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This Month's Posts: Countdown Counts ·
Hop Off Hotpop ·
Counting the Languages that Count ·
300th Floor Added to Tower of Babel
Next Month's Entries Countdown Counts - 5/20/04 - 11:02 pmDavid Peterson wrote in:These are some observations I noted on the recent Top 100 Conlang Countdown. Of the 100 languages listed...- 22 are auxiliary languages of one kind or another.
- 53 are languages that were created for "practical" purposes (e.g., for a novel, for international communication, for a movie, etc.) by "professionals".
- 15 are by Tolkien.
- 7 are, strictly speaking, not languages (Nadsat, Futurama, Parseltongue, Prototype Worlds, Anglo-Saxon Computerese, Klaatu's Language, and Speedtalk), and Furbish is close to being number 8.
- 6 are English.
- 23 have some version of one of the following words in their title: earth/world, euro, international, language/linguo, new/nova, old/ancient, tongue/speak.
He had more to say, but unfortunately the GlobalSCAPE CuteSite feedback form cuts off long responses -- sorry about that! (I'll replace it once work lets me catch up with fun things.)
I don't really see anything wrong with dialects (Nadsat, Anglo-Saxon Computerese, Prototype Worlds) and language sketches (Klaatu's Language, Speedtalk) being popular. I enjoy a good language sketch.
Feel free to contact me with other analyses of the most popular 100.
Hop Off Hotpop - 5/16/04 - 11:27 amAll submissions on this site were forwarded to my hotpop.com account. Unfortunately, their site has been down since 5/13/04 3:42 PM EDT. If you submitted anything between then and 5/16/04 8:10 AM EDT, it has been lost, and you will need to resubmit it. I'm sorry for the inconvenience -- it was beyond my control. I changed the e-mail account used by the site this morning. All outstanding updates that I received have been processed, so check the page you were updating to see if your changes made it.
I have 88 new submissions in my In Box at the moment, but have been too busy to process them. Hopefully later in the week I can get to them.
Counting the Languages that Count - 5/05/04 - 9:27 amReetash writes, "How many types of natural languages are there all over the world and in which countries are they spoken?"
Some estimate there are 6,000 languages, though the number is impossible to determine, since languages often form a dialectal continuum. For instance, imagine Dialect A, B and C. Dialects A and B are mutually understandable, and Dialects B and C are mutually understandable, but Dialects A and C are not. Dialects A and C could be considered different languages, but how would you count Dialect B?
As to the second question, with fewer than 300 countries, it is obvious that most countries have many different native languages. Check Ethnologue for one database of languages indicating the countries where they are spoken.
300th Floor Added to Tower of Babel - 5/04/04 - 7:57 amThanks to Marwan Mohammed Zahari for submitting the 300th Babel Text, a personal translation into Malay! I love the first sentence, Maka seluruh dunia mempunyai satu bahasa dan pertuturan yang sama, as two conlangs take their names from Malay words used there: Dunia and Bahasan.
When I first suggested using the Babel Text to compare how languages render a specific text, back in 1995, I never anticipated it would become so popular. If you enjoy reading the Babel Texts, let me know what you look for in a translation and what you specifically enjoy about reading others' Babel Texts.
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