ULD update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.