My Suburban Destiny

Why

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE SITE PROPOSAL.

Conlanging on the internet is a collaborative project to learn, use and create planned languages.  Sometimes it is part of serious business such as experimental linguistic research or making believable languages for movies and books.  Sometimes it is a recreational hobby.

In all cases, the people involved are constantly coming across really hard question of a theoretical and field linguistics sort.

Currently, the web has two important technologies the forum and the mailing list.  The first tends to be ruled by who ever posts the most.  Because users have to keep up a high volume of posting to maintain their reputation, they fall victim to the board chess player problem.  When the chess players loose interest in the game, some players will find it more interesting to throw all the pieces all over the room.

A stack exchange site is driven by the people with reputation earned through asking good questions and good answers.  Virulently hostile answers get voted down, questions that are just bored-discussion topics get closed, and everyone is under pressure to delete bad questions and answers.  The cost of unnecessary posting or combative answers is that your content will either be ignored or closed.

What should be on topic and what should be a site of its own?

In the end, the community decides, but here are some of my thoughts.

Just about any language with public corpora, a cannon or other published sample text should be fair game.  I personally think that both auxiliary and constructed languages should be on-topic.  As long as the community closes purely-promotional questions, the Esperantists and the Sindarin speakers should get along just fine.  This is what tags are for– they let the community focus on the what is relevant to them and ignore the language they haven’t or won’t learn.

Personal language questions are a bit trickier.  If I create a personal language — we’ll call it fubar–(personal in the sense that I wrote it and no one else speaks it yet), then there isn’t a standard for objective truth.   Does fubar have inalienable possessive constructions? — Have to ask Matt.  Can compound words in fubar include object incorporation strategies? — Have to ask Matt.   If a language doesn’t have a published specification, or any published text, it isn’t really something that has an objective answer.   Language that were abandoned before they were defined or before any text was written certainly fall in this category- most of the questions about abandoned languages can’t have an objective answer.

On the other hand, here is an example of a personal language question that is objective, has an answer and isn’t discussion: “How do I get my conlanguage’s constript added to the Unicode specification?”

“How do you say…”  I lean towards allowing these.  A language Q&A site is easy to abuse as free source of translating talent, but sometimes translating model sentences can be very informative about the structure of a language.

Questions that are really just promoting ones favorite constructed language or aux language should be closed immediately.  “Why are you studying Ido and not Interlingua?” Is not really a question.  It is subjective, leads to combative responses and really an invitation to general discussion, not a specific answer.

Subjective questions are not appropriate.  For example, soliciting  feedback on a phoneme inventory is subjective, unless of course there is an answerable question, such as– “Does this phoneme inventory have consonant pairs that will be unusually difficult to pronounce?”

Some questions are invitations to write articles.  These are so common that they should be tolerated, but converted to community wikis.  “What are all the tonal auxiliary languages that have been proposed since 1950?”  “What movies have constructed languages?”

XML, C# and propositional logic are all in a sense, constructed languages, but not really in the sense that is appropriate for this website.

Conworld creation is a type of creative writing.  While it sometimes goes with planned languages and some people think you can’t have a language without a culture to go with it, I think these questions require a site of their own.  “What kind of flag should I have for my conworld?”  “How should I draft the marriage laws for my Mattopia, my concountry?”

Most conculture questions are getting off topic.

Many natural language questions are on topic.  “Has a natural language ever used the idea that some objects are automatically owned and should be treated differently in possessive constructions?”

Many questions could be asked on a language acquisition site or an academic linguistics site, but should be asked here instead: “How can I teach someone to (or learn on myown)  make fourteen click sounds that they have never heard before?”   On a non-planned language site, it would be a huge distraction to have to explain that this question is important because the language has no native speakers yet.

“What constructed language should I learn?”  Subjective.  Should be closed.

Some constructed languages have utopian aspirations or other social opinions embedded into the specification.  Questions on these issues aren’t really planned language questions, they are invitations to discuss politics, religion and philosophy.  “Isn’t Laadan sexist and crypto-homophobic?”  “Will Esperanto bring peace in the middle east?”  “Why are auxlangs a bunch of failures?” “If Na’vi speakers like Indian languages so much why don’t they move to the reservation?”  “Shouldn’t Na’vi speakers be learning Mohawk instead of Na’vi?”  “People who teach Klingon to their infant babies are child abusers, right?” Subjective, argumentative, doesn’t have an answer, and is an invitation to discussion.  All of these questions are better discussed on blogs and forums. Blogs, mailing lists and forums don’t care about question or answer quality and really do a much better job of conducting flame wars.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE SITE PROPOSAL.  Please ask sample questions and vote on existing questions.

