Greenlee's book, DECal, and other professional pursuits; WAS: "I have an idea..."

----- Original Message -----
From: David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 10:19 PM
Subject: Re: I have an idea! (Good this time)


>     The Conlang Book, Sally, is the book that M. Greenlee's (I don't know
> your first name! :( ) been putting together, where we all send samples of
our
> languages to him and he said that he'd have a book together with samples
of
> all of our languages by late August.  People have been sending things to
him
> over the list for months.  I myself have four of five of my languages in
> there.  You didn't hear about this?
No.  I've been "no-mail" since last fall.  Do you have M. Greenlee's
email address?  Mia Soderquist and I and a few others have posted, but
I'm not sure Greenlee caught those.

>     As for my project (if you missed my first e-mail),
That posting was a mistake!  Forgive me!  I did indeed see your
first email, and then didn't connect it with your other post!

 I came up with the
> idea of teaching a DECal class not this coming semester, but Spring 2002
(I
> assume they had DECal classes when you were at Cal?).
I don't know what this is.  I attended graduate school at Berkeley from
1976-
1982, and got my doctorate in medieval English literature.  Is this some
kind of
special course?  What does the D.E.C. stand for?  Decal.  Clever.

  What I wanted was
> articles on linguistics, conlanging, and (later) some language samples for
> the course reader.  So far I have Irina's three articles.  So, that's what
> I'm up to.  :)
I'd be glad to send you something.  I published an on-line article on
CONLANGing and "audience" for the Australian electronic journal
_MC: A Journal on Media and Culture_.  I could send you that as well.
Or you could just download it.  It appeared in March of last year and it's
archived at:

http://english.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.html

It represents work I'm doing on a larger scale.  ("Sally Caves"
is my _nom de plume_; here I publish under my "other" name.)

By the way, Matt Pearson taught a very successful class at Wisconsin, I
think,
where he introduced students to "conlanging" through a clever approach to
teaching language typology:  teach them typology by inviting them to make
up a joint language.  They had to choose ahead of time, I think through
spinning a dial, what basic features the language would have (would it be
VO, OV; would it be nominative, ergative, active, or a trigger language?)
and
then follow the "rules" that some linguists have noted about such language
types.
You could probably get him to describe this better than I can.  But I too
have
thought of teaching a course on invented and inventing languages, one that
would bridge English and Linguistics at my university.

Good luck with this!   It sounds great!

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net