言語のそよ風

Robot Interaction Language

2012-02-12T19:38:00.003-06:00

The book Learning ROILA was published a couple of months ago. “The RObot Interaction Language (ROILA) is a new spoken language that is optimized for the communication between machines and humans. It is extremely easy to learn for humans and it is simple for machines to recognize.” Available from Amazon.

A brief article about the language with a few specimen sentences is online at ComputerWorld.co.NZ

a tidbit of the language Orghast

2012-02-05T12:39:00.005-06:00

In August 1971, an experimental theatre group performed a spectacle at the ruins of the palace of Darius in Persepolis. Parts of the event were performed in Latin, Greek and Avestan, and part was done in a language called Orghast which was created by poet Ted Hughes. Here is a specimen:

SÓYINNABLÁRGA
I was in darkness

FÓTTAHOÁNYA
brought into light

GRÓKIDOTÚTTU
I was broken in pieces

GUÉRRAOÁNYA
light healed me

Bits of information about the language and its development are scattered throughout the book Orghast at Persepolis by A.C.H. Smith (Methuen Publishing, 1972 and Viking Press, 1973). Used copies of this book are readily available from abebooks.com

It’s quite interesting to read about how the language evolved, how words that Hughes pulled out of thin air* turned out to have similarities to words in ancient languages, and how Orghast served as a lingua franca for the multinational theatre company on a few occasions – there was one situation in which a member of the group sent them a telegram written in Orghast.

If you are interested in artlangs, I recommend the book. There are lots of thought-inspiring quotations from Hughes about the relationships between the human body, poetry, and human languages.

*Perhaps “pulled out of thin air” is a poor choice of words. Hughes said he created each word through a long meditative process.

linking the various selves

2012-02-02T04:05:00.001-06:00

Sometimes when I am at work I will think of something I want to do at home… sometimes a conlang-related thing, and sometimes a gardening or housework thing…

For years I had trouble remembering these ideas after leaving work. I often wrote a note to myself on a piece of scrap paper and stuck it in my pocket or my briefcase, but those notes piled up and failed to get my attention.

Lately I have been sending e-mails from my work e-mail account to my personal account and this seems to succeed most of the time. Likewise, if I am at home and I recall something that needs to be done at work, I can send an e-mail from “at-home me” to “at-work me.” I know some employers don't permit this but fortunately my company doesn't prohibit sending an occasional personal e-mail.

So communication between at-home me and at-work me has improved quite a bit. Now I have to figure out how to improve the flow of ideas between “driving-around me” and “at-home me” and “at-work me.”

Sometimes “driving-around me” will call the landline phone at home and leave a message on the answering machine. That works well. But it is difficult for “at-work me” and “at-home me” to get a message to “driving-around me.”

I have gone back to updating my diary/journal more frequently. This is a great way for “past me” to send ideas and information to “future me.” What’s lacking (and is very much needed) is some way for “future me” to send messages to “present-day me.”

You know what annoys me? People who won't admit that they are laminated, made of distinct layers bonded together. You're not the same person now that you were 15 years ago. You're not the same person at work that you are at home. Stop trying to deceive your multi-self. You are a composite.

Empire Me

2012-02-01T01:51:00.003-06:00

Okay, add this to the list of things I want to see. A documentary film about micronations has been produced. It is called Empire Me and you can see a trailer here.

And don't miss the website Micronations News Network.

endangered sign languages

2012-01-27T04:04:00.002-06:00

I often come across articles deploring the death of spoken languages or celebrating efforts to revive them, but the less common sign languages are also endangered and rarely mentioned. As with spoken languages, each sign language has unique qualities and is part of a culture.

Here is an article about the Village Sign project.

Here is a newspaper article about Plains Indian sign language.

And here's a link to the first page of a related academic article.

learning songs to memorize vocabulary

2012-01-25T04:05:00.002-06:00

I get promotional emails from Jlist.com on a regular basis, and the latest one reminds me of a neat way to hammer more words into your memory when you are studying a language:

Another useful tool for learning Japanese is… karaoke. Yes, going to karaoke is a great for anyone studying Japanese since it provides a stream of kanji and vocabulary words on the screen (providing reading practice) and allows for social feedback from others if you sing the song well, and transcribing or translating songs you want to master is a great way to permanently input new vocabulary into your brain. Plus, if you forget a word when speaking, you can sing the song to yourself in your head until you recall it -- yes, this really works.

I have discarded all my notes of the conlang I made in high school and shortly after high school, but I still remember my translation of the Blue Öyster Cult song Seven Screaming Diz-busters quite well, even after all these years. So I believe it’s true, studying a song in your target language or translating a song into that language can really aid the memory.

Tango doodling

2012-01-24T04:19:00.001-06:00

Fiddling with my lang of mostly 5-letter words again.

I generally prohibit any words that would be instantly recognizable to someone who only speaks English. I have decided to make an exception for kanji, a word that monoglot anglophones would recognize if they happen to be language nuts. Another exception is ganja, a word for marijuana.

a play: The Language Archive

2012-01-23T04:15:00.000-06:00

Forum Theatre in Washington DC will be presenting Julia Cho’s play The Language Archive from February 16 to March 10.

Synopsis: “George is a brilliant linguist, consumed with preserving and documenting dying languages. But at home, he cannot find the words that will preserve his disintegrating marriage. His archival assistant is mute with adoration for him; and his newest subjects, an elderly couple who are the last speakers of an obscure language, refuse to utter a word to one another. A magically inventive comedy, The Language Archive asks whether love is a universal language or, like Esperanto, just a well-intentioned dream.”

That description makes the play sound really interesting. This is the first time I have ever wanted to see a play.

pondering MegaUpload’s demise

2012-01-21T17:35:00.002-06:00

Now that MegaUpload has been closed down by a global muscle-flexing of the Corporate States of America’s government-for-hire, I wonder if any action will be taken against other sites that seek to profit from “piracy.”

One site that comes to mind is Uz Translations, a repository of links to “pirated” copies of language courses, textbooks and dictionaries. Uz Translations’s ad-infested pages and their operation of their own file-hosting service ($50/year for premium access) give me the impression that they are in it for the money. I wonder how much revenue they are generating.

Another worry that pops into one’s head is the safety of original, hard to replace files kept in any online storage service, whether it be iCloud or DropBox or Google Docs. Once again we are reminded of the importance of having backups at home, backups offsite, and backups “in the cloud.” If we are very fond of our files, that is.

Kalaba-X 55th anniversary

2012-01-20T04:05:00.000-06:00

Praise strongly Kalaba-X speaker.

This year is the 55th anniversary of Kalaba-X's first appearance in print. This delightfully strange and incredibly useful conlang was designed by professional linguist Kenneth L. Pike (1912-2000). In 1957 a lecture that he gave during the prior year was published in Bibliotheca Sacra. People who are having trouble breaking free of their native language and grasping the underlying meanings of what they are trying to say should spend a few hours with Kalaba-X. It is a great emancipator; it helps to rip up the straitjacket of native language habits.

Pike’s description of Kalaba-X and its benefits is online at talideon.com thanks to Keith Gaughan.

Orghast

2012-01-16T03:05:00.004-06:00

While tidying up my computer, rummaging through old files, I found a message that Jack Campin wrote in the newsgroup sci.lang back in 1991 describing the play and the invented language called Orghast:

It’s an artificial language created by the English poet Ted Hughes for a spectacle at Persepolis in the 70s to celebrate the so-called 2500th anniversary of the Shah’s dynasty. He wrote the whole play in it. It’s a sort of poetic reconstruction of proto-Indo-European but with many of the words derived by Hughes’ meditations on what the appropriate sound for each referent ought to be.

I googled a bit to see if the web holds any good descriptions of the language or the spectacle in which it was used. I found a terse but fascinating summary of a related book.

And here is a message suggesting that a complete description of the language was never published.

groupthink

2012-01-15T12:46:00.007-06:00

In previous posts I have argued that excessive communication can do more harm than good. I have even gone so far as to say that communication can be a form of aggression.

When you are sitting alone thinking about something that really matters to you and someone walks up and starts babbling about sports or politics, that other person is trying to force you to stop thinking your own thoughts and begin thinking about what he wants you to think about. It’s socially acceptable but nevertheless it is a reduction of your freedom.

This is relevant to conlanging because there exists a faction of conlangers who think langmaking is only worthwhile when done collaboratively, or at least done with the goal of providing entertainment to others. Working independently on a heartlang that is only meant to please yourself and will never be revealed to others, neither knowing nor caring what other conlangers have done, is viewed as anathema by this faction of codependents.

Granted, not knowing what any other conlangers have done seems almost impossible now due to the internet and projects like Klingon, Na'vi and Dothraki that are known in pop culture. But I cling to the hope that somewhere in this world there are remote villagers secretly brewing conlangs in their own heads without being subjected to any knowledge or influence from other langmakers.

