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CONLANG: the quintessential mailing list

The list is currently maintained by David G. Durand, and it is housed on a listserver at Brown University. For subscription information, see the online archives at Brown. A no longer maintained FAQ can be found at http://personalweb.sierra.net/~spynx/FAQ/. You could try the sci.lang FAQ as well.

There are several ways to start subscribing:
- send a mail with an empty subject line to listserv@listserv.brown.edu with this line as the body of the message:
  SUBSCRIBE CONLANG
- or use this handy form at Brown (you only need to fill in the two first fields, the rest are preferences)
If you're getting errors/problems when trying to subscribe, make sure that your email program prefixes your name to the emails you send, as in J. Random Hacker <jrh@cr.yp.to> If it doesn't, or the prefix is only one word, the LISTSERV at Brown might ignore you.
The short, (usually) uppercase words on the subject-line that ends with a colon are topic-markers. You can instruct the listserver not to send you mails sorting under a specific topic , which are: CHAT, THEORY, USAGE, GROUPLANG and NGL, and all but NGL should be self-explanatory. (NGL: the Next Generation Language is a cooperative effort, started by Julian Morrison.)
Certain themes have proven to be somewhat flammable. Themes like 'which IAL is best' or 'why language x is better than language y' is better suited for CONLANG-L's little sister, the AUXLANG list. Proceed at your own risk!
IALs (International Auxiliary Language)s, like esperanto and lojban, have their own list: AUXLANG. The technical aspects of an IAL is fit for CONLANG, though, as long as certain dangerous superlatives are avoided.
This is an international list, and there's no 'official' language everybody is forced to use. However, many (yours truly included) appreciate a translation to English.
Do lurk on the list for a while, or pop by the archives to get familiar with the jargon and previous important threads.
And finally: all other more or less formal rules of netiquette apply, even here.

Webmaster: taliesin-webring@nvg.org

2000-07-19: Finally fixed broken links