As I've said before, learning a language poorly takes a long time. So as a indiscriminate learner of languages, very rapidly I have to get picky about what I bother to study. I like languages that are small. Oddly, Klingon is small. The active community made the vocabulary closed and "de facto" capped at about 3000 words, which grows by about 1 every few years. I think one of the more recent new words was "monk". Dothraki is scheduled to be about 7000+ words, which is about the vocabulary at which people begin to report they feel fluent in say French or Spanish. So by that measure it isn't small. [By published vocab it is small, but texts written contrained by 500 words are not going to be compat with future texts unconstrained by 500 words.] So I ignored it for a few years, until I finished season 1 of GoT. I was annoyed that I had to switch the subtitles back from Swedish to English for the Dothraki sections.

It appears that the reference grammar of Dothraki is at 300+ pages now. Where is the book? I’m wondering if like Na’vi, Dothraki a prisoner of the needs and concerns (or more likely, the lack of needs and concerns) of the movie makers.

Movie makers want a language that isn’t constrained by backwards compat issues (this became a nuisance in the history of Klingon), that is reasonably easy to pronounce by actors, makes the movie sound better than ook-gook-poop nonsense, etc.

What fans want: A published lexicon, enough words in enough semantic domains to get by (but not too many, this is a commercially useless skill you know?), stagnation in the development of grammar, pedagogical grammars (lessons rather than a phonetics/morphology/syntax/discourse tome), a stock of canonical corpus texts, a safe harbor for using the language without risk of cease and desist letters.

Lets score Dothraki so far:
Lexicon – cobbled together by fans by reverse engineering leaked & in movie material
Grammar – Unpublished, so I presume that stuff beyond the current movie text is subject to change
Pedagogical grammars – Again, unpublished, lesson cobbled together by the reverse engineering of fans.
Canonical texts – Laboriously copied down by fans
Safe harbor – Not sure (I know for Klingon, at least the KLI can publish books & make money, couldn’t find the current status for Na’vi, initially Frommer acted as if he was pretty constrained about publishing much & I’d assume that meant fans were similarly constrained) (And yeah, what language we wisper behind closed doors– hollywood couldn’t give a flying f*k, and for usage up to but not publishing for significant money, I can’t imagine a lawyer could be motivated to squash it. But take down notices are always a risk when posting fan-fic or stuff that borders on that)
And what I keep thinking fans want, but don’t know it yet. They want governance… not a great Khal to crush them under the heel of his boot (er, horses’ shoes?), but more like the Tiddly Wink Tournament official rules. Are loan words from English okay? (Like EO) Can words change part of speech to fill a lexical gap? Can new words be coined? Which community proposal for weights, measures, calendars and the Moh’s scale should be used?

Often I’ve been criticized for not understanding conlanging, that one is supposed to enjoy it not by actually using a language, but by sitting in a large chair and reading the reference grammar and dictionary and being amused by that. Well, follow your joy, I’ll follow mine. I’m always shopping for languages to use, even if the number of years left in my life doesn’t really warrant learning many more.

Anyhow, I’ve got 45 minutes until the end of my holiday, maybe I can make some progress on that red Lojban book. At least it has been published.

At about 3 weeks he said “no, ba-gwa, no, ba-gwa, no” (no = english “now” or Japanese, “nao”) Google translate said it was probably Welsh but failed to translate it to anything sensible.

Agoo. No kidding, this means “I sneezed.” It sounds related to achoo.
Mam. No kidding, he says this when is upset, crying and in context, appears to want Mom.
Owh. I’m going to cry in a moment. (or possibly, it means, “Can’t you just give in to my demands already?”)
And he said something once that sounded like “Hello”, but that appears to have been a one-off production for the moment.

Protogestures
We’re keen to teach baby real ASL. The boy has spent the first two months of his life with his hands in tight fists. Not very conducive to ASL signing. The first age of signing would drop if the system worked with clenched fists. One book I read said the lower bound for first sign is 4 months.

Recently, often when he’s laying on his back waiting to be picked up, he will raise his index finger– the rest of the hand is still a fist. I don’t know if it means, pick me up, but we try to react to it if it was. Pointing is a pretty early expression anyhow. So we likely have his first protogesture.

He also makes a fist with pinkie up. This is close to the sign for play/fun in ASL, something I sign to him a lot when he is listening to music. Again, I can’t tell if when he makes these gestures if it really match up to that thought in his head, but I try to react to pinkie-up as if means “play/fun” or music. The ASL sign for music requires making a two arm sweeping gesture, which is beyond what the boy can do right now– his arms are sort of jerky and all over the place.

