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July 2005 Weblog   Advanced

This Month's Posts: The Language of the Month Club · Lang Sung Blue · Abjads Abjugated from Vowels · Kaor, Chaos · Face the FAQs · Conlang Conjunction · Scotty Beamed Up · Scoring Old Skourene · Dead Letter Office · Abjad Abracadabra · Someday Your Prince Will Come · Constellation of Conlangs · Time's Up for Countdown · Top This · Loanword Ranger · Kamakawi Kamikazi · Engendering Karklak · Babelfishing the Babel Text · X Marks the Spot · Dragging On · Throwed out the English Kings · Flagging Attention · Grazie, Mauro · Glossy Glossaries

Next Month's Entries

The Language of the Month Club - 7/31/05 - 7:44 pm
BobbyO writes:
Unilang.org , a site dedicated to the study and teaching of natlangs, has recently started a "learn-a-language-a-month". They pick one or two languages, and challenge people to learn as much as they can in one month. I think this would be a fun exercise for the conlang community.

Natlangs require a few years of study in most situations to become proficient enough to do anything but say hello and order food...but many conlangs are designed for ease of use, and could be better candidates for this type of exercise.

Choose some languages with a good web presence, good lessons, and see who can do what with it in one month. Some recommendations: Toki Pona, Romana, Somish, Mondlango, Esperanto, Kali-sise, Meriate et Darae or Lojban.

Anybody can make a language: it's teaching and spreading the language that makes it more than just a secret vice.

Lang Sung Blue - 7/28/05 - 8:11 pm
The Haijin writes:
I am attempting to construct an artlang that would be exclusively sung. The (musical) intervals used would be a part of each vowel and approximate, and be an integral part of each phoneme and word meaning.

I'm stumped on the writing system for it, though. It seems like I'd need to invent a script, but I'd also like to be able to type said language without using a different diacritic for each vowel-tone.

Also, do you know of any other conlangs (or, heck, natlangs) that are exclusively sung?
The most famous musical conlang is Solresol (see its profile for Stephen Rice's eloquent defense of its importance). The most recent I'm aware of is Eaiea, which - unlike Solresol - uses all twelve notes of the musical chromatic scale.

As for natlangs, check out whistled languages , of which Silbo Gomero is the most famous. A whistled language can evolve out of a tonal language.

Finally, as for representing your musical language with a neography, you could design an alphabet if you restricted yourself to three or four scales of twelve notes each, for example.

Abjads Abjugated from Vowels - 7/25/05 - 7:52 pm
Madyaas writes:
This is in response to Abjad Abracadabra.
"In Latheb, the vowel diacritics are completely independent, and not joined to their consonants, and the mark for one vowel is always the same, independent of with what consonant it is used. Also the consonants do not change their shapes depending on which vowel they are used with."
If that's the case, then aren't most of the Indic scripts considered abjads then? The vowel diacritics are completely independent (for the most part, in many of the insular scripts they are such as in the Tagalog script) of what consonant they are used with, and the consonants don't change their shapes either.

I thought that abjads were consonantal alphabets that had optional vowel marking, and anything that required vowel marks was classed as an abugida? So, if Latheb has optional vowel marking, then yes, I can agree with Matthias. But if it's used and needed, then I agree with Ethan Dickey's assertion that it's an abugida.
Actually, abugidas can be thought of as regularized syllabaries where each symbol represents a consonant-vowel pair and where all symbols represent syllables with a single base vowel. To override this inherent vowel and specify a different vowel (or no vowel, for consonant clusters), diacritics must be used. Since Latheb symbols do not have an inherent vowel (e.g., Latheb 'K' represents /k/ not, for instance, /ka/), the Latheb writing system is an abjad.

Kaor, Chaos - 7/24/05 - 7:27 pm
Suzette Haden Elgin in her blog recently introduced me to Tenser, said the Tensor , who has a subcategory of posts called Linguistics in SF , which led me to his appropriate criticisms of Barsoomian language . (Got that?!)

Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoomian series is more "scientific romance" than "science fiction", full of plot holes, coincidences and undeveloped ideas: chaotic narrative. Yet it was inspiring for its time, and the Barsoomian language is one of the few fictional languages (as opposed to auxiliary languages) that was around in 1900. For me, it will remain a beloved favorite, despite its many obvious flaws.

Face the FAQs - 7/24/05 - 8:01 am
Some updated answers to some common questions:
Q. Do you publish everything that is submitted?
A. We publish almost all new submissions, but only about two-thirds of submitted neologisms.

