Gary Shannon ha tera a:
> Once upon a time about 30 years ago when I was in grad
> school (engineering) a good friend of mine (from the
> philosophy dept.) and I went on a camping trip for a
> week. Our original intention was to get isolated from
> all civilization for a week and to communicate without
> using any language we already knew. If we needed a
> word for something we would make it up and point at an
> object or pantomime an action to get the meaning
> across. Our hope was that at the end of the week in
> the wilderness we would have invented some kind of
> minimal conlang.
> What we ended up with was far too primative to be
> called a language. It involved more point-and-grunt
> than anything else, and we certainly couldn't discuss
> any lofty philosophical notions in our
> invented "language".
I've done something similar, though not to that extent. It's a game I
used to play with my siblings - we'd decide that we wouldn't use
English to communicate, and invent words and try to communicate them to
each other. We never did it for more than about an hour at a time,
though.
> But ever since then I have been intrigued by the idea
> of creating a conlang in exactly the opposite way
> conlangs are usually created. After all, natlangs
> were all created, as needed, by people who knew
> nothing whatsoever about formal linguistics. Whatever
> worked to communicate an idea was kept and refined by
> usage, and hatever was difficult, confusing, or just
> didn't work was discarded.
> So the idea that I've had in the back of my mind is a
> collaborative conlang created by a group of people,
> but without any "planning" whatsoever. Gramatical
> ideas are NOT discussed by the collaborators.
> Vocabulary is NOT discussed by the collaborators.
> Instead the collaboration happens by way of discussing
> other topics of interest EXCLUSIVELY in the newly
> developing language itself.
I'd be very interested in the same thing
> A minimal seed a a few hundred words would be
> generated entirely at random, but no grammatical rules
> whatsoever would be laid down. There would be NO
> central authority to adjudicate disputes or pass
> judgement on what is or is not acceptable usage.
> Collaborators would use the minimum vocabulary in any
> manner they saw fit. As time went on a consensus
> would emerge, not by arguing the merits of the
> different grammatical approaches, but by watching to
> see which grammatical structuires emerged as the most
> popular ones in articles written about home gardening,
> photography, or stamp collecting.
> Not until the language had evolved a reasonably
> consistent consensus grammar and vocabulary would
> actual discussion of grammatical points be permitted.
> Even then, such discussions would be descriptive, not
> proscriptive. The grammar and vocabulary of
> this "organic" conlang would never be changed by
> decree. They would change only when popular writers
> of the language itself set the examples that were
> adopted by the community at large.
> To avoid biasing the language toward any one
> grammatical system the collaborators would have to
> come from diverse liguistic backgrounds. Otherwise
> the new language would end up being a relexification
> of English, or whatever the majority language was
> among the collaborators.
> In fact, it would very interesting to observe a small
> group of five or six people with no single language in
> common work out a system of communication based on
> a "seed" vocabulary of a few hundred random invented
> words not taken from any of their native languages.
> Kind of like growing a pidgin under greenhouse
> conditions. Have the group meet a couple evenings
> a week and "chat" in their own unique evolving
> language.
> Or for that matter, have them get together in an
> Internet forum were the rule is that NO natlang or
> pre-existing conlang would be permitted in any post
> on that forum.
The problem with doing it the internet way, I think, would be that it
would be hard to get the initial meanings of words established, because
you can't use point-and-enact methods... no, wait, that's not such a
problem, because you're starting with some predefined words.
> That would be an intersting way to grow a conlang.
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