mercutio wrote:I feel loads of people have given the poor original poster a hard time!
Why does do some people have to be so bitchy! Give the guy a break! I imagine it took ages to invent a language!
To the original poster: I know basically nothing about con langs but I recognise how complicated it must be to make! I hope you haven't been demoralised by people's negative comments.
Peace
Bitchy? I'll admit to being slightly tetchy, but the guy says he's surprised about the amount of negativity and I've seen far worse on the internet than the reactions to this.
There are dozens if not hundreds of people alive who have tried to invent a new "world language", and where are they all now? Some of them gather a handful of people who learn the language, but most don't. It is not our job to be nice, and it's not our job to work out whether we want to learn it or not.
The first job of the person proposing the language (after writing it) is to demonstrate why it is useful, which is where my first reply ("you're the salesman, get selling!" came from.
Several responses were of the type "read my website" or "check the grammar", but that's putting the onus on us to make ourselves interested and I'm sorry, but people don't work that way. I do not have time to read a grammar for every single language on the planet before I decide what language to learn -- I'm "sold" a language by information circulating more widely about the language and culture.
The message I was receiving from the OP was very unclear, and the more that was said, the more confusing things were. Easy to learn, but riddled with deeply unfamiliar concepts like marking pronouns to say which antecedent they refer to. Ah, but that's for precision.
The thing is, everyone who attempts the task of creating the perfect language (or even just a better mousetrap) finds very quickly that they have to make a lot of compromises, and every compromise is necessary and justified... but they then end up with something that really isn't better than any other language, but in their heads the original intentions still justify the language as better.
The OP took on a task that is just not possible, and the treatment he received here was fairly civilised, and backed up with discussion. If you want to see people get bitchy about this sort of thing, search for "new language" on slashdot.org . Granted, those are computer languages, but the underlying principles of "build-a-better-mousetrap" still apply.