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

On Thu, 9 Oct 2008 00:07:39 -0700, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>It's that time again. Time to try to launch another collaborative project
in linguistic anarchy. My last two collaborative conlang projects were
interesting, but ultimately not terribly successful. (Kalusa - conlang
archives May 2006... and another project from longer ago. I don't recall the
name.)

I have to agree with Jim Henry that Kalusa was far more successful than most
collaborative projects.  Where in most projects the newness fascination
wears off people after the first couple weeks and it dies on the vine,
Kalusa made it past this hump and got some dedicated crafters; it eventually
only died because some social-type strife drove most of the user community
away (Philip's (2)).

Anyway, cool, another collaborative project.  Comes at a time when I won't
be able to contribute much, but I'll try to keep a watch on it, and maybe
dip a toe in.

Oh, a casual comment on the glossing of the placeholder lexicon.  I find
'-ology' / 'study of' as a gloss for -JI a bit funny.  To my eye, many of
these sorts of words in English have a semantic range within which one can
distinguish two senses: for instance to take "syntax" (to take an example
without that distracting "-ology"), as a generic it's 'the study of the
composition of phrases' (or whatever), fine, but in reference to a
particular language it's simply 'the rules of composition of phrases'.  It's
the second sense which seems more fundamental to me, and closer to what
you're after.  The first by contrast feels metonymic, the same way you might
use "English" or "Dance" or whatever as names of academic programs without
being under any illusion that the primary meaning of "English" was anything
other than a language, or "dance" anything but 'sequence of rhythmical steps
and motions often in time to music'.

Alex

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