India’s PM plans to promote Sanskrit

 
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

 
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

 
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”

 
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

 
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!

 
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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

50 days without speech

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.