[conlang_learners] Welcome, and some proposals for what conlang to learn

[Jim Henry]

(I've sent this or some version of it twice before;
Gmail says one or both of those were delayed
because of DNS lookup failures.  Sai recommended
sending to conlang_learners at conlang.org instead
of @lists.conlang.org.  Apologies if y'all end up
getting this or some version of it more than once.)

Welcome to the conlang_learners mailing list.  I've been pleasantly
surprised to see more than 40 people subscribe in the first couple of
days after the announcement.  I expect we'll get several more in the
next
few days as people who don't check email or web fora every day see
the announcement next time they're online.

We can get started now on proposing and discussing possible conlangs
to learn.  The criteria mentioned in the announcement posting were "a
conlang with few or no speakers yet, but which is fully developed
enough to be speakable".  The best evidence that a conlang is fully
developed enough to be speakable, of course, is that two or more
people speak it; but we're aiming to take a conlang without a speaker
community and give it a chance to grow one.  The next best evidence
would be that the conlang's creator speaks it fluently, or can at
least read and write it fluently.  Failing that, I think we would at
least want to pick a conlang that has a fairly extensive corpus, a
largish lexicon (unless it's designed to be minimalist like Toki
Pona), and a fairly thorough reference grammar and/or series of
lessons.

In any case, if we're picking a conlang whose creator is alive and
contactable, we'd probably want to correspond with them extensively
while learning it.  Some conlangers might not want the hassle, or not
want to share more about their conlang than they've already decided to
publish; so after discussing possible conlangs to learn, we'd probably
want to decide on a short list and then get their creators' permission
to use them before taking a final vote on which to learn.

Some well-developed conlangs we might consider include:

* Sally Caves' Teonaht

* Sylvia Sotomayor's Kēlen

* Tony Harris's Alurhsa

* Jim Hopkins's Itlani

* Bill Price's Vabungula

It would also be possible to use this project to take a moribund but
fairly well developed conlang and (with its creator's permission, if
they're still alive and contactable) revive it, adding to its lexicon
and further specifying its grammar as necessary.  Some conlangs I
think might be worth doing that with are Rick Harrison's Vorlin (he's
explicitly given open permission to other people to derive their own
Vorlin-based conlangs), Larry Sulky's Ilomi (which had a tiny speaker
community at one time, 2 or 3 people besides the creator learning it
and writing poetry in it), and Kalusa, a collaborative conlang
initiated by Gary Shannon and further developed by many others.  (The
original Kalusa website is gone, but I have an offline copy of the
corpus (which implicitly defines the grammar and lexicon); others may
have later copies of it.)

Some of you (most of you, probably) joined the list after Olivier
Simon posted his message of June 10.  You can look at the list archives
via the list website, linked at the bottom of each
message.

Alexandre suggests deciding up front what kind of conlang we're
looking for -- auxlang, artlang, engelang?   My own preference would
be for an artlang or engelang, but I think we should discuss both
the high-level question of what kind of conlang we want to
learn, and people's specific proposals for what conlang to learn,
for some time before deciding on a short list or a kind of conlang
from which the specific conlang to learn will later be chosen.

It's not too early to start talking about how we're going to vote
on which language to learn; but I'll save that for another post.
Because several of the people interested in this project are also
involved in the second Inverse Relay, which also involves learning
someone else's conlang, we won't vote on a conlang to learn and start
learning it until after the Inverse Relay is over, i.e.  September at
the earliest.

General administrative stuff: No flaming, no trolling, no invidious or
irrelevant comments about politics or religion.  (I won't rule out
discussion of politics or religion in principle, as it could
conceivably be relevant to the discussion of conlangs, but keep it
civil and on-topic.)  I'd like to recruit another moderator or two,
who checks their email frequently.

Thanks to Brett Williams for coming up with the idea for this project,
and to the Language Creation Society for hosting the mailing list at
lists.conlang.org.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/