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This Month's Posts: Submission Mission ·
Taking A Break ·
Happy birthday, Langmaker.com! ·
Stay Off The Median ·
Formal Study of LangMaking ·
Home Page Now Automatically Refreshes ·
Tolkien Fonts ·
Don't Come Crying To Me When You Need Someone Who Speaks Elvish ·
Calculating Search-Engine Standing ·
Where Do All These Languages Come From? ·
Do English Pronouns Have Gender? ·
Atlantean Tattoos ·
500 Model Languages Indexed ·
A Rosetta Stone For E.T. ·
Volapük & Idiom Neutral ·
Languages Without Verbs ·
Invented Writing Systems ·
How Furbish Was Furnished
Next Month's Entries Submission Mission - 4/29/03 - 4:34 pmSo I'm back from vacation, and the site published new items flawlessly while I was gone, which makes me very happy. Related to this, I've had four or five questions lately about why submissions aren't published more rapidly.
I typically space out the publication of items to the web site a day at a time -- i.e., a new Babel Text every day, a new Model Language submission every day. This gives people more of a chance to review what they see on the site. If there are more than two weeks of items already scheduled, then a submission is just assigned a random time in the next two weeks.
I process updates more quickly. Items are updated whenever I enter them into the database (every few days to once a week), but then are assigned a future date to be featured on the home page.
I publish less than a third of New English submissions. I just publish the ones I like or find interesting. I sometimes don't publish ones that I think are borderline offensive or inappropriate (because kids read this web site). It really just comes down to my personal preference.
Taking A Break - 4/16/03 - 12:00 amI've made a lot of changes to the site this past month:- Added a comic strip
- Added historical auxiliary languages
- Added an automated statistical analysis of the languages indexed
- Added a Top 100 countdown
- Added a right sidebar to the web site listing recent additions
- Added this web log
In early May, it will become clear why I did this, but for now I plan on taking a break. Don't be surprised if I stop updating the site for a week or ten days, but I will resume my regularly scheduled programming after that. The site has been running smoothly for a year now, with almost daily updates since last March, after two years of no updates (hey, I was busy with work and it was tedious to update the site before I automated most of it). Take this opportunity to pursue some of your other interests! :-)
Happy birthday, Langmaker.com! - 4/15/03 - 2:57 pmToday Langmaker.com is six years old. I think it had about 10 pages back then. Today it has over 1,800.
Stay Off The Median - 4/14/03 - 11:50 amThe median size of a model language published to the index here is 800 words. The average is higher, at 1,920, since languages with 5,000 or more words really skew the average upward.
Formal Study of LangMaking - 4/13/03 - 11:47 amSomeone wrote, "Do you know anyone at universities who studies model languages?" Some Middle European universities have programs in interlinguistics, by which they mean IALs like Esperanto and Interlingua. There has been some formal study of Esperanto's grammar and speaker community, but unfortunately not much professional study of artistic languages or the model language community itself.
Home Page Now Automatically Refreshes - 4/12/03 - 10:39 amI added a REFRESH tag to the Langmaker.com home page, so now you can leave the home page open in a browser window, and it will automatically update when the site is supposed to have changed. (These articles are scheduled in advance to be published; e.g., I'm writing this one April 7th.)
Tolkien Fonts - 4/11/03 - 11:37 amSamantha asks, "I have a question. Is there a web site or sites I could go to get the alphabet for 'Classical' or 'Modern' Quenya or Sindarin? It's so beautiful, and I've seen it written on different sites, but I can't find the alphabet." The key with web searches is to have the right words. In this case, you just needed to search for "Tengwar Fonts" to find a good site.
Don't Come Crying To Me When You Need Someone Who Speaks Elvish - 4/09/03 - 11:55 pm
Calculating Search-Engine Standing - 4/09/03 - 12:42 pmMan, I love     . My Oðblgshezi page is now the #1 site for "calculator words". It was the lack of a good calculator-words site that inspired me to create my own page in the first place. , that makes me happy.
