Offlang suggestion & counterproposal

--- Irina wrote:

> > > For all I know in the near future wet may found
> > > a real conlang club down here.
> We had one, briefly, Nederlands Genootschap voor
> Linguafictie. It foundered because the people in it
> (no more than half a dozen) either weren't
> interested enough any more, or stopped being
> friends. It was never "official" as in "founded by
> deed poll", and that was a good thing, because that
> made it much easier to stop having it when it
> effectively stopped existing.
I agree with Irina. If you really want to found an
"official" club, you would need statutes, a board,
money, some kind of defined activities, and at least
25 people who are fully dedicated to those activities.


First of all, where will we find those 25 who would be
needed to keep even an unofficial club running?
Secondly, conlanging is in most cases quite a solistic
activity. What would club meetings actually look like?
Either lot of talking about other things than
conlanging (which is fine to me, but you don't need a
club for that), or a bunch of people with bags filled
up with their conlang materials, telling each other:
"If you show me yours, I'll show you mine"?

On the other hand, I really like the idea of some kind
of regular meetings. I enjoyed the evening at
Christophe's place, and would be happy to invite you
guys to mine some day.

About the club idea: Holland is just too small for
such a thing. A club should be rather world-wide, or
at least European. But who would like to take the
airplane every month from, say, Finland to Vienna?

Some smaller, clublike things could be possibly be
done, though. I think of, for example, the Conlang
Database Project, or even the FAQ project.
Furthermore, it would be thinkable to create a conlang
weekly, or monthly, to be available for members of the
List and eventual other subscribers. It could contain
some of the better bits from the List Archives, like
translation exercises (put together in a more orderly
way than in the archives), introductions to languages,
besides articles and whatever else would be suitable
in such an electronic paper.

Who wishes to say something on this subject?

Jan


=====
"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought,
wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that
happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great
comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." --- J.
Michael Straczynski

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