My Suburban Destiny

Miniblogging is awesome for any language learning, including constructed languages.  Everyone has time to write a sentence a day, everyone can read a senetence or two.  Effective twittering in foreign language though, (especially a conlang) takes a bit of planning.

Create  new account for your conlang twittering.  Your ordinary friends don’t want to see the noise.

Always tag your tweets with the name of your conlang.  Hopefully you’re conlang’s name can be transliterated into roman letters in less than 140 characters.

Get a muliti-account twitter client. Tweet Deck is suitable.  Keep a search running for the hashtag of your (favorite) conlang’s name.

Set up a twibe. A twibe is a way of identifying people and tweets that are related to a topic.  You twibe should have the #hashtag and unhashed keyword for search.  If you language has a very common word that appears in most sentences, that might make a good twibe keyword, too.

Anythime anyone tweets in your (favorite) conlang, mark it as a favorite.  Without favoriting, it is impossible to track down the occassional tweets that get burried in the stream of non-conlang related tweets.  If you have lots of followers and you’ve just read a tweet by a person with few followers, retweet it for them. 

Create twitter lists that list:

• people that only tweet in your (favorite) conlang
• people that have tweeted once in your (favorite) conlang.

Use shoutem as a complementary part of your twitter strategy.  Shoutem is a more elegant solution to doing what twitter does for a special interest group, but twitter has more users. If you ignore twitter, a really large numbe of people won’t ever migrate to shoutem.  Shoutem also lacks the incredible number of clients and addon services that have grown up around twitter.  On  the otherhand, shoutem will be 100% in the conlang and have only people interested in the conlang– where as twitter has a filtering problem–many people who don’t care, many messages having nothing to do with your (favorite) conlang.

Sign up for a twitter scheduling service, such as twuffer.com.  Presumably you are the conlang creator or it’s biggest fan. You can create contest faster than the world can consume, but likley have weeks were real life interferes and you can’t do any conlanging.  If you use a scheduler, you can keep the conversation boiling while you are away.  Do try to respond in real time.  Subscribe

The typical person who learns a constructed language is probably on their 4th language.  I’ve no data to back this up, but here’s why I think so:

1. Everyone speaks their mother tongue.

2. Most everyone takes a foreign language as an elective or requirement in school.  It wasn’t Esperanto or a conlang.

3. People discover Esperanto while studying the language the studied at school and notice Esperanto is easy because they speak 2 of the language that Esperanto uses for source material.

4. People who study Esperanto learn about conlangs and some of them pursue them further since they’ve already demonstrated above average ability to learn foreign languages.

So if you know toki pona or any other conlang, you probably speak or read three other languages reasonably well.

The percent of people who go down the list in the opposite is likely small.  But I don’t have the data for it.

Pick one of the popular auxlangs. ‘Nuff said about those, everyone already knows Esperanto exists and has fans in many cities worldwide.

Create your own? This is the most work.  You will have the most flexibility with regards to how you use the language. You will have to promote and build the community yourself.  A pre-existing conlang often is reasonably complete, has a community and prestige. Achieving that all on your own is a lot of work.

Things to Consider when Shopping for a conlang to study

You know how much time it takes to learn a language…poorly? It takes a really long time.

Is it complete? If its complete, then one needed worry about conflicts with the creator as you and the community argue over what is a mistake, what is correct and what is an innovation.  If the language is grossly incomplete, see if the designer wants to collaborate.  Otherwise fork and create your own.

Was it ever intended to be humanly usable? If the language requires sign language using alien body parts, supersonic screeches and subsonic rumbles, or is ludicrously difficult then just read the grammar and be entertained.

Does the author have or imagine they have extremely restrictive intellectual property rights? Don’t be thinking about posting too much Mandolorian on your blog or the fanfic police will be on your butt.  There are enough language to pick from to bother with highly proprietary conlangs.  Look for conlangs that are in public domain or at least a fan friendly license, like GNU or Creative Commons.