Where Do All These Languages Come From? - 4/08/03 - 12:17 pmMorthir asks, "Where do all these languages come from? Are they like Esperanto?" The 500 languages listed here as I write this were created by over 363 different individuals or, in a few cases, by small groups of people. Most languages were submitted by their authors using this form. Here's a list of language authors. The languages are like Esperanto in that they are invented. Some are like Esperanto in that they are Euroclones, others are like Esperanto in that they are intended for use as international auxiliary languages, but most are private artistic languages not intended to learn and use.
Do English Pronouns Have Gender? - 4/07/03 - 12:39 pmThat is properly considered sex reference, which is different than gender. Gender in the grammatical sense doesn't need to be related to sex. Basically it indicates concordances of classes of words, with the classes traditionally called masculine, feminine nd neuter, due to a rough sex-reference correspondence in Indo-European languages. Better, though, to think of them as categories, meaningless or meaningful depending on the language. Some further references.
Atlantean Tattoos - 4/06/03 - 8:08 pmMegan writes, "I'm turning eighteen soon and am going to be getting a tattoo. I want it to say Jesus Lives in Atlantean, only I've been rather unsuccessful in my attempts at translating this into Atlantean. If you could be of any help, I would greatly appreciate it." Well, you can download the Atlantean font from here and just type "Jesus lives" in it. This would be English written with Atlantean letters. Unfortunately, we don't know the word "lives" in Atlantean, and there is no word for "Jesus". Traditionally, Tolkiens Tengwar is more popular for tattoos.
500 Model Languages Indexed - 4/05/03 - 10:02 pmWell, we just passed the 500 mark. Yes, the model-language index now has 500 languages. This strange "new" hobby isn't new at all; check out the timeline of languages to see some of the ancient history of the hobby and discipline of constructing languages.
A Rosetta Stone For E.T. - 4/05/03 - 9:06 pm
Volapük & Idiom Neutral - 4/04/03 - 8:57 pmSzymon Gruszczynski writes, "I live in Poland. I have some questions about synthetic languages: where I can find some information about learning Volapük (and books in Volapüuk) and about learning Idiom Neutral (and, of course, books in Neutral)?" We have profiles of Volapük and Volapük Revised that point to useful sites and pages in Volapük (though books are hard to find). There's not much on the Web for Idiom Neutral; I would encourage someone out there to put together a good web page describing it.
Languages Without Verbs - 4/03/03 - 8:53 pmSomeone recently asked, "Are there any languages without verbs?" Every natural language has verbs of some sort. The most famous model language without verbs is AllNoun, though it is no longer actively worked on.
Invented Writing Systems - 4/02/03 - 8:28 pmNathan Richardson writes, "While I am very interested in inventing artificial languages, I am presently more interested in inventing artificial scripts, or writing systems. I have posted my own Iconic Alphabet on the web, but I haven't had any luck finding other websites about artificial writing systems. Do you know of any?" Check out Omniglot.com -- it's a wonderful site, and I'll take its imitation as the sincerest form of flattery.
How Furbish Was Furnished - 4/01/03 - 9:26 pmDave Hampton, the creator of Furbish, wrote me about my Furbish profile (created with the help of some of my old CONLANG friends), and gave me permission to pass on his comments:I read your page on the Furbish language with great delight. I would enjoy discussing Furbish if you would like. I'll give you one quick bit of info that no one knows. The choices of the consonants were made for two reasons: - The speech compression is LPC, so sounds that LPC could not do so well were left out.
- This creature was designed for young as well as old and consonants that sound close were left out to avoid confusion.
Sounds that could be mistaken, or easily misunderstood as profanity, were also left out.
I don't know much about compression, but apparently LPC is pretty low tech, and therefore suitable for a mass-market toy. Raymond Brown had suggested that Furbish phonology might be an indication of the unique physiology of Furbies. He was right in a way! For the record, I think what delighted Dave Hampton so much was the utter seriousness with which we evaluated his work back then. Here's a page where Dave answers some questions about Furby design.
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