Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 31 May 2011 20:20:08, Maxime Papillon wrote:

> > Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 16:23:20 +0200
> > From: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Natlang loglangs? (was: Glossopoeia vs. reconstruction)
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > 
> > "A natlang shaped by deliberate planning" - what? We are
> > obviously using the word "natlang" in different meanings!
> > To me (and probably to everyone else on the list save you)
> > a natlang is a language that grew out of centuries of
> > *unplanned* linguistic evolution.
> 
> Every literary language (and surely a number of non-literary languages) has
> gone through some degree of planning and control, from artificial
> prescriptions becoming common, to prestige dialects erasing less
> prestigious ones by law, to complete language reworks and revivals.
> "Planned" and "Unplanned" are not purely binary with conlangs on one side
> and natlangs on the other; some natlangs were deliberately shaped in some
> way and some conlangs obtained some freedom with regard to their original
> design.

Sure.  Many standard languages are to a large degree regulated
and planned.  The boundary between natlangs and conlangs is a
blurry one; there are borderline cases such as Nynorsk and Ivrit.
As I have said before, the difference between an artificially
standardized language and a zonal auxlang is roughly analogous
to that between a dialect continuum and a language family, and
there is no hard and fast line.
 
> And was precisely raising the question of whether such a natlang upon which
> artificial modifications were imposed is still a natlang, and if possibly
> not at what degree is it not? I'm confident that even though some
> sociolects of English follow the invented rules of not splitting
> infinitives and not ending a sentence in a preposition, what these people
> speak is not a conlang, but what about a natlang where a lot of the
> morphology was consciously regularized?

It is a matter of degree; but to turn a natlang into a loglang,
which is the point of this discussion, one would have to
restructure the grammar so dramatically that any mutual
intelligibility is lost, and the result is a new language,
though with an a posteriori vocabulary.  (Indeed, many of the
words would have to be changed in meaning as well to do that
trick.)

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