What are the talking points, what is the prestige factor, what is the goal?
This is sort of like the same question on must ask when picking a natural language to learn.  Esperanto offers world peace, Lojban offers clear headed thinking, Klingon offers a deeper connection to the Star Trek fans–which is something valuable since Kirk doesn’t exist and Leonard Nemoy probably won’t be hanging out with you for beers after work.   Many constructed languages think they are all things to all people, I doubt they are. Think critically about the value proposition that is floating around for a language, make sure it fits with your life goals.

Exactly who is the community right now? Depending on the language, the community of a conlang (or auxlang) is :

- intellectuals– “The only thing between us and world peace, truth and beauty is the morphosyntactic alignment of all these illogical, nationalistic, patriarchial, depressing natural languages…and the glasses  I’m wearing”
- linguists and polyglots– “Hmm, ergative, lots of plosives, but still looks like Samoan”/”… and now I’m speak fluently 14 languages! (but on this language no one can call BS because no one else speaks it, mwah ha ha!”
- fringe elements– “I’ve got tattoos, I’m a member of the radical left/right, and I speak a language that you suburban clones don’t understand.”
- science fiction and fantasy– “A 3 hour 3-D movie isn’t immersive enough. Gimme the body paint and a dictionary and lets go LARP in the park”

Constructed languages do attract their target audience– if someone proposed a compilable conlang that was practical to speak and write business application in, then at least some software developers would show up in the conlang hobby universe.  Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be great to turn COBOL into a language that one could use for conversation?

Are the community and the language designer getting along? Language designers can abandon the project, move on to another, make changes that only some of the community will follow leading to splits, etc.   If your the 2nd language learner, you may also become the designer, promoter and so on if the language is abandoned in an incomplete state.  Community schisms are interesting, too, and sometimes not.  Imitation conlangs are a sign of success, but successful imitators split the community and make it hard to decide which community will survive.

Language Description

Phonology, Phonotactics and Sandhi complete.

Phrase grammar complete.

CALS page complete.

Morphosyntax sketch complete. (question list from book of same name)

Swadesh (or alternative) list complete.

Core lexicon and derivational morphology complete to the point that most if not all words either exist or can be derived by a hypothetical speaker. In otherwords, the language community isn’t waiting for new words.

Intellectual property rules established, (i.e. released to public domain, CC, proprietary commercial licensing, etc)

Corpus, Community and Competency

Corpus (excluding pedagogical examples in reference grammars) has attested all or most lexical entries and grammatical structures.

1st translations of common texts, e.g. Babel text, Lord’s Prayer, Zompist Phrasebook, etc.

1st reported conversation (either on forums, online chat, voice chat or in person conversation)

1st period of sustained daily usage

1st successful in person gathering for the purpose of speaking in the language without code switching.

Milestones with significant economic barriers

Physical keyboards adapted for use with language

Unsubsidized books sales by someone other than the inventor, especially for non-pedagogical materials.

1st long format texts (novella, novel length)

1st podcast, talkshow, news program

Has language governance body with regular meetings.

Living Language Status

Organized in person communities with regular gatherings and activities (excluding pedagogical gatherings)

Language governance body documents what is happening more it than directs.

1st child to learn the language

1st 2nd generation child to learn the language

Spoken by extendend family.  Individuals that marry into the family also learn the language.

Language use considered prestigious

If you double all the parts of a sentence, you get something like this:

C1 la C2 la S1 en S2 li V1 li  V2 e O1 e O2 Prep NP1 Prep NP2.

With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, we lack  co-ordinating machinery to co-ordinate this interleaved sentence except in a few cases.  Worse, by the time you realize that your interleaved sentence looks wrong, it’s too late.

C1 la C2 la is roughly additive adverbs that apply to all verbs.

S1 en S2 are subjects that did both action.

e O1 e O2 were the target of both actions.

NP1 Prep NP2 modifies the entire sentence.

If V1 is instansitive and V2 is transitive, both objects go with the transitive verbs.

If both verbs are transitive, check to see if co-ordination can be done semantically.  If not, you’ll need to split the sentence.

mi en sina li jo li moku e ilo moku e moku linja pan.  You and held a fork and ate spaghetti.

