Dboozer wrote:
We can start another thread, but I've always been a proponent of conlang "evangelism" in the sense of I feel it's a good thing to let people know that conlanging exists as a viable hobby/craft/art. I presented a workshop once where a mother came up to me afterwards and expressed relief that her tween-age daughter wasn't "weird" for creating her own languages. That is worth "furthering" the awareness of conlanging in the wider world in my opinion.
The anecdote's a good enough reason to disband the cult, I think. If her daughter (sorry, don't know what "tween-age" means, or why it has a hyphen) created her own language, her daughter
is weird.
You're weird, I'm weird, we're all fucking weird, and no number of self-help groups, pompous publications, pretensions of academia, and cargo-cult-style irc 'board meetings' will stop that. Quite the contrary. The fact that a community exists online doesn't make its members non-weird, anymore than the existence of pro-ana communities online makes anorexia positive and life-affirming. Conlanging is fundamentally weird and abnormal. That's not to say it's a bad thing, or even that it isn't a good thing, but self-delusion does not help anybody. Certainly taking formal minutes of people reciting "look at me, I'm Serious Business" does not help anybody.
Yes, there are some LCS-specific resources on the LCS site, but that's to be expected. Once again, I emphasize that one of the purposes of LCS is to serve as a bridge from nascent conlangers or interested non-conlangers to the wider community. Instead of making people find CBB, ZBB, Conlang-L, KLI, etc., etc., all individually; LCS can serve as a map to the far-flung world of conlanging.
This isn't a bad aim per se, but could be just as easily (and better) achieved by a neutral website, rather than a political group with its own interests. [You pretend your interests are that of 'the community', and this is one of the most offensive things about you - no institution's interests are the interests of the community, even if that is the initial intention. That's not how politics works. It's not how interests work, either]
Such websites have existed before. They can exist again. No need for one voice in the community to take it upon itself to control the sound system.
I would urge you to consider attending one before you blithely dismiss it as seeing little point in it. Interacting with other like-minded individuals in a real-life setting? Learning from others in a conference setting? Hanging out with other conlangers in an informal setting, going out to dinner, and playing a game of Glossotechnia? Those all seem like enjoyable, educational, and community-building endeavors to me.
I'll take 'blythe' as a compliment - it's something I've often aspired to, but never yet been accused of. Thank you. But no, those all seem like faily horrible ways to spend time to me. Turns out, not everybody is you. Wait, is that connected to that idea I had called 'plurality'? Rather than 'one person decides what they think is obviously in the best interests of The Community and pursues it unilaterally'?
At the risk of repeating myself again again, it's a bridge or map metaphor. There's no federalism or imperial designs. How could someone or some organization exactly "take over the community" anyway?
By becoming the voice of the community to the outside world. By hogging the megaphone. Better not to have a megaphone at all, especially when none of us have anything interesting to say. The metaphor should not be a bridge (after all, as I say, that could be done neutrally), but a funnel, with us on one side and the rest of the world on the other.
How exactly is LCS taking "away the voices of people who aren't (them)"?
It's really a very simple concept.
Before:
Stranger: "hey, you people, tell me about conlanging!"
Conlangers: "X!" "yes, X", "no, Y!", "Y AND X", "anything but X!" "Z! or A! I'm not sure!"
Stranger: "o....k.... may have to think about this..."
Now:
Stranger: "hey, tell me about conlanging!"
LCS: "Q. They say Q. Oh, one of them may say Y, possibly"
Stranger: "Right, Q, OK."
Conlangers: *muffled shouting from behind the door*
Stranger: "not going to ask what's going on in there..."
(substitute 'conlanging' for any more specific question, if you want. On a personal level, of course, an important one is "what are conlangers like?" - you're all one sort of person, and many of us aren't that sort of person. But outsiders look at your "LCS" and think you're representative of us. And sure, if all conlangers were Saizai and THC and lived on the list and not one of the boards, then that wouldn't be so much of a problem. But we aren't all you.)
You are free to speak up in any venue you like, virtually or in reality regardless of whether the LCS exists or not. How are you being stifled?
Why have neutrality on the BBC? Even if the BBC tells you that Labour are all Satanists, Labour candidates can still go round to everybody's houses one by one and show them otherwise, no? The BBC doesn't STOP them.
Controlling the high ground matters - even if it doesn't logically necessarily absolutely prevent others from being heard. Because it doesn't matter what you can do in the venue, it matters how easy it is to get to the venue. The guy with the high ground gets to be at more venues than other people. And your pretensions give you the high ground. Because if the Language Creation Society is arguing with Johnny Conlanger, everybody can see who's representing the conlanging community. Because Johnny Conlanger didn't copyright the "LCS" name first. But that doesn't, or shouldn't, make him less deserving of attention. But it DOES mean he'll get less attention.
I'm going to simply chalk the "orb, sceptre and dais" up to hyperbole because I see no indication that this is, in reality, the case with David.
You don't think his position in the LCS, and the job he gave himself via the LCS, are taken by outsiders as vindication of him both as a conlanger and as a representative of conlanging? You don't think people take the LCS' information about conlangers as having some sort of validity, more validity than would be had if David were a random weird guy on the internet? Then why are you a member of it?
"Random university professor" creating a language would, in all likelihood, not have done that. That was the point I was attempting to make when I previously talked about the positive aspect of Dothraki being created by a conlanger and not "random university professor."
You don't get it. If Dothraki had been created, it would have been by a conlanger. By definition. And if people are going to see conlangers, yes, I'd rather they see university professors than the LCS people. University professors are more impressive representatives - and not really any less representative than you people. And I pray God they don't see your minutes. Otherwise people will expect us to wear our underwear on our heads.
Although, from your previous comments, it would appear to me that you believe shedding light on the wider world of conlanging and conlangers should not be done in the first place. Or are you just saying it shouldn't be done by LCS?
I think it neither bad nor good, frankly. But if it's going to happen, I'd rather it were a neutral light, and I'd rather it not be held by someone with an obsession with self-justification in the eyes of others. It gives a distorting perspective.
And PLEASE, and I say this as a Mod, not just as an interlocutor, don't do that ridiculous thing with the page of sequential replies again. It does nothing but inconvenience everybody. This isn't USENET. The world has moved on. I know we're all geeks, but that doesn't mean we have to act like nerds.
C
J