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razlem wrote:Why is studying conlangs as a formal field rejected/scoffed at by linguists?
linguoboy wrote:Citations, please? My experiences with the Lojban community suggest otherwise.
At least not any well-planned and thought-out research because, honestly, I don’t want people to write me off....I still encounter people who get deeply angry that I would even mention conlangs let alone teach a class on them (which I also do).
Levente wrote:One reason I could think of is that constructed language mainly work like living ones.
It's like "Why create it in a lab when you can study it in nature".
Nothing - half the languages I'm interested in learning are European. I just think that modelling a conlang after Standard Average European (especially the Romance family) is extremely tired and boring, and there are much more interesting things that can be done with conlanging (see linguoboy's examples of Klingon and Lojban). This is your criticism of conlangs too, right?Levente wrote:One reason I could think of is that constructed language mainly work like living ones.
It's like "Why create it in a lab when you can study it in nature".
And modge: What's your problem with European languages?
What makes a language defective? Any sources for this knowledge?Koko wrote:The only thing that bothers me is that if a language is dying, there's obviously good reasons for it. Why study something that's defective? Pointless.
Koko wrote:The only thing that bothers me is that if a languagespecies is dying, there's obviously good reasons for it. Why study something that's defective? Pointless.
Dormouse559 wrote:Koko wrote:The only thing that bothers me is that if a language is dying, there's obviously good reasons for it. Why study something that's defective? Pointless.
What makes a language defective? Any sources for this knowledge?
Koko wrote:The only thing that bothers me is that if a language is dying, there's obviously good reasons for it. Why study something that's defective? Pointless.
And one might say that it's then pointless to study a language like Latin, but this doesn't really suit my argument because it isn't necessarily dead, it's just evolved and changed, like Old English into Modern English.
Luís wrote:There used to be a podcast called "The Linguistics Podcast", but I think it's over now. However, you can still find the old episodes on Youtube. Also, there's the Conlangery podcast. It's a podcast about conlanging, but most of their episodes are about more general language features (e.g. The Sapir-Worf hypothesis, face and politeness (sociolinguistics), language typology, vowel harmony, relative clauses, etc.)
Koko wrote:I may have made a poor choice of words. What I meant was that if a language is dying, there's only one reason why it is: the parents aren't teaching their children their native language.
What mpre is there to research.
Sure it's sad, but it's not very humane to tell the parents of all the endangered languages to teach their children that particular language, now is it?
What can you do with an endangered lguage? Not much, only watch it die while people with absolutely no connections with said language attempt to learn it and pass it on to their children.
Now the question is: "Is it more worthwhile to study a conlang?" Well, if you agree(which I don't think many will), the answer is indeed.
Koko wrote: What can you do with an endangered lguage? Not much, only watch it die while people with absolutely no connections with said language attempt to learn it and pass it on to their children.
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