Re: Bootstrapping a cooperative conlang

Philip Newton wrote:
>
> ...not to mention a willingness to accept that your definition is not
> the law. If you have enough participants who insist that "you're using
> it all wrong; a "zanisa" is *any* small mammal, not just a mouse or
> rat, and if you narrow it down, you're sick and wrong and probably
> grill babies and push little old ladies into the street", the conlang
> won't be going anywhere. Even if that's the defintion they "learned".
And then you know you're on the Internet. You're right on that point, of
course. Not to mention all the spawned threads about whether or not the
rant was wrong because the word for baby is "inherently ungrillable".
This is another place where voice chat at some point (when some or most
of the participants can string together enough words to start getting
really insulting) might be a useful addition because, in my experience,
people who are willing to call each other "a burr on the butt of a mangy
dog" in text are more likely to be civil to one another when they are
actually speaking, especially in the presence of other people that
they've agreed to collaborate with in the first place. (HA! I knew I'd
learn something useful from all that online gaming experience.)

At some point, being fluent enough to be insulting is a positive
development, if people are using it and aren't falling back to talking
about the conlang-in-development in some shared language.

Mia.