* This could, of course, change if one of them were adopted widely and began to develop of its own accord.
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 14:45, Michael Everson
<michael.everson@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10 Apr 2010, at 22:31, Seth wrote:
> i dont know... all but a few of my classmates and professors all but spit when prescriptivism, conlangs, or orthographies are mentioned. those things aren't "real linguistics" to them. when i have told them about Esperanto having natives, they entirely disregard the phenomenon as "not important". maybe my ling department is just particularly biased, but it is a large department, not just one isolated nazi.
Then they are just bigots with their own narrow agenda.
Seriously, that's just dumb. Neologisms are no different from conlang engineering. Iceland has a whole institute (Íslensk málstöð) for devising new terminology. That's not any different from what Zamenhof or his followers did, or what Gode did for Interlingua. Real linguists study Tolkien's languages both because he was a great linguist (lexicographer as well as conlanger).
Linguistics is a lot bigger than what some universities think it is, apparently. But if your colleagues can't take joy in Quenya or Lojban, that's evidence for their blinkeredness, nothing more.