Hallo conlangers!

On Sunday 27 November 2011 19:05:30 Sam Stutter wrote:

> On 27 Nov 2011, at 17:25, Peter Cyrus wrote:
> [...]
> > I understand that artlangers dislike auxlangers, and I can see why Adam
> > wants to slap a green star on Shwa advocacy.
> 
> I don't think we dislike auxlangers. Some of them are quite cute :)

Yes.  I don't know any in person, but I have been told several
times that Esperantists (the largest contingent in the IAL
movement, but what can be said about them probably also holds
for most Idists, Novialists, etc.) tend to be quite nice and
friendly people with a strong community sense.  At any rate,
people who believe in auxlangs are mostly, that can be assumed,
people who wish that people from different nations would talk
more with each other instead of talking about each other or
raising arms against each other.  At least, that is what IALs
are made for.

Yet, the frequent politicking among auxlangers ("My IAL is
better than yours!") puts many artlangers off, for good reasons.
It annoyed artlangers a lot back in the days of old when it was
carried out here, before the AUXLANG list was founded to get it
out of CONLANG.  Also, at least the major IALs are linguistically 
"uninteresting" as they all follow Standard Average European models.
(Not that there is anything bad in a Standard Average European
language, there are indeed excellent treatments of "Europeanness"
on the market, but the type has been overdone by naive conlangers
who are unaware of the vast diversity of human languages.)

These points are probably the reason why so many artlangers (and
engelangers) detest and mock at IALs, and this often translates
into a dislike of auxlangers.  But I think the cause of the IAL
movement is a legitimate one, even though the problem now seems
to be closing in on a pragmatic solution that does not involve
any artificial language.  Zamenhof and most other auxlangers
did and do pursue a laudable goal, namely the improvement of
understanding between people from different ethnic background.
What can be wrong about that?  Also, most of the more successful
auxlangs aren't really that badly designed, even if they just
distill the essence of linguistic Europeanness into a coherent
design; and many of the more impractical suggestions are indeed
fascinating from a linguistic standpoint!  To speak of myself,
I do not dislike auxlangs or auxlangers at all, though I am
more interested in artlangs.

What regards the attitude of auxlangers towards artlangs, I think
it is mostly disinterest, and few auxlangers actually dislike
artlangs or artlangers.  Some auxlangers may think that making
conlangs just for the fun of it was a waste of resources that
would better be dedicated to the IAL cause, but the last thing
the IAL movement needs, of course, are more IALs.  There are
more than enough already.  The skills the IAL movement needs to
succeed are of a different sort, and I doubt that artlangers
as a group are especially well equipped to help them.

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