Perhaps I exaggerate for rhetorical effect, or perhaps this is a “thought experiment.” Whatever. But I revisit this line of thinking now because I enjoyed a recent article in The New York Times Sunday Review entitled The Rise of the New Groupthink. (Oh no, my thinking was affected by somebody else… damn it.)

The article does a great job of pointing out how an emphasis on teamwork and group activities is reducing productivity and assaulting individuality in our schools and workplaces.

The author seems to make an exception for internet-based projects, writing “The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations.” Apparently she is oblivious to the ways in which cabals of “regulars” dominate many online forums and bully newcomers into conforming or leaving. Perhaps she doesn’t know the degree to which the people with most severe cases of OCD tend to control what happens on the Wikipedia pages that they constantly monitor.

The comments from readers of the article also provide dazzling insights.

Think back to the recent “masterpieces” thread on Conlang-list. How many masterpieces of art have been created by focus groups, teams or committees?

the evolution of one conscript

2012-01-14T04:36:00.005-06:00

A few years ago I googled the phrase “my own alphabet” and came across an interesting page by “Cannibal” showing the evolution of his/her personal writing system. I found it interesting.

I’ve been working on a personal script that began as a re-assignment of English phonemes to various glyphs of the Burmese writing system. It has gradually morphed into something that I can write much more quickly. I still am not entirely happy with its appearance. I probably won’t publish any samples of it. It’s personal.

a Tango word for crying

2012-01-12T04:39:00.003-06:00

To sob and emit tears, with or without wailing… how to say this in my lang of mostly 5-letter words?

Glancing at various polyglot wordlists I observed the following clues…

plakat’ and similar words in Slavic languages

plori in Esperanto
plorer in Old French
(derived from Latin plorare)

哭 /kū/ in Mandarin Chinese

At this point a Tango word is starting to take shape:
pl- something -k- something.

Since Tango verbs must end with -e or -u, I will choose -u in this case. Now I have pl_ku.

plaku and ploku didn’t quite feel right, so I considered the similar options blogu, bloku, plogu. And it quickly became apparent that bloku felt most correct.

Inspiration to make a Tango word hits me about once a week. At this rate of word creation it should only take about 20 years to create a basic vocabulary.

Glossolalia can be fun

2012-01-11T16:04:00.000-06:00

(reposted from 26 December 2007)

Sometimes, when I am alone, I just relax my brain and say aloud whatever syllables the brain feels like generating. Usually I get something that sounds vaguely like Swahili— ubamba lo jinka hagalaza and so forth— or something that sounds like ancient Chinese, lots of monosyllables ending in k, p, or t.

This practice is called glossolalia, also known in some religions as speaking in tongues. Some view it as a sacred or supernatural experience. A neuroscience blogger called Neurocritic wrote an interesting article about it last year and received several replies from people who do glossolalia in the religious way.

But I find non-religious glossolalia to be rewarding in its own way, perhaps a form of relaxation or meditation for the language-processing parts of the brain. Maybe it's the brain's way of telling me what kind of conlangs it really wants to create. I invite you to try it.

Neurocritic's article describes a brain-scan study of a group of individuals who were speaking in tongues. It would be interesting to see brain-scan research done on conlangers. I would expect the language areas of our brains to be better developed and more active than the average person's, but that's just conjecture.

this flowed out of my pen

2012-01-10T04:01:00.002-06:00

This flowed out of my pen one morning at work when I was both groggy and bored. At the very beginning I was trying to write English cursive backwards. Then my hand just started doing twirly things without much conscious control from my mind. (Click on image for larger view.)

Gulevache, a joke language

2012-01-08T04:43:00.002-06:00

Somehow during this evening’s surfing I came across the Spanish Wikipedia article about Gulevache, a joke language “created by the Argentine comedy troupe Les Luthiers.” A vocabulary and simple lesson are available at peseatodo.com.ar

Gulevache appears to be Spanish mutilated in various random ways. It could easily pass for an auxlang proposal.

conlang masterpieces thread

2012-01-07T03:05:00.003-06:00

Over yonder on the Conlang mailing list, Puey McCleary wondered aloud if there have been any conlang masterpieces yet.

This interesting thread starts here, my delightful comments are here, and a witty counterpiece can be seen here.

ULD update

2012-01-06T03:08:00.003-06:00

So! I’ve resumed work on my quirky polyglot vocabulary called the Universal Language Dictionary. Abandoning version 2.7 and starting 3.0

For now, I am defining each concept in English, and then attempting to list the corresponding words in English, Japanese, Esperanto, and Papiamentu (the Curaçao variety of Papiamento).

Later, I hope to go back and add more languages. For the time being I want all the information to flow through my own fingers and brain. At some point in the future I might invite volunteers to add even more languages, especially conlangs. If I unexpectedly become wealthy, I will hire people to add languages.

Each entry in ULD3 has a random/arbitrary 4-digit ID number. You will be able to arrange the entries in any order you like by editing the sequence.txt file.

And here is a small sample of the lexicon file in ULD format: www.uld3.org/uld3/ULD3.txt (Obviously, it would be trivial to convert ULD format to XML.)

I had to switch from using sequential ID numbers for the entries to random numbers in order to keep myself from endlessly tinkering with the numbering scheme.

Writing new, clearer definitions of the concepts uses a bit of energy. Of course I take inspiration from existing dictionaries, including the 1913 Webster, but I also have to wrestle with my own ideas of what is needed for basic vocabulary creation, and what concepts can easily be glossed in the natlangs that I’m vaguely familiar with. It’s a wrestling match of astronomical proportions.

The project is a little humbler now. Maybe the pompous “Universal” should be removed from the name.

India’s PM plans to promote Sanskrit

2012-01-05T18:38:00.003-06:00

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says the government will increase its efforts to promote and strengthen the Sanskrit language.

“Like the civilisation of India, Sanskrit does not belong to any particular race, sect or religion. It represents a culture that is not narrow and sectarian but open tolerant and all-embracing… It is this spirit of liberalism and tolerance embedded in Sanskrit that we must inculcate in our present day life,” the Prime Minister said.

A news article about this declaration is available here and video coverage is here.

mistakes I make

2012-01-04T04:31:00.008-06:00

Some disjointed thoughts about some reasons why some projects never come to fruition.

Making it more fun to start a project than to continue it. I love to shop for blank journal-books, both in meatspace and in cyberspace. (A weird lifelong fascination with stationery.) Love to sketch out the first dozen words of a new lang, the ones that come to mind easily and give a flavor of the project.

Like a potential lover’s face seen by moonlight, the early project reveals none of its flaws. When you turn on the Klieg lights, suddenly every acne scar and nostril-hair is visible. Eeeww.

Perfectionism. Oops, I spelled a word incorrectly on the third page of my journal. Well then, I have to throw that whole book away and start over. And why not, since shopping for a journal-book was so much fun?

Hey, this lang doesn’t have enough Icelandic influence. Well then I will just shop online for the best available Icelandic dictionary. After ordering it, I can wait for it to arrive. Presto, another week down the drain.

What’s this I hear about the Miccosukee tribe not wanting outsiders to have their dictionary? Well then, I’m tempted to move to South Florida and see if I can socially engineer myself some access to a copy. That would kill a year or two.

Let's make it bigger. No, that's too big! Let's make this the most gigantic and intricate project of its kind. Oh, now it's too big to finish in one lifetime. Now it's so intricate that, if I step away from the project for a few months, I can't remember all of the methods and procedures.

Who am I doing this for? The endless internal argument. Am I doing this because I have some compulsion to do such things. Or because I hope to look at when it is finished and be pleased by it, or to get some use out of it for my other projects. Or am I doing this in hopes of entertaining or informing others?

Having a firm answer would provide a lot of guidance with regard to “what to leave in, what to leave out.” Endlessly pondering the question or trying to go in all three directions at the same time prevents any progress.

another conlang used in research

2012-01-03T13:46:00.002-06:00

Occasionally scientists will use a simple conlang to study the language learning process. Here is a fresh example from TheGlobeAndMail.com:

Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knosche at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, enrolled 20 volunteers on a six-day course to learn ‘Vimmi,’ an artificial language designed to make study results easier to interpret. Half the material was taught using spoken and written instructions and exercises, while the other half was taught with body movements to accompany each word, which the students were asked to act out. Students remembered significantly more of the words taught with movement, and used them more readily when creating new sentences.

“an Esperanto-type crank”

2012-01-02T13:31:00.000-06:00

A John Heilemann article in New York magazine refers to politician Ron Paul as “an Esperanto-type crank.” This term comes from a 1996 New Yorker article by Michael Kelly, who wrote:

The Esperanto-type crank is a sort of unified-field theorist, a believer in the one great idea that will fix everything… The driving dream of every Esperanto-type crank is that if he could only explain things to enough people, carefully enough, eventually everyone would see, and then everything would be fixed.

Interesting observation. So many people have strong opinions about Esperantists, I wonder how many of them have ever actually met an Esperantist?

light

2012-01-01T15:40:00.003-06:00

So, in times of trouble one can always turn to conlanging.

