[Tlhingan-hol] Beginner's Grammarian: The hunt is on

[Rohan Fenwick]

ghItlhpu' qurgh, bIjatlh:
> One of the reason the old BG line was broken, was that there wasn't
> enough traffic on the list to warrant a new BG.

I know. Things change, though, and recently they seem to have changed fairly substantially and for the better.

taH:
> While the recent uptick in activity due to qunnoQ and the new words
> has been great, is it really enough to warrant a new BG?

(poD vay')

It's not just qunnoQ. It's Karen, and 'aQroS, and Chelsea, and perhaps others who haven't stuck their hands up yet. I'm actually surprised it's as *high* as 308 (or 170, if you want to use that metric); there are maybe twenty or thirty who post on a regular basis, and even accounting for the old hands who might still be getting the list traffic, that still leaves quite a lot of people. Four beginners have stuck their hands up in the last month, qunnoQ posting regularly, Karen a couple times a week. That's enough, for my part. Hell, I fervently believe that one is enough. We're not such a big community that we can afford to talk about scale of demand. If there's even one beginner who is dedicated enough to post to the list, surely there must be even one intermediate speaker who can assist them as BG, and have the opportunity to develop their own skills as a Klingon language speaker (and teacher) in the process.

Even just in general, the list is also much more active now than it was back in the late 2000s - there was a while there where all traffic, not just beginners, dropped close to zero. The recent Star Trek movies have done some to help put Klingon back in the public eye, and if we can ride the Abrams wave for a little while longer, we may be able to draw more.

taH:
> Perhaps we can do something different. Instead of having the intermediate
> speakers use the new students to improve their understanding, we could
> have the advance speakers/Grammarians help pull the intermediate
> speakers up.

The initial idea motivating the creation of the BG position was to foster and encourage beginners. The fact that serving as BG is a brilliant way to improve one's own Hol is a side benefit, of sorts. I do like your idea about having the advanced speakers working to pull the intermediate ones up in a more systematic way, and that's something I think we definitely should explore. I'd be keen to participate in such a system. But at the same time, having an "instead of" focus on advanced speakers teaching intermediate speakers will result in the few beginners we do have being left behind. That's emphatically bad for our community.

taH:
> While the BG role has been very important in the past, perhaps we should
> look at other ways to use the list in lieu of new students.

I can't agree that anything "in lieu of" is a good approach to take. We need to be thinking "as well as". The growth in the Facebook community is fantastic and beyond anything I'd imagined; we definitely need to think some more about how to develop the community there, too. But the list still lives, relatively small though it may be, and is still frequented by beginners, relatively few though they may be. We need to continue making our resources available on every front we're humanly capable of.

QeS 'utlh
 		 	   		  
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