Re: THEORY: Conlangs?

Well actually I haven't done a collaborative one either, except for a brief dabble
a few years back. However I've done group projects with programming and so on.

 Usually the problem tends to be determining what aspect is most important, how
practical to be versus how idealistic (ie. to make a very good program/language
that is 90% of what we would like vs taking twice as long or longer to make it
"perfect" and then of course it never ends up being perfect because there's
always something to improve on).

 I think standards of judging importance, standards of judging completeness,
and standards of judging practicality need to be determined by the group in
advance. A division of labor needs to be formed so people can specialize in
their area of language research. And also I think every decision needs to be
thoroughly documented. The language shouldnt just consist of "oh, here is our
grammar, oh, here is our vocabulary". It should list the reason why every
decision was made, what alternatives there were, why those alternatives were
not selected, and so on. This will make it easy for us to self-check ourselves
and also for any future language developers to see where we went wrong.

  - Doug

Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...> wrote:
  Douglas Treadwell 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.
>
> - Doug
>
I'm just about always building a conlang, though I've never really done
a collaborative one. How well do you find that to work?