I was thinking about my language of mostly 5-letter words, the conlang which has been called Penta, Zengo, Dengo, Tango and so forth. (About due for another new name.)

In making a word for ‘light’ I wanted to blend lu- from Romance words like luz, luce, llum, lumière with something else, anything else. In Hindi and Urdu there are words for ‘light’ similar to raušnī, rośni (romanizations vary).

This gives 4 possibilities for a Tango word: lusni, luzni, lušni, lužni.

lušni would be spelled luxni in the Tango alphabet, and that’s awesome because luxni contains a visual callback to the Latin word lux.

However, š is a voiceless consonant and Tango generally uses voiceless consonants only for concepts that are unpleasant, harsh, or technological. So now I must decide whether to bend that rule in this case.

unhappy new year!

2012-01-01T15:32:00.005-06:00

My friend who lost the ability to speak when he had a stroke in April died in November.

He never regained any ability to speak or write.

He was my only close friend.

So now I face a new year and a new life as a disconnected person, a person unwanted, an unwelcome intruder on the planet Earth.

Challenging.

keyboard layouts

2011-10-28T21:09:00.003-05:00

My brief note on alternative keyboard layouts, written in 2008, still gets comments occasionally. I guess people stumble onto it as a result of googling something or other.

One responder referred to Dvorak, Lojban and Linux as “3 of the most logical and smart things humanity has created recently,” proof that people exist who think very differently from the way I think.

another band using a conlang

2011-10-27T20:33:00.002-05:00

The musical group Prince Rama dabbles in conlangery/glossolalia.

From an article found online: “I kind of invented my own language in the process of making this record,” Taraka explains over the phone from outside a Cracker Barrel in Virginia… “I’d start experimenting with just letting syllables come out and seeing what happened.” The second cut from Trust Now, ‘Summer of Love’ (for which the official video was shot at a Hare Krishna temple on Comm Ave) starts out in Sanskrit, moves to English, and then into her invented language.

The full article is here.

the Copaile Cipher

2011-10-26T20:19:00.003-05:00

Researchers have cracked the Copiale Cipher, which I have to admit, I never heard of until this news story hit the wire services.

If you want to see close-up images of the manuscript, follow this link.

an example of glossolalia

2011-08-09T12:20:00.002-05:00

Just blurt out whatever syllables come to mind. In some churches this is viewed as a religious experience. You can see an example here.

Viktor Medrano's conlangs

2011-06-25T10:04:00.001-05:00

Viktor Medrano gives a nicely personal narrative of his constant conlanging on his Glossopoeisis page.

50 days without speech

2011-06-07T20:10:00.003-05:00

About 50 days ago my best friend had a major stroke. He has regained some alertness and some control of the left side of his body but he still can't speak or write. Visiting him in the nursing home is surreal, as I do a monologue describing local events and the condition of his house and his pets, and he says nothing.

Such a vulnerable situation, to be nearly immobile in a bed in a nursing home and unable to speak for yourself, unable even to moan or say "ouch" when in pain.

I tip my hat to Yaldabaoth, the demented demigod who created this world and filled it with disease and hatred and death, all of which are reflections of his own corrupted nature. Yaldabaoth, your skill in obfuscating and dooming all that is good astounds me. And yet I know that we will ultimately destroy you.

random note

2011-04-10T14:25:00.001-05:00

The domain name glossopoeia.com is available. I had registered it for a year or two but lost interest.

pleasant and annoying

2011-03-26T11:01:00.002-05:00

We need an adjective that means “simultaneously pleasant and annoying.”

I was planning to sleep until noon today but at 9 A.M. a bird perched in the boxthorn bushes outside my bedroom window and sang. Unusually liquid and loquacious was the song, full of vernal optimism and oblivious to the fragility of avian life.

“How utterly ___,” I exclaimed, lacking the necessary adjective.

Indigenous Tweets

2011-03-21T08:59:00.003-05:00

Indigenous Tweets is a project to measure Twitter usage in minority and endangered languages. Here is an explanatory article and here is their blog.

William Rice Rode

2011-02-22T19:15:00.003-06:00

I spotted a conlang-related sentence in New York Times coverage of the Outsider Art Fair: “William Rice Rode, a patient in an Illinois mental hospital around the turn of the last century, made extraordinary drawings of flying machines, people and text written in a self-invented language, on bed sheets; examples are on view at the Carl Hammer Gallery.”

See also the Carl Hammer Gallery website.

poll results

2011-02-14T11:04:00.000-06:00

I see that Mac OS X and Linux are the most popular operating systems among people who read this blog and choose to respond to the silly polls. Good to know.

I’m the one who voted for Mac Classic. Even though I don’t use it any more, Mac OS 9.2.2 was my all-time favorite for its ‘look and feel.’ It seemed to hit the sweet spot of balance between technical and aesthetic criteria, for me. When I am sleepy I still sometimes catch myself trying to find the calculator up there in the Apple menu, or find myself groping for the list of currently running applications up there (gesturing nostalgically)…

my lamp also burning at midnight

2011-02-13T10:54:00.002-06:00

I was staring (in amazement) at this English translation of one of Ryōta Oshima’s haiku last night:

Who is it that is awake,
the lamp still burning?
Cold rain at midnight.

and it occurred to me that this can morph into Esperanto fairly easily:

Kies lamp’ ankoraŭ brulas?
Malvarma pluvo noktomeze.

Hmm. Esperanto. It resurfaces in my mind when I least expect it.

Voynich Manuscript dated

2011-02-11T22:25:00.002-06:00

The Voynich Manuscript, one of the strangest books on earth, appears to be older than everyone thought. It may be 600 years old.

The Gift of the Chicken

2011-02-05T01:11:00.003-06:00

Hypothetical situation. Someone hands you a magazine article, ripped out of some unknown hardcopy magazine. The title of the article is The Gift of the Chicken. There are no illustrations.

What do you think the nature of the article is going to be?

(1) it's an essay about the benefits which chickens provide to humans

(2) it's a story about one chicken which some person gave to another person as a gift

(3) it's a fairy-tale about a gift which a chicken gave to some other animal

That’s the gift of the word “of”.

book giveaway

2011-01-29T15:04:00.004-06:00

Update Okay, the book giveaway is over. Three books found new homes and three were unwanted.

These books were adopted:
Complete Enochian Dictionary by Laycock. Softcover.
Teach Yourself Welsh. Book and 2 CDs in plastic box.
Introduction to Pali by A K Warder. Hardcover, no dustjacket.

penthemeric

2011-01-29T12:22:00.002-06:00

After reading Richard Hamblyn’s book The Invention of Clouds, which describes the life and times of the man who invented the cloud-classifying terms cirrus, stratus, cumulus and nimbus, I popped over to Google Books to look at some old weather-geek magazines.

In Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, February 1885, I found on page 8 a letter from J.H. Hill of Yorkshire announcing: “I have invented a Table of Rain which I call a Penthemeric Table, a term which explains itself.”

In a penthemeric table, rainfall amounts for the first five days of the month are added together and the sum is published as a single number. Then there is another number representing the next five days of the month, and so forth. This sort of table is more compact than a table listing the 30 or 31 days of the month separately, but gives more detail than a single number representing the whole month.

The word penthemeric seems to have vanished from the face of the earth after this one appearance in print. But I couldn’t help thinking there must be another word in English meaning “an interval of five days.” My first guess, quinquediurnal, only produced two Google hits.

And then by googling for definition ‘period of five days’ I came across the word pentad, which is widely used in connection with rainfall data.

So it seems that J.H. Hill’s idea of publishing rainfall amounts in five-day sums became popular, or perhaps it was independently re-invented elsewhere, but the word he/she coined failed to survive. How sad.

Physicists call for alien comm protocol

2011-01-28T09:46:00.004-06:00

Three astrophysicists suggest creating a protocol for contacting aliens.

No need to re-invent the wheel. We mustn't forget that Hans Freudenthal made an excellent plan for handling this in his book Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse (1960). The English Wikipedia article on Lincos is a bit crappier than the German article.

update: Holy cow, I just discovered that Lancelot Hogben devised a protocol for communicating with aliens called Astraglossa.

umtwrfa (days of the week)

2011-01-22T14:09:00.004-06:00

For many years I have been interested in the topic of one-letter abbreviations for the days of the week. It's difficult to know what to do about Tuesday and Thursday, and Saturday and Sunday, since their first letters are not distinctive.

When I had to independently invent my own 7 abbreviations for a work-related task several years ago, I decided to use R for Thursday since the American R is the vowel in that word's first syllable here in the USA. My final system was MTWRFAU.

Googling around today I found various systems in use. There are "about 96" Google hits for UMTWRFA and 7 for MTWRFAU.

Some people use H for Thursday and/or use S for Sunday with A standing for Saturday. Google gives about 3100 hits for SMTWHFA.

MTWRF scores 29,600 hits and MTWHF gets 5,710. So at least we can agree that R must be the abbreviation for Thursday and those who prefer H are deviants.

