Re: conlang.org

At 6:10 PM -0400 8/16/99, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, David G. Durand wrote:
>Wow! Great! I'd prefer an org domain to a com domain anyway. Do you know
>whether
>someone has taken conculture.org, already?
I'd guess not.

>> One is perhaps to provide webspace to conlangers. As that will probably
>> involve using at least bandwidth, and perhaps disk space from my employers,
>> this may be a problem.
>Conlangs could be very space intensive - I'm not at a tenth of my Grammar
>of Denden, and the audio files already take up nearly a meg. I'd love some
>more space, though - we're very near the end of our 15mb we have in Amsterdam.
>We'll be on the cable, too, next year. If I were a company, I wouldn't like
>hosting 10 mb of Denden sound files...
Well, we've got a lot of spare space at the moment. And I might be able to
set up my own server on their T1, w/ at least 1GB storage. Disk is cheap.

>> I've wanted to do dead-tree publications of some Conlang-related material,
>> Matt's grammar (and maybe others), Rick Morneau's book on verbs, and so
>> forth. I'd love to have a series of nicely produced conlang reference
>> grammars. This project requires money, both for startup, as well as a
>> market for the books themselves.
>>
>
>This could be difficult to do - I've been on the team that once produced
>(and got into a bookshop) the Yearbook of the Nederlands Genootschap voor
>Linguafictie, and it was a hard job. Anyway, I'd prefer CD-Rom grammars,
>myself, since I firmly believe paper, beautiful is it is, isn't really
>suited to language descriptions. On the other hand, to have the Grammar
>of Tokana standing next to the Grammar of Dumi...
That's the thought. Self-supporting is probably out of the question, but if
we could sell the books for $10-15 at only a small loss, it'd be worth it
for the list memebers alone. I'm not talking about a real business here. I
don't think the market is big enough, and conlangers' pockets deep enough.

>I'd be willing to work on this. I've already made a list of recommended
>books, and even thought of referring to Amazon. I like messing around
>with bibliographies...
I think we'll pursue this one, as a databasey kind of thing.

>>
>> I'd like to have another database that lists "official" conlang pages, for
>> conlangs on the web. If we once aggregate the information in the many
>> bookmark lists we've all published, we could make keeping them up to date
>> much easier, as the site owners could change the URLs when necessary.
>Excellent idea. I don't have much of a list - I prefer to refer people
>to Mathias list of conlangers. This is something that would be really
>useful.
right. The idea is to harvest the work out there and make an infrastructure
so that we can share the labor of keeping it up to date.

>These two are perhaps a bit overkill - once we are an 'Amazon associate',
>a bank account would be a good idea. I'd transfer the measly sum we've still
>left from the defunct Nederlands Genootschap voor Linguafictie as soon as
>there's one for conlang.org.
That's a generous offer. I'll see about the account next week sometime, and
we'll see if we really need much money anyway...

  -- David
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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
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