He doesn’t do the up sign when already picked up, nor when he’s nursing.

Symbol Boards
In the disabled community, there has been bouncing around the idea of communication systems for boards for communication by pointing at successive symbols. We have the white on black baby book. It is a bunch of mono chrome black and white (no grey scale) pictures. The boy finds it very interesting. This is odd because some days it’s hard to get him to look at other books at all. So if I were to teach a toddler a pointing board, I would use a black and white or white on black symbol set– no colors, nothing intricate.

So back to toki pona, a project that I have been planning to take a break from in favor of spiffying up my Russian.

Big Projects.
A field linguists reference grammar. The hard part here is tying everything back to community corpus text.
The phrasal dictionary. Writing a dictionary that tracks down an example community corpus usage is hard.

Medium Projects
Watching the net for toki pona activity. I use RSS, twitter, and a google search alert to find toki pona stuff as it pops up.
- Reposting new tp content on toki lili & twitter (or the main forum)
- Welcome committee. Let people know that they will be corrected a lot. Correct people a lot. Respond to questions.
- Self appointed tutor. Lesson plans need to be written.
- Translate the foundational docs.
- News contriver. The inventor used to contrive news by adding a new word to the lexicon every other year or so. It’s a big deal if the lexicon is all closed classes and there’s only 125 or so words. The threshhold for what counts as news is pretty low, but if someone isn’t out there contriving news, the conversation dies out.

Small Projects
Systems. Especially ones that don’t call on lots of proper modifiers.
- Number systems. Can anyone make a truely quick to say number system?
- Spelling systems.
- Calendar systems.
- Writing systems.
- Science systems. From Moh’s scale (geology) to Biological taxonomy systems to systems for describing the life cycle of a star. It’s a endless pit of small projects.
- Monitor the wikipedia article. These get in accurate and fixing them is hard because of original research restrictions. So if I do a survey and figure out the true number of “fluent speakers”, I’m not supposed to go fix the article and post a link to my blog. Someone else is suppose to do it.

I wish I could write the datastructures of an message in an IDE (integrated development environment), then have a computer serialize it to a speakable conlex. I’m not too concerned about deserialization, humans are smart, but I notice while writing that the IDE, the computer can check to see how many potential parses it has to see if it is too ambiguous. Unlike lojban, the goal isn’t to have a single possible parse tree, since I assuming that the deserializer is a human brain, which has other knowledge available to aid in deserialization. Imagine if you had the 3 words, “mouse, cat, chased”– no matter the order, you can use your knowledge of small mammals to figure out what scenario is most likely.

You can copy the code below to jsFiddle to see the unimpressive results.

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 language Newspeak.[6]

First off, what some people’s feelings are is about as encyclopedic as fart. What matters is what is defensible on some standard of truth, being it either sociological– (conlangs are things that people do, so lets study it)– or linguistics– (conlangs might even be languages the way French is, so let’s study it).

The “They don’t have a word for it” trope.
New Speak in the fictional world was for expressing fictional English Socialism and as a means of totalitarian mind control. Vocabulary was restricted on the probably defective idea that if you don’t have a word for something, you can’t think about it, or do it, e.g. revolution, resistance, protest, etc.

toki pona isn’t primarily or tertiarily trying to control thought or to prevent unhappiness by taking away the words for unhappiness. In fact, the language’s lexicon isn’t all that happy, with words for death but not life and other oddities. The only way that you could think that toki pona was created by a NewSpeakian process of removing words incompatible with a philosophy is to not actually look at the lexicon. toki pona’s lexicon comes from a choice process more akin to Basic English, where words of high frequency, highly polysemous are chosen and narrow ones are left out.

toki pona and the philosophy of simplicity
Something can express a philosophy and something can be inspired by a philosophy. The Wizard of Oz was inspired by the monetary philosophy of the gold standard. It does a lousy job of expressing it, most people don’t get the allegory. At a museum you might have a piece of art inspired by some philosophy, without a cheat sheet, I bet you’d be hard pressed to figure out what philosophy generated what art (short of obvious hints like crucifixes). toki pona’s design and recommended use was inspired by a philosophy of simplicity. It doesn’t express any philosophy in use. You can write any message you want in toki pona– they will all be equally difficult to read and equally verbose.