This is an idea that rattles around in my head when I design conlang vocabularies: Shouldn't the words for the numerals 1 through 12 be in alphabetical order, so the names for days of the week and the months of the year could be self-sorting?

If your word for one is ban and your word for two is din and so forth, your days of the week could be bantag (Monday), dintag (Tuesday) etc and the abbreviations might be BDFJLMP or whatever.

But then your abbreviations for the first 7 months would easily be confused with your abbreviations for days of the week, so maybe that's not such a good idea.

And another thing. How long will mainstream calendar publishers cling to the custom of putting Sunday in the left-most column of the calendar? In modern Western Civilization, the weekend is a distinct cultural phenomenon that begins on Saturday morning (some would say Friday night) and ends late Sunday. Clearly Monday is the the beginning of the week; the weekend days belong together on the right-hand side of the calendar. In some industries (such as broadcasting) people use printed calendars which are organized that way. But good luck finding a rationally arranged calendar for home use.

Microsoft taunts Google with Esperanto comparison

2011-01-14T23:27:00.002-06:00

In a fit of pique Microsoft has hurled a snarky insult at Google, satirically likening Google's WebM video codec to Esperanto. The story is at PCMag.com and CNET News among hundreds of other sites.

In fact this story was published on so many websites and blogs that the Esperantists haven't been able to catch up; I only saw the obligatory "no you've got it all wrong, Esperanto is really popular and useful" responses on one of ten sites I checked.

monk-scribery vs. printing press

2011-01-14T13:33:00.002-06:00

One of the web comics I read regularly is Wondermark, and its creator David Malki has written an interesting blogpost. Fifteenth-century abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote a tract called De laude scriptorum manualium — “In Praise of Scribes.” Trithemius was "a lexicographer who was also deeply interested in cryptography and steganography" -- probably a conlanger too, I would wager.

Trithemius wrote in praise of hand-copying scriptures and holy texts rather than mass producing them with printing presses. Malki's commentary and the responses from his readers are worth a look.

prosecuting a language-less man

2011-01-11T19:51:00.003-06:00

According to this article, the court system is having a hard time prosecuting a man who has little or no ability to communicate in any known language.

The comments posted by readers raise some interesting questions. How could he drive from Las Vegas to Philadelphia if he could not read highway signs? And here's a question from myself: Why don't they try drawing cartoons or using computer animated images to communicate with him, instead of insisting that manual sign language is the only option?

random flashcards in a blogspot blog

2011-01-05T22:22:00.002-06:00

There's a blog that serves up random Sona radicals with their definitions in English: sonarads.blogspot.com …How does that work?

ULD 3 update

2011-01-03T07:45:00.000-06:00

I’ve been merrily lexicographizing version 3 of the Universal Language Dictionary.

Now planning to publish it under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 License.

I’ve been forced to scale back my plans for the initial publication. I was originally planning to include 20 languages, then 16, then I whittled the list down to 12. Now that I have seen how much time it takes to look up each item in “reliable sources,” sometimes checking two or three sources for confirmation, I realize I will never get the first pass completed with that many languages.

Also, writing clearer definitions for each of the concepts can be time consuming. I have to narrow down a lot of the entries and focus on the most universal (easily translated) senses. This is very contemplative work.

So I’m going to start out with just seven tongues: English, Papiamentu, Japanese, Indonesian, Lakota, Esperanto and Tango. I am vaguely familiar with 5 of the 7 languages so I am fairly confident that the entries will be as qualitiferous* as I want them to be.

After I get the first pass through the lexicon done I will invite comments and see if anybody wants to add more languages. Although a few people have occasionally offered to type in the vocabularies of the their native languages, I don’t think it would be a whole lot of fun to key in 1,800 or more dictionary entries. Seriously, it gets tedious after the first 200 or 300 items. The rapid progress we made on the early version of ULD back in the early 1990’s was done before the graphical worldwide web existed, before Facebook and YouTube were entertaining people to death. I have some doubts about being able to achieve such rapid completion under current conditions.

*Qualitiferous (kwal-ih-TIFF-er-us): an unforgettable (to me) word coined in an awkward moment in 2005 by a weird acquaintance of mine.

Dropbox

2011-01-02T00:34:00.002-06:00

I’ve been using a service that might be useful to you. It’s called Dropbox. Basically it is online ‘cloud’ storage for some of your computer files.

If you install the software on more than one computer, it will synchronize your files on all of the machines. In other words, if you edit your conlang vocabulary file on your desktop computer at home, the changed version will be stored on the Dropbox servers and then copied to any other computers on which you have installed Dropbox.

Even if you only run the software on one computer, you can log into Dropbox via the web and grab a file if you suddenly need it when you are at work / school / whatever.

I used a vaguely similar service called box.net for a while but I am finding that I prefer the Dropbox software. (It is available for Mac, iPhone, Linux other operating systems whose names I refuse to type.)

You can read about Dropbox on Wikipedia or visit their website.

Russian cursive alphabet

2011-01-01T16:35:00.001-06:00

Idle curiosity department: The Russian cursive alphabet is interesting. Several surprises in there.

Logomaniacs (a play) portrays langnuts

2010-12-29T11:54:00.002-06:00

Billed as an “intellectual freak show,” Logomaniacs examines people whose passion for words carries them to extremes, from Georges Perec and his novel without the letter “e” to the Russian futurists and their invented language, “Zaum.” The whole article is legible at the Jersey City Independent website.

texts du jour: designing orthographies

2010-12-27T10:10:00.002-06:00

A summary of factors that need to considered when designing a writing system for a language: Factors in designing effective orthographies for unwritten languages by Michael Cahill and Elke Karan, downloadable at the SIL website. A much more detailed look at the issues is available in Karan’s thesis Writing system development and reform.

A document from unicode.org, Recommendations for creating new orthographies, gives advice about selecting existing characters from the Unicode repertoire. Lots of useful warnings in this document about the trouble you might have if you try to combine left-to-right characters with right-to-left characters, try to use a numeral or punctuation mark as an alphabetic character, etc.

the language Tango (a reverie/update)

2010-12-26T12:40:00.004-06:00

Since about 1995 I have been haunted by this desire to have a conlang made of 5-letter nouns and verbs with 2-letter conjunctions and particles. The 5-letter words all have their consonants and vowels arranged in CVCCV or CCVCV patterns. I suppose these word-shapes are inspired by Early Loglan, but I have no sympathy for loglang grammars.

Early drafts of this language were named Penta. Eventually I changed the name to Zengo, and later Dengo. Now that its form is becoming clearer, I realize I have to call it Tango. Yes, this will be a constructed language named Tango. From the Vorlin word tan combined with the Tango word lengo.

Tango pulls its vocabulary from every available source: bidza from Italian pizza, lindu from Finnish lintu, hamba from Fanagalo hamba, lengo from Japanese gengo and Papiamentu lenga with a tip of the hat to Playful English lingo.

What can you do with a language made up of 2-syllable 5-letter words and 2-letter monosyllables? One use that seems obvious is poetry. Haiku might appear spontaneously in Tango, like weeds sprouting up in freshly tilled soil. With voiced consonants being much more common than their harsh voiceless counterparts, Tango might become a good medium for singing, chanting, oratory and liturgy.

Finding vocabulary for Tango is sometimes difficult. Sometimes I can’t locate any natlang words of the right shape for a given concept. But finding a grammar has been even harder. I’m craving some sort of an English-Japanese hybrid syntax but I don’t feel confident that I can arrange such a thing.

A Klingon Christmas Carol

2010-12-25T19:25:00.003-06:00

Three years ago this very blog reported on A Klingon Christmas Carol. This year the play was performed in Chicago and received a lot of mainstream press coverage. Replying to a disrespectful comment in Slashdot, someone associated with the production wrote the following:

So let me get this straight. Our goofy little Klingon show is lame. We had massive coverage in the Chicago area in all of the major papers (Trib, Sun-Times, Daily Herald) and had tv spots on WGN twice. We got the front page of the Wall Street Journal which lead to coverage by the BBC World Service, CBC, London Times, & Daily Telegraph... and then last night we got mentioned in Conan O'Brien's monologue.... and the night before that we got mentioned in Jimmy Fallon's monologue.... Quite frankly, if this is your definition of lame, then I don't want to be anything but lame for the rest of my life.

resolutions

2010-12-24T18:52:00.005-06:00

The season for New Year’s resolutions is upon us. Personally I find it fascinating that roughly 80% of people who make such a promise to themselves are unable to keep it. This means that most of us are utterly unable to control our own behavior. Holy cow, that’s remarkable. That’s right up there with being mortal as far as Life’s Biggest Problems are concerned.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming to be a glowing exemplar of self-discipline. I’m a member of the out-of-control majority. My language projects, my investment portfolio, my physical fitness all resemble New Orleans shortly after Katrina blew through. Even the vehicle I drive has articles of clothing, bits of incoming mail, and various sundry objects randomly scattered throughout. I’m a mess.

I would like the coming year to be more successful as far as doing what Part A of me wants to do, instead of doing what Part B wants to do (which is mostly endless web-surfing and spending all of our wages on stuff from Amazon). So I’ve been reading up on the art of making and keeping resolutions.

