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

[Padraic Brown]

--- On Mon, 6/15/09, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973 at gmail.com> wrote:

> >> Some well-developed conlangs we might consider
> include:
> 
> > You seem to have already posted my short list!
>  (Well, I'm not
> > actually that familiar with Itlani, but I've heard
> good things about
> > it.)  I'm interested of course by the depth of an
> Alurhsa or the
> > strangeness of a Kēlen, but there's also something to
> be said for the
> > humble simplicity and earnestness of a Vabungula.
> 
> I'd add Arthaey's Asha'ille (which apparently has over
> twenty short
> texts on the website, more than most conlangs -- my gzb has
> a larger
> corpus, but Asha'ille has a much larger proportion of its
> corpus
> already online ready for potential students to read,
> whereas most of
> gzb's corpus is too private to share, and most of what
> isn't
> inherently private, I've been too lazy to transcribe and
> HTMLize) and
> maybe Roger Mills' Kash as well, depending on how many more
> texts are
> available than are on its website at the moment.

Unless IE/Romance conlangs have been shouted down already, I'd like to place Kerno and Talarian on the list of possibles. The former has a number of texts online (a couple quite long ones), plus has got a fairly large lexicon and pretty well developped grammar. There are two documented registers and I'll be willing to answer questions, expand any unclear or weak areas of the grammar and help with word coinage.

Talarian has a pretty well documented grammar and lexicon as well, though not as large as Kerno's lexicon. Not as much online, but the whole grammar/lexicon could be easily emailed / snail-mailed.

I don't plan on participating (in the middle of learning Waray-Waray); I've learned a little Teonaht and sufficient Brithenig to converse with Andrew and write texts in it. So I think the present project is quite sound and am eagerly awaiting the spectacular results with whatever languages you guys end up choosing.

Right now, it looks like the group could easily be divided into three or four categories. I think that would be healthy: we could not only develop groups of language communities, but also compare notes as to experiences had with naturalistic and planned, human and alien languages.

Padraic

> Jim Henry