Is it just me, or are auxlangs multiplying like rabbits? When I first became interested in Esperanto, I recognized its flaws, but put up with it anyway. If the point of an auxiliary language is to aid in communication, then all these auxlangs have done just the opposite. Although Ido made up for some of Esperanto's flaws, now that's two more languages that separate people who wish to communicate. I recently discovered Inter-Esperanto [#174 on the Top 200 conlangs], and it is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. A language made just to let Esperanto speakers communicate?! Why don't they just learn Esperanto? It's not that hard. If people say it is, they're forgetting how hard natural languages are to learn, and are just being too picky. If united by Esperanto - or any one other language - the human race could obviously advance greatly. "But Yahweh came down and confused their speech so that those who had once been united through Esperanto now spoke Ido, Mondlango, SASXSEK, Interlingua, Basic English, Essential World English, Americai Speak, etc."

"I see you mentioned SHELLOIL in your calculator words. This is the oldest of calculator words, and a joke going back to 1972 when calculators were first becoming popular in high schools.

One was asked to do a calculation about the price of crude oil where two answers were needed. The first answer was the profit and the second answer was who gets to keep the profit. The profit was, of course, 710,773.45 and by flipping over the calculator, you got the other answer."

I came across your site while searching for information on Jr. and related forms. It is very informative and interesting.

I am a Brazilian living in Australia, where locals have extreme difficulty accepting the fact that my family name is not Júnior. I constantly receive lots of letters addressed to Mr. Jr or Jnr, and am frequently called out as Mr. Jr. (\djr\) or Mr. Mello Jr.; this seems to be an ethnocentric feature carried onto information systems (as in "the last string *has* to be the family name"). I may have to officially change my name here to have the Júnior shortened to Jr. instead of Jnr. and to avoid the Mauro Jr. Mello which some institutions insist upon.

Now, you mentioned that Jr. is unique to the English language. I must point out that it is an extremely common feature in Brazil (where the mother tongue is Portuguese) and, from what acquaintances tell me, of other countries in South America (all Spanish-speaking); the same seems to be the case in other non-English speaking countries. However, the American Roman numeral equivalent (II, III, etc.) never caught on (and is not allowed, anyway) in Brazil, though it is readily understood.

Interestingly, I have never been referred to as Senhor Júnior ("Mr. Jr.") in Brazil and other countries in South America, and anyone there can readily tell the family name. The same goes for the Americans, most British but, to my consternation (well, now some pained amusement), not for the Australians, who often ask whether I am not ashamed to have Júnior firmly attached to my name.

Also, at least in Brazil, you will find that Júnior continues into Neto for 'grandson' and Sobrinho for 'nephew'.

I started work on a private project, mainly for my own amusement but with the hope of getting published, to create a very detailed and intricate fantasy world from which I would eventually create an illustrated book. Inevitably I came upon the realization that if I wanted to create something that felt realistic and believable then I was going to need a language to generate the names of the people and places within this fictional world. The easier but less satisfying route of simply making them up as I go along could never make me content.

After scouring through many of these "How to Create Your Own Language" sites with "step-by-step guidance" I've come away with two things, a headache and the question "so how do you create your own language?". It seems to me that even with the construction kits and step-by-step guides, you still need a basic working knowledge of languages.

So my question is this: do I need to learn all about phonological constraints, orthography, diacritics and a whole bunch of other words I never knew existed in the English language, or is there some sort of idiot's guide I can use?

• All you need to know about phonological constraints is that languages don't permit any sequence of sounds to be valid and your language should have its own syllable pattern: CV, CVC, CCVC with a small group of CCs (e.g., /pl, kl, tl, pr, tr, kr/). Feel free to use only sounds that occur in English, but do limit your possible syllables more than English does.
• Orthography is just a fancy word for spelling. Orthography can be as simple as using 'c' for /k/ or can be just pronouncing the words the way you spell them.
• Diacritics are just those wacky things on letters; I'm usually diacritical and rarely use them myself.

• climate change - global warming
• death tax - estate tax
• intelligent design - creationism
• ownership society - privatization
• tax relief - tax cuts

"Go back to Genesis and read about the Creation. God says I will call the night 'night,' I will call the heavens 'heaven.' Naming was important. Then the Tower of Babel came along and messed everything up. In effect, the UPC has put everything back into one language, a kind of Esperanto, that works for everyone. Whether you're in Europe or Asia, it's there, a commonly understood sense to naming." - Alan L. Haberman, board member of UCC (Uniform Code Council, not United Church of Christ)