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

> From: And Rosta
>
> John Cowan:
> > Matt Pearson wrote:
> >
> > > The only decades-long conlanging projects I know of
> > > --those of the artlang variety, anyway--are Teonaht and (I think)
> > > Amman-Iar.
> >
> > Also Quenya, Sindarin, Livagian.  Loglan/Lojban is not an artlang,
> > but I just thought I'd mention that it's now about 45 years old.
>
> If conlangs are likened to cities, then Teonaht would be an ancient one
> with lots of winding alleys, whereas Livagian would be a modern one,
> forever being rebuilt on the same site (with each new phase of building
> demolishing previous ones still incomplete). So as a conlanging project
> Livagian is (at a stretch) decades-long, but as a language few parts
> of it have so far ever been more than about five years old (tho O! would
> that this would change!). Of course, to have a decades-long conlanging
> project it helps to be a few decades old oneself; here Sally has a slight
> edge on most of us, and I myself seem to be becoming older than average
> for this list (what with most old-timers drifting away, and a perpetual
> influx of frighteningly precocious 14 year olds joining us).

amman iar really fits the same mold as Livagian.  Although I have been
working on what is notionally the same language for decades (and unlike the
current crop of precocious 14 year olds, I have many decades under my belt
and at 56 am surely among the oldest on the list), the current incarnation
bares no resemblance at all to my earliest endeavors and very little to the
language as it existed just a few years ago.  The language has however
evolved through a series of small skips and large leaps from efforts started
when I was a precocious 14 year-old (the only bad thing about being
precocious is that you inevitably grow out of it).  Like And, I often feared
that the darned thing would never settle down to anything remotely
resembling stability.  It took a bout of exhaustion from overwork and a
year-long sabbatical during which I honed the language to its current state
to change that.  I'm convinced that any hope of reaching the finishing
touches on a created languages requires a concentration of effort that few
of us working stiffs can afford.  I've recently started work on my
second-ever language, forendar, but now that I am once again gainfully
employed in a regular job, I find the effort excruciatingly slow.  I suspect
it will be decades before it gets anywhere near the state of amman iar.

David

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David. E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
dbell@graywizard.net
www.graywizard.net

"irvorisel in villissen ciroinarrion unastil
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JRRT