Hallo conlangers!

On Wednesday 25 July 2012 18:57:00 R A Brown wrote:

> On 24/07/2012 20:14, David Peterson wrote:
> > On Jul 24, 2012, at 9:36 AM, R A Brown wrote:
> >> But no mention of BrSc   :(
> >> 
> >> Actually bits of BrSc, Bax and Brx had appeared on the
> >> Net well before her book was published.  Ah well, I'm
> >> in good company - two conlangs that I like, Claudio
> >> Gnoli's "Liva" (1997) and Maurizio Gavioli's "Kinya"
> >> (I can't find the date for this but it was certainly
> >> before 2003) are not included in her list.  I don't
> >> mind being in their company   :)
> > 
> > This is, I think, an artifact of Okrent being more keyed
> > in on the historical aspect of conlanging. My impression
> > that the online conlanging community (as it's existed
> > since the early 90s) was something of a new discovery
> > for her after she'd already planned out and researched
> > her book, and she wasn't ready to evaluate it on its own
> > 
> >  terms. As a result, there are a number of bizarre
> > 
> > omissions and commissions present in the book
> 
> There are indeed.

Yes.  I actually expected, when I read the book and found
such chapter titles as "Wilkins and the Language of Truth"
or "Zamenhof and the Language of Peace", that the chapter
on fictional languages be titled "Tolkien and the Language
of Beauty"!  Instead she gives the IMHO dreadful and hackish
Klingon language as the prime example of a fictional language.

>       However, it does seem to me that if she
> insists - quite rightly IMO - on actual publication in the
> case of old style books, the same criterion should be used
> for the web, i.e. actual publication of the language on a
> website.

Yep!

> I notice that And correctly referred to Livagian being
> publicated in 1991, not published.

Right.  The *first mention* of Livagian in a public medium was
in 1991, but the language must still be considered *unpublished*
- nobody except And himself has a good idea of what the language
actually looks like!

>       There are some fine
> Conlangs published on the web which do not get mentioned; I
> just give two above (tho sadly I find that the Kinya site is
> no longer maintained), and their are others.

There are.
 
> [snip]
> 
> > say). That said, I think it was nice that *any* modern
> > conlangs were included at all.
> 
> Yes.

It is quite a lot that she did not limit her attention to
auxlangs!  Many, if not most academic treatments of the
phenomenon of artificial languages consider only languages
which, at least marginally, are meant as international
auxiliary languages (I'd consider Lojban such a "marginal
case": while it is not *primarily* meant as an auxlang,
it *has* been suggested that it be used that way by people
seriously involved with it - AFAIK the idea of using Loglan
as an IAL goes back to J. C. Brown himself - as opposed to
language such as Quenya or Verdurian, which were *not at
all* meant as auxlangs by their authors).
 
> > It would have been a full book without delving into the
> > online conlanging phenomenon, and hopefully those
> > interested in any of the modern inclusions will find
> > their way to the Conlang-L or something else connected
> > via Google.
> 
> Yes.

A good treatment of the Internet conlanging community in a
book remains to be desired.  Or at least, I am not aware of
any such book.  There is an "Encyclopedia or Fictional and
Fantastic Languages", but that one only treats languages
from published books and films (and includes some that are
only briefly described but not at all documented in the
relevant sources), and expressly disregards the vast field
of Internet-based conlangs.

> ===========================================================
> 
> On 25/07/2012 06:31, Matthew DeBlock wrote:
> > I find this point very interesting.
> > 
> > While I am not an academic (as I'm sure many have
> > guessed from my wording and typos), it seems to me the
> > scientific community has a pretty good standard already,
> > and it is perfectly applicable.
> > 
> > "proof of existence" is established when documentation
> > detailing how to reproduce the experiment is made
> > public.
> 
> Yes, proof of a conlang's existence is established when
> enough of it is published to be usable, even if in a limited
> degree.  For example, there a limits to what one can do with
> Sindarin or Quenya without coining new words or making
> assumptions over missing bits of grammar.

Right.  With Sindarin and Quenya, we have a good impression of
what those languages are like, even if the corpus is fragmentary.
We can, for instance, tell that they are related to each other,
and even reconstruct the (fictional) diachronic developments
from Proto-Quendian to the attested languages, and make educated
guesses of what we don't know about them.  They are better known
than, for instance, Etruscan!

Some of the conlangs done by members of the online conlanging
community are even better documented.  We have, for instance,
a fairly complete reference grammar and dictionary of Mark
Rosenfelder's Verdurian.  Many others remain fragmentary, but
with enough documentation to give us a good idea of what kind
of language the author had in mind.
 
> One small point: though I expect her not to have included Dr
> Outis' 17th century conlang (because it's fictional), I was
> sorry to see no mention of Philippe Labbé's conlang of
> 1663.  It is the earliest attempt I know of at producing a
> simplified Latin auxlang and more worthy IMO of mention than
> oddities like the Earl of Worcester's "Pasigraphie" and A.
> Kircher's "Polygraphia" which she does list for 1663.

Yes, the existence of Latinesque a posteriori auxlangs in the
17th century is often overlooked by researchers.  The common
notion that the 17th century was the time of the taxonomic
languages and the 19th/20th century the tome of the a posteriori
auxlangs is not accurate.  There were both kinds of languages in
both times, even if the taxonomic languages were more prominent 
in the 17th century, and the a posteriori languages in the 19th
and 20th centuries.
 
> But, despite the bizarre omissions and commissions in the
> list in Appendix A, I do recommend the book.  Arika's
> description of her own attempts at learning many of the
> languages she considers I found to be very interesting.

Sure.  The book, despite its shortcomings, is very much worth
reading and should not miss from the bookshelf of anyone
interested in the art of conlanging.

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1