My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

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janMato
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My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by janMato »

The Problems with Success: What happens when an opinionated conlang meets its speakers by jan Kipo

These are notes, not transcript. I type too slow to do a proper transcript.

How to find the talk:
http://conference.conlang.org/lcc2/media.php, LCC2 live webcast archive: Sunday (174 MB), starts at 1:47-3:10

Orthodox tp
- has conculture of daoism, pro-primitivism, etc.
- goals influence syntax and style
- specific goal and use (inducing a state of mind)
- not general purpose (significant domains exluded from discourse)
- noun and verb phrases interpreted as wholely unbound morphemes (good person, cute animal of lines on the face), a given entity in the real world will have multiple realizations depedning on context.

Early ideolects
Hetro-orthodox users
- auxlang (in the small sense of a language for 2 people, not necessarily in the sense of a international language)
- no conculture, instead the culture is the users culture and the spontaneously created culture of the user group
- goals and uses reflect the peculiar goals of the user and the moment
- new goals influence syntax and style (in tp's case leading to a shift of emphasis to longer sentences, sentences that max out the languages expressive capacities, etc) and lead to community innovation
- if it can't be done, the community should innovate
- general purpose (all domains are fair play)
- noun and verbs interpreted as a whole (i.e. idioms) and will be re-used as lexical entries.
- mispronounce words to distinguish ale/ala
- forks with more works, more grammatical rules
- use loan words and eponyms when useful, nimi + foreign word, word + person's name
- establish new conventions in discourse, if people keep using it, it becomes part of the language (e.g. la fragments)
- innovate to deal with circumlocutions (mdm: np > 4 words, get creative)
- allow errosion to happen (drop unnecessary sounds in rapid speech)
- eager to generalize new rules from common patterns mi tawa => mi mute tawa (jan =Mr/Mrs) (right grouping with pi, aka recursing with pi)
- eager to use words outside of official POS
- new scripts (sometimes remarkably complicated), [mdm: shorthand proposals being the most functional and most likely to succeed]

Hyperorthodoxy
- regarding Sonja's idioms, use of recursion, mani & esun, the new words, as mistakes, etc.
- if it can't be done, it shouldn't be done
- community innovations in the direction of orthodoxy (not using words that have straighfoward synonyms)
- pronounce words as designed (ale and ala with stress on 1st)
- forks with fewer word, fewer sounds, fewer grammatical rules
- borrow only country names, people's names
- new conventions can only be established by the language designer (wait for the book to be published!)
- live with circumlocutions (np > 4 words, don't say it, be patient and say it)
- don't allow errosion
- reluctant to generalize from common patterns (jan = person), mi tawa => mi mute li tawa, leading to the hyperorthox community innovation, mi li tawa.
- reluctant to use words outside of official POS
- only latin (remarkably simple)
- adverbs in la-phrases are suspect

Advice (to conlang writers in general)
Prepare before publishing, early reactions are predictable
Either resist community vs engage and negotiate with community vs give it ove to the community (abandonment)
Institutionalization Governance
Take a balanced view of community reaction (innovation and negative response isn't a personal attack)
Fighting with the community is counterproductive (examples loglan and volapuk)

From questions
Expect language community splits to be along natural language community lines
Success of an artlang may be rely on *discouraging* use among the community (!)
The ~65 words from NSM
Last edited by janMato on Sun Jan 24, 2010 7:33 pm, edited 4 times in total.
jan-ante
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by jan-ante »

janMato wrote: - new scripts (sometimes remarkably complicated), shorthand proposals being the most functional and most likely to succeed
jan Kipo said this? no, this cannot be true..
janMato
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by janMato »

jan-ante wrote:
janMato wrote: - new scripts (sometimes remarkably complicated), <-- [he said] shorthand proposals being the most functional and most likely to succeed <--[My notes to self while I listening]
jan Kipo said this? no, this cannot be true..
He did say that alternate scripts were one of the early unforeseen community innovations. I said shorthand of one sort or another is the most likely script alternative to get adoption. I can't type fast enough to do a proper transcript.

