Fake languages by a fake linguist

So I’m 18/30th of the way through a conlang in 30 days and I’m realizing that, unlike a novel, there are many ways to engage with fake languages for a month.

– Things that appeal to people creating fake languages for art and recreation
A write a novel using a conlang in 30 days, i.e. NaNoWriMo
B write a novel written in a conlang in 30 days, i.e. LoCoWriMo
C create 30 days worth of fictional anthropological reports and histories (conworlds)
– Things that appeal to people creating fake languages as a social activity
D create a conlang in 30 days. i.e. 30DayColang
E learn a conlang in 30 days.
F promote/teach a conlang for 30 days

Also, you can do all of the same but substitute “conlang” with “Dead language”. It’s kind of the same exercise when you are working with a language without a living community.

A and B have a natural end to them. Eventually you will finish writing your book. C, F don’t have a natural end to them, you can promote and write fictional histories, build fictional scale models forever. Learning a conlang can have an end to it– someday you’ll learn all there is or acquire near “native” fluency, but it sure won’t take less than 30 days, unless it is a very, very small language and your competency goals are modest. A conlang might have a natural end to it, but there are many different design agendas for creating conlangs and not all of them have a natural end to them.

And A,B,C have a natural start. In a contest it would seem fair to start from scratch, as one does in NaNoWriMo. In D,E,F– it would just be a waste of effort to keep switching horses midstream.

For the very long and infinite tasks, the goal is to start a habit. There is a rule of thumb that it takes about a month to establish a habit, so a month of promoting, studying or consistent scribbling of some sort could kick of a multidecade project.

So, back to the fundamental idea– writing a language in thirty days. All you have to do is image what a complete language definition is and then divide by thirty. So I solicit some advice on the Conlang mailing list and get lots of good advice.

The language is done when it has it’s first native speaker.
A native speaker is someone who speaks that language from birth. So, if you noticed, one of the key elements of the language definition here is a living, human child. So if we we aren’t making babies, then were just fucking around with tangential materials. It is time to get down to the hard work of screwing around.

A Modest Proposal for a Conlang Design Agenda
This isn’t entirely without precident. When previously dead languages are brought back to life, a couple will need to resolve to learn a language as a second language and use it at home extensively enough that the child will begin to use it. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his wife got the language going again by speaking only Hebrew at home around their son, who did eventually figure out the language, despite the Hebrew as a second language skills of his parents. Later Hebrew really took off because it was taught at the public schools. Unless you have your own nation state, you won’t be able to jump start your conlang by the second route, but the first route isn’t in the realm of science fiction, just merely difficult.

It will take more than 30 days. At least nine months just to prepare the initial materials. Before you get that far, you will also need to find a suitable boyfriend or girlfriend. Since this language doesn’t exist in the outside community, it will become the “bonding language” or language that a kid uses with his parent(s). Kids vary and it’s hard to say if they will keep using it with their parents. People also have a habit of switching to the language that facilitates communication. So if you speak your own conlang poorly, but speak English, your child may be tempted to speak only English to you as soon as they realize how much more effective that is.

The optimal scenario is:

Marry a monolingual foreigner-someone who doesn’t speak your mother tongue
Move to a community where your mother tongue isn’t spoken–so that your child doesn’t learn your mother tongue.
Speak only your conlang at home–but of course! How else will this become a living language?

Since your child never learns your mother tongue and you speak the language of the community as a second tongue, then the easiest and most effective language for communication will be the conlang.

Next Generation
A language is dead as soon as it is no longer being taught to the rising generation of children. So to keep the language alive, you really need not just a spouse that is willing to speak a conlang at home, but you need to recruit people to the “club” so to speak.

From research in Anthropoly and space colonization, the rule of thumb is that you need to have 50 to 500 members of your conlang club to have a viable and genetically healthy community.

So the recipe for a conlang
Find a girlfriend/boyfriend who is also a conlang enthusiast or is willing to speak an unusual language at home. This is the moral equivalent of speaking a really, really rare living language at home, since opportunities for using it out of the house are pretty low.

There currently are tens if not dozens (as in more than a single dozen) of people on OkCupid world wide with an expressed interest in conlangs.

Step two. Make a baby. There are instructions, both textual and video, elsewhere on the internet.

Step three. Speak your conlang exclusively at home.

Step four. Document the form spoken by your child or children.

Piece of cake. You now have completed your conlang.

No progress, but I have an idea. A nonconfigurational language (a bag of unordered words) based on existing data structures as found in C#. The language would have an instant parser. The text could be fed into a special page that would randomize the order of words in each sentence for each new view of the page, which would help people break their use of syntax and rely on everything else.

