[conlang_learners] Speaking vs Writing

[Noelle Morris]

>>Is our group goal to become conversational *speaking* the conlang we
study, or is writing "good enough"?

I realized while chatting with a friend about this project that I had
only reading & writing in mind. Not that I'm against speaking and
listening skills in a conlang too -- it's just that it honestly hadn't
occurred to me.

If we're aiming for full speaking ability, then I'm going to need
advice on affordable hardware. :)


--
AA<<

Hi,
While I think the initial goals of the project will undoubtedly be reading
and writing, I think it's important that we keep the spoken aspects of the
language in mind as well. As any linguist can tell you, speech is primary,
writing secondary; there are no living languages (barring sign languages, of
course) which have writing without speech, while there are plenty who have
no writing system.
On a more practical level, I think we'd need to make sure all learners are
on the same page about the actual phonological values encoded in the
orthography. If the language does not already have information about its
phonology in IPA, it should probably have that before the start of learning,
alongside a less technical description for those who don't know IPA. In
other words, I think any language we choose should be fleshed out enough in
their phonology so that there is little ambiguity in pronunciation (though I
wager there will be "dialectical" differences anyway ;) ).

Noelle
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