Q. How long until my submission is posted?
A. It can take up to eight weeks. We're all volunteers with jobs, schoolwork, families, conlangs of our own and plans for world domination (conworld domination, that is). We do eventually get to all submissions. The Langmaker.com Directory Statistics page shows, among other items, the last time we updated a specific directory. Feel free to contact me with questions about a specific submission. And if you are really bothered by our slowness, volunteer!

Q. How long until my submission is shown on the home page?
A. Once it is uploaded to the directory, it can take up to 31 days before your item is featured on the home page, if it is shown on the home page at all. Repeated changes within a month aren't published on the home page, nor are what I consider to be minor submissions (perhaps you've just started your language page, and it doesn't have much detail yet).
I'm sorry if this sounds discouraging. We really do welcome all your submissions, and we do get to them eventually.

To put this in perspective, every other conlang directory that started in the mid-1990s eventually gave up because of the sheer volume of submissions. I personally gave up on Langmaker.com at one point, not updating it between May of 2000 and March of 2002. Site traffic doubled in 2001 anyway.

I took that continued interest as a positive sign and decided to write a program to automate the site updates, removing much of the tedium. We've been going steadily ever since. I can still update every fortnight or so, confident the site is churning out daily news and headlines from that activity.

So, by all means, go submit something!

Conlang Conjunction - 7/23/05 - 4:00 pm
WhatConlang confabulation and dinner
WhenSaturday, July 30, 2005, 4 pm EDT
Where Shoenhof's, Cambridge, MA, USA
WhoKeith "Talideon.com" Gaughan
Mark "Zompist.com" Rosenfelder
Jeffrey "Langmaker.com" Henning
You?
Zomp suggested Schoenhof's as the meeting place, as it is the oldest foreign language book dealer and the fourth oldest bookstore in the United States. Seems perfect for a bunch of language geeks.

We can discuss separately where would be a good place for dinner. Please contact me if you can attend!

Scotty Beamed Up - 7/23/05 - 12:27 am
I was very saddened to learn that James Doohan died. One item omitted from the several obituaries I read was Mr. Doohan's role in creating Klingon, here summarized by Marc Okrand:
The Klingon dialogue in Star Trek: The Motion Picture was devised by James Doohan and spoken by Mark Lenard, who, of course, played the Klingon commander in that film. My understanding is that Doohan recorded the dialogue on tape and Lenard then listened to the tape and wrote down what he heard in a way that would help him learn the lines. To the best of my knowledge, Lenard's handwritten transcription of this tape is the only written version of what Doohan made up. (There was more made up than actually ended up in the film. Some of this additional dialogue can be heard -- though without benefit of subtitles -- in a scene where we see the Klingon commander on a viewscreen on a Federation monitoring station. But the Federation folks are talking though all of this, so the Klingon dialogue can't be heard very clearly.) I don't know whether at the time Doohan made the recording he or Lenard or anybody else knew which phrases would go with which subtitles or whether subtitles were changed after the filming was done. (Having said that, the command meaning "fire [a torpedo]!" -- which I transcribed as {baH} but which sounds kind of like {maH} -- must have always had that meaning, since it's there a couple of times. [The {H} is pronounced like the final {ch} in the name of the composer Bach.])
Out of all his Star Trek scenes, one of the most poignant is when Scotty's nephew is killed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. James Doohan will be missed. Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!

Scoring Old Skourene - 7/22/05 - 5:10 pm
"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" Zompist has published his Old Skourene grammar (a Lenani-Littoral language), just in time for the weekend. I haven't had a chance to read it myself yet, but take a look and then join the ZBB discussion of it, "Lenani is up".

Dead Letter Office - 7/18/05 - 7:49 am
Pam P. asks, "Do you still have a newsletter?"

I no longer write new issues. Langmaker.com originally began as a web site to list the archives of the Model Languages newsletter, which I sent by e-mail in 1995 and 1996. The site ended up being more interesting to me than the newsletter and has been my focus ever since.

Abjad Abracadabra - 7/17/05 - 7:10 am
Mattias Persson writes:
I saw that Ethan Dickey had changed the script type of my Latheb. He had chosen Abugida, but Latheb is an Abjad, which is almost always fully pointed, though (which might render it to be called an alphabet, but it is definitely not an abugida!).

For me, an abugida is a script like the Ethiopic script , in which the characters contain both consonants and vowels, but in a visible liaison, so the two parts can easily be identified (in contrast to a full syllabary, in which the characters can not be analyzed in their constituent parts, as in Japanese Katakana for example).