Naturally Part B bought a book from Amazon on the topic (This Year I Will by M.J. Ryan) The book discusses the fact that many people give up on a project during “the awkward phase.” Learning a language or taking up a musical instrument, for example, will involve an initial period of being incompetent. This is rather discouraging. Perhaps it will be less daunting if one knows in advance that it is going to happen and accepts that.

(I wonder if being especially sensitive about “the awkward phase” of language learning might be what drives some people to advocate very simple constructed auxlangs.)

Another pitfall which derails many people is failing to deal with the first slip-ups intelligently. If you vow to learn three kanji every day or translate a kilobyte of the Tipitaka into your conlang every week, you need to be ready for those times when you fail to keep your promise to yourself. Don’t turn slip-ups into give-ups, says the book.

A bit of googling will turn up numerous online articles about succeeding or failing with resolutions. A study conducted at the University of Hertfordshire yielded the following results: the success rate for resolutions is highest for those who use these five techniques…

1) break the larger goal into smaller steps
2) reward yourself after performing each one of the steps
3) tell your friends about your goals
4) focus on the benefits of success
5) keep a record of your progress

global explosion of conlanging

2010-12-11T19:59:00.004-06:00

It seems like more and more creative writers are using invented languages in their works. Back in the days when I compulsively tried to keep lists of all these things, I would be stressing out trying to deal with this volume of material. But now that I’m older and wiser I’m willing to just enjoy the flow…

Nate Neal’s first graphic novel The Sanctuary has its characters speaking an invented language of symbols. In an interview with Robot 6 at comicbookresources.com, the author says:

“With a made up language the words would take on a symbolic stance that they otherwise wouldn’t have. That helps get across one of the important ideas of the book: how things get fucked up when a society thinks too symbolically. Or at least thinks too symbolically without being aware that that’s what they’re doing. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the world we live in now! The book uses symbols to convey a somewhat anti-symbolic sentiment.”

Jenna Scherer's review of the play “Blue Flower” mentions that one character’s “life becomes steeped in regret and nostalgia, which he funnels into creating a collage book and inventing a made-up language.”

The short film Ana’s Playground, which is a short-list candidate for an Academy Award nomination, uses an invented language so that the characters “could not be pegged as being from any one particular place.”

the Ojibwe word for glottal stop

2010-12-05T15:19:00.003-06:00

…is gibichitaagobii’igan.

People who are trying to keep Ojibwe alive are presently operating some total immersion schools for young children in Wisconsin and Minnesota. They sometimes find it difficult to teach math, science, and American politics in the Ojibwe language due to a lack of specialized vocabulary. Therefore some activists arranged for a meeting of fluent speakers from various communities to get together and invent/document the needed terminology.

The terms they agreed upon are documented in Ojibwe Vocabulary Project working session of July 6-8, 2009. (Downloadable.)

The introduction contains this interesting thought: “In addition to the education challenges for instruction of Ojibwe, many fluent speakers complain that when speaking about the language or certain subjects that the conversation slips into English because of vocabulary challenges. A language lives when it can be used for everything in life, not just certain parts of life.”

How many times have language designers wrestled with the conflict between having a limited size vocabulary for ease of learning and an infinitely expansible vocabulary for coping with the modern world? The native speakers of creole languages like Bislama and Papiamentu debate this quandary too. Does it make more sense to switch into whatever locally popular language has the necessary vocabulary when discussing technical matters, or can ways be found to invent the need terms internally? The organizers of this Ojibwe vocabulary workshop believe that having an insufficient vocabulary for modern terms can lessen a language’s chances of survival.

Here are some of the Ojibwe terms documented in the aforementioned publication:

gimiwanaanakwad to be a rain cloud
naasaabiigamon to be parallel
waasamoo-manidoobiiwaabik electromagnet
memeshkwajitoong dachingagindaasowin commutative property of multiplication
waa-pimibatood candidate
gashkichigewin socioeconomic background
maawandoochigewinini tax collector

There is also a list of terms for bodily functions that the puerile side of your personality will find amusing.

Here is the News

2010-11-20T10:14:00.000-06:00

The website of the American TV network ABC has brought invented languages into the public eye by writing a lengthy description of the play ‘The Memorandum.’

On undercover.fm there's a news item entitled Jessica Mauboy Re-Records Single In Simlish

The Register published a fairly long article called Speak geek: The world of made-up language.

The Hornsby and Upper North Shore Advocate (Australia) has published a brief profile of a woman who collects Esperanto books.

bilingualism delays Alzheimer's

2010-11-10T17:35:00.000-06:00

Research indicates polyglots with Alzheimer's syndrome fare better than monoglots.

Na Papiamentu, fo'i wepsait di Radio Hulanda: Hendenan ku ta papia dos idioma regularmente ta parse di ta haña síntomanan dje enfermedat di Alzheimer na edat mas avansá, kompará ku esnan ku ta papia ún idioma so, segun investigadónan kanades… Mente di bilingwonan, o sea esnan ku ta papia dos idioma, tabata mustra e mes síntomanan ku di pashènt ku ta uza ún idioma so, pero ku e diferensha ku e enfermedat tinbe ta aparesé 5 aña despues numa serka esnan bilingwal.

Here is the News

2010-11-04T13:30:00.001-05:00

The many delights of Portland's Vagabond Opera (in The Seattle Times) mentions Oshtal, "a vaguely Slavic-sounding invented language" used by the vaudeville-operatic troupe Vagabond Opera.

The theatre listings in The New York Times mention Vaclev Havel’s drama The Memorandum which features an invented language.

AustralianStage.com reviews a play called The Golden Age. In this play, "two young chaps are bushwalking when they stumble across some odd people. They turn out to be a tribe of forgotten settlers, who have, in their isolation, evolved a culture and language unique unto themselves."

any plans for 10-10-10?

2010-10-07T15:08:00.002-05:00

The date 10/10/10 is rapidly approaching. Some people believe it's good luck to start a new project on a date that has an interesting pattern in its numbers. (Even if it's not especially lucky, at least the start-date will be easy to remember.)

So, dear readers, do you have any language-related plans for the date? Are you planning to begin or re-start the study or creation of any languages?

‘sun’ and ‘moon’ conflated in one word

2010-10-07T14:55:00.002-05:00

Languages map their concepts in different ways. In English we just have the word “brother” for a male sibling, but many languages require the speaker to choose either a word for ‘older male sibling’ or ‘younger male sibling.’

English requires its speakers to distinguish between ‘the sun’ and ‘the moon’ but apparently this is not universal. From Handbook of the Seneca Language by Wallace L. Chafe comes the following quotation:

Both the sun and the moon are referred to with the one word kä:hkwa:ʔ, literally ‘the sun or moon is in it’ (that is, in the sky). Which of the two is meant can be specified by preceding the above word with ʔɛte:kha:ʔ ‘diurnal’ or sɔekha:ʔ ‘nocturnal.’ An eclipse is called ʔɛkä:hkwáhtɔʔt ‘the sun or moon will disappear.’

New York Times article on Papiamentu

2010-09-30T14:51:00.002-05:00

I totally missed this when it was published back in July but it's worth mentioning. The New York Times did a nice story about Papiamentu.

It's unlikely to happen but I think Papiamentu would make a nice choice for a global auxiliary language. Opponents of this choice often start their counter-arguments by saying Papi has a complex system of intonations. To which I reply, big deal, the correct intonation of English is also complex and non-native speakers rarely get it right; that doesn't stop them from using it as an interlingua.

still alive

2010-09-18T20:18:00.002-05:00

My job has been consuming a lot of my time and energy. I was promoted to full-time status and now have access to affordable health insurance, as well as the illusion of being a member of mainstream society.

I've been developing a secret alphabet for making private notes. Endlessly fiddling with it, developing ligatures, horizontal and vertical variants, symbols that represent common words. So much effort to make my grocery list illegible to my co-workers or landlord. Sigh! If only I had some exciting secrets to conceal.

pseudowriting

2010-08-11T20:06:00.002-05:00

Just a random thing that came up in today's web-surfing: Some children produce vaguely letter-like symbols before they learn to write properly. Here is a Google search that produces various articles which mention this phenomenon: children+pseudowriting

systems of measurement

2010-08-01T16:08:00.004-05:00

begin rant

On the net one often encounters people who advocate preserving and revitalizing endangered languages, but who advocate abolishing the colorful Anglo-American system of measurements and replacing it with the metric system.

I submit for your consideration the idea that these are contradictory wishes. If we should help the Lakota people, for example, keep their language and culture alive, why should we fight the American people who want to keep inches, Fahrenheit and pounds alive? You cannot drive in two directions at once. Either you are in favor of letting localities keep their own culture, or you are in favor of a dumbed-down Euros and kilometers culture for all 7 billion of us everywhere including those in orbit.