I made a trivial amount of progress on writing a community website. The stumbling block is that I need to write the smallest thing that could possibly work, but as soon as I start I think, “Man, if I do it that way, it’s going to create more work in the future” and then I do nothing.

And I have an idea for a new conlang methodology, but it will take more space than I have time to write.

Since I’m making remarkable little progress, I decided to work on defining my goal, the thing that tells me, “Yes, you wrote a language and you wrote it in 30 days.” And if I could make that goal quantifiable, so that some could visit a webpage and upload documents or fill out a survey, then one could do the next step of saying, “These people completed a language, these people didn’t quite finish in time”

I submitted this question to the Conlang mailing list and will incorporate some of the ideas from there.

Done as in perfect vs done as in objectively along the line starting at [no effort] and ending at ["like a natural language"]
I very much have the philosophy on NaNoWriMo in mind. In NaNoWriMo, contestant write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. At the end of that, they only really know for sure that they have 50,000 words. It could be 50,000 words of “Ni!” or it could be a rather readable story. The point isn’t that 50,000 words is magic, the point is that a quantifiable goal will motivate some people to do something rather than nothing.

While it feels good to say that language development will never be done, it’s done when it is perfect, must take an infinite amount of time, etc, it isn’t really motivating to contemplate that. In fact, even if conlanging really is like trying to drain the sea with a teaspoon, let’s just ignore that and work on something quantifiable. People need new languages, they need to be written and shipped. And language learners need to be able to decide which languages are ready to learn and which aren’t ready. If some conlangers don’t plan to ever reach that point, that’s fine– follow your joy, a 30 day conlang project is probably not going to fit your design agenda anyhow.

Morally better vs more complete. I think I’ve made it clear here that quantification isn’t about writing a better language. A paragraph describing an really great idea for a conlang might be morally better than a language that has a dictionary larger than the OED, a corpus larger than the combined published works of all human languages todate, etc. But at the end of a month, I’d feel more pleased by accomplishing the later, or something close to it, than accomplishing the former. And I think numbers can be put on that.

Multidimensional measures.
What ever measure turns out to be pragmatic, I expect it to be multidimensional. CALS is already choc full of conlang descriptions that exist only as a check list of features and there are plenty of conlangs that exist only as a long list of words and single word English translations. With a little of each, it is possible to write something in a conlang, with only one of each, almost nothing can be written. So these two measures are multidiminisional and sort of multiplicative.

Some measures are additive, or at lease sometimes additive– i.e. a signed language will be complete without anything being written about the phonetic inventory or phonotactics.

Dictionary Size
Of the top of my head I though of dictionary counting, which has some technical problems, especially with how you lemmatize your words. In a language with lots of morphology, it can be tricky to say what is a word and what is a part of a word. Word counting works the best for isolating languages, worst for polysynthetic languages. Word count can’t take into consideration the quality of words– for example a dictionary of commonly used words represents a more complete description of a language than a dictionary with a similar number of scientific and technical words.

A potential fix for the lemmatization problem, suggested by And Rosta
Count listemes. – Theese are word with meanings that can’t be inferred from the parts. So write, do, work, rewrite, redo and rework would be about four listemes: re-, do, work, write (or maybe 3 and derivational morphology would be in the grammar, not the dictionary.)

Corpus Size
Words here can be counted, with some of the same caveats as with dictionaries. The word counts will be most comparable with similar languages (i.e. analytic compares to analytic, agglutinating compares to other agglutinating). To do interlanguage comparisons, you’d need similar texts. Unfortunately, there are few texts that people are commonly translated, e.g. Lord’s Prayer, Babel Story, UN Declaration of Human Rights. These are short and pretty specific semantic domains. Even a large text, like the entire Bible, doesn’t cover enough scenarios to say that the language is usable in modern contexts, as demonstrated by Modern Hebrew, which had to invent numerous neologisms to cope with modern situations.

Grammar Size
There are templates and lists of questions that attempt to cover a broad area of grammatical topics that typically occur in languages. WALS/CALS is one, the outline of “Describing Morphosyntax” is another. If you stick to these too closely, they will influence the design of your language. Imagine if you used your high school French textbook as a model– you’d end up with a French-like conlang. Many of these question sets can yield “Does not apply” if the language in question is too different than what the question set was expecting. For example, toki pona uses almost no morphology at all, so any morphology sections would be “skipped”. Should these skipped sections count as complete or incomplete?

Merely counting word count of the supporting documents works only if the general quality and depth is similar and those criteria are hard to measure. On the other hand, this is the exact same problem than NaNoWriMo has when comparing a 50000 word good novel and 50000 words of “Ni!”

