no one has forgotten

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

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

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

"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

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

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.