By the way, the strongest argument in favor of keeping pounds and ounces, inches and feet, is the very argument often brought up in opposition to them: the math is harder. Yes, it's harder to add seven and seven eighths inches plus two and a third feet, THANK GOD. Stop thinking about sex and TV and Facebook for a minute and use your f--king brain for something other than a head-implosion-preventing placeholder.

end rant

For con-culturing I like to think of units of measurement based on things that are readily available. Why not a unit of length based on the height of the average human adult, and a unit of liquid volume based on average bladder capacity? And naturally these units have to be subdivided into halves, quarters, 8ths and so forth, rather than 10ths. When you are out in the real world it is much easier to fold a piece of paper into equal halves and quarters, than it is to fold it into 10 equal parts. And if you know that piece of paper is 1/6 of a human-height length-unit tall, you can use it to measure things.

Likewise you can divide a quantity of liquid into halves by pouring it alternately into two equal-size containers. Easier than dividing it into 10ths. You see, 8ths and 16ths are natural, like tropical rainforests and dolphins. Units that divide into 10ths are unnatural, like coal-burning power plants and nuclear weapons.

no one has forgotten

2010-07-25T13:58:00.003-05:00

and no one has forgotten the Terror in Tromsø, that regrettable incident in which an obsessive linguistics student kidnapped and tortured two boys from the Vorlin tribe…

That dream-borne sentence was echoing through my head last Monday morning when my alarm clock rang.

nonsense three layers deep

2010-07-23T19:55:00.002-05:00

If you can read Esperanto and you like Vorlin, you might enjoy the description of the enhanced alphabet now available at vorlin.org

a glimpse of Rodi

2010-07-13T11:41:00.002-05:00

For the enjoyment of we conlangers who enjoy borrowing words from a large number of sources, here is an example of a natural language (or perhaps a semi-intentional argot) which took that same approach. Its name is Rodi, and it is/was spoken by a quasi-Romany or para-Gypsy band of people in Norway. Its vocabulary contains some words of Asian origin and loans "from almost all European languages."

source--> The Nordic languages: an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages
authors: Bandle, Braunmüller, Jahr, Karker, Naumann, & Teleman
publisher: Walter de Gruyter, 2005
pages: 1936-1938

As was made clear by Iversen (1945, 14), "Norw. Romany and Norw. Rodi (Rotwelsch) are two different idioms, which should well be distinguished from each other"...

With reference to the difference between the baro-vandringar ("great travllers) and the tikno-vandringar ("small travellers"), Iversen in his description of the Rodi (Rotwelsch) language in Norway points to the ethnic background of the two groups. The forefathers of the baro-vandringar were mostly genuine Gypsies; they had kept their tribal solidarity alive fairly well, had avoided external marriages, and might still claim to have some of the genuine Gypsy blood in their veins. This is not at all the case with the tikno-vandringar who "actually possess no tribal pride -- for obvious reasons, as from an ethnological point of view, they are simply Norwegians born and bred, though from of old with a certain alloy of foreign elements, especially -- as it would seem -- Germans and Romanies"...

The sound system in Rodi is Norwegian throughout, whereas Romani phonology still has markers of its alien origin... Stress falls mainly upon the first syllable in Rodi (as in most Norwegian words); in Romani it is frequently placed on the last or the penultimate syllable. In Rodi plural endings are the same as the dialect forms in the area where the Rodi speakers have been born or have been travelling around. In Romani the endings are mostly invariable and independent of the local Norwegian language...

As far as the vocabulary is concerned, one could say that "Romani has kept more firmly to the traditional, the old and the inherited in the stock of words, whereas Rodi has shown a great ability to adopt from outside and to create from inside" (Iversen 1945, 250). Among the loans from Romani in Rodi vocabulary are a number of words of Asian origin (Indian, Persian, and Armenian). Some of these words are kept alive in Rodi, but seem to be dead in the language which Rodi borrowed them from, viz Romani.

Besides these, we also find loans from almost all European languages: Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Lappish, Finnish, and from West-Slavic languages. In Norwegian Rodia there are also ca. 50 words from Latin, e.g. anum `year', astro `star', kannis `dog', matrum `mother', tönnik `shirt', vesper `evening'. Between the two regional varieties of Rodi, the South (Sørlandet) and the Southwest (Sørvestlandet), Iversen (1945, 251f.) also reports some minor differences, for example in the word stock. The "small travellers" in Sørlandet have a considerably richer vocabulary than their colleagues in the west.

Today both Norwegian Romani and Rodi (Rotwelsch) are threatened languages and must be considered dying idioms (Wiggen 1996, 153f.; Iversen 1945, 252).

"Iversen 1945" refers to
Iversen, Ragnvald (1945)
Secret Languages in Norway II.
Oslo.

OMG, a series of books called Secret Languages in Norway… must have… drool.

Internet brain damage

2010-06-19T12:43:00.002-05:00

"If a person is constantly wired, how can he or she think deeply about anything?"

There is a decent article in the June 6 New York Times describing how constant use of computers and smartphones reduces peoples' ability to focus on the here-and-now (or even to tolerate reality). Intensely focusing on one issue or prolongedly contemplating a single creative project are skills that internet addicts lose.

Multitaskers may not be as clever as they think they are; studies show that multitaskers suck at filtering out distractions and are actually slower at switching from one task to another. Netizens examined in the article are no longer able to complete a business deal in a timely manner or even bake a batch of cookies successfully because the flood of incoming e-mails, tweets and Facebook updates seems more stimulating than remembering that the food will catch fire if it is left in the oven too long.

As is often the case, readers' comments posted on the newspaper web site add some valuable insights. Here's one: "I work with groups of middle-schoolers and over just the past 5 years it's obvious that their ability to concentrate has plummeted. The annoying social intrusions of electronic media are nothing compared to the damage it inflicts on individuals who willfully ignore the signs and delude themselves into thinking it doesn't affect them."

That phrase annoying social intrusions is a gold nugget! We must never forget that communication is often a dilute form of rape. For example, imagine that you are sitting on a park bench on a pleasant day, listening to the birds sing and thinking about noun declension schemes for your new conlang. Now some stranger walks up to you and starts talking about sports or politics. She is trying to stop you from thinking about what you wanted to think about! She is preventing you from using your brain the way you wanted to, just as a rapist prevents you from using your genitals as you wanted.

Another comment posted to the article: "A few years ago, I read that Stanford, Duke and some other fine universities were giving free iPods to incoming freshman so that they could listen to professors' lectures as they walked around campus. I was stunned. Aside from my suspicion that most students would use their iPods to listen to ‘tunes’, I remembered how productive my walking time from class to class was. I'd spend that time thinking about what the professor and other students had said in class. I'd sort through it, reflect, agree, disagree, come up with other questions. If a person is constantly wired, how can he or she think deeply about anything."

Equally important, how can a constantly wired person ever be himself? The freedom to act as you want, to think your own thoughts without any worry about making the right or wrong impression on others, and the ability to decide what you will think about rather than having to deal with incoming topics hurled at you by others – these freedoms exist only when you are alone and not communicating with anyone. Every moment that you spend in the company of others or communicating with others is like a moment spent in prison or in a coma; it is time spent not-quite-living.

I predict that the net will have a devastating effect on conlangers who fall prey to it. The hive-mind will go through fads, fascinated by self-segregating morphemes one decade, diachronic sound shifts the next. Instead of seeking linguistic information from sources written contemplatively by people who actually know and understand the material – i.e. books printed on paper by publishing companies that use fact-checkers and professional editors – some conlangers will settle for wiki articles cut-and-pasted together by topic-dabblers hiding behind absurd pseudonyms.

Instead of making languages that reflect only each conlanger's own need for something that resonates as beautiful with the unique semantic orchestra of his own brain, a unique crystalline structure reflecting his own concept-map and grammar, net-addicted conlangers will suffer cross-contamination (which the rapists among us euphemistically call "cross-pollination"). Some of them will feel a desire to please others in the swarm, setting aside their own tastes as they are buffeted by the winds of the "swarm conform storm."

A decline in the number of solo projects and an increase in collaborative conlanging seem inevitable, since creating a language is a large task that requires concentration and net addicts can't concentrate. So, just as fewer and fewer people are able to write a coherent article about any topic – it now takes ten or fifty wiki participants to clumsily attempt the kind of writing that almost any individual with an IQ over 100 could do 15 years ago – there will be fewer and fewer individuals able to create a full-blown language of great originality and self-directedness.

Is there any point trying to resist this trend? Or is resistance indeed futile, and assimilation inevitable?

ULD backstage view

2010-06-12T15:31:00.003-05:00

Here is a view of the editing process. The published ULD file will be in XML format, but I prefer to work in a format that is more pleasant to look at than a friggin' nest of XML tags. I think you can click on the smallish image to get a bigger view.

ULD update

2010-06-12T12:10:00.002-05:00

Whee, here comes a brief wave of energy and optimism. Let me do something creative quick before it passes!

I've stopped working on version 2.7 of the ULD and started version 2.8

In 2.7 and all the earlier versions, the serial number of each concept indicated that concept's position in my system of classifications. Starting with 2.8 each concept gets a random ID number. That way, each user can create his/her own system of classifications that will appear just as valid as mine.

