August 2004 Weblog

August 2004 Weblog

Advanced

This Month's Posts: Mystery Language Theater 3,000 · Timanto: One Who Fears · Ask Mr. Language Person · Passing the Baton · Eloi, Eloi · A Downside of UPSID · Featuring David J. Peterson · Atlantean Sinks · Which Wikis Are Which · What Poly Means To Me

Next Month's Entries

Mystery Language Theater 3,000 - 8/28/04 - 6:02 am

Langmaker.com now has 3,000 entries. Wow! Neologisms will soon be passing the number of conlangs indexed; the only surprise there is that it has taken so long: it is a lot easier to invent and submit a word than it is to invent and submit a language.

Directory Entries
Conlangs 1,147
Neologisms 1,100
Babel Texts 324
Books/Media 179
Resources 136
Neographies 114
Total 3,000

Timanto: One Who Fears - 8/20/04 - 7:34 pm

In 1997, I ranked Esperanto the single most important conlang, much to the consternation of many of my artlang brethren. For the past two years activity on my site has demonstrated that Quenya is more popular here. Yet as I say on my Top 10 Conlangs listing, Esperanto has "more staying power, more longevity, more speakers, more imitators than any other constructed language." No, I don't speak Esperanto, but I continue to find it to be an astounding achievement in language construction.

What? You're afraid of Esperanto? My wife certainly is. This fear is common, and you should read Psychological Reactions to Esperanto to better understand why.

Ask Mr. Language Person - 8/19/04 - 7:52 pm

Nick Kalivoda asks,

How can one properly put to use a "subjunctive mood," and do conjugations for this need to be created for every tense?
I have up until today unquestioningly inflected nouns after saí ("to be") as if they were direct objects. I know that they are actually complements, so should I leave them in the nominative form?
My language has no consistency: it doesn't have a sound of its own, but steals from totally random ones. One sentence may sound like French, one Finnish, one Russian, and one who-knows-what. Is there an easy way to make all, or most, words sound as if they're part of the same language?
Is it possible to work backwards and make a proto-language after you've made its child? It's been really, really frustrating...any suggestions?

Great questions, Nick. Maybe I should start an "Ask Mr. Language Person" column, a la Dave Barry. "The Subjunctive Mood - wouldn't that be a great name for a band? Do passive verbs make you tense?" OK, maybe humor's not my calling. Some answers:

As for the subjunctive, there are many ways to handle it. You can express it with an adverb, to make your task much simpler. For other ideas, suffice it to say that you should see the Wikipedia article on subjunctive mood.
The typical choice is to leave them in the nominative form. Do you have accusative and dative cases? You can in fact define a number of cases and then create special exceptions. You could say that since "to be" evolved from a verb with a different meaning that took the accusative, it still does. After all, the verb "to be" often has irregularities that other verbs don't.
You need to create a strict phonology (system of sounds) and then create rules for mapping sounds from other languages to your phonology. For instance, Dublex has no /w/ sound, so words with /w/ are borrowed as /v/ instead. Since Dublex syllables can only begin with a single consonant, initial consonant clusters experience metathesis: Latin 'class' became /kals/, Hindi /kras/ "cross" became /kars/. By making consistent rules, you give the language its own unique flavor. Dublex words like 'fabvocsist' ("conlang"), 'carsdev' ("Christ") and 'hazarmuh' /shahzarmoosh/ "squirrel" appeal to me, apparently. Check out Japanese borrowings of English for a real-world case of this.
Why yes it is, and Zomp would argue that it is more fun to do proto-languages in reverse!

Passing the Baton - 8/18/04 - 7:18 pm

I decided to enroll Kali-sise in the latest translation relay, because I wanted some more sample texts in Kali-sise. I hadn't participated in a relay since translating the Bast relay of 1999 into Dublex. This time around, I started the relay, being given a Wenedyk text by Jan van Steenbergen. It was great to spend some time with his unique language.

I translated the seven-sentence text in about three hours, passing it along on the relay. Unfortunately, while I didn't think I had expanded the grammar, I really hadn't documented it in enough detail for the person who followed me. Accordingly, based on his questions, I've now updated the Kali-sise grammar page to clarify the semantic role of cases, to describe dependent clauses, to explain the lack of prepositions and to proscribe question phrasings. Of all my languages right now, I think Kali-sise has the most elegant grammar, simple yet expressive. Kali-sise is in some ways my answer to Toki-Pona. If you think the Kali-sise grammar is too minimalist, I would contend that it is more complex than that of many pidgins.

Since it would be breaking the rules to show an excerpt from the relay (which is still in progress), I will instead share a translation I recently posted to the CONLANG-L list:

Ka pi sisi se nunete ke ka lele pi kune-pinise se sisi se lete luka ke.
RELATIVE-CLAUSE NOMINATIVE movement VERB mountain ACCUSATIVE RELATIVE-CLAUSE male NOMINATIVE beginning(opposite-end) VERB movement VERB little-thing rock ACCUSATIVE.
"The man who moves a mountain begins by moving small stones."

Eloi, Eloi - 8/17/04 - 7:44 pm

Yanifv asks, "Does anyone know how H.G. Welles' Eloi should be pronounced, and where their name comes from?"

