Take care to use the interface at brown.edu and not, for example, YahooGroups. The list is mirrored there for historical reasons, but it's a one-way (read-only) gateway.
people who know about languages would tell me I was crazy or wrong.
People may point out that something is unusual or appears to violate a language universal, but if so, it's more likely to be for your information then because they're deriding you. They tend to be a pretty friendly bunch, in my experience.
It does help to know some linguistics jargon to understand the conversations, but some of it you may learn by watching (that's how I learned a lot of what I know about linguistics).
Offhand, I think that sloppy thinking is probably looked down on more than unusual grammatical or syntactic features -- and that conlangs that are too close to English are considered a bit less... artful, shall we say. (For example, languages where the grammar and word order is just like English, or where the author shows a conscript saying that this con-letter corresponds to "c", i.e. to an English letter rather than to a sound, implicitly implying that it can represent the same idiosyncratic range of sounds as the English letter.)
clearly nobody on a conlang list will think I'm crazy for making a conlang
Very true :)
a lot of things which actually occur in natlangs would seem unnatural if they didn't.
There's a saying about that on the list: ANADEW - A Natlang's Already Dunnit, Except Worse.
For unusual features someone has in their conlang, where someone else will say, "Actually, in Haida/Pirahã/Dyirbal, they do that, too, and even more oddly than in your conlang!"
no subject
Take care to use the interface at brown.edu and not, for example, YahooGroups. The list is mirrored there for historical reasons, but it's a one-way (read-only) gateway.
people who know about languages would tell me I was crazy or wrong.
People may point out that something is unusual or appears to violate a language universal, but if so, it's more likely to be for your information then because they're deriding you. They tend to be a pretty friendly bunch, in my experience.
It does help to know some linguistics jargon to understand the conversations, but some of it you may learn by watching (that's how I learned a lot of what I know about linguistics).
Offhand, I think that sloppy thinking is probably looked down on more than unusual grammatical or syntactic features -- and that conlangs that are too close to English are considered a bit less... artful, shall we say. (For example, languages where the grammar and word order is just like English, or where the author shows a conscript saying that this con-letter corresponds to "c", i.e. to an English letter rather than to a sound, implicitly implying that it can represent the same idiosyncratic range of sounds as the English letter.)
clearly nobody on a conlang list will think I'm crazy for making a conlang
Very true :)
a lot of things which actually occur in natlangs would seem unnatural if they didn't.
There's a saying about that on the list: ANADEW - A Natlang's Already Dunnit, Except Worse.
For unusual features someone has in their conlang, where someone else will say, "Actually, in Haida/Pirahã/Dyirbal, they do that, too, and even more oddly than in your conlang!"
So yes - don't worry too much.