Re: VMs: VM in made-up language?

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Hi, Elmar,

	The idea of an artificial language has come up
repeatedly in the history of the list.  Gabriel Landini
has it as one possibility on his list on the EVMT
page.  Antoine Casanova, in his doctoral thesis, said
it was in "not less than four, and maybe six"
artificial languages.

	It's rather like the hoax hypothesis - it maybe be
true and we can't disprove it.  It remains a
possibility.  

> Actually, some people are
> making a hobby out of it (see www.langmaker.com), and the fact that there
> are Esperanto and Klingon speaking communities out there proves that it is
> within the realm of the hobbyist to devise, learn and use such languages.

	Jacques Guy is conversant in this realm.

> Although this looks a bit like a word written in Voynichese, there are two
> arguments against it:
> 
> *) The concept seems to be later than the VMs origin,

	A priori languages, as far as I know - but there are
always cases we don't know about - and the VMs could be
it!  Hildegarde of Bingen and Ramon Llull created
artificial languages well before the VMs.  Hildegarde's
was all nouns, derived from Latin and German.  I
haven't seen Llull's.  Robert Firth mentioned it a long
time ago, and he hasn't been around in a while.

> *) For all practical purposes, these vocabularies turn out to be useless.
> The real world (tm) seems to defy the theoretically elegant breakdown in
> independent categories. While a disctinction between "gold" and "silver" in
> the above scheme seems to be feasible, "apple" and "pear" is getting
> difficult, not to mention "strawberries"...

	There could certainly be partial cases.  The
nomenclator that D'Imperio is sort of like this.

Dennis
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