Kalusa
Kalusa
The 2006 Smiley Award is presented to Kalusa, an unplanned constructed language begun by Gary Shannon and developed by a community of contributors. Congratulations to Gary and the entire Kalusa community!
Origin of Kalusa
Gary Shannon, known for his innovative projects involving language and web technology, has contributed numerous ideas to the conlanging community. These projects include the movement to replace fonts for pictographic language, the Assertion Based Language Experiment, the conlang by mutation idea, the 30-minute conlang challenge, the listing of the only six verbs you'll ever need, the entertaining SOALOA, and a system for using the Roman alphabet as a syllabary. These projects are documented on his main page. One of Gary's notable projects was an accidental conlang created with a friend, leading to his desire for a "collaborative conlang created by a group without any 'planning' whatsoever." This idea resulted in the conlang game Madjal, a language that anyone could add to but had some definitive grammar rules. While it generated interest, it did not gain the traction Gary had hoped for.
The Kalusa Language
Kalusa began on May 22, 2006, with four simple sentences posted on the Kalusa homepage: # Ma vito es John. ("I see John.") # Ira vito es palu. ("He sees the cat.") # Ira vito es teku kia ruba. ("He sees the red book.") # Ma vito es da ruba. ("I see the red one.") With no initial grammar or grammatical information, Kalusa was open to contributions from anyone. In less than a week, the corpus grew from four sentences to over a thousand.
Kalusa as a Collaborative Effort
The strength of Kalusa lies in its collaborative nature. Creating a language from scratch can be a slow and painstaking process, but Kalusa simplifies this by allowing the community to build grammar incrementally. New sentences employing features of the evolving grammar are constantly added, allowing contributors to expand the language by proposing new sentences and grammatical structures.
Kalusa and Language Evolution
Kalusa is akin to a naturally evolving language, similar to a pidgin. Pidgins arise in contact situations where multiple languages are spoken, and a need to communicate leads to the creation of a compromise language. Like pidgins, Kalusa features competing structures and lexical items, and its grammar remains in flux. From a linguistic perspective, Kalusa models the early stages of a pidgin. The community of users, familiar with elements of linguistic theory, contributes to the language's development. Despite the lack of initial input, Kalusa's growth has mirrored that of a pidgin, with constant competition between structures and lexical items.
Factors Influencing Kalusa's Evolution
The evolution of Kalusa is influenced by four main factors: innovation, augmentation, analogy, and misanalysis. * Innovation: New structures and words are created ex nihilo. * Augmentation: Established patterns are expanded and built upon. * Analogy: Users generalize patterns to create similar forms. * Misanalysis: Users interpret structures differently, leading to new grammatical rules. For example, the first biclausal structure was created spontaneously: Jesus ira dun wepan. ("Jesus wept.") This led to the creation of sentences like: Ma wepan, ma ziresh. ("I want to weep.") Despite initial expectations that such structures might fall out of use, they became integrated into Kalusa's grammar. Users adapted and expanded these patterns, leading to the development of new modal-like words and sentences. Kalusa's evolution demonstrates that users can create and generalize patterns, contributing to the language's continuous growth. This process highlights the collaborative and dynamic nature of conlanging within the Kalusa community. Kalusa Homepage