29 May 2010

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.

15 May 2010

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.

01 May 2010

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