another ULD update

Finally got around to doing the "levels" in the ULD vocabulary. (They are only visible in the downloadable XML file at the moment.)

There are 30 items tagged as being in level 0. These are items which are indicated as noun cases, verb inflections, or other grammatical machinations in some languages. (English in its boringness indicates them by free-standing words.)

Then level 1 (170 items) contains very high-frequency or ultra-"basic" items; followed by level 2 (715 slightly less frequent items) and level 3 (907 items, which are mostly less frequent and more specialized terms).

These levels are just my subjective impressions. They are meant to assist with automatic vocabulary creation. A computer application that makes conlang vocabularies would assign longer morphemes to level 3 items than it would give level 1 or level 2 items. The stuff in level 0 would have to be hand-crafted by the language's owner.

30+170+715+907 = 1822. There are two new entries in the lexicon: "no" (corresponding to German kein rather than nein) and "alone." These are only visible in the XML file currently; they will show up in the checklists and HTML pages later.

I keep telling myself there is an absolute limit of 1825 items for version 2.7 of the ULD. 1825=365*5 and refers to my belief that anybody can create (or learn) 5 words per day for a year and thus build up a well-rounded basic vocabulary using the ULD.

ouch

My kidney stone forced me to go to the hospital, where a doctor crammed a laser into my innermost plumbing.

Which makes me think of the word ouch, an interjection expressing unexpected pain. How is this handled in other languages? Looking at Wiktionary it appears that ai, au, and [ox] are common equivalents in Indo-European languages.

Looking up ouch in some of the hardcopy dictionaries in my collection, I found the following:

Italian: ahi
Ojibwe: yawenh
Lakota: yuŋ
Esperanto: aj, aŭ, huj

Various sources for Japanese give itai, wa' (that's a "truncated wa"), or ite. It seems to me that in the anime and jdorama programs I've watched, the Japanese sometimes say itetete – a string of te syllables, unlike anything else I have heard, but vaguely similar to the noises that some English-speakers make when shivering in extreme cold.

Many of the dictionaries in my collection do not give an equivalent for ouch, which is unfortunate but not surprising. Interjections and onomatopes are often neglected by bilingual dictionary editors.

the window of opportunity

Most language inventors start doing it before the age of, let's say, 25. Is this just because there is more free time for daydreaming during the school years? Are young people less likely to be insulted for engaging in creative activity than adults? Or are there physical reasons having to do with brain development?

From the BBC comes news of a study indicating that brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability begin to decline around the age of 27. "Abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60." The article is here.

If that study is confirmed by future research, perhaps good advice for young conlangers would be: Do your grammar and your conculture while you are young, then you can work on gaining fluency and creating literature in your language for the rest of your life.

book note: In the Land of Invented Languages

Arika Okrent's book will be released soon. The title is In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language.

A review in Publisher's Weekly describes it thusly: "She surveys “philosophical languages” that order all knowledge into self-evident systems that turn out to be bizarrely idiosyncratic; “symbol languages” of supposedly crystalline pictographs that are actually bafflingly opaque; “basic” languages that throw out all the fancy words and complicated idioms; rigorously logical languages so rule-bound that it's impossible to utter a correct sentence; “international languages,” like Esperanto, that unite different cultures into a single idealistic counterculture; and whimsical “constructed languages” that assert the unique culture and worldview of women, Klingons or chipmunks."

You can read an article Okrent wrote about Esperanto culture several years ago here.

an idea for anime fans

If you download anime shows via bittorrents or other means, here's an idea to ponder... how about obtaining the "raw" (untranslated) version of your favorite show and creating subtitles for it in your own conlang?

If you're not into anime you could do the same with any live-action TV show that you can grab off the net. Imagine seeing Lost or an Australian football match or a classic Star Trek episode with subtitles in your own language.

Here is a link to a Google search for subtitle-creating software.

Sona on YouTube

Never would have expected this to happen: a YouTube video about word formation in Sona. There has also been a slight increase in activity in the Sona forum.

I like the look and sound of Sona but can't seem to hold the "radicals" in my memory for any length of time. So, I fear I will never gain fluency in the language.

It's fascinating to watch how interest in Sona ebbs and flows over time. The pattern seems to be this: one person gets very interested for a month or two, then the passion fades a little and he/she puts Sona "on the back burner." A year later, somebody new comes along who is very very interested, but there is nobody else equally ardent at that time. So a self-sustaining chain reaction never occurs; little or no communication in Sona ever happens.

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.)