[conlang_learners] shortlist

[Jim Henry]

2009/6/16 Olivier Simon <cafaristeir at yahoo.com>:

> I could review rapidly most of the languages present.
> I fear there's already a first selection criterion (not depending on my
> private appraisal of each language):
> Some of the projects proposed function with diacritics that aren't available
> on most keyboards... I have the impression this dooms them to exclusion for
> the purposes of this group, since we won't be able to communicate in writing
> between ourselves in such languages, in case we'd learn them.

Not necessarily; there are a variety of methods for typing text with
characters that aren't on your keyboard, either setting up your
computer so combination keystrokes are interpreteted as diacritic'd
characters, or typing plain ASCII text in an orthography with digraphs
and running some program or command on it to convert it to the primary
orthography with diacritics, or copying and pasting diacritic'd
characters from a program like Windows Character Map into your text
editor or mail reader...  But the specific ways to do that are going
to vary from one operating system to another.  Still, with as many
people as we have in this group all deciding to learn a language, we
probably have enough knowledgable people among to create whatever
entry methods for various operating systems we need for our chosen
conlang, and teach the rest of us how to use them.  For some of these
conlangs, such entry methods already exist (though probably not for
all operating systems).

Restricting ourselves to conlangs that can be written with ASCII (or
even just those using Latin-1) would limit us way too much, I think.

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