a Tango word for crying

 
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

 
(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

 
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

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

 
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

 
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

 
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.