Re: A proposal to bring together the conlang communities

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.

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.

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