Which one resembles a language, which resembles an idea for a language
New Speak is an artlang that in the real world isn’t defined enough to do squat with it. So a linguist couldn’t really do much with it. toki pona, by dint of effort of it’s fans, is some percent on the way to being a language– people use it online for communication. No one uses New Speak for anything, except as a rhetorical device for criticizing the way people choose words to encourage listeners to agree with their political views.

toki pona is not an artlang. toki pona is not embedded in any fictional work and does not have a conculture associated with it. Also, unlike a typical artlang, fans are expected to and have memorized the words and practiced the grammar to the point that they can read and write texts for consumption by other people on the internet. toki pona’s foundational documents are pedagogical, not primarily entertaining reference grammars and entertaining dictionaries, although I suppose anyone could potentially find anything amusing.

Structural Differences
toki pona’s lexicon is closed except for proper nouns (aka proper modifiers). NewSpeak’s vocabulary is open for all technical, scientific words. I suspect the effect of this would be to make the basic vocabulary of people impoverished, but people would still have a huge vocab of scientific words. But we don’t know– there isn’t a complete spec for NewSpeak and there isn’t a community of people trying to speak NewSpeak into existence.

NewSpeak is derivationally agglutinative. toki pona is isolating.

NewSpeak is a condialect of English. toki pona might as well be apriori as it borrows little syntactically and the lexical borrowings might have well have been apriori as the mother tongue semantic range is irrelevant in use and is generally not helpful for recognizing what a word means should you speak the loaning language.

Phonetically, NewSpeak is English. toki pona phonetically, was designed the way an apriori auxlang designer might, by picking sounds that are globally common.

I recommend this fix to the wikipedia article:

This goal, together with Toki Pona’s deliberately restricted vocabulary, triggered some gaseous, flatulent airbag to fart that the language, whose name literally means “simple language”, “good language”, or “goodspeak”, resembles George Orwell’s fictional language Newspeak. In the meanwhile, other people know that this nonsequitor comment is irrelevant, unrelated, nonsense and detached from any serious analysis of toki pona as a small social movement or as a spec for a small language.[6]

(Why don’t we instead compare tp to Klingon– because Klingon’s vocab is in practice fixed because Marc Okrand only coins a few words every once in a while, or compare it to Lingua Ignota because the inventor had religion/philosophy on their mind at the time, or gah! why bother? There isn’t a tidy pair like “Esperanto is like Interlingua” Actually one fake language it is kind of similar to is Sona, but that isn’t a very parallel fit either, but since no one knows anything about Sona either, it wouldn’t be a very enlightening comparison in an encyclopedic article)

Teaching toki pona to baby
Ha, not like you think. I’ll be speaking Russian to baby, mom will speak English (one-parent-one-language) and when the baby is near his vocab spurt, I plan to do 30 hours of imaginative play using sock puppets and those sock puppets speak toki pona. It’s important for babies to work out who speaks what language, so I can’t be seen as the one that speaks toki pona, but it’s fine if sock puppets do.

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 dictionary. In the case of the refrigerator manual, the fridge stuff is just a distraction to your main message. (And hey, there is a real book, zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance)

Editorializing Definitions
“A banker is someone one who offers an umbrella only when it isn’t raining”

“fun: fun is going to church, does not apply to drunkenness, dancing or gossiping”

“There is no word for traitor”

These aren’t definitions that a real lexicographer would accept. Words are as words are used. In a conlang with users, the words are as the fans use them, the definitions in the foundational documents are just a starting point. As soon as the language is born, there will be lexical gaps– and those lexical gaps will be filled by a variety of strategies, expanding the definitions of existing words, wordy circumlocutions, and so on.

Words don’t work this way. Language is very declarative, it says what is, not what it should be. Language describes the inner reality of real people and you can’t dictate their inner reality. You can just provide some words and recommended initial usage that spans the gap between your inner reality and someone else’s. As you pair any lexicon with a given inner reality, you will see different usage patterns. For example, in modern Russia, people routinely call business men bandits and criminals, having grown up hearing that sort of thing in school and just everywhere. In the west, where the rule of law works well enough, the local baker would be a businessman, not a bandit and a westerner would make the same distinction if he were speaking Russian or English. And the Russian may fail to make the distinction if he were speaking English or Russian or a fake language with pro- (or anti-) capitalist editorializing in the official definitions.

