Re: Offlang suggestion & counterproposal
| From: | Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Thursday, April 11, 2002, 10:11 |
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Sorry I've been inconspicuous by my absence - I had a computer misconfig and
have only just realized what the problems were. Now that's over, here's
something I have long considered:
What I have been wondering about lately is, why not have a central repository
for all the conlangs we've munged together, burn a cdrom from it, and
exchange it for a consideration, to all active members of the conlang mail
group?
Sort out some form of dictionary - there's a library database setup called
koha, web-page www.koha.org.nz, if I remember correctly - and I happen to
know that library database/catalog systems can take any number of
words/characters, whathaveyou, having worked on more than a couple in my time
- a MARC style library database/catalog delimits on the basis of special
characters, not fixed-length fields like commercial database systems do. And
Koha is a MARC-style database. All you need to make it truly portable from
Mac to Windows to Linux to whatever, is to get some computer geek or hacker
to compile Koha executables for the various operating systems plus glue logic
to recognize the various systems, etc.
Work out a consistent form of describing highly different grammatical
formations, as different as Te Reo Maori, Arabic, Georgian and English -
anyone doing Linguistics at Uni?
Maybe we could even talk the various Linguistics depts. into supporting this
as a research project/s of sorts - whaddayuthink?
Wesley Parish
On Monday 08 April 2002 19:59, you wrote:
> --- 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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