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

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 3:07 AM, 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.)
Madjal, right?

http://fiziwig.com/soaloa/corpus.html

I thought Kalusa was pretty successful, actually, as long as it had
a significant number of users.  The problem with that project, in its
later months, was more social than linguistic; a repetition with the same
basic methodology but less anonymity and better ways for the
community to enforce its norms would probably be even better.
Periodic recruiting drives on CONLANG and ZBB and perhaps
other fora might help, too, when some of the first group of
enthusiasts drop out; and it would help to find a way to make it
easy for new participants coming in late to get up to speed
on the language as quickly as possible.

> So here's my latest brainstorm: Start with a simplified "bootstrap"
> proto-language along the lines of Toki Pona (but without all the excessive
> ambiguity). That bootstrap language is used for all discussions about the
> emerging collaborative conlang, so that people who do not share the same
> native language can all discuss and work on the conlang using the bootstrap
> language.
Cool.  Let's do it.


> For that it would be necessary first to have a quick and easy course of
> instruction to pick up the bootstrap grammar and vocabulary. This would
need to be available in many natural languages so that people from diverse

I'll volunteer to render the tutorial sentences and so forth into Esperanto,
and publicize the project in suitable Esperanto fora; maybe in Toki Pona
as well.  Not sure how long it will take, probably 2 weeks or more given
my other responsibilities at the moment.  If no native speaker of French
volunteers by the time I finish the Esperanto version, I'll take a stab at
translating stuff into French as well.

It might be best if, on the tutorial sentences and dictionary pages, you add
some interface for people to contribute additional glosses and translations of
the  sample sentences in additional natural and constructed languages.

I agree with Herman's idea of making it easy to link dictionary
words and sample sentences to various online resources that
would ease the burden of translating everything into multiple languages,
and make it easier for new people to get up to speed even if not
everything has rendered into their native language yet.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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