Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "And Rosta" <[log in to unmask]>
>
>>>>In the field of Alternate History, a famous exemplar of this sort
>>>>of thing is Robert Sobel's _For want of a nail_: it reads like an
>>>>ordinary scholarly work of history.
>>>
>>>Sort of like a nihilartikel?
>>
>>I had to google for this word, which is new to me, (best source:
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilartikel )
>>and the answer is "Yes: sort of". But without the mischievous intent
>>to deceive (or to deceive the unduly credulous). Instead, you might
>>compare it (the Fake-X) to the film _The Blair Witch Project_: I
>>haven't seen it, but as I understand it, it is constructed as though
>>it were authentic documentary footage, rather than an authored film.
>>
>>--And.
>
>
> I have to say I love this idea of a "fake" natlang.  Put me on board!

To be honest, I always thought this was half the point of conlanging;
I'd simply never got around to doing it in fullness. This is why I have
a history to my languages, because then I can discuss a lot of history.
It had always been my intention for discussions/descriptions Modern
Føtisk to discuss all sorts of odd stuff. It wasn't for no reason that
Ancient Føtisk and Modern Føtisk have no definite article, but Old
Føtisk had one... Discussions of Ancient Føtisk would refer to
discoveries of ancient documents from the  (Though rather than citing
works in English or Italian or whatever, most of the fakeworks I'd
considering referring to were going to be in Føtisk.)

I would like to join the LLL... [[Is there a Yahoo! Group for it yet?.]]

> I was
> waiting for And's response, for I remember a similar conversation with him
> on another list--whether there have been any artificial languages passed off
> as real languages.  I conceived an amusing fantasy of a demented librarian
> who prints a dictionary and grammar of an invented language, prints up a
> body of poetry and some sagas, puts Dewey Decimal numbers on the bindings
> and inserts them in the University Library, and then lists them, somehow, in
> the on-line card catalogue; then fakes requests for copies of these books,
> ships them off to other libraries, writes articles about them and publishes
> them in Linguistics Journals, manages to get entries into amazon.com....
> sort of like the Iolo Morgannwg of Conlangers.

Reminds me of the already-mentioned-in-this-thread 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius' by J. L. Borges. Which is good _anyway_ because it contains a /tl/.

> http://www.frontiernet.net/~whatsteo.html
 >
 > Some visitors to my website have thought Teonaht was a real language.

Hmm... well, that page seems very similar to English+HTTP/1.x error
messages (specifically 404). Actually, the server is perhaps acting up
(acting down?), <http://www.frontiernet.net/> has a dearth of data.

--
Tristan.                 |       To be nobody-but-yourself in a world
kesuari at yahoo!.com.au |  which is doing its best to, night and day,
                          |                 to make you everybody else---
                          |          means to fight the hardest battle
                          |            which any human being can fight;
                          |                    and never stop fighting.
                          |      --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany"