Announcing the Smiley Award

Hey all,

As Larry Sulky pointed out recently, it would be nice if there was
some sort of a way to recognize conlangs.  Partly in response to
this, and partly based on an idea I've had for quite awhile now,
I decided to create a new award for created languages: The Smiley
Award.

The Smiley Award is going to be a feature of my website, so
it's by no means official in any way.  Its purpose is not too spark
competition, but simply to recognize well-made or innovative
conlangs.  If the award exists for fifty years, I hope to give it to
fifty different conlangs.  For me personally, it gives me a forum
to write about conlangs I like, and detail exactly why I like them,
and what I like about them.

The rules for awarding the Smiley are pretty simple:

1.) I award the Smiley on the first Monday of June every year.
2.) I'll do a write-up for each winner every year.
3.) Smileys are given out to languages (or families of languages,
language projects, etc.), not language creators.
4.) The winner will be current (i.e., being invented and/or used
or elaborated during the award year).
5.) Given that this is based on what I can see, the award will be
given to languages with websites, or some detailed info on
the internet (this isn't ideal, but I have to be able to *see* the
language, somehow).
6.) Awards will not be given to professional languages (e.g., Tho Fan).
7.) A given language can only win one Smiley (these aren't Oscars).
8.) There are no categories: Any type of language can win it.
9.) I encourage nominations, but discourage self-nomination.

Again, I want to stress that the whole point of this enterprise
is to recognize good work, *not* to suggest that language X is
better than language Y, or anything like that.  I'm not going to
put up a list of nominees and then say which one's the winner,
or anything like that.  It's kind of like the Lifetime Achievement
Award presented at the Oscars as opposed to the Oscars
themselves.  The only difference is that you don't necessarily
have to have been working on the language for a lifetime
(though I'm sure many of those lifetime conlangs will eventually
be win a Smiley).

For more information, you can go here:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/smileys/

The presentation of the first Smiley will follow this e-mail.

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/