Re: Created languages list

Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> baccomunu:

> Perhaps someone should tell him about this list.;)
Assuming for the moment he knows about this list, he might have created a
new one if he feels the volume here is too high.  As Yogi Bera said, "It's
so crowded no one goes there anymore."

I know I really appreciate it when people use the prefixes suggested by the
list owner:

>CHAT: For any purely social discussions (such as arrangements for meeting
>in Real Life (TM)), phatic speech (ROTFL, Thanks for the nice note, etc.)
>NGL: For the discussion  of the NGL project. At times  this has been very
>heavy, though this is less true than  it once was thanks to the newsgroup
>alt.lang.ngl. NGL is an  ongoing collaborative "Next Generation Language"
>development effort.
>THEORY: For the discussion of linguistic theory as divorced from concrete
>phenomena (like  ergativity or  word order)  that might  be useful  for a
>CONLANGer.  For instance,  the pros  and  cons of  Chomskyan theory,  the
>innateness hypothesis  (or postulate!), and  the exact definition  of the
>term  "center-embedding"  have all  been  discussed  at great  length  at
>various times. Such discussions of  options in linguistic theory _are_ of
>interest to some readers, but not to all.
>USAGE:  For a  whole  variety of  threads that  regularly  come up  about
>language quirks, correct  (or reformed spelling), how people  on the list
>pronounce the word flibbertegibbet, and the like.
>New prefixes can be  created at listowner discretion (to a  limit of 7 or
>9), if a high traffic topic causes consistent problems.
This certainly helps me decide which threads to skip and helps me manage the
volume of the list better.  I wouldn't mind seeing a few more:

PHON - phonology & pronunciation -- some people, myself included, aren't
interested in phonology and don't want to follow these threads
PROG - programming & technical -- while I love things like XML thread, a lot
of nonprogrammers or nontechnical people probably don't care and would
prefer to skip such things.
LEX - how your language lexifies concepts -- now here's a type of thread I
love to follow and a marker like this would keep me from missing them.

I'm not sure why the list owner has to set them up.  I would think people
could just type them into their subject line, but perhaps listserv has some
value-added features regarding this prefixes that I am not aware of.  I'm
sure you can think of other threads you might like marked with prefixes.

The advantage of these prefixes are that you can configure your e-mail
program to delete the messages with prefixes you don't care for.  And the
advantage of keeping these all as one list is that a discussion might segue
into different threads, evolving from CHAT into USAGE, or from PHON into
THEORY, etc.

Best regards,

Jeffrey Henning
http://www.LangMaker.com/ - Invent Your Own Language
http://www.Jeffrey.Henning.com/ - Santa Paravia & Fiumaccio for Windows