On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:57:55 -0500, Rick Harrison <not@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>In article <47cc79d6$0$15849$9a6e19ea@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Sandy
>Rhodes <nobody@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> Now with artlangers on the ZBB typically having half a dozen langs per
>> person, announcement of a new lang is more like the sound of one
>> raindrop hitting the ground during a cloudburst.
>>
>> What would be big news in this environment?
>
>If two or more people actually learned a new language and had a
>spontaneous, unplanned conversation in it, that would be big news.
A pleasant surprise, perhaps, but big news? That I'm not so sure
about. I've done that with another person's conlang. It was nothing to
write home about. It was neat being able to converse, even a little
bit, in a conlang other than one's own.
*Big* news would the United Nations adopting Teonaht as its official
language of all UN business! ;)
>The first Language Creation Conference was big news.
Any such "first" will be newsworthy. When conlang boinks were first
popular (a decade at least, or maybe more ago), people were rather
excited about meeting other conlangers face to face.
>Fans of particular
>auxiliary languages have had gatherings since the days of Volapuk, but
>the first LCC was, I think, the first time fans of experimental langs
>and artistic langs had a gathering.
No, conlangers have been boinking for years. Perhaps this was the
first big formal conference event, but certainly not the first
gathering! References to conlang boinks go back to at least 1999.
>Let's see, what else... I view the publication of relevant books as
>news. Not earth-shattering, but definitely noteworthy.
Yes. Anything that brings conlangery out into the mainstream
conscience as something other than a "secret vice" or "weird people
doing weird things" or people "wasting time when they could be
recording / preserving / teaching dying *real* languaes" (as if
conlangers were, as a whole, a bunch of actual linguists!) in a
positive light is noteworthy.
So, quite a bit of noteworthy, but really nothing Big News! Maybe
that's not such a bad thing.
Padraic
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