Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

Hallo!

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:54:40 -0800, B Garcia wrote:

> One thing I've noticed on mailing lists versus message boards is that
> on mailing lists, people tend to be far better behaved and mature
> about things. I visit gardening boards and am on the medit-plants
> (Mediterranean gardening) list, and I've noticed that people tend to
> stay pretty much on topic on the list. On message boards I visit, it's
> usually flame wars, political discussions (that edge toward neo-con
> politics), and nasty attitudes wrapped up in falsely innocent posts
> intended to fan flames. I pretty much cannot stand the ZBB board
> because of many posters there (call it snobbery, elitism, or what, I
> remain firm). So, I tend to be an off and on visitor to message
> boards.
This perfectly matches my experience regarding CONLANG vs. ZBB.
The CONLANG mailing list provides a much more mature and polite
forum, where people tend to stay on subject and refrain from
personal attacks most of the time.  On the ZBB, there are many,
many immature people, frequent flame wars, and much politics
- American right-wing politics, mostly, which I, the European
leftist I am, find utterly unbearable.

I used to be quite active on the ZBB several months ago, and still
monitor it, but I hardly contribute any more, more and more lose
interest in following it (most threads remain unread by me), and
feel that posting about my projects there would be pearls before
swine.  Sure, there are exceptions.  There are a few nice people
with interesting projects over there, and they are the reason
why I haven't completely withdrawn from the ZBB yet.  But they
are a minority.

The CONLANG list is much nicer, even if I feel that it has been
rather quiet and leaning towards engelanger dominance lately.
But while engelangs are only of limited interest to me, they
do more for me than the immature English-relex-esque projects
which dominate the ZBB.

I sometimes compare the various fora to different sorts of
musicians.  My main conlang project, Old Albic, is a rather
sophisticated naturalistic-diachronic artlang, perhaps
comparable to a progressive rock concept album (which happens
to be my perferred kind of music).  There are not many other
progressive rock musicians on either forum.  On CONLANG, there
are a handful of them, but also several serialist score music
composers whose music I find less than attractive, even if
I can appreciate its sophistication.  The ZBB, in contrast,
is a bunch of garage punk bands with a strong preference for
obscene, abrasive lyrics, with only very few people among them
doing anything interesting.

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:45:50 -0500, Rick Harrison wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:36:41 -0800, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
>
> >However, one CAN try to make something that becomes a de facto central
> >ground for everyone - and if it worked (i.e. all the major needs for
> >specific-content areas are met) then it could just make other sites
> >redundant.
>
> Just as Wal-Mart makes family-owned businesses redundant when they open a
> SuperCenter in a small town?
>
> This kind of hegemony is unappealing to me, although those who are attracted
> to it should go for it. Different strokes for different folks!
Agreed.  The diversity of web sites and fora dedicated to conlanging
is not a bug, it is a feature.  Diversity is better than hegemony or
monopoly.  The conlang scene is very, very diverse, and there is hardly
a project that interests everybody even remotely connected with the
art of making up languages.  I, for example, am mostly interested in
well-developed naturalistic-diachronic artlangs; I am somewhat less
interested in engelangs, much less in naive relexes of English, and
not at all in auxlang advocacy.  The next conlanger will have different
preferences.  Why should people who have little to tell each other
join the same forum where they just add to each other's load of
uninteresting messages?  One would have to set up subfora, but then
the question comes up why the different fora have to reside under
one single roof.  I see no problem with the current diversity of
conlang-related fora, at least none that could be remedied by a
Unified Conlang Forum (TM).

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