tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 28 21:23:01 1994

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Re: A thesis on tlhIngan!?



Hu'tegh! nuq ja' JOEL jay'?

=YOU MENTION THAT ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES DON'T EVOLVE, BUT HASN'T ESPERANTO 
=DONE JUST THAT? AND KLINGON HAS GONE THROUGH SEVERAL DOCUMENTED FOCED CHANGES.
=I DON/T MEAN TO ARGUE I JUST WANTED TO UNDERSTAND YOU POSITION. ^FORCED

(Please don't shout / Bonvole ne krii)

I don't mean that they don't evolve, but that they evolve rather differently
than natural languages --- a commonplace in Esperantology since Manders'
_Interlingvistiko kaj Esperantologio_ in 1948. And of course Klingon's
gone through changes of its own; that's what I keep hoping to put into
any article I send off on Klingon to an academic journal. What I'm saying,
quite simply, is that you're not going to get the kinds of changes, like
grammaticalisation, that you'll get in natural languages. burgh -> "inside"
is unlikely (and has already been resisted here). And of course, the
conservative force of prescriptivism can never be underestimated in such
artificial languages.

-- 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne.   [email protected]  
        [email protected]      [email protected]
        AND MOVING REAL SOON NOW TO: [email protected]



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