Re: Offlang suggestion & counterproposal

En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>
> That's what I meant, actually. IMO the frequency could
> well depend on the number of people who will send
> copy.
>
Well, that's basically something I don't like. I prefer to have a fixed time
limit, or else it becomes easily anarchic (in the wrong sense of the term). I
have been chief redactor of the student's monthly in my school, and I know the
problems of publishing. Give no time limit for the publication, and you can
wait for receiving articles until you melt... Even with a time limit (which in
the case of the student's newspaper was one week before publication, and was
repeated nearly twice a week constantly), I had people who came to me the very
day the newspaper was supposed to be published and wondered why they couldn't
publish their article right away...

So if we want the thing to work really, we need to be tyrannical when it comes
to time limits. I speak by experience :)) .

> > an "International Journal of Language Construction,
>
> Sounds attractive, though ;)
>
Hehe, we could keep this title (or even have "International Journal of
Glossopoiesis" to make it even more pompous, or maybe even: "Glossopoiesis: the
International Journal of Language Construction" :)) . Anyone has a better
name? :)) ), as long as we don't become too pretentious (me first :)) ).

>
> I agree with everything you write, and I'm glad your
> answer is both very constructive and very practical.
> With this approach, we could actually make this thing
> work.
>
I think so too. As I told you, I have experience in this thing :)) . Along this
experience comes also my experience of Word as being awful for publications
like that :(( . And I don't think I want to invest in Publisher when I can do
the same things even more beautiful with LaTeX (and looking very professional
without doing much. I'm lazy too :)) ).

>
> A great proposal, I think. You are definitely the
> right person to do this, since you seem to know almost
> everybody around and know a lot about web things as
> well. I would really like to be of assistence, but my
> knowledge on both fields is rather limited...
>
Well, unless you get a computer at home, I don't think I can ask you to help
me. I wouldn't want to take too much from your working time :)) . Though people
who could receive the articles and check the spelling and punctuation (I know
by experience that it's better to have someone else to do this, because when
you write an article yourself you tend not to see your own mistakes) would be
very welcome :)) . I have a program here (made by Dutch people :)) ) which is
basically a spelling checker for TeX files (it can also check spelling in HTML
files for people interested :)) ), so it's not a difficult job.

I also think that, since English is the main language used between each other,
the journal should be written mainly in English. I say "mainly" because I think
it's a good idea to have articles written also in other languages (even
constructed! That would be extremely nice, and a good exercise for the
conlanger), as long as an English translation (and maybe some comments on the
grammar of the language, whether it's a nat- or conlang. I dream of seeing
articles in Finnish for instance :)) ) is available. Of course, this is only a
proposal. There's nothing binding in it :)) . Still, it would make this journal
look like no other. I'm thinking about the logistic problems for languages
using other scripts than the Latin alphabet (LaTeX handles Greek quite
correctly, as well as Cyrillic IIRC, but other scripts are more problematic).
Anybody has a good web resource on Metafont? It looks like a powerful thing,
but I cannot find anywhere a manual on how it works... (and I have to check
whether FontLab can make fonts usable by LaTeX)

>
> > Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else
> > play the leading role.
>
> What's more beautiful than doing so?
>
Indeed!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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