Re: A conlang free-for-all

--- Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> On Mon, 22 May 2006, Gary Shannon wrote:
<snip>

> Gary, this is just too much fun!  I've already
> wasted ... er, spent ... I don't know how long
> reading and adding to the corpus. There were 153
> sentences when I left it just now, and I wasn't the
> only one playing.  The growth on this may well be
> exponential!
>
> I think you've hit on an extremely attractive and
> usable method to gain the coöperation of many
> inventive people.  Get a little more exposure for it
> (starting on the Langmaker wiki?) and Kalusa may
> become all the rage for netizens everywhere ...  The
> rewards for adding a sentence are both immediate -
> you give the feedback clearly and tangibly - and
> deferred - any contributor would be likely to come
> back to see how his or her inventions had fared in
> the voting.  Any sub-graffitist (aka "tagger" who
> runs around defacing public property asserting their
> existence in the dead of night may well be tempted
> to make his or her mark on Kalusa; no problem! since
> the format is forgiving.
>
> You've really done it this time ... you may just
> have given us a vehicle for turning conlanging into
> a mass sport ;-)
>
> Now, I have just one tiny request to make of you ...
> can I have one too?  Just for private use - I think
> it would be a great boon to any conlanger in the
> throes of building up their own corpus in a new
> lang.  (I see it's all PHP - would that make setup
> too difficult on a single computer?)
>
> Regards,
> Yahya
I'm glad you are enjoying it. I don't know about it
becoming a "mass sport" though. ;-)

The program requires php and MySQL database, both of
which can, I understand, be installed on a regular
computer, but I haven't really tinkered with that
myself. I'd be more than happy to share the software.
Of course I plan to add more features as time goes on
to make it easier aned more fun to use.

--gary