Re: a provocative question

Definitely Mozart.  (Am I supposed to reply to you privately, Jonathan?
This isn't like the "Poll" is it?)

I don't know if I'd call Zamenhoff the "founding father" of modern
auxlanging, only the most successful one.  Modern "auxlanging" goes back at
least to the seventeenth century with Wilkins, Delgarno, and others.
Partial conlangs can be found in More's Utopian and Swift's Lilliputian,
both posited as "discoveries."  The distinction I would draw would be
between public and private language invention.  Both Bach and Mozart meant
for their music to be heard and understood by multitudes.  Do we have such
ambitions with our private invented languages?

And then there are all the "magical" and "angelic" languages that dominated
medieval and renaissance language invention.
The Solomonic cycles and its lists of names, the Irish Evernew Tongue, John
Dee and his Enochian, the Old English Lacnunga Manuscript and its macaronic
verses...all of which attempted to keep magical and divine language somewhat
secret and hieratic.

My Teonaht is meant for much more worldly uses than Tolkien had for his
Quenya.  But I would not compare it to Esperanto.  My father-in-law (broad
grin!!  he's ninety!) wanted to know if I could sell Teonaht to the
government as a code language!!  I told them they already had far more
maggelitous languages, like Navaho, for that kind of thing.



Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Knibb" <j_knibb@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 3:31 PM
Subject: a provocative question


> A provocative question that occurred to me just now:
>
> If Zamenhof was the J. S. Bach of conlangers ...
> (founding father of modern conlanging, created for use as well as
> beauty, high value on logical structure)
>
> ....and Tolkien was the Mozart of conlangers...
> (appeal to technical and lay audiences, elevated common features to
> high art)
>
> ....with which composer would you identify yourself?
>
> Jonathan.
>
> [reply to jonathan underscore knibb at hotmail dot com]
> ===
> 'O dear white children casual as birds,
> Playing among the ruined languages...'
> Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'
>