[conlang_learners] Submission of conlangs

[Jim Henry]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Padraic Brown<elemtilas at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- On Thu, 6/18/09, Amanda Babcock Furrow <langs at quandary.org> wrote:

>> I think that's a great idea, but I also personally would
>> rather choose one
>> language and stick with it - with the idea of building a
>> community of
>> speakers for that language, not just to move on to the next
>> one.

> That's fine. I'm not suggesting that everyone has to leave after a set amount of time! What about someone who doesn't like the language chosen? Do we force everyone to stay with one language forever?

Of course not.  How could we possibly force people to stay with the
project longer than they find it enjoyable?  But if some of us do find
the language, and the speaker community that starts to grow around it,
interesting enough to stick with long-term, then that would be an
ideal outcome, in my opinion and apparently Amanda's and Brett's, if I
understand them correctly.


> Could be. This certainly isn't a short-term project. But is it a life-long affair either? I would imagine that learners could easily spend three to six months getting a good feel for the language and another six perfecting their skill. But at what point does the cycle end? Is this really a spring-board for a full-fledged speaking community?

I hope so, but as Sai pointed out, that isn't incompatible with the
larger community of people-who-like-to-learn-other-people's-conlangs
collectively descending on conlang Bar in six months or a year's time
while a small kernel of people who are really interested in conlang
Foo continue "using it into existence", creating a literature for it
and customs and traditions and so forth, even while some of them also
start learning conlang Bar or, later on, conlang Qux.

> Are we expecting people to teach these conlangs to their kids? That I really would have a problem with, and would never want someone to (ab)use my conlangs that way.

Not expecting it at all.   In the unlikely event it ever happens, it
would be, I suppose, because the speaker community has grown so large
and there are so many fluent speakers that there are couples whose
primary common language is conlang Foo, as happens fairly often with
Esperanto and occasionally, if I'm not mistaken, with Interlingua.  It
would certainly be wrong and foolish to raise children speaking it
*experimentally*, when it hasn't been proven as a speakable language
on a large scale by adults who are first messing with it for fun and
later using it for more serious purposes.   But nobody's suggested
anything like that.

(A digression: There would be a big difference between raising
children as native speakers of a conlang, and offering to teach it to
them as a second language when they're old enough to decide whether
they want to learn it.   In the latter case, I don't think it would be
in any way unethical, even if the conlang isn't fully developed and
proven speakable, if you're honest with the children about the nature
of the language and how many people they'd be able to speak to with it
vs. some other language they might want to learn.  Even in the case of
proven conlangs with a sizable speaker community, like Esperanto, I'm
not sure the latter isn't the better course to follow when the parents
have a common language that's more widely spoken than Esperanto.
Katalin Smideleusz commented that she hadn't raised her daughter as a
native speaker of Esperanto because she wanted her to decide for
herself whether she wanted to learn it; and she did decide to learn
it, when she was about eleven or twelve, and after a year or so of
study was one of the most fluent speakers at the immersion course when
I was there in 1998 -- perhaps more so than a native Esperanto speaker
of about the same age whom I also met there.)


> I suppose if someone wants to stay active with the chosen conlang, that's fine and admirable, but is this going to be a requirement of participation?

No, not at all.   In an earlier message on this thread I suggested
asking people who participate in the vote to commit to sticking with
the language chosen for some minimum time, maybe three months or six;
but nobody else has commented on that suggestion yet, positively or
negatively.  And in any case there would be no way to enforce such a
"requirement".


> I guess it's cos I see conlangs as pieces of art. I mean, becoming part of a real honest-to-God speaking community for a conlang is rather like buying a statue of a nymph and going to bed with her...
>
> I haven't even done that with my own conlangs!

It boils down, I think, to a difference in conlangers' temperaments,
our main interest or focus being on *langue* or on *parole*.   I too
see conlangs, or at least the best of them, as art; but art is of
various kinds, some meant merely to be appreciated by looking at it,
and some to be appreciated by using it as well.   Or perhaps I see the
conlang-equivalent of staring intently at a painting for a long time
and taking in all the details, or reading a great novel carefully
multiple times, to be, not reading the reference grammar through a
couple of times, but actually learning the conlang well enough to read
and write a little in it.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/