Re: Conlang Books - ASP & CL101

On 10/9/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:

> The essays book, named "Art, Science, & Philosophy of Language
> Creation" for now (ASP) needs authors.
I might be able to contribute an article/essay on becoming
fluent in one's own conlang, based on my experiences and
a survey of other people who have done so.  I haven't
forgotten my intention to do a talk on that subject at the
next LCC assuming I'm able to go, though I haven't yet
found time to do the survey.


> The other book - on teaching constructive linguistics - needs authors,
> auxlangers and engelangers. (Its title is currently "Language
> Creation: From conception to fruition", formerly "Constructive
> Linguistics 101", or CL101 for short.)
I can work on this some, particularly in the design and exposition
of the engelang.  You might try recruiting on the AUXLANG list
for designers of the auxlang example material.  If you can't find
anyone else (or not many) I can work on the auxlang as well.

> Again, chapters can either be done by one person (if you want to) or
> as a collaboration. We have most of the core documents in place:
> http://saizai.backpackit.com/pub/777712. It's ready to start work in
> earnest. The docs there - mainly the overview & style guide - should
> give you a very good idea of what we're looking to do and how.
It seems likely that most chapters will need to be collaborations
to some extent, no?  Suppose persons A, B, C are the primary
designers of the artlang, engelang and auxlang respectively,
then if person D is the primary writer of the chapter on morphology,
they will probably want to get contributions from A, B, and C
for the examples of how morphology is developed in those
conlangs, rather than person D writing all those passages
themselves based on the behind-the-scenes specs written
by A, B, and C.


> While this isn't a wiki - we are aiming for a serious, coherent book
> worthy of publication, rather than a loose collection of informal
> articles - collaborative authorship still allows most of you to join
> in the fun without necessarily having to shoulder a large burden. If
> anything, we can wiki-write some chapters and then have a single
> author (+ editors) go through it and turn it into something more
> coherent, single-voiced, and authoritative; it is always easier to
> start when there is a good skeleton (or a meaty one) in place already.
Remember that Wikibooks and Wikipedia are under Creative
Commons licensing, so we can re-use material from the Conlang
wikibook and various linguistics and conlanging-related
Wikipedia articles with credit.  I'm not sure how specific the
credit needs to be to comply with the license, e.g. would each
chapter need to have credits saying it takes material from
these specific WP or WB articles, or is it OK if the book as a
whole has credits saying some material throughout is
taken from these sources, or what?  Need to study the license
agreement.

Looking at the book outline at
http://www.writely.com/Doc?id=dct5h6zd_7c96khk,
the main omission I see is a chapter on semantics.
Maybe you intend to cover this in the chapter
on "vocab generation"?  And it might make sense
to put the chapter on orthography either right
after phonology, or at/near the end -- its position between
"Signed language" and "Vocab generation" doesn't
make sense to me.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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