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I do have to concede one point that Padraic makes, Capsicum, and that's to be found simply in the point that I can't completely understand everything he posted in his last reply (how embarrassing on my part!). There may be some romlangs so distant from Latin, or Romance languages familiar to us, that some of us will be left struggling to communicate at all. (That said, that doesn't mean it's not worth a try to anyone who's willing to invest the effort.) He also raises many other good points, though, and this one has surfaced here before. Many artlangers don't make artlangs to learn them to fluency-- a few will often even deliberately limit their corpus of words so they can move on to other projects. IOW, the goals of that language have so little to do with actually using them that they're not developed in a way that makes that very feasible. Often this isn't so much the case with, say, micronational languages or personal languages (or auxlangs, of course, but that's a bit tautological, yes? ;-) ). The Talossan language boasts a huge corpus, and that's because (a) it's meant to be used with some degree of regularity by the creator's following, and (b) its policy of word creation seems to be rather liberal (i.e., no Grand Master Plan, just whatever feels good). It appears to be pretty highly functional as a result, as far as a conlang is concerned. I actually have scrapped the notion of any Grand Master Plan for my (first) romlang, because unlike other conlangs I'm invested in, it is intended for use as a personal language (rather than, say, demonstrating the results of any certain contrafactual historical/diachronic-linguistic anomaly). You can see some rough patterns of phonological change in what tentative words I *have* coined, but they're far from consistent. I just want to create something fun that I can use to write with or what-have-you, for no other reason than that I would enjoy using it. I'm rather surprised to hear that (from the sound of it) you're working out a GMP in a conlang you intend to make that kind of use of-- that'll be a lot of work, at least insofar as you intend to have a reasonably complete corpus of words (but don't let me discourage you, as your ideas sound fascinating and I'm sure you can pull it off!). I'm not really sure if Padraic's response was in any sort of negative spirit, but this dialogue does raise the notion that it's important not to be imposing when suggesting such a forum. I agree that this group is quite fine for showing off conlangs and exchanging ideas-- my interest in a romlang chat simply comes from (a) an interest to see some of them used in more expedient communication and (b) the fact that it would prevent this group from becoming flooded with back-and-forth exchanges of that kind in the event that your proposal were to take off (all due respect, if I were not involved in such exchanges myself, I don't know that I'd be dying to read through them to find other posts here). I almost hate to suggest this, but it really is one of your better options, in terms of finding interested parties. Have you considered inviting speakers of Romance-based auxlangs? Most of them seem quite enthusiastic to speak the ones they know, but I imagine someone would have to stipulate that issues of advocation are not to be introduced in order to keep the mood light. All told, I still think this is a good idea, and I'll happily join in even if it just turns out to be a two-man ordeal. :-) --- In romconlang@yahoogroups.com, "Capsicum" <thomas@...> wrote: > > There is no need to be unfriendly. >