Maybe a compromise could be found by requiring that a descriptions follow a series of sections and that a certain minimum word count be in each section, or some percent of sections (to take into account that some languages have more going on in morphology than syntax or vica versa)

(Some clarifications on the potentials of this strategy from Jim Henry, phrasing is all my own)

Highest Assessable Competency
This idea get’s its inspiration from the competency exams people take to assess their skills in English, French, etc., such as the TOEFL and many other like it.

Let’s take the Black Language of Tolkien. There is one sentence written in it. If someone one were to write a competency test, at best someone could test out to being incompetent. On the other hand, Esperanto is so complete in this sense that you could test out as level 1, 2, 3, etc. up to “passes as a native,” since there are native speakers of Esperanto.

I like this idea, and I suppose in the 30DayConlang context, this could be implemented as writing a series of exams similar to the real life exams, starting at the easiest and working up to the most advanced. The acid test of course would be to take these tests oneself and pass. But that certainly would take more than a month. It’s in a range of imagination to write a language in a month, but learning a language in a month is really a pipe dream, unless there isn’t much to it.

(General idea suggested by Sam Stutter, rephrasing all my own.)

Achievements
Achievements is a common videogame system, where you can rack up points in variety of domains. In the conlang sense, you might gain achievement points for translating certain texts, for completing a 1000 word dictionary, for writing a lesson. These achievement can be earned multiple times, so you can earn 20 lesson achievements, earn the 1000 words in the dictionary achievement five times, etc. Mathematically, this allows for certain interlanguage comparisons.

Language A: 5 achievements of type Q, 6 of R, 10 of S
Language B: 12 of Q, 18 of R, 22 of S
Language C: 1 of Q, 44 of R, 15 of S

B is clearly more complete than A, but C can’t be ranked without making some potentially arbitrary decisions about weighting of scores. The nice thing about a website is that if I feel ambitious enough to do the programming, I could allow people to set their own weighting and sort languages on themselves.

An advantage of achievement scores is that people can compare languages based on criteria that they believe in. For example, if you think the grammar is a bunch of nonsense, then you could sort a list by quantity of corpus to decide who has a complete language and who hasn’t really been trying.

(General idea suggested by David Peterson, rephrasing all my own.)

Completeness by Translation Challenge
So the idea here is to take a large corpus in, say English, and pick sentence at random. If the maximally competent speaker/user of the language at the moment can translate that sentence, and many more, then it is more complete than another language where the best speaker says, “There just isn’t a way to say that yet”

Now this gets tricky with extendable languages and deciding how convenient a translation can be before one accepts it as a translation. English can be translated into toki pona, but whilst doing it, one feels like they are inventing a lot and the result is sometimes clumsy and wordy. If one can find a way to say most things using toki pona– a langauge impoverished in most mechanisms lexical and syntactical, then I suspect many other language that a man in the street might call “incomplete” might have some clumsy way to say just about anything.

All that said, this certainly could be done by survey. A reasonably honest and cooperative conlanger could answer a survey and then say yes/no to “This sentence was translatable” and “I didn’t have to innovate to translate this sentence” and at the end, count up how many yes. In a long enough survey and across enough different people, the individual peculiarities of how people answer should disappear leaving a rough statistic of completeness.

(General idea suggested by And Rosta, rephrasing all my own.)

I spent the day reading about monkeys because I was too tired to do much else. Since I said I was going to do some conlanging everyday, so here I am. Despite being lazy, I’m like two weeks ahead of where I was last year because I have a suitable word generator going already.

Okay, as planned, the language will a subset of US English phonotactics. The root words will be machine generated.

Ideas I’m kicking around for some guiding principles
- It will be apriori, except the phonotactics
- It will be small and most bound and unbound morpheme categories will be closed
- This could be the language for hunter and gathers stuck on a multigeneration spaceship (there are several novels and movies on the theme)
- OR this could be another Arlington, VA “home-lang”
- This can’t be a catlang. The catlang will have to wait for another year.
- This could use a data structure other than trees, like maybe unordered sets. Think non-configurational.

Paste the following into Wordo to see some samples. At the moment diplongs and consonant clusters are generated too frequently. I used wikipedia’s list of valid onsets, vowels and codas. Currently, its showing IPA, but I’ll pick practical orthography soon.

StartingRule word 500

Rule word {
Token Onsets
Token Vowels
Loop 75[1] 25[0] {
Token Codas
}
}


Follow the #30DayConlang hashtag on twitter.

This obviously is inspired by NaNoWriMo, which is the “write-a-50,000-word-novel-in-November” event. This is not to be confused with LoCoWriMo, which is “write a novel in your already complete conlang”. LoCoWriMo, for me, is putting the cart in front of the horse because I haven’t a reasonably complete conlang, and if I did, it will take me many months to learn to use it.

