Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 18 October 2011 09:31:07 R A Brown wrote:

> On 17/10/2011 23:00, Michael Everson wrote:
> > I have been unable to find out anything concrete about
> > Brx to know whether it is interesting or not.
> 
> Of those conlangs mentioned on this list over the years
> since I've been here, some are not very interesting to me
> and others have grabbed my interest.  It's a somewhat
> subjective thing - possibly what interests you will not be
> the same as what interests me, though there may be some overlap.

Surely, it is subjective.  There have been quite a few conlangs
discussed here which I wasn't particularly interested in; also,
what interests me, has changed over time.
 
> But one thing we can, I think, be sure about is that *every
> conlang is interesting to its individual author*.

Yes.  But that may change.  Sometimes, the author loses interest
in one of his conlangs, which usually leads to him abandoning it,
or changing it in a way to rekindle his interest.  I have examples
of both.  I lost interest in Gobldi Guk and Flafi soon after I
started them, and they now lie abandoned (their unfinished sketches
still are on display on FrathWiki).  Nur-ellen also began to lose
my interest - I got bored of making a descendant of Sindarin, and
of Tolkienian Elves in the modern world - and I completely restarted
it into what was to become Old Albic.  Meanwhile, it is Roman
Germanech which is struggling for my interest.  I don't really care
much about it any more, though I still feel that the thing needs to
be "done" - I want to write up a grammar sketch, assemble a fairly
well-rounded vocabulary, and build a small corpus of text samples,
then leave it at that.  I want to get rid of it, but I don't want
to leave behind a ruin.  (However, an abandoned conlang is not
necessarily abandoned forever.  As long as the documentation still
exists, you can pick it up again later.  A good reason not to throw
anything away.)
 
> Brx has had a long gestation. It is the latest incarnation
> of my longstanding "briefscript' project; a look back in the
> Conlang archives will reveal this project had its genesis
> way back in the mid 1950s!

A history of more than 50 years - most of us weren't even born
when you started it!
 
> When I joined this list & the Auxlang list sometime in the
> 1990s, I referred to language as 'briefscript', intending
> that to be "holding name" till I thought up a better one.
> But on both lists others started referring to it as BrSc
> (which I also adopted but continued to pronounce the
> abbreviation as 'briefscript.)'

Some people apparently pronounced it as [brisk]; though to me,
it always was clear that "BrSc" was just an abbreviation for
'briefscript'.
 
> Also the scheme I had been developing came in for justified
> criticism and was, accordingly, modified.  Later other
> changes took place and eventually two version of the
> language emerged:
> - BrScA, which continued the tradition of modified
> 'briefscript' of the 1990s;
> - BrScB, which revived an idea I had had in the late 1950s
> (and well _before_ I had come across Babm) namely the use of
> the Roman alphabet as a syllabary.

Back when I was working on an auxlang with just nine phonemes
(six consonants and three vowels: /p t k s n l a i u/) and
a maximum syllable structure CV, resulting in just 21 possible
syllables, I also had the idea of a Roman-alphabet syllabary,
but I never actually designed it.  Since then, that project
has been tossed - I felt it to be meaningless.
 
> It became apparent, however, that the abbreviations BrSc,
> BrScA and BrScB were not only awkward to type but also were
> being taken a the actual names of the languages and being
> given all sorts of pronunciations!      ;)
> 
> This was clearly unsatisfactory and in January 2005 the
> abbreviations BrSc, BrScA and BrScB were abandoned, and in
> an email to the list I wrote:
> {quote}
> I propose that:
> 1. as a generic term for both possible developments, I
> revert to the term briefscript instead of BrSc;
> 2. the language hitherto dubbed 'BrScA' be named _bax_;
> 3. the language hitherto dubbed 'BrScB' be named _brx_.
> {/quote}
> 
> I continued to develop _bax_, which was pronounced as
> /pi'a:çi/ and anglicized as Piashi, until October 2009 when,
> in an email to the list, I formally abandoned it. I was
> dissatisfied with certain aspects of it, particularly the
> compromises I had made over its orthography and
> pronunciation and the consequent unsatisfactory rules for
> vowels in hiatus.
> 
> In August 2011 it occurred to me that by adopting the
> earlier BrScB scheme I could avoid these problems, and thus
> Brx was revived. The name Brx, as those who follow the story
> know, is actually pronounced ['puluçi]     :)

To the enjoyment of those who (like me) have followed your
project with interest, and were disappointed by your abandoning
of Piashi two years earlier.  A project that has been gestating
so long deserves to eventually carry fruit!
 
> As Jörg wrote two days ago:
> {quote}
> It would be a pity if you died without having developed Brx
> to reasonable degree of "completeness" (not that any conlang
> could ever be truly complete, of course).  You have invested
> so much work in it, it needs to get done before you pass away.
> {/quote}
> 
> It is interesting to me and, I know, of some interest to a
> few others, but may well not grab general interest.

It is certainly one of the most interesting approaches toward
a highly concise language I have ever seen.  Most other highly
concise languages inflate the phoneme inventory in order to
allow for a large number of short morphemes (examples include
Lin, Ithkuil and Danny Wier's Tech).  You set out in the
opposite direction in order to reach the same goal: you *reduce*
the phoneme inventory such that you can use the 26 Latin letters
as a syllabary.

There is no such thing as a conlang that grabs the interest of
every conlanger of the planet, I think.  Not even of everybody
on this list.  Conlanging is a very diverse art.

--
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http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
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