Re: A Conlang Pidgin Game

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 11:44:49AM -0500, Joe Mondello wrote:

>     I've already been contacted privately by lblissett
> (blissett@optonline.net) about a Conlang game, and I think playing with four
> or five people would be ideal,
That sounds like fun!  I'm in.

>     I like Amanda's idea of making this a *REAL* pidgin game, for example,
> assuming a situation and then creating utterances with english translations
> of things which could be easily communicated in a real situation, and
> leaving fine points of grammar unspoken, e.g.
>
> Joe has 100 logs of timber that he wants to sell to Amanda.  he wants to
> know how much wood she wants to buy.
> Joe: mi na sento abozi ko. tu ki kesa abozi? ku leya ideya tu ko kesa? mi
> ta-uru kesa abozi?
>
>     The major problem with this setup, I think, is that it would be
> difficult to tell when a word has entered the lexicon of the pidgin.  but
> this would do away with the need for a base vocab.
Well, I wasn't really thinking of doing away with the base vocab.  And I
think it's probably more fun to figure out the utterance if a translation
is not supplied with it (plus, gives the opportunity for realistic and
amusing misunderstandings! :)  I vote we keep the vocab, receive utterances
to figure out in pidgin only (no translation except for new words), and
act out the realistic pidgin situation as closely as possible...

(In a real pidgin situation we might not get translations with our new
words, but we'd have objects to point to.  For other concepts like "interest",
for fun we could try explaining it in roundabout pidgin instead of supplying
a translation... we should probably try to do that wherever possible, I
guess.)

Also, if anybody sends me anything as long as that wood-buying thing on
the first round, keep in mind that "no comprende" is valid pidgin too :)
I imagine a pidgin situation would start out with shorter sentences :)

Amanda

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