Meetup- for regular, repeating special interest group events.

Facebook- birthday parties to invite people you know. Can import events from meetup with an app.  The events on facebook tend to be undiscoverable unless your friend is the organizer.  To really promote events on facebook, you need to friend lots and lots of people, which really makes facebook less useful as platform for letting friends and family know what you are up to in your “semi-personal” life.

Twtvite/Tweetups- To invite random strangers to hang out with you at a bar and talk about twitter.  Well, I’m being cynical. I thinks twitter driven events are very promising.  Twitter is already proven a good fit for one type of event, the conference.  Maybe it will scale down for small events if people tried it.

Myspace- for promoting and finding music concerts. You can list small non music events, but what is the point?

Craigslist- for finding people to join a club (groups), but the event section is actually better for listing paid events like cooking or dance classes.

Evite - for inviting everyone at your college or office to an awesome party at you house that will possibly wake up the neighbors.

Traditional newspaper- for huge events, like a county fair.

Special interest sites, e.g. Nerd Dinner or GoodReads.  These tend to have sparse user bases so you might have a hard time finding attendees from these places, but they’re good options for RSVP engines if you already have a group.

So I tell my son he should sell stuff online and earn some cash, rather than me re-selling his video games, books and music for him.  Constraint one: I don’t want to give him my financial account passwords or otherwise link my accounts to his seller accounts.  My son is 14.

1) Most online banks won’t let you open an account until about age 16, or they will only let you open a savings account.

2) Paypal will let a child open an account, but it must be linked to a checking or credit card account before you can do anything with it. (See #1) Paypal will let you open a subaccount of an adult account,  but this subaccount appears to be unable to pay ebay fees.

3) Half.com will not pay you unless you can accept ACH payments, presumably via checking account and doesn’t accept paypal.

4) Amazon.com auctions will not accept paypal for paying fees or receiving payment.

5) Things like visa BUXX appear to be only for making payments.  I haven’t check to see if BUXX cards can be used for paying fees on ebay, amazon or half. BUXX certainly can’t be used to receive payment.

So it looks like to keep my account separate from my sons, I need to set up under my name, address, etc, an entirely new checking account, paypal account, ebay account, amazon account, and half.com account and then give the logon credentials for those to my son.  What a pile of work!  Then in 2 or 4 years, I have to shut all these accounts down and trasfer them to accounts set up in my son’s name!

A personal language is created the intention of being used, but only by one person in the null domain, that being all linguistic acts that do not require an understanding collocutor.

The features and goals of a personal language may include any known features of artificial and natural languages.   Because the structure of a personal language may happen to resemble an auxiliary language, artistic language or engineered language one might confuse the goals of these languages with personal languages.

Languages adapt to the environment they’re used in. A key feature of a personal language is that it is used, and not just an sketch of how a language might be.  As a language is used, features that are awkward wither away and features that were missing will spring into existence.  Natural languages have a tension between efficiency and convention.   It is more efficient to drop unnecessary sounds from words, have short words for commonly used concepts, but it is more important to follow the conventions of the community if one wants to be understood.  A personal language would be expected to evolved to be a very good match with the user’s environment.

Other characteristics and benefits.

Highly optimized to needs of one person.

Highly but not completely private.

Standards of quality are personal.  It might be a relex of English, it might be a clumsy re-hash of Sindarian.  Since it isn’t written  primarily as a work of art for consumption by others, the fashions of the moment are irrelevant, although one would expect to see influences from the laguage designers mileau.

There maybe benefits to creating and using ones own language beyond the benefits of having a hobby, for example, it is known that bilingual people get alzheimer’s later.  If one didn’t have the opportunity to learn a popular natural language (which is a daunting task), writing one’s one language might be just as beneficial as a mental training exercise.

Technical Possibilities

The pronoun system does not need to develop “you” because it wouldn’t be a very important word.  1st person and 3rd person would be more important.

Phoneticis are less important, anything will do.  There is no feedback loop to fine tune the phonetic system.

Philosophical possibilities

If one is using their language to speak to unseen beings, then one would need a well developed pronoun system covering “you” but it wouldn’t be so personal anymore, would it? Pure personal languages aren’t for talking to anyone, seen, unseen or imaginary.

There is no particular philosophy of personal languages, but solipsism seems pertinent. If one has messages and isn’t communicating them, maybe it is because there is no one to communicate with or at the very least the other’s aren’t that important or they just don’t understand you.

Another angle is that one has information that describes reality from one’s own perspective and that is unique enough that it can’t be communicated, but is nevertheless worth recording for future  use.  Using a language for communicating the common deniminator messages that everyone understands would be suboptimal for recording the messages that only you understand.

What a personal language definitely is not.