Last year, Gary Shannon wrote a conlang in 30 days. I also tried, and made more progress than usual. Also, last year the 30 Day Conlang, for me, was in November. I think it makes sense to do this in October because the most common reason to create a conlang nowadays is not for international communication (that project is done), but to support a fictional novel. Even when people don’t follow through with the novel, they still often write the conlang as if it were for a novel and are generally following a Tolkien design agenda. So I imagine some people will want to follow this up with a NaNoWriMo novel that uses the conlang they just wrote.

From NaNoWriMo, we learn that to create something cool and sort of large, we should give ourselves a feasible but tight deadline and to not worry about quality. Instead, worry about getting it done. Because if we worry too much about quality, we get bogged down in our creative project and don’t finish. Ever. That said, once people do finish their rushed, slipshod work, they often look back and say, “Gee, that really isn’t that bad” and they fix it up. Or it is a train wreck and it goes into the trash. Either way, you’re better off than if you’d skipped the exercise entirely.

The best thing I got out of last years 30DayConlang was a lot of thought about methodology, machine assisted conlanging and rapid second language acquisition. I wrote a manifesto (a sort of set of design guidelines), I machine generated vocabulary, I sat down one evening with MS-Access and filled in meanings, and failed to finish my morphology and syntax and so no corpus text was created.

Gary Shannon “spoke (his language) into existence”, by babbling and assigning meaning and syntax to the babbling that came out. (See the Brown Conlang mailing list for Nov 2010)

I’m sure more methodologies exist, but unlike a novel, it’s not so much “just sit in front of the computer and pound the keyboard.” any one of the language creation tasks could burn up 30*24 hours– dictionary making is especially laborious if you let it take you over. So you have to explicitly slice up your time and spread it across the various tasks of conlang making– lexicon building, grammar building, grammar testing, language learning (creating flashcards, creating test questions, etc)

It takes 500 hours to learn a language (that may actually be the statistic for becoming an expert at any subject), so I figure if I finish a conlang this year, I could learn it over the upcoming year and then participate in LoCoWriMo.

Rules
Start October 1st, End one minute before November 1st.
Ignore your inner critic and editor, just write it!
Publish your results November 1st.
You have to define “done”, in the sense of what a “complete conlang is”, and it should be easily measurable, to keep with the NaNoWriMo sense of done. For example 2000 words or lexemes, 100 syntax rules, 75 bound morphemes and 1000 words of corpus or example sentence text. Unlike NaNoWriMo, there isn’t a simple metric like the 50000 word novel metric.
Optional. If you wrote a conlang to support a novel, write that novel in November!
Optional. If you wrote a conlang for use, go forth and build a community.

30DayConlang Discussions
Fraith Wiki

Every year I remember that I should be writing and completing a conlang about November because of Nanowrimo month. I wouldn’t write a novel in a conlang, and I’m not really a competent writer, so I wouldn’t write a novel that uses a conlang as an element. I just want to write a conlang. I got a reasonable distance last year, but didn’t finish.

My plan for this year is to actually work on two conlangs, last years and a new one. It sounds stupid to divide effort, but I figure if I can keep from adding a language feature to a language that doesn’t need it, that is a good thing. The other language will get the left over feature(s).

Also, this year I’ll be doing flash cards.

Day one- phonotactics. Phonetic inventory will probably an English subset. My audience is people who live in the same city as me, so I know they won’t do a good job of producing vowels and consonants that they can’t hear.

Day two- generate words.

Day three- Assign meanings using a core + branch technique. The idea is that you pick a generated word, assign a meaning, and then figure out how a language with that core word would work. If you have a verb for the time the sun crosses the horizon, by metaphor, you have a (part) of a word for death, the end, and other associated concepts. In you add a bound morpheme, try to bind it to all the existing words and see what it generates. The key here is that early assigned meanings will block future word building strategies. After you have “dusk+man” to mean a human’s death, you don’t need a basic word for death.

End of week 1 – Flash cards loaded into anki and being reviewed on a daily basis.
End of week 2- Pidgin corpus. Write some provisional sentences. Imagine one is communicating to a fluent speaker and you need to rotate through all the possible variations on how to say something in order to make yourself understood. The specific meanings available will
End of week 3- Create verbal paradigms, syntax and what not to formalize and make efficient patterns from the pidgin corpus. If a feature was planned for but isn’t realized yet, make it happen here. For example, if you don’t have a cool pronoun system that varies by speaker height, implement it now.
End of week 4- Write up drafts of community documents: dictionary, grammar, license

Day 30, postmortem.