The random ID numbers also make it possible for each user to add a lot of extra items to any part of the concept list they want. If the half-dozen baseball terms in there aren't enough for your needs, you can add a hundred more items ranging from "pop-up fly" to "rosin bag." You will be able to edit your copy of the ULD like crazy with the greatest of ease. See if I care.

One more benefit of the random ID numbers: each concept can keep its ID number as we move forward into future versions. In this case, randomness adds stability.

Of course, a few of the numbers are not really random. I couldn't resist tampering with a handful of them. For example, the ID number for nycthemeron is 2400, and the ID number for "to count things" is 1234.

I'm writing clear(er) definitions for each of the concepts, adding a few more concepts, and deleting a couple that were very difficult to translate from English to other languages. This process might take several months. I've had to think about a few of the items for several hours each, to determine exactly which sense of a polysemous English word I would really want to use as the nucleus of a trying-to-be language-neutral signpost in semantic space (the final frontier).

book giveaway

2010-05-29T21:47:00.002-05:00

I finally got all the books mailed out (sorry about the delay). I will do one last batch of give-aways soon, whenever the next wave of energy and optimism comes along.

best conlang bragging EVER

2010-05-15T15:17:00.002-05:00

Sometimes we like to brag about the awesome features our conlangs have. I think the funniest, most outrageous outburst of such bragging is found in Thomas Urquhart's Logopandecteision published in 1653. You can read it here; the relevant material starts at paragraph 69.

What do you think, was Urquhart being serious or was he writing an elaborate joke? A Wikipedia article asserts the latter, but provides no reliable references which support that viewpoint.

Twitter is fun, possibly useful

2010-05-01T11:35:00.003-05:00

Twitter seemed foolish to me before I started using it. However, the ability to enter and exit a stream of short messages whenever you want, has some advantages.

You can search the stream of messages for individual words, or for hashtags such as #conlang that indicate the subject-category of a message. Even if you don't have a Twitter account, you can go to twitter.com and search for all appearances of the word lojban, for example.

If you want a daily dose of short texts in other languages to help you learn those languages, Twitter can be useful. You can find original haiku posted daily in Japanese or Esperanto. There are a few people exchanging messages in Lojban and probably in other conlangs.

Twitter is ideally suited to reading on a cellphone or other pocket device. You can set your Twitter account to relay messages from your favorite Twitter authors directly to your phone.

You can use unicode on Twitter so you can write in virtually any natural language. Considering the 140-character size limit on Twitter messages, some languages are able to pack a lot more information into each "tweet" than others; this is one area where alphabetic writing systems seem to be at a disadvantage.

My Twitter ID is @rick_harrison

misc. update

2010-03-03T23:42:00.004-06:00

I finally fixed the uld3.org website so you can download the XML file. Sorry that I delayed repairing it for so long.

In unrelated news, I have been experimenting with Twitter. What a strange phenomenon Twitter is. Some tweeple are trying to collect thousands of "followers." Others are frantically promoting their band/book/blog or multi-level marketing scheme. Some are using Twitter to keep in touch with friends and family. Some, like myself, are using it to take a few brief notes on what we are reading or thinking each day, and sending these notes out into the aether. You can read my tweets under this link.

chips ahoy

2010-03-01T15:25:00.000-06:00

usenet's alt.binaries.world-languages has fizzled out; language-nuts who do "file sharing" seem to be gravitating to sites like uz-translations dot net

I'm just sayin'

sample of Ro newsletter Roia available

2010-02-20T12:40:00.000-06:00

Ro was an auxiliary language proposal advocated mainly by its inventor and his wife in the 1920s and 1930s. It's basically a word-for-word encoding of English (minus the articles "the" and "a"). The stunning enthusiasm of its inventor for his creation is truly a wonder to behold.

And now you can behold it in a PDF file containing a few example pages from the newsletter Roia.

new issue of LD&C is out

2009-12-28T03:05:00.002-06:00

A new issue of Language Documentation and Conservation is available online.

Being a collector of foreign language dictionaries and textbooks, I have always been a big fan of this journal.

another ULD update

2009-09-07T02:31:00.002-05:00

Finally got around to doing the "levels" in the ULD vocabulary. (They are only visible in the downloadable XML file at the moment.)

There are 30 items tagged as being in level 0. These are items which are indicated as noun cases, verb inflections, or other grammatical machinations in some languages. (English in its boringness indicates them by free-standing words.)

Then level 1 (170 items) contains very high-frequency or ultra-"basic" items; followed by level 2 (715 slightly less frequent items) and level 3 (907 items, which are mostly less frequent and more specialized terms).

These levels are just my subjective impressions. They are meant to assist with automatic vocabulary creation. A computer application that makes conlang vocabularies would assign longer morphemes to level 3 items than it would give level 1 or level 2 items. The stuff in level 0 would have to be hand-crafted by the language's owner.

30+170+715+907 = 1822. There are two new entries in the lexicon: "no" (corresponding to German kein rather than nein) and "alone." These are only visible in the XML file currently; they will show up in the checklists and HTML pages later.

I keep telling myself there is an absolute limit of 1825 items for version 2.7 of the ULD. 1825=365*5 and refers to my belief that anybody can create (or learn) 5 words per day for a year and thus build up a well-rounded basic vocabulary using the ULD.

ouch

2009-04-12T11:40:00.003-05:00

My kidney stone forced me to go to the hospital, where a doctor crammed a laser into my innermost plumbing.

Which makes me think of the word ouch, an interjection expressing unexpected pain. How is this handled in other languages? Looking at Wiktionary it appears that ai, au, and [ox] are common equivalents in Indo-European languages.

Looking up ouch in some of the hardcopy dictionaries in my collection, I found the following:

Italian: ahi
Ojibwe: yawenh
Lakota: yuŋ
Esperanto: aj, aŭ, huj

Various sources for Japanese give itai, wa' (that's a "truncated wa"), or ite. It seems to me that in the anime and jdorama programs I've watched, the Japanese sometimes say itetete – a string of te syllables, unlike anything else I have heard, but vaguely similar to the noises that some English-speakers make when shivering in extreme cold.

Many of the dictionaries in my collection do not give an equivalent for ouch, which is unfortunate but not surprising. Interjections and onomatopes are often neglected by bilingual dictionary editors.

the window of opportunity

2009-03-17T12:32:00.002-05:00

Most language inventors start doing it before the age of, let's say, 25. Is this just because there is more free time for daydreaming during the school years? Are young people less likely to be insulted for engaging in creative activity than adults? Or are there physical reasons having to do with brain development?

From the BBC comes news of a study indicating that brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability begin to decline around the age of 27. "Abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60." The article is here.

If that study is confirmed by future research, perhaps good advice for young conlangers would be: Do your grammar and your conculture while you are young, then you can work on gaining fluency and creating literature in your language for the rest of your life.

book note: In the Land of Invented Languages

2009-03-14T17:52:00.002-05:00

Arika Okrent's book will be released soon. The title is In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language.

A review in Publisher's Weekly describes it thusly: "She surveys “philosophical languages” that order all knowledge into self-evident systems that turn out to be bizarrely idiosyncratic; “symbol languages” of supposedly crystalline pictographs that are actually bafflingly opaque; “basic” languages that throw out all the fancy words and complicated idioms; rigorously logical languages so rule-bound that it's impossible to utter a correct sentence; “international languages,” like Esperanto, that unite different cultures into a single idealistic counterculture; and whimsical “constructed languages” that assert the unique culture and worldview of women, Klingons or chipmunks."

You can read an article Okrent wrote about Esperanto culture several years ago here.

an idea for anime fans

2009-02-20T13:38:00.003-06:00

If you download anime shows via bittorrents or other means, here's an idea to ponder... how about obtaining the "raw" (untranslated) version of your favorite show and creating subtitles for it in your own conlang?

If you're not into anime you could do the same with any live-action TV show that you can grab off the net. Imagine seeing Lost or an Australian football match or a classic Star Trek episode with subtitles in your own language.

Here is a link to a Google search for subtitle-creating software.

Sona on YouTube

2009-02-16T22:20:00.002-06:00

Never would have expected this to happen: a YouTube video about word formation in Sona. There has also been a slight increase in activity in the Sona forum.

I like the look and sound of Sona but can't seem to hold the "radicals" in my memory for any length of time. So, I fear I will never gain fluency in the language.

It's fascinating to watch how interest in Sona ebbs and flows over time. The pattern seems to be this: one person gets very interested for a month or two, then the passion fades a little and he/she puts Sona "on the back burner." A year later, somebody new comes along who is very very interested, but there is nobody else equally ardent at that time. So a self-sustaining chain reaction never occurs; little or no communication in Sona ever happens.

