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7/30/99 More Klingon Speakers Than Navajo - Not!
The Onion

This week The Onion writes, "According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than seven-to-one." Don't believe everything you read. The Onion is a funny, political incorrect publication. :-) But if you're curious... The Onion says there are 7,000 Klingon speakers and 1,000 Navajo speakers. In fact, "North American languages with the largest numbers of speakers include Navajo (100,000), Cree (70,000), Inuit (75,000), Ojibwa (50,000), Central Alaskan Yup'ik (20,000), Sioux (20,000), Creek (18,000), Tohono O'odham (15,000), and Choctaw (11,000). All of these languages are in danger of disappearing. Today the majority of North American languages are spoken primarily by elderly people, in some cases by no more than a handful." Source: Encarta, "Native American Languages". Sobering stuff. According to the Klingon Language Institute, about 1,600 people have been members at different times but only dozens are fluent speakers. So Navajo speakers outnumber Klingon speakers perhaps 500 to one. Comments

 

© Copyright 1999 by Onion, Inc., All rights reserved.
7/29/99 Ask LangMaker.com: 40,000 Conlangers?
Karl Jahn

Karl Jahn asks, "What's your source for the statistic of 40,000 people who've invented their own languages? That's pretty amazing." It's a fact wrapped in an assumption wrapped in a guess. Fact: 4 million people in the United States are avocational writers. Assumption: 1% of them have invented their own languages. Guess: 40,000 people in the U.S. have done it. Keep in mind most model languages might have had just dozens of words and little grammar or text. I also looked at data on the number of role-playing gamers, the number of copies of Tolkien books sold in the U.S., and the popularity of Klingon, so I am as comfortable with my estimate as possible, given so little data. I would love to someday do a statistically valid random sample of the U.S. population to come up with an accurate estimate, but I can't afford it. Comments

 

???
7/28/99 Odonien Is A Star Trek Conlang
Steve Oostrom

Odonien (Oostrom, Steve) - fictional language - 1981
Odonien is the language spoken by the Odonans, an alien race introduced by the author in his Star Trek fan fiction. When creating the language, he intentionally violated as many language universals as possible in order to produce a more alien language. Odonien was designed as an OSV language, and does not use prepositions or postpositions. Instead, it divides all nouns into adjuncts to nouns and verbs, and uses case particles to indicate the relationships. The aim of Odonien is to make sentences as succinct as possible. The language has a unique script, a primer and approximately a thousand words. Comments

 

7/27/99 Lapine of Watership Down Now On LangMaker.com  

Richard Adams' Watership Down is one of the classic works of xenofiction, placed as it is among and between the warrens of rabbits in the English countryside. Lapine, the language he sketches for his rabbits, is arguably the best naming language ever created, and is a minimalist virtuoso performance, a haiku of a language compared to the sonnet of Sindarin. It's amazing how much can be accomplished with how little, which is why I was inspired to document it here. Lapine went a long way towards establishing the verisimilitude of the rabbits' culture and in the process making Watership Down a bestseller. Comments

 

 
7/23/99 Romancing The Lex  
Duncan Duchov

Artlangers rejoice! Duncan Duchov has prepared a Latin LEX file that can be used with LangMaker/Win so that artlangers can generate their own Romance languages. Don't want to use LangMaker/Win? You can use the HTML version of the lexicon. Want suggestions on how to begin creating a Romance lexicon? See his introduction to the lexicon. Comments

 

LangMaker/Win logo
Tolkien's Ilkorin Documented In More Detail  
Helge Fauskanger

Helge Fauskanger writes on Tolklang, "I uploaded a revised version of the article about Ilkorin, with etymological comments added to every word in the wordlist. If we don't count ancestral, 'unattested' primitive forms, this means that all the Ardalambion wordlists primarily based on the Etymologies - the wordlists for Telerin, Nandorin, Doriathrin, Old Sindarin and Ilkorin - are now fully annotated. As far as I know, this is the first detailed analysis of the minor Elvish languages ever published. Printouts of the articles in question would run to more than 250 pages. If anyone wants to deny that this is a detailed commentary, please go ahead. I would be amused. My next priority will be to rewrite the Sindarin article." Without a doubt, Fauskanger has contributed the most important analyses of Tolkien's languages yet published, and I am thankful that he has made them available for free. I can imagine how much time and energy he has put into them. Comments

 

