Re: Round Robin Transcreation

--- Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> Sally Caves wrote:
> > Gary, did you or someone else suggest this before
> on CONLANG, about a year
> > ago?   Because this sounds very familiar!  Several
> of us pursued a game
> > like
> > this for about a week.
> >
> Ha!! Yes, he did, back in July-- Madjal (thanks to
> google).  There was a web
> site, but I've lost the URL.
Aha! You are right. But that project was for folks to
just email me sentences of their own creation to add
to the corpus.  What I got was often written without
regard for the prior corpus so there was no
consistancy and it ended up being a scrap pile of
disconnected utterances rather than a conlang.

Plus, the sentences were all over the map with things
like "I killed the orange dragon with poison."  There
was no pattern or progression in the corpus.

The present idea is an attempt to bring a semblence of
order to the process by using a predetermined list of
progressively complex sentences and discovering the
translations one at a time, so that each discovery can
build on the previous ones. Plus the preselected
sentence list would provide built-in balance for what
the vocaublary and grammar need to accomplish.

Finally, by making it turn-based, the process proceeds
at a reasonable pace of one sentence every few days
rather than like Madjal, which often left me flooded
with 100 sentences in one day about how to battle
dragons, and then nothing for weeks and weeks.

Just a random thought, but I always thought it would
be fun to actually watch a language evolve (active)
rather than be designed (passive).

--gary