Amanda Babcock skibe:
> 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...
I like it. Upon further inspection, the dublex list seems to have a lot of
concepts on it that I don't find too essential (why include 'disparagement'
when one could say 'say bad things about'), and seems in general better
suited to creating a full fledged language than a pidgin.
> (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 :)
Well, it was just an example. I was trying to picture a frustrated merchant
saying "I have wood! Do you want wood? wood, tree-stuff! you buy my wood,
no?
>
> Amanda
Joe