[conlang_learners] Creators' permission to use conlangs for this project

[Larry Sulky]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 10:19 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/6/19 Larry Sulky <larrysulky at gmail.com>:
> > On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >> The three I alluded to there (I hope I'm not overlooking any) are
> >> Larry Sulky's Ilomi,
>  .......
> >> Arthaey, Larry: would you object to us learning your conlang and using
> >> it?
>
> >  I would certainly not object, no. Ilomi is now very much in the public
> > domain; it's not really "mine" anymore.
>
> ...So would it be more accurate to describe it on the wiki as "free"
> or just say that we have the permission of the creator?
>

Both equally. :-)


>
> > I would be in a better position to teach people Qakwan, which is the
> direct
> > offspring of Ilomi, and comes equipped with interactive lessons and, if
> not
> > a conculture, at least a conhistory. Ilomi's further development and
>
> I like what I've seen of Qakwan so far, though I haven't yet set aside
> time to study it as much as I studied Konya and Ilomi some years ago.
>  The reason I nominated Ilomi was its corpus of poems and other texts
> written by several people who learned it when it was new.   But maybe
> Qakwan would be better for this project in some ways... e.g., how
> large is its lexicon compared to Ilomi's?
>

Both about 1100 words (not being too picky about what constitutes a "word").
Qakwan only has a few poems so far, but it does have one song in MP3 format.


>
> In progressing from Konya to Ilomi to Qakwan (and at least one other
> conlang in between, right?),


Right! What a memory you have, Jim. It's called Lume and it has some of the
funnier lessons, built around the conversations of literal-minded Luke and
his long-suffering friend, Anna.


> did you manually recreate the entire
> lexicon with the new phonology at each stage, or partially automate
> the process?


Manual re-creation, though taking advantage of global changes frequently. So
many of the exercises are word-for-word translations from earlier languages.


> How much did the semantic structure change from one
> stage to another, vs. the phonology and morphosyntax?
>

It changed somewhat. Those things that I thought worked well, I kept; other
things I reworked. Qakwan has pretty much all the same design constraints as
Ilomi, plus the requirement that it be somewhat easy to adapt foreign words,
especially scientific terms. For example, the element protactinium becomes
"protaktinei".


>
>
> When I did my conlang fluency survey, I asked what people used their
> conlangs for or planned to use them for.   Fifteen people mentioned
> pretending in public that they're a native speaker of their conlang.
> The question was phrased ambiguously, so I'm not sure what proportion
> of them have actually done so, vs. ones who think it might be cool to
> do sometime, maybe when they get more fluent.   Two or three people
> gave details, saying they'd spoken in their conlang to deflect
> unwanted attention from someone they didn't want to talk to.
>

I used Portuguese for that purpose once, but I was lucky the guy (in the
Netherlands) didn't speak it along with the half-dozen other languages he
spoke. :-)

---larry
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