Comments for Fake languages by a fake linguist

Comment on What it would take to finish Shyriiwook (aka the Wookie Language) by ZCSJ

ZCSJ — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:25:34 +0000

I think one of the more important and inspiring things for theorists and scholars to keep in mind is the basic principle: Shyriiwook is a language of roaring

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

Neicen — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:20:57 +0000

I was thinking it would be possible to use the Kalusa engine to work out rhetoric/stylistic issues in toki pona and occasionally innovate.

Comment on Content Management for Conlangs by Koppa Dasao

Koppa Dasao — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:36:49 +0000

I can vouch for the spam problem of mediawiki. It really sucks like a vacuum cleaner run on a 1MV line! Though, if you install and set up the correct extensions immediately, it is manageable. Unfortunately, I didn’t do so, and got so swamped with spam that the legitimate pages was only a fraction of the content. All spam was removed (6-700 pages), but the spammers continues to attack the wiki, even though their access has been completely locked out.

Thankfully, Dreamhost doesn’t shut down sites due to excessive bandwidth usage.

Comment on The Most Viable Conlang Communities as of 2013 by Neicen

Neicen — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:18:00 +0000

There is also talossan!

Comment on Toddler conlangs- aka idiolects, plans to teach toki pona to baby by Neicen

Neicen — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:12:56 +0000

Baby sign language has like 600 signs, which is 5 times as many as TP but TP collocations could have their own signs as though they’re phrasal words.

This reminded me of Where are your keys? which uses sign exact language to teach yourself and others languages.

Comment on Toddler conlangs- aka idiolects, plans to teach toki pona to baby by matthewdeanmartin

matthewdeanmartin — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:40:52 +0000

This I can actually answer! I recently took an intro class to ASL and read a bunch about the linguistics of sign languages. The toki pona spec might be a basis for inspiring a toki pona sign language, but so far no one has written one. If we created 125 signs for each word, we’d have “exact signed toki pona” a sort of way of writing toki pona in the air. Signing has a much lower rate of transfer of bits of information per second. So systems to sign what works as a spoken language lead to systems that are incredibly slow. A usable sign language needs to use all the possible tricks to reduce the number of signs you need to express something– including stacking (simultaneous signs, in ASL on the face & the hands), polysynthesis (incorporating subject, verb & object into a single sign), etc, etc.

Kids do learn sign earlier because comprehension and the ability to think in a language races far ahead of the ability to master the fine motor skills need to move the tongue and the lips that fast and accurately. That said, the period for which this is true is often short, just a few months to a few years.

If you are conversationally fluent in lojban, it would help the lojban community and your kid more to speak that at home. toki pona can say many things with the few moving parts it has, but lojban, as far as I can tell can say everything. toki pona has areas where there just isn’t a good way to say it and speakers have to innovate. So a fluent toddler would likely innovate and speak a toki pona that is a superset of “canonical toki pona”

Be sure to read up on the huge literature about how to raise bilingual kids– the pitfalls are many (mostly in the area of failing to teach the minority language, not so much in the area of “harming the child”) I’m teaching my newborn Russian, which for me is a 2nd language, I keep getting to semantic areas where I’m just at a loss for words, I worry if this would harm my relationship- this situation would be far more common were I to try to speak toki pona for long stretches with my son. On the otherhand, once he’s older, its an excellent way to teach someone how to learn a 2nd language, one that doesn’t take decades (like chinese) or months (like esperanto).

Comment on Toddler conlangs- aka idiolects, plans to teach toki pona to baby by Delfi

Delfi — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 07:40:29 +0000

Gah this is a great idea, too bad I’ll have to wait a while to hear your progress!
I’m planning myself to teach my children some conlang, but if it will be Toki pona or Lojban isn’t decided yet.
I heard someone say that children can learn sign language quicker, do you think tp-sign could be a good idea?

Comment on The Most Viable Conlang Communities as of 2013 by Wikimistusik

Wikimistusik — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 14:20:07 +0000

As IALA, the Kotava is the aprioristic language currently most active in the world, but mainly outside the English-speaking world. It has a real community of fluent speakers and thousands of translated texts.

http://www.europalingua.eu/wikikrenteem/Emudexo
http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/map/Wikimistusik

Comment on Content Management for Conlangs by Silvercat

Silvercat — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:30:47 +0000

I use Tiddlywiki (http://tiddlywiki.com/). It’s like a wiki, but all one page. You have to upload it like normal HTML, but no one else can edit it. And it’s easy to add macros so you can see what you need to work on.

Mine is here. Between the table of contents and the tagcloud, it’s easy to find stuff.

Comment on How not to put philosophy into a language by Neicen

Neicen — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 01:12:25 +0000

I’ve started a blog, and I have a new entry dealing with this post, and why I advocate fusionality in conlangs.

http://learntrix.blogspot.com/2013/02/fusion-in-conlanguages.html

Comment on Conlangs for expressing a philosophy by How not to put philosophy into a language | Fake languages by a fake linguist

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:26:02 +0000

[...] This is a follow up to my last post, “Conlangs for expressing a philosophy“. [...]

Comment on Content Management for Conlangs by Neicen

Neicen — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:01:15 +0000

There are small dictionary tools like this
http://www.veche.net/programming/lexmanager.html

Comment on The Most Viable Conlang Communities as of 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

matthewdeanmartin — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:13:31 +0000

It’s a small joke. Interlingua was designed to be immediately readable by speakers of Romance languages, sort of like a Romance Slovio and I think they achieved that, but I’m not especially competent in any Romance language, other than French comics, on a good day.

Comment on The Most Viable Conlang Communities as of 2013 by thnidu

thnidu — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 23:46:39 +0000

Of Interlingua, you wrote “Has a forum. I think. I honestly can’t tell if this is Portuguese, Italian or Spanish.” If you’re referring to the language of the website and/or posts, on the basis of the few posts I’ve just looked at in several different fora, the answer is “None of the above”, so apparently Interlingua.

Dr. Whom: Consulting (real) Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

Comment on The Most Viable Conlang Communities as of 2013 by Neicen

Neicen — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:37:11 +0000

I think the other thing is, there are some very developed languages such as Alashian and novogradian that are begging for teaching resources. These languages are very robust and probably have the largest grammars bar none (including Lojban) and have a pedagogical challenge on par with a natlang. On the other hand, the fact that we have a useable grammar for them is impressive even including natlangs. And since linguistic pedagogy is kind of my thing, I’m interested in making a memrise course for one or several of them. However, considering I haven’t learned a case language before, this will be a challenge. I’m going to make a blog I think. I’ll keep you posted.