Salmoneus wrote: ↑Tue Jul 30, 2019 4:46 pm
EDIT: if you are doing this, it might be worth reminding people to look at their Babel texts as well. In addition to the text, some of the Babel text entries have descriptive texts on the language, and these aren't inherently linked to the descriptions in the registry. The Babel descriptions may therefore either supplement or disagree with the registry entries.
Good thought, thanks. It could help with those pesky languages with no name attached.
With respect, I struggle not to feel rather awkward about this sort of project, which takes information collected from people for one stated purpose (a free-access online register) and, years later, uses that information for an entirely different purpose (a published, commercially-available book). It may not actually be illegal, because the information collected was so minimal, but it seems... dodgy. A good principle in the harvesting and publication of personal information is that the individual should meaningfully consent.
[why wouldn't they? Well, most people probably would. But the point is, that should be up to them, not to Jeffrey. And there are reasons we can imagine. For one thing, some of that information may have been entered twelve, fifteen, or even more years ago, and there's lots of things we might regret having done that long ago - particularly since some of the contributors may have been minors at the time, and the internet was a very different place. Personally, I may, as a child, have been happy to put my name down as a conlanger, and associated with a particular (in hindsight pretty awful) conlang, on a remote internet site back when nobody I knew actually used the internet for anything much, but would rather not have that printed on paper and distributed in the year 2019. The fact that this is a book published presumably for (what I assume is a tiny) profit may also be a sticking point for some, just as a point of principle - if you're going to make money from my content, you should ask me first, as a general rule. Again, I don't imagine many people on this register will have any great objections, but it just feels icky to make that decision for them.]
[to be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of any malignant motivation here, and I'm sure we all have a great sense of gratitude for Jeffrey's role in the early online conlanging community. I for one wouldn't be on this board today without his influence.]
Eh, I think you're applying considerations that are appropriate for Hollywood movies, or something else that actually makes real money, to things that are either money losers or provide beer money. Under capitalism it's hard to have nice things that are free for everyone.
Langmaker was a "profit-making entity", in the sense that it had Google ads, and back when Google ads were worth it. The site also sold Jeffrey's software. On the other hand, it cost money to run, just as this site does. (And I keep paying for the old ZBB just so the material is available.) Jeffrey is not expecting to make a profit on the book; if he does, it probably doesn't cover what he's spent on the site. If you object to beer money, you basically object to almost everything that's creative and interesting on the web.
I also think this material has historical interest for conlanging. Not that conlangers have a huge sense of history, but that's pretty typical for a new artform. I think it'd be sad if the only remnant of this phase of conlanging was (say) the minimal list in Arika Okrent's book. The Langmaker database is a pretty good snapshot and worth preserving. (And it's easy to forget just how fragile our record of the web is. The Wayback Machine attempts to preserve it, but it misses a lot of stuff, and once it's gone, it's gone.)
On the other hand, I do have a nostalgic fondness for langmaker and a fondness for the general idea of a conlang registry... it's a great shame that all the attempts at it back then quickly resulted in oceans of dead links (and were swamped in "conlangs" that in many cases were never anything more than two sentences the author wrote on a back of a napkin and never bothered actually recording anywhere...).
Jeffrey did better than most, so it's sad that his database crashed.
I don't think that the back-of-a-napkin languages are such a bad thing. I mean, I admire the hard work behind the 10,000-word, multi-year projects. But a healthy art form needs vignettes too. An example-- I'm going through Jeffrey's own conlangs now, and one of my favorites is about four pages long and doesn't IIRC contain a single actual cited word. It's extremely weird and unlikely, and that's what's good about it. Making it 50 pages long probably would spoil it.
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