Like most toki pona sentences, the above has many nonsense readings, which can be safely ignored.

Some prepositions don’t make sense with certain verbs.  Preps resolve to the verbs they go with, and no the others.  If a prepositional phrase could go with either, consider using multiple sentences.

Sequential Interleaving.

mi li pali li moku li lape e pali mi e moku mi.  I did my work, ate my dinner and slept.

Again, this has a nonsense alternative of “I worked and ate and slept my work and food.”, which we can safely ignore.

Mixing predicates and SVO sentences

Predicative sentences and SVO sentences probably shouldn’t be mixed unless you double check for plausible ambiguities.

mi li suli.

mi li suli li pali e sijelo sama.  ? I am big and I work out./I increase the size of and work out my body.

? mi lon tomo mi li lape.
? I’m in my room, sleeping.

Mixing predicate and SVO sentences is outside of what wikipedia says we can do with toki pona, but I suspect people will do it anyhow.

Toki pona is an isolating language.  The 125 morphemes do not fuse, so it is somewhat like Chinese.  This makes it tricky to discuss compounding and derivational morphology because the linguistic jargon that is established almost universally assumes that words are created by solidly glomming words together.  Most derivational morphology is going on at the phrasal level in toki pona.

Compound words that include prepositions as modifiers must split or mutate in the nominative.

jaki lon nena sinpin  => jaki pi nena sinpin li tawa anpa sinpin mi. (change preps to pi)

OR jaki li tawa anpa sinpin mi lon nena sinpin. (move prep to end of sentence)

kule lon palisa luka => kule pi palisa luka

Compound words must be internally grammatical phrases as if they were stand alone.  This is analogous to chemen-de-fer in French, which retains prepositions in compound words.  Compound words in toki pona can contain modifiers, pi-phrases, and prepositional phrases.  Compound words can’t contain la, li or e phrases, i.e. no adverbials, verbs or direct objects.

Compound words can include conjunctions, but these compound words can only be use with prepositions and adverbial clauses, not in accusative!  Worse, there is no obvious transform to make it legal in the accusative.  More likely, the phrase grammar rules will be updated to disallow the accusative form of conjunctions between two head nouns, but allow conjunctions words in a pi phrase.

? soweli tawa pimeja en walo- zebra

(possibly should be soweli tawa pi kule pimeja en kule walo)

mi lukin e soweli tawa pi kule pimeja en kule walo.

Compound words that are modified by verbal phrases are not part of the language yet. I’m waiting to see how long it will take before it does.

Compound words with multiple modifiers can express themselves in multiple orders and it is the same word.

palisa noka lili - toe

palisa lili noka  - toe

Compound words have subset-anaphora. One could use “ona”, but because “ona” can agree with anything, it is more prudent to repeat the head of the compound word instead.  The sloth of the writer is paid for by the reader.

palisa noka lili mi li jo e pilin ike.  palisa li jo e kule loje.

My toes are sick.  They have a blue tinge to them.

Other imaginable variations include,

ona palisa  li jo e kule loje.  (pronoun with head word as modifier)

palisa noka li joe e kule loje.  (head plus one of the modifiers)

When you chart the frequency of words used in the corpus, you can see that the distribution is the combination of two curves, probably because function words are common and content words less so.  Some words play both roles.

Words 1-5 is the steep descent.  Words 6-36 are above the line for Zipf’s law.  I think this is because they are both content and function words.  Among them are the words we’d expect to find in a derivational morphology system:

suli- Augmentive (undivisible things),  e.g. kasa suli, tree
mute- Augmentive (divisible things) e.g. tomo mute, city.
sona- -ology, e.g. sona toki, e.g. linguistics (note that sona comes first, unlike -ology in English!)
ala- -un, e.g. kepeken ala, e.g. without (note this is a derivation on a preposition!)
lili- Diminutive (both divisible and indivisible things), e.g. jan lili, child
jan and ma are both important because they are the required head noun to loan words for countries and geographic locations.

And soon I’ll discuss the rest of the ways words can be created in toki pona (change of POS, loan words and eponyms).