Re: Correction, I hope, of M/C URL

Congratulations, Sally!  A wonderfully written and insightful article.
The question of "audience" with relation to conlanging is an intriguing
and understudied problem, and provides a fascinating case-study on
the way in which the internet helps build communities out of individuals.
(Whenever some politician or reactionary pundit denounces the internet
as a haven for pornographers, geeks, and kooks, I always think fondly
of what CONLANG has brought to my life, and where I and my creations
would be without it.)  I particularly enjoyed your discussion of the
tension between "public space" and "private space" in conlanging--how
most conlangs are intended not as exercises in navel-gazing, but as
'performances', which are *designed* for public consumption, even
though they may not be *intended* for public consumption.

With regard to length, I actually think that forced compression has
improved the article by making it more focussed than earlier drafts.
It's really quite effective in its condensed form.  That said, I would
welcome an expanded/extended discussion of this topic--by you or
some other intrepid scholar.  You raise a lot of fascinating points which
deserve further discussion--perhaps within a broader cultural context:
Conlanging, it seems to me, is part of a larger family of pastimes
involving detailed created worlds.  You mention dollhouses and model
railroading.  But even if one restricts one's attention to projects which
exist solely 'on paper', there are a variety of other pursuits just
as abstract, elaborate, and audienceless as conlanging.  For instance,
I once met someone who spent all his free time designing luxury cruise
ships.  His designs were meticulously drafted and technically informed,
but he had no hope that any of them would ever be built--or even that
his blueprints would ever be exhibited.  That wasn't the point.  What is
the cultural and social significance of such projects?  How do they relate
to other forms of creativity?

One minor quibble:  Tokana has not been in development for "decades",
as you assert.  The only decades-long conlanging projects I know of
--those of the artlang variety, anyway--are Teonaht and (I think)
Amman-Iar.  Tokana is only about 7 or 8 years old, by my reckoning
--unless you consider it a radical overhaul of my previous conlang
Kosan, in which case it's about 15 years old.  (Kosan and Tokana share
a large amount of core vocabulary, but almost no grammatical features;
it may be a matter for historical meta-conlinguists to determine if
Tokana and Kosan are separate conlangs or radically different 'drafts'
of the same conlang.)

Again, congratulations!  Hopefully your article will inspire a wider
interest in conlanging among media scholars.

Matt.