Der Spiegel article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.