I assume Eloi is pronounced /EE-loy/. And of course for the etymology I immediately thought of Mark 15:34:

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

If anyone has any other theories, contact me. Also let me know of information we can use to update the Eloi profile. Yanif writes back to say, "Thanks vey much, Jeffrey. That's also what I found, although if that's indeed the source then the 'right', 'original' pronunciation should be /e-lo-HI/ ('God' or 'Godly') in Hebrew: a strange name indeed for that race!"
9/4/04 - Thomas Slawson adds,

I thought of the same thing too. But just to point out "elohim" in Hebrew means "God" or "gods." When Jesus cried out from the cross he said, "eloi" which is Aramaic. "Eli" in Hebrew means "My God" and "Eloi" is the Aramaic for "My God." I'm not sure if the correlation is intentional or not. Given the nature of the story in which the Eloi are being hunted and eaten by the Morlochs, it could be very well possible that there is some connection, as if to say, "My God, why have you forsaken us." Just a theory though. It could just be that Wells liked the sound of the name.

A Downside of UPSID - 8/15/04 - 10:06 am

Tirtirxu writes, "I just thought of a really cool idea. I use and really like your UPSID phonemic inventory. Surely you have thought of this: why not a conlang phonemic inventory!? I have encountered a lot of weird stuff out there, as well as some that were terrifically banal. Such a list would really stimulate some thought among the less creative and put forth quite a challenge to the excessively creative. What do you think???"

Thanks for the kind words about my web version of UPSID. The inimitable John Cowan was a big help with it. It had actually never occurred to me to do a conlang phonemic inventory, but someone should do it. This site, with its current directories, keeps me too busy to take on the responsibility, though, and I'd like to see more conlang directories out there, so I encourage someone to post a message on CONLANG-L and Zompist Bulletin Board and start such a listing. (I love this site, but I'd like to be working on some of my own conlangs more often, especially the languishing Novvocu.)

Featuring David J. Peterson - 8/13/04 - 11:58 pm

I'm pleased to announce that the new neologisms these past few weeks have been edited, culled and formatted for you by David J. Peterson. David is now the Feature Editor for Neologisms -- a completely unpaid position, as Langmaker.com's ad revenues pay for hosting but nothing more. So go to David's site, review his many cool conlangs and neographies (like Ilaxošaþ, to the right) and tell him what a great guy he is!

Atlantean Sinks - 8/07/04 - 11:41 am

Venom writes, "Hello, my name is Brendan, and I'm interested in learning new languages. I know that the Atlantean laguage (the one used in Atlantis: The Lost Empire) isn't a real language, but I'm really interested in learning how to speak it. I've printed the letters, but I want to learn the pronunciations and everything else that goes with it. Please help. P.S. The language and the movie both are 100% great."

I too loved the movie and the language. Unfortunately, though, Atlantean only consists of a few hundred words; it doesn't have enough vocabulary to even write a Babel Text, let alone carry on a conversation. I'd encourage you to spend your time learning a different language instead:

Marc Okrand's other language, Klingon, has a rich corpus for a conlang and lots of learning materials.
Speaking of great movies, The Lord of the Rings series has increased interest in learning Tolkien's languages; check out the ELFLING mailing list for help learning an Elvish language.
If you like learning languages, you owe it to yourself to hit Lernu! and study Esperanto. It's the only conlang that rewards learners with free places to stay all around the world -- seriously. (And skeptical conlangers out there should at least check out Lernu's innovative online curriculum for teaching a language. Or download an MP3 of an Esperanto song.)

Which Wikis Are Which - 8/06/04 - 10:53 am

Jeffrey Lilly wrote, "I've got the beginnings of a conlang that I'd like to share with the community and get some feedback on. However, I don't have a website where I can post the information. I thought of using a Conlang Wiki page, but the Wiki Etiquette page said I shouldn't simply use their pages to host languages. Do you have any suggestions? Many thanks!"

Besides the Conlang Wiki, you can check out the Unilang Wiki and the Frath Wiki. Both have different copyleft agreements, so the documentation of your language may be adapted by others for their own use. So don't publish projects you want to maintain the copyright of (my Dublex conlang is public domain, which has no copyright or copyleft restrictions, but my other languages are currently copyright by default). It's nice to think your language can live on in some way in someone else's project; I'm actually disappointed others haven't adapted any Dublex materials into their language.

If you want to maintain copyright, or don't want to learn Wiki text formatting (which is simpler than HTML and worth learning), you can upload a word-processor document or text file to the Langmaker2 mailing list. Since Yahoo! Groups hosts free mailing lists and provides free community areas, I've recommended this group to language creators who lack web-site space. While posted files are viewable only to members, membership is free upon registration and the group has 240 members who can view your work. Yahoo! Groups provides up to 20MB of uploaded conlanging files, with about 6MB still available.

What Poly Means To Me - 8/02/04 - 10:38 am

MasterArtim11 asks, "Perhaps you could add - in the LangMaker for Windows program - a feature that catches duplicate words? When one is creating thousands of words, one can duplicate without knowing it; which, of course, is a problem : p".

While I no longer actively develop LangMaker/Win, at the time I did I considered duplicate words to be a feature. Words often have many different meanings, and a good artlang will be polysemous. Check out the many senses of set.

Prior Month's Entries

Conlang Profiles at Langmaker.com CC-BY 4.0: 1996 — 2022 .

FAQ - About Us - Contact Us - Features -