Re: Inverse relay: quality of documentation

On 11/27/08, kaleissin <kaleissin@...> wrote:
> I'd love to be in the next inverse relay but I doubt the documentation
>  I have on Taruven is sufficient. Therefore, I'd like a more in-depth
>  discussion of what level and breadth of documentation is needed to
>  participate:
>
>  * A minimal number of words/meanings in the lexicon?
I wouldn't set an arbitrary minimum here.  Some conlangs
are intended to be lexically parsimonious.  But if your
language is intended to have a small or closed root vocabulary,
you should give a rules and examples for how more complex
meanings are expressed with compounds, derivations,
phrases etc.

>  * Descriptions of which features of the language?
As David said, a description of basic and some more
complex clause types, and word classes and how/whether
each of them inflect.

>  * How many details per word?
The definitions should written to be useful to
someone learning the language, not just to remind
you about what you meant by the words.
Several of the questions I sent Lars when I was working
on my Urianian text had to do with which sense
of an English word he meant to use in his glosses,
for instance.

>  * Examples? (Sample texts or fragments?)
Sample texts are good, although a sufficiently large
number of sample sentences in the grammar might
make them not absolutely necessary.  The more
material someone has to practice and test their
knowledge of the language on before the relay starts,
the better.

>  * Teach-yourself-style tutorials?
Nice, but probably not as important as making
the reference grammar as thorough as possible.


>  I propose a test for sufficient-ness, a short text that someone else
>  than the author of the language was capable of translating into the
>  language, that is: a non-relay translation game. Then the translator
>  can vouch for the quality of the documentation at least.
>
>  Oh and of course, I hereby offer to translate a tiny text of my
>  choosing into one - 1 conlang. Just to get things started, ya' kno'
Let's say we know that the five languages used in Inverse Relay #1
are well-documented enough.  So we might want this kind of
test for languages that weren't used in that relay and which
look like they might be well-enough documented but might not.
What about point me to the Taruven website, if any, or email
me offlist with other Taruven materials, and I'll see what I
can do about writing something in Taruven?  And you can
pick one of the languages offered by other people who
want to participate if this kind of pre-relay documentedness
test seems necessary for them.

Again: who all is interested in participating?  I think so far
David, Arthaey, Amanda, Kaleissin, Eugene, Ina, Jim Taylor
and I are all that have said they're interested.  That gives
us five languages (at least) that haven't been tested by
someone else translating into them (at least not in this
kind of game).

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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