It is not an auxiliary language, even if it is easy to learn and relies heavily on loan words.

It is not necessarily artisitic, naturalistic, engineered, although it might be.

It is not a community.

It is not a living language, but one could call it a moribund one, on deaths doorstep.  This is okay because propagation isn’t a goal.

All that said, a personal language could potentially gain fans and even be used by people other than the creator, should the creator publish enough materials.  I suppose if fans were to stay true to the philosophy of a personal language, they’d contort the language to suit their own minds and not use it to communicate with other fans or the creator.

Languages evolve through many mechanisms including rebracketing, where one word splits into two or they merge, often as a result of a misunderstanding or ignorance of the origin of the words.

kepeken - to realize an ability, to manifest  an ability.

ken- potential, ability

* kepemoku - to manifest food, to farm.

* kepejan - to manifest a person, to conceive or give birth

suli, lili, seli, great, small, hot– all various ends of a scale

*janli - man sized

*okoli - eye sized

Online communities, I have recently come to believe are a mixed blessing for constructed languages.  On one hand, for the last few hundred years of constructed languages, they typically languished without any attention at all because the audience for constructed languages is so thinly spread out, it was nearly impossible to get critical mass for a new language using traditional media.

Klingon, Na’vi and toki pona probably would all have disappeared at birth without mailing lists.  At the moment only Lojban seems to have had a serious pre-internet community and even Lojban would be a shadow of it is now without the internet. So what is not to love about using the internet at the primary place to find and build a community for your or your favorite conlang?

In my roamings online since last November, I’ve decided there are some serious pitfalls.

The internet affect (or compromises) language design. Even English gain a new vocabulary and is probably on the verge of new grammatical constructions from it’s use online.  Emoticons, ALL-CAPS means shouting, /commands, the threaded discussion, replacing diacritic letters with letter followed by x, all are changes to the language to adapt it to online needs.  A designed language has goals, such as being true to a fictional culture, a certain social goal–such as cross border communication, a certain therapeutic effect, and many other whimsical goals peripheral to the needs of facilitating keyboard mediated written communications amongst strangers widely dispersed across time and place.

Civility and Fight Club. “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”  All online communities run the risk of griefers, trolls, people who treat the internet like some sort of fight club.  Even discussing the internet’s level of civility is a losing battle, with camps of people imagining that it isn’t a even a problem to begin with.  Those who do see it as a problem, often have no recourse but to leave the community.  This starts a downward spiral until most online communities are fight clubs, inhabited by  only those who are looking for a fight, enjoy fighting or can’t tell the difference between discourse and fighting anymore.

Someday, there might be a social or technical solution, such as human moderation, comment voting.  In the conlang world, prospects don’t look good.

In my years of living the real world, I’ve never encountered the number fights, and nastiness that just pops up all over the place in online communities, some I’m just observing, some of it I end up on one end or the other.  Obviously, for many this is a non-issue.  They either enjoy fight club or are oblivious to it.  For me, each fight is a colossal distraction. As they say, if you can’t take the heat, stay out the kitchen.  I now choose to stay out of the online community kitchen.  I’ll use the internet for organizing in person meetups, posting my letters in a bottle to no one on my blog, but I’ve pretty much had it with participating in online communities.

Stay tuned for my next article on how to build communities for conlangs using real world resources.

The null domain is where only you are using the language and no one else is.

• Diary writing.
• Prayer.
• Thinking.
• Dreaming.
• Talking to the cat.
• Writing codes (e.g. your accounting books for income not reported to the tax authorities)

The null domain is for the language that isn’t ready for public use (like a new conlang), for when you’re studying a language outside of it’s normal range (Icelandic in Washington DC), or if you are in fact the last speaker of a rare language.

The null domain doesn’t really have a community, so in that respect, it isn’t fully a language.  I would say it is a full language in the sense that it will evolve and be subject to the forces of erosion, sound shifts, etc.

There is a interesting  thread on the Zompist board.  Not about conlangs, but about meta–talking about the board there.  The zompist board has suffered a general drop in the level of civility to the point where most people there routinely dish out harsh and rude words and generally have adopted a Klingon attitude that manners are for the weaker species.  What doesn’t matter is what these people have written.  What does matter, is “Are the people that have left that community  from the constant harshing the ones that I was interesting in talking to?”  The answer must be yes because I’ve generally stopped posting on Zompist.

