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

[Jim Henry]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Mechthild Czapp<0zu149 at gmx.de> wrote:
>> >> Does someone know whether ressources on Fith still exist?
>>
>> http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm
>>
>> A lot of pages on langmaker seem to be broken, but the Fith
>> subsection seems OK.
>>
> It only seems to, things like the dictionary and sample texts 404. Which is sad because I like the ideas behind it and would have suggested it if ressources on it existed.

Bother.

Well, it seems that Jeffrey Henning is less insanely busy with work
and less hard to contact these days than he was a while ago -- he came
to LCC3, for instance.   So if you want to try to email him and ask
him for Fith materials that aren't online, and for permission to use
Fith for this project, go ahead; it can't hurt.

Personally, I would rank Fith fairly low among the conlangs that have
been mentioned so far here precisely because I doubt it's
human-speakable, and I think the best possible outcome of this project
would be for some of the people involved to become really fluent
speakers of the conlang we choose and for them to found a speaker
community that will outlive them and the conlang's creator.   That's
unlikely but possible with something like Ilaksh, where most of the
individual features are found in natlangs but the combination of all
in one language may or may not be unnatural to the human brain (we
can't know until we seriously try).  With Kelen I think it is
possible, since the absence of verbs or rather, I suspect, having a
tiny closed class of verbs, seems intuitively like it violates the
sort of "universal" that applies to natural langauge evolution but not
to the language capacity of the human brain.   Fith, on the other
hand, seems likely to really be impossible for humans to learn to use
fluently.

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