7/22/99 Yf Rgalin Back On The Web  
Mark Shoulson Yf Rgalin - (Shoulson, Mark E.) - personal language - 1995
Inspired by Lojban and Klingon, Yf Rgalin was developed to explore some features that were "amusing" to the author, while maintaining simplicity and regularity. It's a verb-first ergative language, with some attempt at Lojban-like regularity (but without quite so much rigor). There's some attempt to derive everything from verbs (except nouns). The phonology is slightly unusual; its sentence structure may be unique, as well as its verb structure (inspired by a feature in Basque). Comments

 

7/16/99 LangMaker/Win Tip  
Duncan Duchov

Duncan Duchov writes in with a tip for LangMaker/Win. "Hello! I was receiving the 'Subscript out of range' message, but it has been working almost perfectly since I downloaded your updated .exe. Thanks for the hard work! It's a fantastic program. So maybe in return I can help. This might save other users a lot of time. When you try to load LEX files without LangMaker/Win, they are opened into an Excel spreadsheet. This was good in the respect that I was able to work on the LEX files even when I couldn't get your program to work, but bad because - once they are associated with Excel - LangMaker will no longer open them. Therefore, I once thought that all the work that I had done would have to be redone, and all of the words would need to be retyped in order to perform the mutations, and so forth. Fortunately, I found that if you save the LEX file in a TXT file, LangMaker should open it. The only bad part is that your generating and transforming guidelines are gone. Well, you win some, you lose some. Anyway - maybe there are people out there who can benefit from this information. And for making LangMaker, and making it free - thanks again!" You're welcome. LangMaker/Win supports Excel 4.0 format, and if you save your spreadsheet back to that format, its directly openable in LangMaker - Excel doesn't preserve the linguistic guidelines, since they're quite meaningless in the context of a spreadsheet. A version 1.12 is also in the works, fixing a few problems others have experienced. Comments

 

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7/15/99 The Tree Of Life Classifies Plants & Animals  

I was frustrated while working on naming animals for a new model language of mine, as the dictionary just didn't provide enough detail about the interrelationships of different species. Knowing that fellow langmaker Herman Miller is fascinated with naming animals in his languages, I wrote and asked him for a good link. He sent me a link to The Tree of Life, which was exactly what I needed. I had wanted to come up with a Ro- or Roxhai-like classificational system for animal names, but the length of the branches on the tree convinced me otherwise. Check out The Tree of Life! Comments

 

 
7/14/99 Trudging Towards A Universal Translator  

Next week Carnegie Mellon scientists will demonstrate spontaneous speech-to-speech translation in six languages in an international video conference. It's one small step for a tran, one small step forward to a Universal Translator. Esperantists and other IAL lovers needn't panic yet: it's a closed vocabulary (travel related) and for only six languages (the world, let alone the universe, has over a thousand languages with 10,000 or more speakers). Comments

 

CMU
7/13/99 Frodo Lives! As Elijah Wood?  

Elijah Wood will play Frodo Baggins in New Line Cinema’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings (their web site is pretentiously shallow but pretty). Peter Jackson will direct the $130 million trilogy, with the three films being shot back to back. Current estimates are that the films will be released as a Christmas-summer-Christmas event series starting in 2000. Xenite.org reports among other rumors that a language professor in New Zealand (where the movies are being filmed) apparently offered to assist with the Elvish languages. Wish I lived in New Zealand. Comments

 

Lord of the Rings
Sally Caves Interviewed About Teonaht  
Sally Caves

Teonaht (Caves, Sally) - fictional language - 1962
Sally Caves gave us a great interview about Teonaht, a language we long ago should have listed. You won't find a personal language being actively developed that is as deep and rich as Teonaht. Much is unique about it, from its word order to its verbal system to its affixing. The author's studying of Spanish, French, German, Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Welsh, Old Irish, Latin, Basque, Hebrew and Greek have all contributed to Teonaht. Her web site for the language boasts original artwork, a dictionary (listing at 500 perhaps a quarter of extant words), grammar, sample texts, unique script (heavily Cyrillic) and a primer. Comments

 

Babel Tower
7/12/99 New Latino Sine Flexione Site Linked To  
Chris Burd

Chris Burd writes in about Interlingua/Latino Sine Flexione, saying "Jay Bowkes maintains a site on Interlingua/LsF. It's an excellent piece of work; among other things, he's HTML'd most of an early 1930s grammar." Comments

 

 
7/11/99 Bibliotheca Sagittarii Just Updated  
David Solly David Solly has updated Bibliotheca Sagittarii, the most comprehensive list of languages and linguistics in science fiction and fantasy. Version 4.0 of the book list (one of the most popular pages on LangMaker.com) is now available. Comments

 