In general, the Zompist forums has colored my opinion of a whole style and approach to conlangs.   People learn or write a language so as to reach out to the people who’d be interested in such a language, if only to briefly look at the grammar and dictionary.  If naturalistic conlangs with richly imagined conworld (like Vedurian) attract people who behave like arrogant rude 12 year olds, then for gods sake that is the last sort of language I’d want to create or study.  This goes for the Language Construction Toolkit.   I suspect that if I wrote a language to that spec, it would attract the same sort of people that are pissing all over the zompist bb.  If anything, I would want to write a language that is repulsive to the people remaining on the Zompist, reading the Language Construction Toolkit in reverse so to speak.

Anyhow, nothing left to do now but sit back and wait for some flaming comments from the Zompists.  Does anyone know of  a better run forum?  The yahoo conlang mailing list doesn’t have even a fraction of the bile you see on zompist.  Ditto the toki pona forums.  Ditto the lojban mailing list.  Ditto for the Klingon mailing list (oh the irony!).

What do you call the trolls when it’s only the trolls that are left at an online community?

As a baby, you can hear all phonemes.  As an adult, many phonemes are experienced as one sound, even if they are different.  Often ordinary people can’t re-learn the difference until after years of listening to fluent speakers- such as the aspirate consonants of Hindi or the double consonants of Swedish.  Conlangers that wish to attract fans should ignore these facts at their peril.

Everything and the kitchen sink. Dritok, Ithkuil, gjâ-zym-byn fall into this category.  These languages have radically different phonetic structures, so chipmunks can speak it, so you can do some sort of information compression and so it won’t be mistaken for an auxlang.  I don’t think anyone expects these to be spoken, except as a sentence or two as a party trick.  Even the designer of Ithkuil has reconsidered the phonetic inventory in favor of fans and way from a large phoneme set, by designing Ilaksh.

Same Phonetic Inventory as X. For Esperanto, the inventory is much the same as Bialystok Polish.  Na’vi is much the same as English except for a handful of exotic sounds.  The advantage here is that it is relatively easy to find materials to listen to to learn the phonetics of those languages and then apply it to a conlang.

This is somewhat out of  style because conlangs that ape natural languages too closely are considered uncreative derivatives.  But it’s also a practical choice.  It should be learnable by at least one existing language community and the extra sounds is a minor burden and possible not important should fans fail to ever get the extra sounds right.  It would be like listening to English with a Japanese accent.  Sometimes the l->r transform causes problems, more often not.

Ordinary, but Extra Exotics. This would describe Klingon, whose alphabet isn’t especially large, but has a bunch of harsh noises.  Klingon is also noted for having unusual distribution of phonemes.  I’ve read posts where people harp on if a distribution is natural or not (such a language lacking certain categories of sounds), but for language learning, I’d pay more attention to crowding.   The more similar sounds you have, the more phonetic misery you will be inflecting on the fans of your language.

Radical subset.  This is a common auxlang feature because it makes the language pronounceable for the most people.  Toki pona is a good example of this sort.

A conlang doesn’t have to be an auxlang.  If it isn’t an auxlang, it doesn’t have to be over the top difficult with the phonetics.  The odds of anyone learning to read and wrote a new conlang are slim, the odds of getting two people to speak it are slimmer.  The odds of getting two highly trained and talented phonetics experts to follow your phonetic recipe are getting to be infinitesimal.

By the time you have 12 uncommon sounds in your language, you might as well specify that is only be spoken by rhythmic contractions of the sphincter muscles whilst farting.

Answer to a post on a forum.

I have being doing this exact experiment with Icelandic for ~2 years– I listen to about 1-2 hours of Icelandic talk shows and podcasts a day while commuting, always new material, I never repeat.

Initially, I was chuffed if I could distinguish words (that I didn’t know) from the buzzing noise. Initially only the grammatical particals pop out (definite articles, suffixes on adverbs, etc) One day, I realized that gjaldProta meant bankrupt, which was a word I’d never looked up in a dictionary. More interestingly, I didn’t really understand the news article where I heard the word. I learned hrigja aftur means “call back” on a call in talk show where the caller had a obviously bad connection. There is more context in a stream on noise than you might imagine, after all, the blind learn English largely on input from a stream of noise with no visual context.

There are now 100s of words I’ve heard the point where I recognize them but still don’t know what they mean. However, next time I see the work krof, I will learn it in one repetition because they talk about it all the time on the radio. (It turns out to mean something like central bank reserves)

I used to be able to listen to Icelandic news and read English at the same time. It is getting to the point where I understand enough that it breaks my concentration. When I didn’t understand, it didn’t bother me that they were reviewing a book on knitting.

I think this has helped my pronunciation– I’ve heard a lot of people’s speaking styles. Young girls, academics, men and journalists trying to act serious all have different qualities to their intonation and you can’t learn that from re-listening the same CD over and over.

I’ve a long ways to go, but I think it’s helped.   (Listening to foreign language music on the other hand, has never helped me. Dunno why.