Re: an accidental conlang

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@Y...> wrote:

It sounds really cool, I'd be willing to take part
in the experiment.  Please open up a new Yahoo!Group
for the project, since some of us (i.e. I) don't
check this list often.  =P



> 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.
That sounds very romantic and all, but don't expect
us conlangers to act the same as pre-lingual people
would.  A collective of minds unprejudiced with
existing linguistical knowledge and paradigms can
come up with some truly original concepts (trigger
langs, anyone?), but imagine somebody of us were
trying to establish a past tense system in our lang
-- <day> <before>, <I> <see>al <bird>, for example,
and everyone would just go "oh, a verb suffix, how
boring".  And if we strive to make our grammar non-
trivial, how are we ever going to grow it and
communicate it consensually?



> 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.
We'd need two Yahoo!Groups, then.  One for out-of-
character discussion (i.e. administrative questions
or "I'll be gone for a month" messages), and a
"reactor" for in-character babbling.



-- Christian Thalmann