Re: Collaborative conlang - Third time's the charm?

On 09/10/2008, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:
>  There would be no "official" dictionary, because any forum member could contribute
>  any word or grammatical principle. Whether that word remains in the language
>  would depend only on whether other community members used that word. The same
>  would apply to rules of grammar, declensions and case endings (if verbs and
>  nouns are eventually inflected), number of noun classes and their properties,
>  and so on. Rules would remain rules if and only if they are generally adopted
>  by the community.
[...]
> Complete linguistic anarchy prevails.
I predict that one or more of the following will happen:

1) the project starts off with a respectable number of participants,
90% of whom lost interest, time, and/or motivation after a couple of
weeks, so that the remaining 10% have essentially unlimited control
over the language, and it's no longer so cooperative a language -- not
a community language, but an in-group or clique language
2) one or more vociferous, obnoxious, obstreperous, and/or
thick-headed people will push through their preferences by fiat, and
others will put up with them to save themselves the headache of
arguing over the same point yet another time. Again, the language is
disproportionately influenced by few rather than many.

Still, good luck with your idealism! Perhaps I'm too pessimistic.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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