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Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

From:Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 29, 2008, 8:31
On Tuesday 29 January 2008 09:58, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo! > > On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:13:18 -0600, Herman Miller wrote: > > li_sasxsek@NUTTER.NET wrote: > > > I'm just wondering if this isn't just reinventing the wheel. > > > There already is a conlang wiki out there at Langmaker.com. > > > Unfortunately it hasn't been too well maintained lately (server > > > failures, etc.) but it's a perfectly good resource. > > > > There's also FrathWiki, which I prefer because it also covers > > concultures and world-building. > > I also prefer FrathWiki, for just these reasons. An alternative > would be KneeQuickie, which is more or less the "official" ZBB wiki, > but I like FrathWiki better. > > > Languages are the main focus of my > > interest, but a language needs people to speak it, who need their own > > culture and a world to live in. So I end up with pages like my Zireen > > music page (http://wiki.frath.net/Zireen_music) with very little conlang > > content. > > It is the same to me, as it was with Tolkien - the whole world of Arda > was ultimately created to give his languages a place where they could > be spoken. My languages do not and cannot exist in a vacuum; I always > felt that they needed people who speak them, with a world they live in > and a culture. A wiki only for con*langs* at the exclusion of con*worlds* > and con*culture* would not work for me.
I myself cannot subcreate without language creeping in. The stuff I was waffling on over the Xmas-New Year holidays, has turned up some numbers and some names: odaiin dvaiot trivan kataihia pettaian sekoweh hebataia autoia noianaia tehemaia though most people in that world will cut the larger numbers down - the three-or-more syllable numbers seem to have crytallized during a difficult period and more-or-less stuck. Blame it all on Bin Boutros's affair with Ivanna, or at least that's what everybody who survived that episode - ie, everybody, or in other words, their descendants - tend to do. Names tend to be like Antaia or Edeiun, with a number like Unrudna, and the stress is on the penultimate syllable. I have yet to work out what they mean, if anything; I just expect they will either mean something, or have meant something. (Except I can't make their meaning "cutesy" - Antaia and Edeiun will beat me up, and Unrudna will let them. It's hard being a subcreator, boo hoo hoo! ;) Wesley Parish
> > However, there are many conlangs not connected to a fictional culture. > This holds, for instance, for most engelangs. But that does not > constitute a problem with FrathWiki. > > > [...] > > > > The PDF thing could be good for more polished articles with > > illustrations, more professional-looking typography, etc. but it would > > also be convenient if the text of those journals would be available in > > an alternate web-page format for quick browsing. > > PDF is fine for texts that constitute a well-defined, self-contained > document, especially when it comes to printing. But HTML is more easily > browsable and searchable, and thus preferable for overview articles, > abstracts, tables of contents, work in progress and other such matters. > > > I don't know about the > > blog format for discussions. I guess I think of blogs as discussions > > directed mainly by one person with comments from visitors to the site. > > I don't like blogs much. They are good for quick, volatile comments > on current events, but little else. > > ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
-- Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish ----- Gaul is quartered into three halves. Things which are impossible are equal to each other. Guerrilla warfare means up to their monkey tricks. Extracts from "Schoolboy Howlers" - the collective wisdom of the foolish. ----- Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui? You ask, what is the most important thing? Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.