[conlang_learners] Submission of conlangs

[Jim Henry]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Sai Emrys<conlangs at saizai.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Padraic Brown<elemtilas at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I had also thought, though I may be wrong, that this is not just a one-off deal. In other words, if for example

> I think that's an important point. How much time will be spent
> learning the chosen language? Suppose this is a regular thing (which
> IMHO would be good),
.........
> I'd ballpark about 3-6 months per, depending on the amount of effort
> involved and depth you want out of it. I suspect that achieving second
> language fluency is a bit too high a goal... but then, perhaps not.

Some conlangs aren't well enough developed for fluency to be possible;
but I hope we won't pick one of those, unless we're planning to revive
something moribund and expand it so fluency *is* possible.  And, as
Amanda wrote, I'd rather pick a language that's worth sticking with
for a good deal long than six months, and hope that the community that
learns it will have enough people who feel the same, and will pick up
additional learners over time to replace the members who drop out
after 3 or 6 or 12 months, so that it builds a stable, lasting speaker
community.

But if that fizzles, for whatever reason, then I'd want to try again
with another conlang.

Another possibility is that, instead of planning to split the
community from the beginning and learn the top two or three languages
chosen by the September vote in parallel, we could ask everyone who
participates in the vote to give a minimum amount of time to
*whatever* language is chosen; if they still feel inclined to after
this time (3 months, maybe, or even 6?) they could leave the
Foo-learning community and band together to start learning runner-up
Bar or third-place Qux.   But having the largest possible group for
the first few months would be beneficial, in terms of having more eyes
looking at its grammar and lexicon for possible holes and organic ways
of filling them in (by using existing grammatical structures in new
ways, by compounding etc. with existing morphemes and derivational
processes), and writing stuff in the language.   And some people whose
initial inclination is to learn Bar might find, on seriously learning
Foo along with other enthusiastic people, that it's niftier than it
looked at first, or has become so with the addition of an incipient
speaker community and expanding literature.   (I first started
learning Esperanto from reasons of linguistic interest, to get a feel
for how its derivational morphology worked and steal ideas for my
conlangs; it was mostly the literature and the speaker community that
sucked me in and induced me to stick with it long enough to become
fluent instead of just long enough to learn how it works.  But
linguistically, too, it's far more interesting from inside than from
outside; most descriptions and introductory lessons don't do it
justice.  I shouldn't be terribly surprised if that turns out to be
the case with some of the conlangs mentioned so far on this list which
would be among my lowest-ranked choices if the vote were today.)

>> That way in stead of 100 people learning one language, we might have a more manageable "class size" of say 20 to 40 each learning a different language.

There are 51 list members, of whom about 40 joined in the first two
days after the project was announced.   At the slower rate people are
joining now, I doubt we'd have anywhere near 100 before September
(though I'd like to be wrong; does anyone have ideas for other places
to promote this project besides the places I announced it?).   And at
least two of the people who are posting regularly have said that
they're interested in watching how the project turns out but don't
intend to participate; I suspect a fair number of those who haven't
posted feel the same way, so we're probably looking at around 20-30
people starting to learn whatever language or languages we choose in
September.

> What's the current list size? What's the necessary amount to achieve
> critical mass? What's the method that'll be used, given that no
> language is likely to have an actual instructor per se (so much as
> documentation of varying quality and extent)?

The more people we start with the better, since several will probably
drop out over time for various reasons.

As for methods, it will depend on whether we pick a language whose
creator is contactable and interested in teaching us (by email, chat,
whatever), or one whose creator is uncontactable or who has lost
interest in the language, and where we're on our own.   In the former
case, we'd study the available materials, discuss them among
ourselves, and collate questions to send to the creator (not to
overwhelm them with slight variations on the same question asked by
five people, or questions which we can answer from the available
documentation).   We'll write stuff in the language and send it to the
creator to be corrected or commented on.  If such don't already exist,
probably some of us will create flashcard software (or flashcard data
files for some existing software) for the language, and entry methods
if the conlangs require non-ASCII characters, and so forth.

If the creator isn't available, we'd study the language and figure out
its limitations, then start talking about how to remedy them; probably
writing as much in the language-as-it-is first as we can, probably,
before we allow ourselves to start expanding the grammar and lexicon.

Either way, we'd want to start writing to each other (by email, chat,
and whatever other tools) in the language as soon as possible.

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