[conlang_learners] Thoughts

[Jim Henry]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 8:27 PM, James Montgomery<dreamripple at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I believe this project may be as much about preservation than just simply increasing the number of speakers for the given conlang(s).

> I believe we should also place weight on being able to modify the language. Even if it's with first getting approval from the creator, having one too rigid and archaic, without being able to...update it would seem like the best way to go. For preservation, yes. For practical use, no. Surely we can find a balance.

If we pick a conlang whose creator is unavailable, or who is
contactable but has no further interest in developing said conlang but
doesn't mind us doing stuff with it, yes, I think we should plan on
expanding it as necessary, filling in whatever gaps in its lexicon and
grammar prevent us from saying what we want to say in it.

> An example of a language I've looked at seriously in the past was Adelic http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Station/6297/index.html I has a combination of things going for it, but also has some pitfalls. The largest being that this is the only page left for Adelic that has the whole corpus available to the public.

I'm not sure when exactly Geocities is going away; the main page just
says "later this year".  I've saved an offline copy of the Adelic
website with wget to study later, as I did with the Ceqli website
after trying and failing to contact Rex May about the Geocities
closure.

It looks like archive.org has copies of some versions of the Adelic
site available.  I'm not sure how complete they are, though.

> I was Adelic's plight that led me to eventually find this group. Pages are going down. Authors can't be contacted, repositories are fading away, and I see this as almost as much of a loss as losing a unique Natlang.

Well, not nearly that bad.  But not good, either.  It's more like one
play by Aeschylus being lost, vs. losing the entirety of ancient Greek
drama.

As best I understand, a language per se can't be copyrighted; but
descriptions of a language, grammars and dictionaries for instance,
and texts written in the language, are automatically copyrighted
unless the author explicitly waives their rights.  However, if the
whole reason we're copying a website relating to a conlang is because
we can't contact it's creator, then it's probably safe to go ahead and
copy it now, put up a note saying we've tried to contact the creator
and failed, and in the event the creator eventually contacts us and
wants us to take it down, we do so.

Copyright law should not prevent us from learning a moribund conlang
whose author can't be contacted, and creating new original or
translated works in the conlang, but the incompleteness of the
documentation might.  The latter needn't stop us if we're willing to
expand the conlang as necessary; in the latter case, we should be
clear about what we're doing, and label our work as neo-Adelic or
whatever.

In the future, thinking ahead to a time when we ourselves might be
uncontactable, I think it's a good idea to explicitly release our
conlangs and perhaps other material we've published online via
Creative Commons or some similar license.  I've said before and I'm
saying again now that the contents of my website (except the Wonder
Magazine articles by people other than me), and all my posts to public
mailing lists and web fora, are under Creative
Commons licensing.

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