Mark Hall wrote:

> The sad part I find to all these folks rushing out and trying to
> learn/create Elvish and Klingon and whatever else is, that there
> are lots of perfectly good languages that are dead, dying and going
> into oblivion for a variety of reasons.

Well, as a conlanger myself, I'd like to defend the hobby. Languages
are products of human art and craft, something we do. By some
modern theories, language construction is an art practiced by
everyone; children don't as much learn a language as construct one
that is compatible with that spoken around them. (the Gods help me,
I think I just defended Chomsky in a public forum) Natural languages
are built by large groups of people, by cultures, and change slowly
for the benefit of those people; constructed languages are built
by one or two people. Your argument, to me, starts to sound like:
'the sad part is people rushing to perform solos when there are
lots of perfectly good chorales dying.'

Languages are tools we use not just to communicate, but to order
our culture and to organize our thoughts; this is the sort of craft
we should get a handle on, and model languages are a good way to
do it. I know plenty of people who got into old European literature
via Tolkien and his rip-offs; is it surprising they would want to
move into those languages from Tolkien's languages? (I know at least
one linguist who claims he only aced Welsh lentition patterns because
of his study of lentition in Sindarin) Even if Esperanto has not
succeeded as a interlanguage, its study has encouraged many otherwise
monolingual people to study a further languages with confidence.
I'm told that in Asia, Esperanto is studied as a model Indo-European
language, to help those speakers understand the difficult structures
of IE languages, without the mind-boggling details and irregularities.

> And even from an academic viewpoint, so of these languages,
> particularly the Native american ones only have a handful of schoalrs
> working on them/preserving them. Sigh.. :(

This is more problematic than it sounds. Many of these people,
especially here in New England, are not interested in Anglos learning
their languages. They feel too much of their culture has already
been taken from them. All the schools I know of that teach Micmac,
for example, require you to show proof of Micmac descent.

In short, I don't think learning a conlang prevents you from learning
a natlang; I think learning any language makes learning the next
easier; and I think the study and practice of building model languages
is a useful pasttime.

ranting off-topic,
Erich