Talk:Conlang learners/Learners shortlist

Why I nominated Dalcurian

Seeing as I nominated my conlang Dalcurian, I should probably put my case forward.

I initially thought that it would be a bit pretentious to nominate my own conlang, and eventually came to the conclusion that maybe it was. However, this is a project to learn an unknown language, and I happened to have one at hand!

I genuinely think that Dalcurian will be relatively easy to learn. Its grammar isn’t half as complex as some conlangs I’ve come across. (And this is where the bone of contention comes in-some people want to sink their teeth into something difficult, others want an easier conlang to kick this project off). Dalcurian is based in our world and timeline, but with a fictional, integrated history right up to modern day. As for the sound, well there is a hybrid flavour to it: Germanic, Scandinavian, Russian, Celtic, Arabic...and of course Dalcurian! So how would I promote Dalcurian?

• comprehensive lexicon with examples: comprehensive enough to be conversational
• full grammatical structure
• easy pronunciation guide, with a 'sounds like' and IPA
• no verb agreement conjugations to get tied down with, inflections only come with tense
• most affixes can be removed to reveal stems therefore making derivation a key element to finding and creating words (for example, the ending ämös applies to verbs in order to form nouns; coming across mosödrämös-film, one can immediately derive the verb to film-mosödr without having to look it up)
• no complex verbal phrases to try and translate; a simple verb can do this
• Dalcurian is phonetic
• no complex conjugations of the verb to be, no copula
• many sample texts (including some audio) with literal translations

But what is unique about Dalcurian? My honest answer is, "I don't know"! I often thought that the adjective 'past tense' was unique, but recently discovered that Japanese has something similar.

If I had to outline any negativity, then I would say that some words may be difficult to pronounce, due to the rhoticity of the language, but this is aided by lenition and mutation. Also, Dalcurian is highly diacritical which is not friendly to some operating systems or keyboards. Again, there is an auxiliary spelling system to overcome this.

I am the only person who has studied Dalcurian, therefore this is my opinion. However, I'd be quite pleased to have some feedback with some 'constructive' criticism, or outlining any mistakes or issues that may lurk unnoticed to my biased eyes. Dayle Hill

Why Lojban, Esperanto and others aren't on the list

It is my personal opinion that the primary goal of this page is the promotion of candidate conlangs, these languages that are so well known in the community need no fanfare, but if someone thinks that they really should be added, I suppose that there would be no wild objection

The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ave matthew.

That's also why I'm not planning to rank Láadan very high on my ballot. It's a cool language, apparently fairly complete and learnable, but to my mind the goal of this project is to jump-start a language that doesn't have a speaker community yet, and give the learners encouragement by all learning the language together. Láadan already has a community around it, though smaller than Lojban's or Toki Pona's, and if anyone wants to start learning it at any time there are a number of people out there who can and will help. A lone person deciding to learn, say, Teonaht or Vabungula though, wouldn't have that advantage. --Jim Henry 15:28, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Conlangs I consider to be too incompletely documented or in flux to use for this project just now

These are conlangs of which I like what I've seen so far, but which seem to me to be too incompletely documented to be learnable at this time. --Jim Henry 15:28, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

• Laefèvæsili - online documentation is too terse and incomplete.
• Itlani - no online documentation at present, just texts with no gloss.
• Tokana - online documentation is reasonably complete, but very out of date; Matt Pearson says the language is in flux now and the documentation of the current version is inconsistent and incomplete. Maybe we'll learn Tokana in a year or two when he finishes the revison of the grammar etc.

I removed Talarian from the list due to lack of modernity -- the secondary world it exists in is not only different physically but also historically. I think that a language for this project should not only be learnable, but also usable by people in the primary world. Elemtilas 18:14, 13 July 2009 (UTC)