Hallo!

On Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:53:35 +0200, Philip Newton wrote:

> The impression I get is that speakers' reluctance to coin new words is
> not related to Okrand's leadership style, but that it derives from
> fans' acceptance of the fiction of Klingon as a real language revealed
> to use by Okrand and Maltz.
> 
> In other words, I think it's a self-imposed restriction for most
> speakers; just as you wouldn't coin a word for "cement mixer" in a
> natlang you were learning, you won't coin words in Klingon yourself.

Yes.  It also has in part to do with respect towards the artistic
creation the language embodies.  The same way you usually won't add
a stroke to a painting done by someone else, you won't add a word
to someone else's conlang.  And Star Trek fans usually treat the
Star Trek canon as if it was real, drawing a clear line between
canon and non-canon.  (However, as Mark J. Reed pointed out a few
years ago here, the Klingonists don't care much about Star Trek
canon; rather they care about Klingon canon, which follows the
rule that the only person in existence who could create canon
material is Okrand himself.)

> However, I believe that there are people who do not subscribe to this
> view, and who - for example - create new compound words.

Sure.  But that can sometimes result in bitter strife.  Consider the
"purist" vs. "reconstructionist" debate among Tolkienian linguists.

The "purists" restrict themselves to study of the extant material
that comes directly from JRRT, and reject any attempts at the
reconstruction of unattested words and forms, as well as attempts at
the composition of new texts in Quenya or Sindarin.  However, the
"reconstructionists" do respect the canon and do not draw new words
out of thin air - rather, they form new compounds, reconstruct
Sindarin cognates of attested Quenya words, and that kind of stuff.

Recently, a ceasefire has been attained by tagging the extended
versions of the languages used by "reconstructionists" with the
prefix "Neo-".  And even the most liberal reconstructionists opine
that drawing new words and grammatical forms out of nowhere is not
legitimate in Tolkienian linguistics (which doesn't mean, of course,
that you can't build *your own conlang* on Tolkienian foundations).

On Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:59:16 +0200, Philip Newton wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Lars Finsen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Den 24. apr. 2010 kl. 06.53 skreiv Philip Newton:
> >
> >> I think in both cases it's a self-imposed restriction, not a
> >> leader-imposed one: such people who take up Toki Pona or Klingon know
> >> what they're getting into and accept the "closed canon" as part and
> >> parcel of the language. (All the while others do not. But in both
> >> cases, it seems to me that more "liberal" speakers are not part of the
> >> speaker community but tend to be on the fringe, more by themselves
> >> than interacting with the core community, or even with other liberal
> >> speakers.)
> >
> > It's understandable if they avoid creating new words because they fear to 
> tread outside the framework of how they perceive the languages. But how can 
> they serve as human languages without a way to extend the vocabulary?
> 
> I'm not sure such "closed" languages are intended to serve as
> universal human languages.

Indeed they don't - with the exception of Volapük, which failed in
part due to the proprietary attitude of its author (in combination
with a design that called for imrpovements which were then boldly
rejected by Schleyer).

> Klingon was created for a specific reason, and that reason was not to
> become a universally-useful human language, and Toki Pona, I think, is 
> also more of a Sapir-Whorf experiment than an attempt at a language
> that can fulfil arbitrary communication domains.

The central idea behind Toki Pona is that the vocabulary is *closed*
- and thus, you are *not expected* to coin new words in it!

> So I think it's not applicable to measure such languages with the same
> criteria as languages that *are* intended to be "full" languages.
> 
> Compare, for example, Lojban, which has a closed group of root words
> (gismu) but an open class of "loan words" as well as an
> effectively-open group of compound words formed (to simplify things a
> bit) from the combining forms of one or more gismu. So that language
> *can* introduce an arbitrary number of new words -- because it *is*
> intended to be a useful language.

Yes.  I don't know the official policy of the Logical Language Group,
but if they were to declare any new coinages by other people out of
bounds, they'd only kill and fossilize their language.  A language
that doesn't change is a dead language, as some linguist once said.

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html