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

[Alexandre Baudry]

  Here are some more lists, you probably already know:

  A list from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages

  The Janko Gorenc's collection of number (It's interesting to catch quickly what the language looks like): http://janko.gorenc.googlepages.com/collectionnumbers

  The list of Arika Okrent's "in the land of invented language": http://inthelandofinventedlanguages.com/index.php?page=languages

  Omniglot's Conscripts http://www.omniglot.com/writing/conscripts.htm

  some other things here: http://cals.conlang.org/  (by the way, this related site is amazing: http://wals.info/)

   That's all I have. :)


Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:48:19 -0700
From: cafaristeir at yahoo.com
To: conlang_learners at conlang.org
Subject: Re: [conlang_learners] Welcome,	and some proposals for what conlang  to learn

Hi ! 
 
Here is a French list of auxlangs: 
http://www.europalingua.eu/ideopedia/index.php5?title=Id%C3%A9olangues_auxiliaires
 
Olivier
http://sambahsa.pbworks.com/ 

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


From: Jim Henry <jimhenry1973 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [conlang_learners] Welcome, and some proposals for what conlang to learn
To: conlang_learners at conlang.org
Date: Monday, June 15, 2009, 2:54 AM


2009/6/15 Brett Williams <mungojelly at gmail.com>:
> 2009/6/12 Jim Henry <jimhenry1973 at gmail.com>:
>> 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.


>> 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.

> I had a thought, though I'm not sure if it's a good one, that we could
> choose to revive the Lingua Ignota.

I see a few ways we could do it:

(a) Use it as Hildegard apparently did, embedding LI words into
 Latin
texts, and inflecting the LI words (all of which are nouns) with Latin
case endings.

(b) Like A, but embedding LI words into English or other modern
natlangs and/or conlangs and inflecting them according to the nominal
morphology of the matrix language.

(c) Keep the LI noun list as it is, reverse-engineer its phonotactics,
coin another couple of thousand words in other grammatical categories
with the same phonotactics and Wortgefül, and devise a grammar for
this neo-LI.

Any of those would be interesting, the last most of all, but I'm not
sure it's within the mandate of this project.  If we're going to
revive a moribund conlang and learn it while expanding it a bit and
filling in gaps, I'd prefer it to be one that was more fully developed
by its original creator or creative team, so the resulting neo-conlang
owes a lot more to the original than to us.   Vorlin, Ilomi or
 Kalusa
would work for that, I think, and perhaps Adelic; not sure about
Voksigid, whose grammar I like but whose vocabulary, or at least the
surviving documentation of which, is really small.


> We perhaps ought to give a little thought to what criteria, other than
> pure personal preference, are most appropriate to apply here.  I've

> I feel a sure sign of success would be if we could develop a
> continuing, fluent population of speakers for the chosen language,
> however small.  I would like to see us accomplish that especially in

That would be the best possible outcome, yes.   I hope that we'll pick
something viable enough that some years from now some of us are still
using said conlang, new people have learned it who weren't part of
this project originally, the majority of the extant corpus was written
by someone other than the conlang's creator, and there
 are competing
theories about how the language actually works, which cite actual
usage more often than the original defining documents.

> I don't think we have to choose something
> simplistic in order to accomplish that goal, though-- I personally am
> committed to a serious study of the language we choose, and I think
> there are others here who feel the same way.  More important I would
> think is that the language be a suitable medium for a real
> conversation that we want to have, that it be useful to us.  A
> language that's a toy or unripe, we'll play with but then just put
> away.

Yes.  It's important that the language have seen enough use by its
creator to show that it actually works for a range of uses, and that
it be well enough documented (or have a creator willing to expand the
documentation and answer lots of questions) that other people
 can
actually learn it.   Unless it already has a pretty large vocabulary,
it would also be best if the conlang's creator is open to other people
coining new words, if only by following the rules of the derivational
morphology using existing roots and derivational processes.

Another way to look at it, in terms of ecological sociolinguistics,
is: what conlangs currently enjoy a certain amount of mindshare and
have people learning and using them?  And is there some ecological
niche that isn't filled yet by one of the conlangs that already has a
speaker community?  Or if not, could a conlang that gets a boost in
popularity from this project compete with one of the existing
conlangs-with-speakers for new speakers on its own terms?

In the niche of "conlang associated with a fictional nonhuman
culture", for instance, there's Klingon.   Klingon has massive
advantages in
 publicity, but Kēlen, for instance, if we learned it and
produced a larger corpus and so forth, would have important advantages
too: it's more euphonious, and also more truly alien in its grammar.

In the niche of "auxlang that's relatively easy for Europeans and not
terribly difficult for non-Europeans", there's already Esperanto, Ido,
Interlingua, and maybe others.   There may be other auxlang ecological
niches that aren't filled yet (e.g. "worldlang" by any of several
definitions), but I'm dubious.

Similarly, I doubt a new mini-auxlang or engelang with minimalist
vocabulary and grammar could grow much with the niche already firmly
occupied by Toki Pona.  If it did, it might do so by starting out even
more minimalist than TP, with a goal of gradually growing in
complexity based on use and decisions by the speaker community until
it's maybe twice or three times larger than TP (we
 discussed something
like this on the CONLANG list recently).

As for "engelang that's more precise and unambiguous than natlangs and
which might or might not violate real human language universals, we
won't know until more people try to speak it", Lojban occupies that
spot with little real competition AFAIK, but I think Ithkuil or Ilaksh
are different enough to potentially compete in that niche or a nearby
one too.

What about the niche of "artlang with a unique mix of features but not
violating any human langauge universal, associated with a fictional
human culture"?   Quenya and Sindarin, maybe, but they're so
under-documented and the communities using them are so divided by
arguments about what kind of reconstruction of unattested words and
grammatical forms is and isn't legitimate that a newer,
better-documented artlang with a creator who's still alive to answer
questions might
 compete there too.

Better still would be recognizing a niche that isn't filled yet at
all, and an existing conlang with few or no speakers that could
potentially fill it.

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