On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Eleanor Good <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I recently did a half-hour presentation on conlangs, the first part showing
> examples to help people see the variety of conlanging approaches people
> take, followed by a brief how-to section describing the process of making a
> phonology, syntax, etc. And I can back you up that it is not a simple thing
> to prepare. I like how you (Sai and Vincent both) make up a language on the
> spot - I think that's a good way to make it seem less intimidating and more
> fun. I wish I'd seen that before giving my talk.

My talk started out much more theoretical (you can see in
http://conlang.org/26c3slides.pdf all the stuff I cut out and moved to
the 'secret' section at the end). But in practice runs I took a hard
look at the content and realized that, frankly, it's boring and glazes
people over.

If I'm giving a talk to outsiders about conlanging, the *last* thing I
want to do is actually teach *linguistics* per se, as in all the
details of what one needs to know to Actually Do It™.

Rather, what I've found to be engaging and effective - in this as well
as in other topics - is to give the audience the closest possible
taste of what it's *like* to Actually Do It (as if they had the needed
expertise). What's interesting to others is not the day-to-day
details, but the import thereof, the feeling of being able to make
something neat, etc. They don't have the expertise, and I can't
realistically teach it in one hour - let alone fast enough that they'd
be able to get from phonetics to allophonic rules in 1 minute. I'm
there as the expert so they don't have to worry too much about all
those details.

So I cloak almost all of the linguistics concepts I teach: as
easy-to-understand choices they can aesthetically respond to on the
spot, as ways in which I fill in things around their suggestions, as
ways I do something that's not quite what they asked, as "off-hand"
elaborations on things that they have "spontaneously" suggested. (In
quotes because, although it is in fact spontaneous from their POV,
it's very calculated from mine, and I'm expecting particular
responses, with prepared stuff to riff on them. In some cases I even
set things up so that it's almost forced; there's something not quite
right and someone will want to fill it in... :-P [E.g.: ensuring that
the phonology will not be enough to natively render at least one of
the names in my cheat sheet, and then using a phonologically broken
name in a translation prompt - thus getting *them* to "spontaneously"
realize the whole issue of transliteration not being 1:1 without me
having to say it.])

My goal for the conlanging talk is not for people to come away being
able to make a language - that's overambitious even for me - but for
them to have a sense of the range of options, why they might be into
it, and sorta-kinda what it's like to be a conlanger.

That I'm overprepared after having boiled down the talk from a more
complex previous version means that I get to do this frequently - not
mention something, wait for someone to have a realization, and already
have to hand notes in my cheatsheet (or indeed, an extra slide tucked
away) for how to deal with exactly that thing. It makes both them and
me look good: they thought of it first (sorta), which ups their sense
of involvement / accomplishment a lot; I'm able to give solid answers
that tie in / segue well, seemingly "off the cuff".

When someone's actually learning how to *apply* it of course, it's a
different story. Then you want them to understand the next level of
details to what they understood before, and so on. Just never so much
that it becomes a boring slog before they can get to the fun parts.
But this is a matter of scope, really. Even if you're teaching
straight up phonology (or, say, how glosses in a well made language
are not cross-linguistically parallel[0]), you can do all the stuff
above; you just get to have more detail by not having to cover the
whole damn thing in one session. :-P

> I find speaking to a camera to be much more difficult than to an audience,
> but you do have the advantage of being able to change things or do it over
> if you want.

I also prefer a real audience, since without one I can't do any of the
above interactive stuff and have to fall back to "listen to me talk
about this" mode.

It takes me at least ~3 full runthroughs to get any talk down to
reasonably good delivery.

The first time I did a live run of my conlanging 101 talk, it was
utter crap; technically, content-wise, pacing, everything... I just
bombed, hard. I got really good feedback from it though, and made
extensive revisions. So when I did it at 26C3, it was pretty rocking.
I'm hoping that Notacon will be better, as I improve the handful of
things I didn't like about the 26C3 version. :-)

- Sai

[0] I always liked http://www.nkuitse.com/conlang/glosses/howto.html for this