Re: THEORY: Conlangs?

On 5/31/07, Douglas Treadwell <epicureanideal@...> wrote:
> Is anyone here currently building a conlang? Is anyone interested in a
> collaborative effort to develop a conlang? I have a few thoughts about how to
> resolve the issues that usually slow down progress on collaborative projects.
I've been involved in several collaborative conlang projects at one
time or another.  The most interesting and enjoyable of the lot was
Kalusa, which was developed using a corpus management engine
built by Gary Shannon, plus (later) a message board and mailing list.
The others, still interesting but not as intensely so as Kalusa,
were built at artlangs.com (which ran on Drupal) before its demise,
and on another conlang wiki, whose name I can't recall.

It seems to me that a collaborative conlang would do well
to use a combination of an archived mailing list, a wiki to document
the results of decisions made on the list, and some other tools
(like a database, and perhaps the Kalusa engine) to manage
the lexicon and corpus.  Trying to manage everything with
just a mailing list makes a huge barrier against new people
coming in and getting up to speed; trying to manage discussions
as well as document the current state of the language on
a wiki is more cumbersome than a mailing list.

Gary Shannon seems to have dropped off of the Internet or at least
the conlang lists, but you could probably get the source code for
the Kalusa corpus management engine from David J. Peterson, who
uses it to document some of his conlangs on his personal site.

What kind of conlang are you aiming to build?  Artlang, auxlang,
engelang...?

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

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