repost of a pitch to the Conlangs facebook group

[mungojelly (SwiftRain, swifty)]

the following is posted at http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2207912185&topic=6413

i gave shoutouts to everyone's contributions!

anyone who's on facebook; please feel free to add your perspective;;;
it seems like a moderately busy group these days; at least active; so
i think we might get a nibble or two;;; lll;;;

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So, a little bit about what's the deal with the strange words in
qww'xzx...

The words in qww'xzx are fairly ordinary words, actually. It's just
that they're organized into a series of pools, in order to make the
language easier to learn and construct. The first level of the
language you learn is qww'xzx-l, and on that level you're only taught
words using the letter l, like ll and lll and ll'lll'll. The second
level is qww'xzx-k, so on that level you might learn words like kl and
lkl and klk'lkl, while on qww'xzx-j you'd learn jkl and lj'jlj. If
someone signs their name with a "-j" at the end, then you know to only
use words with them that go up to J-- so a new speaker of qww'xzx can
hopefully be a little less overwhelmed than someone learning an
ordinary language, because the structure helps them to only be exposed
to a few new words at once.

It's also my intention to make each sublanguage of qww'xzx its own
functioning linguistic ecosystem. It will be possible and encouraged
to only learn qww'xzx as far as -l or -k or -j -- to just learn a
simple level of the language and stay there. As well as being
accessible and easy to get through, the early levels are meant to
appeal to people who like to collect languages, to add to the list of
languages they speak-- a common condition in conlang circles. :)

The new phonology we have for qww'xzx (thanks Alex!) does make it
possible to pronounce strangely spelled words like "lk'jkl" or
"qww'xzx", by assigning each letter both a consonant and a vowel. So a
word xxxx can be pronounced as CVCV or VCVC or VCCV etc., or in noisy
places (and this is based on the first suggestion ever made for
qww'xzx, from our new friend Vincent, thanks Vincent!) you can say
both the consonant and the vowel, so that each letter is a syllable.
This provides a lot of different possibilities for the sound of each
word, which I expect we'll explore together to decide how each word
ordinarily sounds in conversation.

A lot of things in qww'xzx are relatively free, uncontrolled,
exploratory. The purpose of the language is just art and exploration
and fun. So if something doesn't have to be heavily organized in order
for a functioning language to emerge, then it won't be. Things will
develop organically. But hopefully like a trellis helping a pea plant
to climb, the level ladder will help the many ideas that go into
qww'xzx to each find a safe home and be shared with new students at a
productive time. (I have found that the inability of new students to
catch up with the avant garde is one of the critical failure points of
new collective conlangs, so I'm attempting preventative medicine.)

We don't just need a script; qww'xzx needs everything! Anything that
can possibly be created for a language, qww'xzx could use it. All it
has so far is the lesson ladder that I've invented, and the phonology
that Alex is working out. There's also the beginning of some
interesting semantics for the words on the -l level, based on
suggestions from our new friend Eeveelyn, thanks Eeveelyn! :) We're
still missing though for instance GRAMMAR -- it's no problem at all to
fake our way through the grammar for the first three levels or so,
because we're doing things like (possibly): hesitation noises on -l,
some emotive outbursts on -k, and greetings and social words on -j...
those kinds of things often have their own weird grammar quirks
anyway. But in the next few months sometime we'll need to locate a
grammarian, to tell us what kinds of words qww'xzx even has and what
we should do with them. :)

There are countless ways anyone reading this could make their mark on
qww'xzx -- you can invent what to invent. One idea I had was that
qww'xzx could use a flag, or even just a set of colors -- all it would
take would be for someone to answer this post and toss out an idea for
a color scheme, and someday soon you could see your idea flapping in
the wind.

See, I'm being a little tricky: I'm providing this space where it's
very easy right now to make something and have it be taken seriously
and carried forward, which is hopefully enticing to artists-- and then
once those creations exist, I'm going to turn right around and sell
qww'xzx to the next group of contributors by showing them that it must
be serious, because it's already got all this stuff made for it. :)
But there IS a little bit of a trick to starting a living language, to
whipping up a consensus reality out of nothing -- like constructing an
airplane in midair. With your help, it can be done!

Here are the seed groups that exist so far for qww'xzx:

http://groups.google.com/group/qwwxzx/
http://groups.google.com/group/qwwxzx-l/

All are welcome.

♥ ,
mungojelly-l