Spontaneous collaborative conlangs

[sucaeyl]

Hello!

Has anyone else tried this? Grabbing someone who either

1. • is also interested in linguistics/conlanging, or;
   • is otherwise willing to embark on unconventional adventures with you

and creating a language, right there. I've done it a few times, but the most interesting and fun have been those made without English or any other natlang acting as a meta-language. That is, starting from nothing, and gesturing and vocalizing until something communicative happens. We crucially prohibited any natural language from being used at all.

If you have done it, have you noticed anything interesting happen? What was fascinating to me was how massive metaphorical leaps were made using a tiny inventory of elements, allowing for a wider range of expressible eventualities. If I recall, the word that started out as 'good'–one of the first few created–was soon used for everything from affirmative interjection (unsurprising) to something like perfective aspect (quite surprising). Also interesting was how different my interpretations of some of the morphemes were from my collaborator's, though we seemed able to use them to express the ideas we wanted to. We learned this after the fact.

If you haven't tried doing this, I encourage you to give it a shot! And I can share more details and pointers from my own experience, because it's actually a little tricky to get going, requiring a lot of patience, fairness, and, well, communication. Also, I am interested in thinking of possible variations/parameters/restrictions, so I'd love to hear any ideas in this regard.

Thanks, all.

[mèþru]

Kalusa
The project finish a while ago.

[shanoxilt]

I am currently working with the folks of the Listserv on Sajem Tan (Common Honey). It is a non-naturalistic artistic language that is slowly forming its own subculture, including its own calendar. We meet every Saturday on Skype.

[Nortaneous]

my first conlang was made this way. my collaborator was also a programmer. we ended up handling subclauses by having both a 'begin subclause' word and an 'end subclause' word. they were, respectively, l and r

[sucaeyl]

several cool things sucaeyl did not know about

I didn't know about either of these! Admittedly I did no research before posting here. These are neat.

...we ended up handling subclauses by having both a 'begin subclause' word and an 'end subclause' word. they were, respectively, l and r

This is fantastic.

[vec]

Cedh and I collaborated heavily on Proto-Ronquian/Rompian, along with our team on the relay which included Nort, Dhok, Nerulent, CatDoom, Pogostick Man, Click, Vortex and ObsequiousNewt. It kind of just happened that Cedh and I took charge once the phonology and core features of the grammar had been worked out. I really enjoyed the process. I found that in some ways it's a lot easier doing a conlang in a pair, than alone, if you get along. There are areas of grammar I find incredibly tedious that Cedh happened to love working out and vice versa, and stuff we both hated working on we were able to do tackle together. We ended up with the most comprehensive grammar I've ever worked on, although it's not public yet, as the language hasn't been deciphered by the other team yet.