Matthew D. Martin is a conlanger & he has a neat post about creators giving their fans a hand in their design. I agree with the sentiment and think that while their have been many collaborative conlangs, few have been truly crowd sourced. I think it would be great if creators found a way to impart dynamism to the communities that they want to grow. So far, like with Esperanto, that has meant tinkering inside the grammar and coining new words, but nothing allowing that grammar to grow. If there were enough glue to hold a language together while not being a closed loop, that would be fantastic.
I realized something awhile back, that when words are made up of morphemes those morphemes can still be bound, or the meaning dictated by convention. In other words, meaning isn't created in those words by their composites. Instead people create little folk stories that help them learn the word and its meaning, sometimes even it's pronunciation. The process sometimes even works in reverse if people are really pressured into needing a way to remember it...Which is where much conlang design comes in. Esperanto is really good for this. However, the process isn't really regular, and I don't see any reason it should be honestly. So lets say you want people to actively work on the language, Why not let people change the language fairly often? Ere are languages that glom together words all the time, and those words' morphemes can have different forms, different meanings, etc. And the thing which eventually works out is convention. What's popular catches on and gains currency. People work out little stories for themselves.
This happens slowly somewhat in English. A word like "acorn" gets reparsed as meaning "egg" + "corn" = "eggcorn" = "acorn" (That might be a "typological pun" but bear with me.) This is not too productive in English because its language community is huge and people are all literate, and because English isn't hugely fusional, but you can see it in other ways.
In English there are two morphemes, "-in'" and "-ing", and believe me they are two morphemes. In ye dayes ov olde our language had separate endings for the gerund and active participle, but fashion and vowel changes shaved them down. However, rural speakers retain them still in certain places and mark a distinction between them that urban speakers have long lost to syncretism. It's a mistake that most speakers of English make when parsing these that they can't tell there's a grammatical distinction present. We make a story that these speakers mean the same word as we do, but chop off the <g> at the end...It's not actually a natural sound change, and its not being lazy. That's our prejudice as more fashionable less conservative, more innovative speakers of a different dialect with more prestige. This language change can happen more rapidly in a small community of speakers hashing out a language speaking to each other. People will crush and mangle words and misunderstand each other and contrary to most conlanging that's natural.
I've said this before, but I really like lernu's forum dictionary. Now if its going to work with the above, users need to be able to add entries like urbandictionary. That way they can give derivations...if they choose. Or leave it to other users to puzzle out.
P.S. A while ago there was a guy posing as a philologist by the name of Edo
Nyland. He was trying to relate all the world's languages to Basque by fusional processes. His energy is good, and a different kind of Conlanging, one which I nevertheless respect. It would be a shame to not let it in the picture.
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