In Latheb, the vowel diacritics are completely independent, and not joined to their consonants, and the mark for one vowel is always the same, independent of with what consonant it is used. Also the consonants do not change their shapes depending on which vowel they are used with.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, Mattias. I've made the change. We also maintain an index of neographies by script type, which can help illustrate your point.

Someday Your Prince Will Come - 7/16/05 - 7:03 am
Harry Potter coverHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out today, and Curlyjimsam writes in to describe his Harry Potter page:
J.K. Rowling's languages, which appear in the Harry Potter books, are not particularly detailed to our knowledge — indeed, it is highly possible that she has thought very little of them beyond what actually appears in the books. Nonetheless, what facts are available can still be collected for the interest of conlangers and general fans of Rowling's work.

Constellation of Conlangs - 7/15/05 - 2:36 pm
The just-completed Top 200 Conlang Countdown is an unabashed popularity contest based on web traffic. To counterbalance it, for the second half of this year, I want to highlight languages with solid web presences, regardless of their popularity.

Last April, Jordan Kay suggested having site visitors give 1-10 ratings of languages. Unfortunately, we don't have enough visitors to create ratings of much reliability (heck, only 14 of our 187 books have ratings). With 1,414 conlangs as I write this, I realized I would need an automated rating system.

Accordingly, last year, I came up with a methodology for rating the web presence of each conlang. I further refined that methodology this week (frankly because it rated a number of my conlangs too high, leading me to add two factors to the calculations, and lower their ratings in the process!). My unachieved goal was to have the methodology fairly evenly distribute 5-star ratings, coming up with the same number of 5-star, 4.5-star, 4.0-star, 3.5-star ratings, etc. In other words, conlangs are graded to the curve.

For the rest of the year, I will highlight a Conlang Star of the Day on the home page. Each subsequent day's language will have a slightly higher rating than the one the day before. As the reviews progress, let me know if you disagree with the ratings, and why, so that I can fine-tune the algorithm. Right now the rating system takes into account 12 factors; over time, I will add a few more.

At the end of the year, I will unveil the ratings for all the conlangs and put them on their profiles. Next year, ratings will be dynamically calculated and will change frequently, even if you haven't changed your web site or conlang-profile listing.

Finally, the algorithm isn't rating the language: just the web presence of the language. Build a more thorough web site and your conlang will get a better rating, even if it is the blandest Esperantido.

As always, the primary goal of Langmaker.com is to encourage interest in one another's conlangs. I hope you will use the Conlang Star of the Day to familiarize yourself with some of the languages you've missed. Enjoy!

Time's Up for Countdown - 7/12/05 - 10:26 am
I hope you've enjoyed the 2005 countdown of the Top 200 conlangs, which comes to an end today. This is the third year I've done a countdown, though it is the first year I've counted down the Top 200. I had a number of goals in mind:
  • First, to get you to visit the site each day :-) or better yet to subscribe to the RSS feed.
  • Second, to showcase a conlang for the day so that you would spend some time looking at it. With over 1,400 conlangs in the directory now, it's important to me to direct your attention to noteworthy languages.
  • Finally, so that the site would constantly appear fresh (which is also the reason for the random elements on right pane of the home page), especially during those times when I'm too busy to update it.
I decided to count down the Top 200 this year instead of the Top 100 because it would get me halfway through the year (I think I started the year featuring #183 on the home page).

Tune in tomorrow to see what will carry us through the rest of the year, while still meeting my three goals above.

Top This - 7/11/05 - 8:14 am
David J. Peterson writes in:
Awhile back I mentioned that I thought of an idea about creating a kind of tag image file that could be added to someone's website to indicate that they were listed on the Top 200. Well, I went about creating some example tags. First, though, I did an edit of the Langmaker logo. The letters were kind of blocky, so I touched them up a little. I'm no expert at that kind of stuff, but I think it's an improvement. I created images for the Top 10, Top 100, and Top 200.
Thanks to David for doing this! If you want to celebrate your language's appearance here on Langmaker, here are the images that David created:

Feel free to copy and upload the appropriate image to your website.

Loanword Ranger - 7/10/05 - 8:22 am
I was planning on entitling yesterday's post "Check out Kamakawi, Kemo Sabe", but got distracted by these amusing theories of the origin of kemo sabe. Instead, I accidentally recycled some bad alliteration from No Kamakawi Kamikaze Script. Oops.

