May 2005 Weblog

May 2005 Weblog	Advanced
This Month's Posts: UPSID Down · Star Warsle · A Hitch in the Schedule · No Fine Wine Before Its Time · Thanks for All The Fish Next Month's Entries UPSID Down - 5/20/05 - 3:38 pm Christian Hanard writes, "Exploring your database for African languages, I found only Amharic having 'voiceless, bilabial, plosive' segment, i.e /p/. Even Spanish doesn't have this segment! Where can I find the sources from which you extracted this data?" F. Wood writes, "You report 35 as the phonemic inventory for Zulu, including only four vowels. Essentially all authorities on the ground in Africa report almost sixty consonants and five vowels. How did you arrive at such a large mismatch to the conventional understanding in South Africa?" I've always clearly indicated the possibility of error with my conversion of the UPSID database. I first put up my UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) conversion out of frustration that this data was not readily available in some form. I'm a big fan of UPSID (using its aggregate data to guide the design of Kali-sise). Can someone with Mac Prolog check to see if my conversion reflects the Mac Prolog data? If not, I can try to fine-tune my conversion process. If my HTML pages do match, then the Prolog implementation is wrong. Please contact me with any ideas. Thanks! Star Warsle - 5/19/05 - 7:03 am Chowbasa! I feel obliged to write about Star Wars, but I confess I've gone from rampant fanboi (who had all the toys, once watched the original three movies back to back in the theatre, and who knows the Huttese for "hello" off the top of my head) to this sad point: I'm buying tickets for 20 of my coworkers to go see the movie today and I'm not going with them. I really don't care anymore. Thanks to Sith's PG-13 rating, I'll probably end up seeing the Heffalump movie with my daughter while my wife takes our three sons to see Sith. She's excited. (Don't tell her Harrison Ford isn't in this one either.) So I'm not in the Star Wars mood, but I did enjoy these two Language Log posts: Speak this way I do because wiser than I actually am I sound Yoda's syntax the Tribune analyzes; supply more details I will! But Weird Al Yankovich summed up my feelings best. I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda S-O-D-A soda I saw the little runt sitting there on a log I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said Yoda Y-O-D-A Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda Well I've been around but I ain't never seen A guy who looks like a Muppet but he's wrinkled and green Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand How he can raise me in the air just by raising his hand Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda -- Weird Al Yankovic, "The Star Wars Song," to the tune of "Lola" by the Kinks Me jooz koo, Star Wars. A Hitch in the Schedule - 5/18/05 - 10:07 pm I have fallen woefully behind in answering e-mail and updating the site, thanks to a hectic travel schedule and general busyness at home and work. I had ambitions for writing something about A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but don't have the time and the moment has passed. However, two conlangers did chime in: Zompist with a Hitchhiker's rant about criticisms of the movie and Jose Martinez with a Hitchhiker's comic strip. Since he stole one of my joke's last week :-), I'm encouraging Zompist to have Bob do a scathing comic review of his work . No Fine Wine Before Its Time - 5/02/05 - 12:01 am I wanted to be one of the first people to wish Dave Winer a happy 50th birthday. His birthday wish was for links to his Scripting News weblog. I first read about Dave in the late 1980s in a magazine article in MacWorld or MacUser about his founding of UserLand Software to make scripting tools for the Macintosh. I remember a picture of him by his swimming pool in his house. I remember thinking that "UserLand" was a great name for a software company. When I stopped being an industry analyst and co-founded my own software company in 1993, I was thrilled when shortly thereafter Dave started sending out informal e-mail newsletters, which he jokingly called DaveNet. We didn't have an office, and my partner and I typically worked from our own homes, so it was pretty lonely, coding all day and night. Each DaveNet was a welcome relief and a reminder of the wider industry I wanted to be part of, as a software developer this time. Dave had written an interesting bit of code that would send the newsletter to six people at a time: in the "To:" line you would see five other subscribers, selected at random. This was in the days before privacy concerns, and the randomness was a subtle networking aid. Now this was also in the days before spam, so imagine my surprise one day when Bill Gates hit Reply-All to six of us for Dave's piece, "Bill Gates vs. The Internet"! DaveNets have gone the way of the dinosaur. We used to think the dinosaurs all went extinct, but the nimble ones evolved into birds. DaveNet evolved into Scripting.com, the longest continuously running weblog. What does all of this have to do with Langmaker.com, you wonder? Well, Langmaker.com also started as a newsletter (Model Languages) before evolving into a website. Inspired by Scripting.com, I evolved its home page from a changelog into a weblog. And because Dave co-invented RSS, I added an RSS feed to Langmaker.com. If you subscribe to any RSS feeds, you have Dave to thank for popularizing the format, and I hope you'll join me in wishing him a happy birthday! Thanks for All The Fish - 5/01/05 - 9:59 pm Langmaker.com was named by PC Magazine this week in a cover story as one of the "Top 100 Sites you didn't know you couldn't live without": This site for hobbyist model language inventors invites you to get lost in topics like Gymnastics with Onomastics, which discusses naming conventions, and Emulating Tolkien, which celebrates the creator of such popular languages as Quenya, Sindarin, and Adûnaic. Thanks to John Quijada, creator of Ithkuil, for pointing this out to me. Thanks to the volunteers who help keep the directories updated. Thanks to you readers for all your submissions to the directories! This may be the oddest weblog on the Internet, and it's certainly grown far larger than I ever imagined. I'm truly honored, shocked and humbled at the recognition from a mainstream publication. My aim has always been to increase awareness of our unique hobby, so that -- eventually -- when you tell people you invent languages for a hobby, they know what you're talking about. Thanks to PC Magazine, and thanks to the Academy. Prior Month's Entries

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