Well, to be fair, this was one of his odd pronouncements, without introduction and without context and something that can be read in several different ways. That's why I chose to hedge my bet and take two different possible readings, either of which could be entirely wrong. You could well be right, but to be honest with you, I didn't read in there anything about the issue being fictional peoples. Even if that is the case, I can scarcely recall any outsider leveling that kind of claim either! If anything, we tend to propose (actual) races and ethnicities far more diverse than anything we find on our monracial, though polyethnic, Earth!Khemehekis wrote: ↑06 Aug 2020 04:56Ummm, I don't think Bob means that people dislike a conlang because its creator is African-American or Jewish or Filipino or Chinese. If I read his post correctly, he means that the fictional peoples who speak conlangs are races not like Western, White, Protestant Homo sapiens. I bet your average racist wouldn't even hire an otherwise White-looking person if said applicant had elf ears, so maybe that even applies to Quenya?elemtilas wrote: ↑06 Aug 2020 04:02 The claim that language invention has attached to it a stigma of "racism" is quite ludicrous. No random internet blogger or linguistician has the first clue who we are as individuals. There can be no rational basis for the claim that "race" is fueling any kind of stigma against the art; either outsiders levelling accusations of racism towards us or behaving in racist ways against us. I've seen language inventors called many things, as above, but racist is not one of them. Rather I have the feeling that Larry is transferring & internalising his own delusions of what happened over in the Other Place into this essay.
I dunno what a racist might or mightn't do. They might surprise you! 8)
Curious. I started some notes for a story set in a place where, in fact, language invention was considered morally wrong (though mind you, the determiners of what is and isn't moral had a very odd sense of what is morality).Agreed. Conlanging is not morally wrong. No wronger than eating your bread with the butter side down.
And don't get me started on that disgusting habit of sousbeurrism! If anything should be excoriated with the vimmest of utmostery!
That was a good question! We ought to revisit that every now and again.Thanks for bringing that post back up, Elemtilas -- and I'm honored, as that post is in a thread I started! I enjoyed reading back over it. I first discovered the online conlanging community in the mid-nineties, as an eager teen-ager inventing Kankonian and Hapoish. I never got ostracized at school for conlanging, so I'll never know the experience of Xers and other prior generations.
I never got ostrichised either at school, but then again, like I said in that post, it wasn't something I talked about with anyone else. Still isn't, really, apart from folks here in the community. And even then, never really on a personal level, apart from yourself & maybe two or three others. I've only ever talked much about it with the son of a friend. Like you in the mid-1990s, he'll be (hopefully) a still eager teenager of the mid-2020s, and hopefully he'll land here and in other good communities!
Ah Teonaht! Now that warms the heart! A glossopoem if ever there was!While conlanging, I learned of such conlangs as Sulekhï/Merdian, Rokbeigalmki, Teonaht, Xara (sp?), Neelan, q^upl (sp?), Rhean, Gonardoi, Gevey, Verdurian, Mango, Talossan, Ilish, Ahua, Ceqli, Fith, Rikchik, aUI, Picture Language, and Tomato. Some, like Verdurian and Talossan, are still going strong; others, to quote George MacBeth, are "Creatures whose names we scarcely remember/Zebra, Rhinoceros, elephants, wart-hog/Lion, rats, deer".
Several of those, I think, I'd characterise as "distant mountain lost in surrounding forest". There are just so many invented languages out there now, and so many forums, and so much sundering of tongues, that the older names are bound to be forgotten or whose harmony is lost in the cacophony of so much joyful noise.