[conlang_learners] Submission of conlangs

[Jim Henry]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Brett Williams<mungojelly at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, what I thought of to not trigger people's competitive drive was
> a lottery.  We've in fact chosen a competition, and I don't think
> people are likely to be fooled into feeling otherwise.  There is such
> a thing as a healthy competition, though, and I believe it is possible
> that we can foster one.

I'm not sure "competition" is the right word for this either.  By my
count, only six of the twenty-four languages proposed so far were
proposed by their creator, and of the other eighteen, only three
others, I think, are created by people who are subscribed to this
mailing list.

Possibly your idea of a lottery could be conveniently combined with
our earlier discussion of instant-runoff-voting?   That is, use voting
to trim down the long list of conlangs nominated to those that at
least several people seriously think are learnable and worth learning,
and then let the ballot committee pick randomly from among the top 3
or 5 conlangs chosen by the vote...?

In any case, this reminds me that probably fifteen of those conlangs'
creators have no idea that their conlang is under consideration for
this project.  I think Mechtild has volunteered to try getting in
touch with Jeffrey Henning re: Fith, and James Montgomery said (or
implied, actually, now that I re-read his message) that he'd tried
without success to get in touch with S. A. MacLagan about Adelic.
That leaves thirteen more.  Do we want to start getting in touch with
the creators of the other conlangs and asking their permission to
potentially use them for this project now, or wait a bit longer --
maybe trim down the long list to a shortlist a month or two hence, and
then contact any conlang creators who haven't already given their
permission at that point before doing a final vote from among the
shortlist items whose creators have given permission in early
September?

We should probably annotate the wiki page to say which conlangs we
have their creator's permission to use and which ones' creators still
need to be contacted, etc.  I'll start on that now.

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