm not sure indeed how I would arrive at any
meaningful figure.

> as it would include a vast number of sketchy langs
> with a lifetime of less than a year. I guess you could call them
> mouselangs.
Quite so. My first conlang IIRC appeared when I was about 10; it was
heavily influenced by tables of French grammar I found in old text books
belonging to my mother, with a vocabulary based on Old English and other
etymologies I gleaned from dictionaries. I think the language had a life
span of about a year.

Then I discovered Esperanto in old book in my grandparents' attic - and
that give rise to a veritable host of would-be auxlang - often two or
three a year - from about the age of 11 till my late teens. How many of
them were there? How long did each 'live'? I simply have no way now of
telling.

Also during that period at least one artlang was produced: a language
much influenced by Turkish & Hungarian inter_alia spoken somewhere on
Venus! How long was its life? A couple of years maybe. Were there any
other artlangs that I've forgotten (some of the later auxlangs were far
removed from the Esperantine model and had more of the flavor of
artlangs, I think).

> My first conlang, Olaetian, was under development for around
> 15 years, from the late 1970's to the mid 1990's.
None of my early conlangs had anything like that lifespan! But what
about the Briefscript Project? It began about 1958 and is still not
finished! Do I say that the language which in its early years on the
Conlang & Auxlang lists was known as 'briefscript' and later as BrSc,
which then split into two 'dialects' BrScA and BrScB and has now come
back into a single evolving form known as Piashi - do I say this
language is 50 years old & still growing? But what about the long years
between mid 1960s till the early 1990s when the language lay dormant?
Should these years be included or not? Are BrSc, BrScA, BrScB and Piashi
really all the same language or are they different, tho related, languages?

> I've been developing
> Tirelat since 1999, but since I started developing Minza in late 2004
> until recently, Tirelat has been on hold for most of that time.
The more recent langs are easier: an as yet unnamed experimental loglang
(Plan C??) began in 2007, and TAKE (το άνευ κλίσι Ελληνικό - Greek
without inflexions) began its life in 2007. Both are still ongoing (of
and on  :)

But if you look in the Conlang archives you find somewhen in my earlier
years on Conlang I did start an artlang of sorts called Tursan. It's
probably dead now. But .....

> It's
> always possible that I could revive older languages from the mid-1980's
> which have been dormant all these years (but not likely).
Yep - who knows? Tursan might get revived one day (tho at the moment, I
think not). No chance of reviving any of my juvenalia - all the
documentation is long lost and probably deserves to be.

It's clear that I could not now arrive at anything near an average for
my conlangs, and even if I could, I agree with Herman that "the average
would be misleading."

--
Ray
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