Kamakawi Kamikazi - 7/09/05 - 8:50 am
David J. Peterson writes in:
Regarding Rosa By Any Other Name, you know, I really think that's a neat idea, and it's something I've been working on for awhile now. I have a page for Kamakawi that lists Kamakawi baby names. Eventually, there will be a lot of names, and I also want to devote a small section to last names and how they're used. Anyway, though such a thing would be too big for Langmaker (I mean, if every language was going to do it, yeesh!), but you might blog it as an example. If people can get an idea for what a page like this can look like, maybe more people will do it, and I think that'd be neat!
I do think it's a neat idea and hope to see more connaming.

While my wife and I are in the market for another baby name, I hate to disappoint you all: it would be suicide for me to suggest a name from Kamakawi or any other conlang.

Engendering Karklak - 7/08/05 - 8:01 am
As I wrote a few days ago, Dragon magazine inspired me to create my first language, Karklak, a language for gnomes. It was pretty naïve. Its words were mainly derived from English etymons, and I rewrote the etymologies so that Latin roots were said to derive from Imperial Northish, Old English roots were said to derive from Old Alfish, and so on. Really Karklak's only claim to uniqueness was that the two genders were "offensive gender" and "defensive gender": kraz, "sword", had offensive gender, where grev - [FA greve < N or GT greve < OA reof.] "leg armor" - had defensive gender. Yet still today the file box with the lexical index cards holds a place of honor on my bookshelf at work, as Karklak was my first humble creative effort at this magnificent hobby.

Babelfishing the Babel Text - 7/07/05 - 7:30 am
Walter Popp has a page on the automatic translation of the Babel text.

X Marks the Spot - 7/06/05 - 6:26 am
Buried on Ahribar's user page of the Kutjara wiki is a detailed analysis of all the uses for the letter X in languages:
  • Plosives: /t_j c k k_h k_w g q G\ ?/
  • Fricatives: /h_t\ T D s z S Z s` s\ C j\ x x_j x_w x\ G x_- X R X\ ?\ h h\/
  • Affricates: /ts ts_> dz tS dZ ts` J\j\ kx/
  • Clusters: /ks gz kS xs/
  • Nasals: /n` J N/
  • Rhotics: /4 R\/
  • Laterals: /K\/
  • Implosives: /G\_
  • Clicks: /t_! t_7 t`_!/
  • Vowels: /i @ 7/
  • Syllables: /kI/
  • Zero phoneme: /0/
The sounds are represented in Z-SAMPA.

Dragging On - 7/05/05 - 7:20 am
Neon Fox writes on the ZBB, "I'm reading my April Dragon, which just arrived this afternoon, and there's an interesting article on page 94. It's about how to come up with verbal components for your wizard's spells. There's a short list of URLs for constructing your own language for this purpose."

I forgot to blog about this at the time. Even though the mention is just a URL listed in a sidebar, I'm very excited to be in Dragon magazine. While my first exposure to conlanging and neographies was J.R.R. Tolkien, it never occurred to me to create my own language until I read "Old Dwarvish" by Clyde Heaton in Dragon #66. That inspired me to create my first language, Karklak, a language for gnomes.

So being covered in Dragon brings the hobby full circle for me.

Throwed out the English Kings - 7/04/05 - 7:41 am
Happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans. For some linguistic fun this morning, here's H.L. Mencken's translation of the Declaration of Independence into 1920s colloquial American English:
When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man these rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of goverment they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any goverment don’t do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I. W. W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled... (continued)

Flagging Attention - 7/03/05 - 9:55 am
Conlang FlagThinking of Independence Day here in the U.S. has me thinking about flags. Back in September, I wrote about Flag Daze, the CONLANG-L discussion around creating a flag to represent conlanging. A rapid series of designs were created by many people, frequently iterating on earlier versions: the designs included the suggestions of many. Then an innovative voting process was used to select the winner. I meant to show the final design, created by Christian Thalmann, but didn't before now.

Grazie, Mauro - 7/02/05 - 10:12 am
Thanks to Mauro Baglieri for his hard work as neologisms editor. He's taking July and August off, and David J. Peterson has volunteered to step in as interim neologisms editor.

Mauro will be continuing to refine his History of the Italian Language based on constructive feedback from the ZBB and elsewhere. His most recent addition is a short list of Italian neologisms.

Glossy Glossaries - 7/01/05 - 6:58 am
Suzette Haden Elgin (of LáAdan fame) blogs about the glossary story subgenre of science fiction and posts an example, "A Tale In Twelve Terms". I've never seen such a story before, but it's a great art form for the conlanger.

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