 
7/10/99 Liva Added To ModLang Links  
Claudio Gnoli Liva (Gnoli, Claudio) - logical language - 1995
Liva's phonology has what the author calls "a weird symmetrical scheme", with phonotactics designed to disambiguate word segmentation. Morphology is isolating, and tends to be agglutinative. The syntax is based on predicate logic (as in Lojban) but depends on special word classes such as nouns, operators, dietetics/determiners and syntactical markers. Stems are generated randomly. Comments

 

 
DiLingo Is De Lingo Of DiLeo  
Jay DiLeo Dr. Jay DiLeo writes in to let us know that DiLingo now has a dot.com address: DiLingo.com. I'd make fun of his site, but he's much better at making fun of me (here's proof), so I'll restrain myself. Comments

 

 
7/9/99 New Site Design Offers Easier Navigation  
  Originally started as the now defunct Model Languages newsletter, LangMaker.com has grown haphazardly over the last four years, as it has moved first from CompuServe member pages to AOL member pages and then here. The site is finally undergoing a long overdue redesign to make it easier to navigate through its pages. Comments

 

 
7/8/99 Ask LangMaker.com: Any Dragonlance Language Sites?  
Jada- lynthasa Valinlore Jadalynthasa Valinlore writes in, saying, "Hello, I was just wondering if you knew of any Dragonlance languages that are on the Internet. I am particularly looking for Elven languages. If you know of any sites, or anyone else I can talk to, you'd be a great help. Thanks a bunch!" Suggestions by e-mail or by web forum.

 

???
7/7/99 Sarandur Shines As RPG Setting  
PJS PJS has put together one of the better Role-Playing Game settings in his Sarandur Campaign, a RuneQuest campaign that reminds me of my wasted adolescence. While the campaign has been running for ten years, PJS became serious about the language settings five years ago. You can check out a zipped LangMaker/Win LEX file to generate Saradic, Lakal, Kirjathan or Vanarite names or to derive Lakal/Saradic words from old Lakari (yes, LangMaker/Win 1.11 seems to be solving people's problems). You can even play Microsoft's Age of Empires in Sarandur! And read about the world in Lund's Treasure, where Strom, Ataran and Zontora search for the hoard of the barbarian warlord Lund. Comments

 

 
  Babble On With New Babel Texts  
PJS,
Exu Yangi
PJS has submitted a Babel Text for Lakal/Saradic. And Exu Yangi writes, "As long as we are posting Babel translations, you can find a Tsumhetyan translation." The Sen:esepera and Zegzolt Babel Texts were left behind in the migration from our old site and are now back up. Comments

 

Babel Tower
7/6/99 LangMaker/Win 1.11 Released For Beta Testing  
  If you've experienced any "Subscript out of range" error messages with LangMaker/Win, please download the beta version of LangMaker/Win 1.11. Save the file langm111.exe to your hard drive to the same directory as langmake.exe, then click on langm111.exe to run it. You may experience the same problem as before, but with a different error message, in which case you should e-mail me and attach the file tuneup.pdc. Hopefully you won't experience the problem at all! Comments

 

7/5/99 Folkspraak's Dutch Was Out Of Date  
Wilbert Geijtenbeek Wilbert Geijtenbeek writes in about the Dutch content of the Folkspraak page, which I've updated accordingly. "I've found some mistakes; there are approximately 23 million people speaking Dutch as a native language and an additional half a million as a second language. Furthermore, there are 6 million Afrikaans speakers. Finally, there are 500,000 Frisians." Population figures were from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 1987; I've now indicated these estimates are circa 1985, as the exact date they represent is difficult to determine. Geijtenbeek continues, "Many of the Dutch words are wrong or archaic [or just not listed!]; the real spelling is: 'absorb' - absorberen, 'common' - gewoon/gewoonlijk, 'German' - Duitser , 'master' - meester, 'model' - model and 'share' - delen (met)." I used as my source Frederick Bodmer's The Loom of Language, 1944, an excellent book but its representation of Dutch and Norwegian is now out of date. We continue to seek volunteers to expand the Folkspraak lexicon. Comments

 

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7/4/99 Native Klingon Speaker Embraces English  
  Gavin Edwards, in the August '99 issue of Wired magazine (p. 66), writes about the first native Klingon speaker, Alec Speers. His father, d'Armond Speers, had been raising Alec to be bilingual in English and Klingon. Alec would respond to Klingon and could sing Klingon filk songs with his father, but lost interest in the language when he was three (he's now five). One difficulty the elder Speers encountered was that the lexicon was too small and didn't have words for many of the objects of a toddler's world ("bottle", "diaper" and "table", which Speers expressed using a circumlocution meaning "thing which is flat"). Edwards concludes his article saying, "Not long after Speers gave up, Klingon language architect Mark Okrand released Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, which included 1,000 new words, including one for table." Comments

