Re: conlang.org

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, David G. Durand wrote:

> I applied for this domain, as I wanted us to have it available, and I was
> starting to worry once I saw that conlang.com is now taken (but the Italian
> Consulate General of Los Angeles).
Wow! Great! I'd prefer an org domain to a com domain anyway. Do you know whether
someone has taken conculture.org, already?

>
> 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...

>
> 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...

> We could have book recommendations on the conlang.org website. This could
> address the money problem by having conlang.org be an Amazon associate. I
> would like this to be a web-based database, so that we could all
> collaborate to keep interesting books on the site.
>
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 am willing to provide domain names for conlangs themselves, so that, e.g.
> tokana.conlang.org, or draseleq.conlang.org (to pick two at random) would
> take one to the appropriate site. We could also have a referral service for
> outside hosts. This can be hacked to look pretty transparent, if the target
> browsers support frames.
Oh! denden.conlang.org... What a lovely thought.

>
> 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.

> We could of course properly incorporate as a nonprofit, but that's too much
> work for me. I could open a separate bank account, or just keep the books
> on whatever money comes in (if we go for those kinds of project).
>
> We could even have an election, dues, and a president, but I'd hope that
> that would not be me. It seems like overkill at the moment.
>
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.

> What do you think about this? [in my dialect, "you" is still indefinite as
> to number]
>
I think very well of it ;-). Lengleng ray, as the expression is.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt