Author Archives: matthewdeanmartin

Baby’s First Language

Posted on April 30, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

So, some things my baby likes to say (he’s 2 months old, so according to most charts he’s not supposed to express any communicative skills for 2 more months). At about 3 weeks he said “no, ba-gwa, no, ba-gwa, no” … Continue reading →

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Orphaned projects in the world of toki pona, aka conlanging (err..conlexing when you aren’t the inventor)

Posted on March 27, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

This is about conlexing, not conlanging. In a conlex (article on definition forthcoming), there is a community of users and they don’t take well to deep reforms that you might see in independent conlanging or collaborative conlanging. In a collaborative … Continue reading →

Posted in toki pona | 1 Comment

A very, very verbose Tower of Babel conlex implemented in JavaScript

Posted on March 6, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

This is my conlex called “Bresenish”. It’s set inspired. The idea is to do for programming data structures what lojban did for propositional logic. I tried this with C# and that was pretty verbose. JS is just as verbose but … Continue reading →

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toki pona and Orwell’s NewSpeak

Posted on March 5, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

Wikipedia has for a long time said this nonsense: This goal, together with Toki Pona’s deliberately restricted vocabulary, has led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means “simple language”, “good language”, or “goodspeak”, resembles George Orwell’s fictional … Continue reading →

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Toddler conlangs- aka idiolects, plans to teach toki pona to baby

Posted on February 17, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

I read about this a long time ago- the story was that twins would speak to each other in their own language. But while reading Baby Brain Rules (which happens to be on sale on amazon, cheap $3) the author … Continue reading →

Posted in babies and new languages | 3 Comments

How not to put philosophy into a language

Posted on February 10, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

This is a follow up to my last post, “Conlangs for expressing a philosophy“. I suppose one can use any vessel for expressing a philosophy you’d like, a prose book, fortune cookies, songs, or even a refrigerator manual or a … Continue reading →

Posted in conlang design | 1 Comment

Content Management for Conlangs

Posted on January 30, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

I’m considering my options for posting the evolving definition and learning materials for a small conlang. Plain html. Evolves poorly. Easy to set up for a single document. Wiki Evolves well, but at the end it will look like a … Continue reading →

Posted in conlang community building | 3 Comments

ASL-Lite for Late Life Hearing Loss?

Posted on January 24, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

Here is a study that says mental capacity declines when old people go deaf or become hard of hearing. Having personal experience with the Deaf (well, I took a class taught by someone in the Deaf community), this isn’t happening … Continue reading →

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Conlangs for expressing a philosophy

Posted on January 22, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

toki pona was supposed to be something about daoism, in my experience, it missed that design goal. I think the historical philosophical languages were supposed to be good for discussing philosophy in general, or approached derivational morphology in sort of … Continue reading →

Posted in conlang design | 2 Comments

Forums are cheap, I think I will put one up- Learn Any New Language

Posted on January 19, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

English has a lexical gap for a word that covers languages from Esperanto to Klingon to Elvish to Lojban and the numerous others, I’m going to provisionally use “new language”. The word “conlang” more and more seems to mean just … Continue reading →

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Solipsist Conlanger = the new Auxlang advocate

Posted on January 18, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

Sometime after the internet boom started, auxlang promoters finally had access to the means to send unsolicited messages to people who care about languages but don’t care about the auxlang project and auxlang advocacy became the new body odor, odious … Continue reading →

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Conlangs and a priori auxlangs

Posted on January 8, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

So recently I became aware of Kah, an apriori, new language. An unfairly brief review of the language makes me think this is designed based on a creole, with serial verbs and the like and seems to have some optimizations … Continue reading →

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365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember

Posted on January 5, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

So what conlaning methodolgy is most likely to capture the minds and hearts of recreational linguists? One based on portmanteus of month names and chapter headers from your linguistics text books of course. Did I even have to answer that? … Continue reading →

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The Most Viable Conlang Communities as of 2013

Posted on January 3, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

Update: This is an article about con-paroles, languages that are used as languages. This caused a bit of confusion. If I missed any communities, just leave a comment, I know that some of the ones in Europe are active, but … Continue reading →

Posted in conlang learning | 17 Comments

Bresenish Syntax- A set theory inspired syntax

Posted on December 27, 2012 by matthewdeanmartin

So I’m working on a new small language, which for the moment is called Bresenish. Here is a rough description of the syntax, hopefully it will be worth reading about even if you don’t care to learn the full language … Continue reading →