The gist of the whole speech was that the community would have heterodox and orthodox fans. I'm definitely in the heterodox camp, jan Wiko--definitely in the ultra-orthodox camp, I peg jan Kipo as being a pragmatist closer to the orthodox camp. Which is not a value judgement on my part, these are all well thought out and reasonable positions to take on the matter-- in the long run neither camp can "win" because a living language has to both be reasonably consistent community wide and be reasonably flexible to unforeseen needs.
jan-ante
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by jan-ante »

janMato wrote:He did say that alternate scripts were one of the early unforeseen community innovations. I said shorthand of one sort or another is the most likely script alternative to get adoption. I can't type fast enough to do a proper transcript.
ol korekt
mi pilin e ni:
- new scripts (sometimes remarkably complicated), [mdm: shorthand proposals being the most functional and most likely to succeed]
- new conventions can only be established by the language designer (wait for the book to be published!)
tan ni la mi jHyper en jHetero
mi pilin nasa tawa ni:
- reluctant to use words outside of official POS
nimi POS li seme?
mi wile sona e ni: jSonja li jHyper anu jHetero anu jan pi kulupu tu?
janMato
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by janMato »

jan-ante wrote:
janMato wrote:He did say that alternate scripts were one of the early unforeseen community innovations. I said shorthand of one sort or another is the most likely script alternative to get adoption. I can't type fast enough to do a proper transcript.
ol korekt
mi pilin e ni:
- new scripts (sometimes remarkably complicated), [mdm: shorthand proposals being the most functional and most likely to succeed]
- new conventions can only be established by the language designer (wait for the book to be published!)
tan ni la mi jHyper en jHetero
mi pilin nasa tawa ni:
- reluctant to use words outside of official POS
nimi POS li seme?
mi wile sona e ni: jSonja li jHyper anu jHetero anu jan pi kulupu tu?
POS
part of speech
? kulupu kipisi pi nimi toki

POS questions, of course center around
- using (v,n,m) -> (n, v, m) --nouns, verbs and modifiers seem to be able to cross roles effortlessly and mostly non-controversial community innovations
- using (v,n,m) -> prep --it happens, it's somewhat suspect, some popular ones, like sike or poka look like they have an official solution of "lon sike" or "lon poka", etc
- using (vt -> vi), (vi -> vt) --it happens, somewhat suspect, not clear if the direct object of a vt can be omitted, not clear how the meaning shifts when an unofficial vi to vt change happens
- using (ALL POS) ->(ALL POS) this includes oddities such as "exclamations as verbs", "clitics as nouns"
e.g. mi mute li a a a tawa jan musi
e.g. mi weka e e lon kulupu mute mi.
- using (any POS) -> (clitic), by cliticis

jan Sonja li mama pi toki pona. jan li jan pi nasin pona.

If we keep up the political group/religious group metaphor, jan Sonja sets the center of the spectrum, the heteroorthodox on one side and the hyperorthodox on the other.

jan pi nasin ante mute - hyperheterorthodox
jan pi nasin wan mute - hyperorthodox
jan-ante
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by jan-ante »

i dont want to criticise, but the author(s) seems to be too much theoretical. author(s) should first check if the users of tp could be really groupped according to this classification by means of e.g. some questionary or poll in some (e.g. this)forum(s). based on this data one can make a conslusion
janMato
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by janMato »

jan-ante wrote:i dont want to criticise, but the author(s) seems to be too much theoretical. author(s) should first check if the users of tp could be really groupped according to this classification by means of e.g. some questionary or poll in some (e.g. this)forum(s). based on this data one can make a conslusion
Yes, empirical data is good. Sometimes it moves onlookers to the same conclusions faster-- sometimes not. Interestingly there was a post recently to the Klingon list where the author categorized the userbase as being Trek fans, Professional Linguist and Computer programmers and it was a taxonomy that was useful to him for explaining the online behavior of Klingonists. When the most active community is numbered in the ten's, taxonomies are trickier because one taxonomic group might be one particular person.
janKipo
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Re: My notes on jan Kipo's talk from LCC2

Post by janKipo »

Pakala! Now I have to go read the damned think again. Some of jan Mato's notes look familiar, some don't and some look just wrong to me now, a couple years or more after the fact. I think the first thing to say, before even looking back, is that the paper is not about tp, but about a number of events that (inevitably?) happen to a language and a language creator if a language "catches one." tp is just a nice case, because it was, at the time, new enough that all the various events were still fresh, not yet hardened into factions or spinoffs and yet virtually all the things I wanted to talk about had occurred already (thank the internet for speeding up these processes from decades to weeks). Without going back to the paper, one minor thing that struck as wrong (there are more major ones I want to check on before commenting) is that new orthographies were unexpected. In fact, they are among the first things to happen, along with Bible translations (and other, even more esoteric, spiritual books) and instructions on how to improve just about every feature. The first suggestion for Loglan -- created in 1955 and widely disseminated in 1960 -- was in 1957 and the 1960 publication brought in a half dozen more in the year after the July publication.
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