 

 
7/3/99 Folkspraak Returns from Slumber  
Dan Dawes Folkspraak returns from slumber, folks! After years of inactivity, caused when the Folkspraakmeister who succeeded me abdicated, the language is back under construction. Dan Dawes has written a draft of the grammar. Read it, then talk about it. Comments

 

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  Ask LangMaker.com: Can You Fix Error 9 In LangMaker/Win?  
CW CW writes in about trouble with LangMaker/Win, "I'm having a problem with opening and saving lexical files. When I try to open a lexical file I get an error.  When I try to close it, I get a small 'Subscript out of range' message. When trying to save, I get an error.  I've tried to move the directory around, but it had no effect.  Could you please help?  Thank you." Unfortunately, you're not alone, CW. Others have written in with this problem. I've still not able to recreate it, but I am continuing to work on it and hope to have a fix here soon. Comments

 

  Try Interlingua, or Tri-Interlingua?  
Chris Burd Chris Burd writes in to say the main link for Interlingua was dead and needed to be here. He points out, "Also, note that Interlingua was the later name for Latino sine Flexione, not the original name. (Actually, there was some equivocation on where Interlingua meant the international language - i.e., Peano's - or any international language. This is in keeping with the 'not invented, discovered' philosophy shared by LsF, IALA-Interlingua, and Occidental. The last of these became known as Interlingue after 1948." To further clarify a confused matter, he writes, "It's not generally known, by the way, that Gode got permission from the (virtually defunct) Academia pro Interlingua to take over the name for IALA's language after the IALA project team had informally adopted the name." I've updated the Model Language Index with these facts. Comments

 

 
  Interlingua Babel Text Now Up  
Dan Dawes Dan Dawes writes in, "Here you don't have an Interlingua Babel posted.  It may not be the best translation, but until you get a better one..." Thanks, Dan. Now which Interlingua is this? ;-) Comments

 

Babel Tower
  Volapük Site Has "Everything Imaginable"  
Iaymet Iaymet sent in a new link for Volapük over at Ken Caviness' site, saying, "Very good news! Just found this all-purpose Volapuk page. It has everything imaginable. Comments

 

 
  You're a-Panting For Europanto  
Sabine Husson Sabine Husson has an invitation for you. "If you want to read funny texts in Europanto, you can visit us." Comments

 

 
  Mango Has More Words Than Most  
Natalia Gruscha Natalia Gruscha submitted a link to Mango using our submission form. "Now my Mango is on the way. It was great to notice that I have the largest vocabulary of all (10,179 words)! You got my Babel text translation from one of my previous mails here, didn't you? Please add it to your great site too! - Nadnabavi (my Mango name)." Well, Nadnabavi, sorry to disappoint you, but the submission form just records the maximum for languages submitted using the form. In fact, Talossan has well over 20,000 words. Other languages "cheat" by generating arbitrary word forms for the entire WordNet lexicon. Comments

 

Babel Tower
  Ask LangMaker.com: Who Owns The Copyright Of The ULD?  
Isaac Maizels Isaac Maizels writes, "Hello, I've just downloaded your LangMaker/Win software, seems like a very clever program. Anyways, just one quick question, what is the copyright status for the vocabuld lexicon file?" Rick Harrison owns the copyright to the Universal Language Dictionary, and I paid him a licensing fee to use it within LangMaker/Win. It's a great resource, and I wish more conlangers out there had contributed lexicons for their native languages. I created a Basic English one once, though that wasn't worth too much. Comments

 

???
  Dha-Patu Now Indexed  
Karl Jahn Karl Jahn has submitted Dha-Patu, a fictional diachronic language he has been working on since 1993, to the index. "It is completely analytical; it has only two parts of speech, radicals and particles; it has sets of particles that form noun and verb phrases, classify the nouns and define the functions of the verbs; it has an artificial core vocabulary, expanded by loans from natural languages (mainly Greek and Latin)." What languages inspired it? "None. The grammar was conceived entirely on a priori logical principles, and the core vocabulary was generated by random combinations of the given letters." Use any utilities to do that, Karl? His site features a dictionary of over 1,250 words, a grammar and sample texts. Comments

 

Babel Tower
  Talk With Others About LangMaker.com  
  If you want to talk with others about langmaking, the LangMaker2 mailing list is a companion to this web site, and provides a forum for people to talk about invented languages. If you like fiction with model languages, think the world needs a common artificial language, or just like to make up words, this list is for you.

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