Der Spiegel article

2008-12-24T13:48:00.002-06:00

Der Spiegel has done a nice article about constructed languages. It's here. If you can’t read German you can paste the text into the Google machine translator.

the magazine, again

2008-12-21T22:04:00.004-06:00

I celebrated the solstice by planting 5 trees: three pines and two "wild black cherry" (Prunus serotina). This is how I start the process of editing a new edition of the magazine Invented Languages.

Although, truth be told, not enough copies of the first edition were distributed to require that much environmental offset. Hopefully by the time we get to the 3rd or 4th edition we will really be re-purposing 5 trees' worth of cellulose.

We have enough material on hand to fill another edition but there is not yet a compelling lead article... I hope something a little exciting or useful will fly in over the transom to serve as a beginning for this edition.

So much energy is being flushed down the internet – so many good ideas are idly dissipated in disconnected forum postings or blog entries that sink down further and further into the darkness of the archives, eventually getting compressed into some sort of electronic coal, I imagine… What a waste! Let's make something real, something of lasting value.

OMFG - a LOLcat Bible

2008-12-13T12:40:00.002-06:00

and we're BACK from a vacation in the Twilight Zone.

I have been shocked to discover that there is a project to translate the Bible into LOLcat-speak. It is here. A sample:

At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

By the way, "twilight zone" used to be a perfectly respectable term among radio communications hobbyists; it referred to the part of the Earth covered by twilight. Now it's called the "gray zone." Feh.

(Why do people say "meh" when they really mean "feh"?)

semi-retired from Usenet

2008-11-02T17:13:00.002-06:00

In recent years activity in my favorite Usenet newsgroups* has declined. I think it has reached a point where I can no longer justify paying $15 per month for high-quality access to them. So I’ve closed my newshosting.com account.

Yep, I feel kinda sad about it. But fads in technology change. The telegraph operators used to have interesting textual discussions with one another during the wee small hours of the night when they were not passing commercial traffic. That was then; this is now.

I guess I can still monitor the discussion-oriented groups via Google Groups.

*my favorite groups were:
alt.binaries.world-languages
alt.binaries.mac.applications
alt.language.artificial

UK bureaucracy blasted for excessive translations

2008-11-01T15:00:00.001-05:00

The National Health Service in Britain spends 255,000 pounds annually to provide its NHS Direct telephone service in a variety of languages including Cherokee, Akan, Homa and Esperanto.

Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, says: “NHS Direct seem to have lost touch with reality… If they have surplus money, ordinary families need it back – there's no reason to waste it on Esperanto medical tips.”

Complete newspaper article under this link.

Book of the Week: Gestuno

2008-10-16T05:59:00.004-05:00

Resuming this series of posts now in which I give you a tour of my book collection. Here we have:

Gestuno
International Sign Language of the Deaf
Langage Gestuel International des Sourds
The revised an enlarged book of signs agreed and adopted by the Unification of Signs Commission of the World Federation of the Deaf

Published on behalf of the World Federation of the Deaf by the British Deaf Association. Copyright 1975. ISBN 0-9504187-0-6.

(Click on thumbnail for larger view.)

The copy in my collection is ex-library. I found it on eBay and paid about $50 for it. It's interesting in an abstract way; sometimes I leaf through it while sitting in bed trying to get to sleep.

To what degree can any given sign language be considered an intentional or constructed language? This question can be controversial. There is no room for argument with regard to Gestuno - its vocabulary was unquestionably intentionally selected from existing sign languages by a committee. (But the book doesn't say a word about syntax/grammar.) So to some degree Gestuno is a constructed language.

If you want to learn more about this language, please do a Google search and read a variety of viewpoints. Remember, if you limit your reading to Wikipedia, you will be limiting your knowledge to that which the biggest bullies and the people with the worst cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder think you should have. (“Consensus reality” is an oxymoron.)

OMG I'm obsessed LOL

2008-10-12T15:29:00.003-05:00

My brain won't let me read or write about anything other than Papiamentu. It happens sometimes; my brain locks up like a Windows computer. Just have to let it run its course.

Codex Seraphinianus

2008-09-30T06:45:00.002-05:00

If you're not familiar with the Codex Seraphinianus, you might enjoy learning about it. There's a blog entry with some sample pages here, starting about two-thirds down the page.

burning the relative clauses candle at both ends

2008-09-24T03:58:00.002-05:00

I think it's fun to mark both the beginning and end of relative clauses in a conlang. Vorlin did it, and someday some other lang o' mine will do it. There's a nifty post about natlangs that do it on the Far Outliers blog.

cross-pollination my ass

2008-09-19T00:52:00.004-05:00

Several months ago, a certain organization suggested that it would be wonderful if most of the active online forums about conlanging moved onto servers controlled by that group. Supposed benefits would be convenience and cross-pollination.

This idea was, for me personally, the most annoying thing I have ever seen in a forum about language creation. Whenever I have trouble waking up in the morning I just recall this proposal and then wham I'm wide awake with elevated blood pressure and heart-rate.

Convenient it would be, certainly. Instead of having one login to view and post in Conlang-L, and another for ZBB, and other sets of IDs and passwords for whatever else, with one login you'd be aboard several forums.

But think of the consequences. This would make it even easier for the most socially aggressive 15 or 20 people to dominate every conlanging forum on earth. There would be no sanctuary, no refuge, no escape. Quiet little estuaries where you can get away from the extroverts are precious, and any proposal that would reduce the viability or individuality of lesser forums should be resisted IMHO.

The other consequence not mentioned in the proposal is that forums which used to be hosted independently would suddenly be dependent on the organization. Dependent people are more likely to donate money and follow orders. That's good for the organization; not so good for the people.

As for cross-pollination, well, nobody gets more cross-pollination than a drone in a Borg cube. Have you ever noticed that nobody in Star Fleet ever yells "Beam me over to that Borg cube right now so that I can get assimilated and join the collective!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe there's a reason for that.

Well, I just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading :-)

one folktale in a zillion languages

2008-09-14T04:28:00.002-05:00

Just stumbled across this Low Saxon folktale translated into many languages. Several constructed languages and some of my favorite pidgins and creoles are included. This might be a useful resource for people looking for a short text to use for comparing and showcasing languages.

added a couple o' links

2008-09-11T01:24:00.002-05:00

Over there on the left you'll see a list of "informative blogs." Just added The Ideophone and Ryan's Linguistics Blog.

I know about the famous blogs like Language Hat but there's no point in me linking to them; everybody else under the sun links to them.

Dengo update

2008-09-06T23:58:00.002-05:00

Dengo (formerly called Zengo, and before that, Penta) is my conlang made mostly of 5-letter words. Just an idea that keeps bubbling on the back burner of my brain. I have made surprisingly little progress considering how long I've been thinking about it.

But I have made one decision. I will go ahead with the idea of changing most unvoiced consonants to their voiced counterparts when importing words. So pizza becomes bidza and Finnish lintu (bird) becomes lindu.

I still have no idea what the grammar will be like. Obviously most words will have to be isolating and uninflected to preserve the 5-letter aesthetic of the language. Beyond that, the muses have revealed nothing yet.

Got time on your hands? Check out the top 20 Google search results for quinquiliteral and quinqueliteral. The former produces some interesting language desriptions while the latter produces mostly definitions of the word.

no resonances in newly-made languages? huh what?

2008-08-31T15:04:00.004-05:00

In a blog called Shop Talk, cantueso expresses an old prejudice against constructed languages: "In a natural language almost all words carry a kind of ballast as if they were tied to each other from way back. Almost none are neutral, but some are more classy, others a bit old, others slangy or technical or only used by kids or typical of old men... And that is why a real language is not comparable to any artificial construct."

Cantueso is beating up on Esperanto, inaccurately, because Esperanto does have archaic words, new words, words that are no longer used due to political correctness e.g. lunatiko, swear words, idioms that some people use and others avoid– the whole nine yards.

But I would argue that even richer resonances exist within any artlang that one person has made solely for his/her own pleasure. In a personal language where each word has been handcrafted and carefully tuned so that it will sound right in a sentence, aesthetic resonances abound. Not the kind of resonance that makes you hate a word because your Phys Ed instructor in high school mispronounced it or because your least favorite politician overused it, granted, but internally generated resonances rather than extraneous ones.

Wouldn't you agree that the voluntary resonances built into an conlang by choice are to be preferred over those imposed upon our natlangs by vile people that we were forced to associate with?

language archives on glass disks

2008-08-27T18:18:00.003-05:00

Recently several constructed language forums have had messages from conlangers who lost precious data due to drive crashes or corrupted files, and discussions of how rapidly digital storage media become obsolete. If your mother stored her conlang on 8-inch floppies back in the 1970s you would have to find someone who collects and maintains obsolete equipment to read the data now, if the disks are still readable.

Hard drives, burn-em-yourself CD-R disks, flash memory – all these media have limited lifespans.

SFGate has a news item regarding the Rosetta Project's efforts to save data about the world's languages, most of which are endangered. They are using glass disks with data micro-etched on them.

"The groups say the Earth's languages are rapidly disappearing and they are concerned with the fragility of historical recordkeeping in a digital age."

Interesting and inspiring.