Salvaging a bad idea
Let’s imagine a communication system really did have the above 3 rules regarding bankers, fun and traitor. To keep fans from just ignoring them, you’d need to provide words (or suitable lexicalized phrases) for “banker, as in a person to lends money or holds money for safe keeping”, “fun, as in dancing, drunkeness and gossiping”, and the compound word or phrase that means the same thing as “traitor”. The lack of a short word for traitor will be likely temporary– useful phrases get lexicalized, shortened and turned into words through time and use. The attempt to redefine banker and fun failed– instead we created two jargon words.

Anyhow, an entire language is an awfully big and cumbersome vehicle for expounding on a philosophy– if one is making a language to express a philosophy and all you have are jargon and editorializing definitions, then one might as well extract that to a discussion of philosophy and “how-things-should-be”.

(And if you haven’t read my other post, please do, it that one I’m more optimistic about getting some philosophy into a language via grammaticalizations, pronoun systems, etc)

Plain html. Evolves poorly. Easy to set up for a single document.

Wiki Evolves well, but at the end it will look like a bunch of disconnected pages. Some versions, like media wiki, have such poor security they get overrun by spam. Easy to turn into a bunch of stubs if you aren’t careful.

Blog. Well, this blog isn’t a good option. I hate mixing streams of content with different audience. This blog is for just anyone interested in fake languages. Inserting a bunch of lessons on a specific language is just noise.

A dedicate blog isn’t a very good option because by default, a blog makes recent content very visible and old content less visible. A conlang has about three levels of content– the expository description for tourists and people deciding if they want to try it out. The second is a lesson plan, work book ,flash cards and a forum for posting texts, questions, etc. Comments on a blog do a poor job of allowing the community to initiate a discussion.

The order in which content is created has nothing to do with the order in which content is most digestible.

Email Lists These scale poorly, but are easy to join. They scale poorly— at more than a dozen emails a day, people start to ignore it, send everything to a folder than they ignore, or they use only the web interface which makes a list behave more like a forum. I have no idea what the etiquette is for mailing lists where it is just the creator trying to create most of the content but I for one, wouldn’t want to be constantly trying to create conversation on a mailing list if it didn’t have critical mass, where as I can post daily to a blog and there isn’t a problem if no one is answering (at the moment).

Mailing lists assume there is someone ready to respond *right now*. Blogs allow people to respond years later.

Forum. Forums have a high entry cost, but work well for core community participants. Forums work well for high volumes of messages and work poorly for low volumes of messages. Some people just don’t like forums. Forums also have rules of their own, can attract people who enjoy other forums that may have a culture that you’d rather not import onto your life.

Miniblogging This is a good place for learner’s discussion, maybe a way to teach– breaking the lessons and vocab into a tweet or two a day is a creative way to drip feed the world the knowledge to use a language when they otherwise might not have the time to devote a 30 hour block to it.

Moodle and the like Moodle is an online lesson thing. Most computer base training is multiple choice quiz oriented, e.g. you read some text and answer a multichoice question and repeat. It sound like a lot of work to create one well and it isn’t clear how many people would be comfortable with that sort of training. Lets say that 500 people try to learn a language, will their budgeted attention span expire before they get used to the user interface? Anyhow, I’ve got a moodle up, I’m starting to think the real burden is going to be on the course designer and less so on the course user.

chat There isn’t a single dominate chat technology– people use irc, skype, and many others. For conlang projects, a key feature is the ability to get consent to record logs and to record the logs for corpus research.

Link to Article

For people familiar with the chatter in the ASL community, when they think of new languages/ conlangs, they probably think first of things like Signed Exact English. The problem with ASL for late life hearing loss is that old people hardly socialize are not likely to seek out the Deaf community who use ASL. And if they did, they would find that they are on a multi-year program to learn a foreign language that is as hard as Chinese for an English speaker. The problem with SEE is that people think that they will be able to leverage their English and just write English in the air with their hands (the same bad idea that led to people trying to use fingerspell all-the-frickin-time) Signing is different enough from spoken speech that you need to have a human communication system that accounts for the rate that you can sign, the fact that you have two hands and a face (and can send 3 signals at the same time), etc.

Globish and Basic English were both conlangs that took a larger language and reduced it to a subset. The languages that result are on the conlang continuum, somewhere around the “con-dialect” area because there is at least 1 way complete comprehension. English speakers read Basic English effortlessly, but a person who knows Basic English will only understand some fraction of full English.

Maybe someone needs to make up a Basic ASL or Ayesselish, a limited vocab and limited grammar subset of ASL. That way someone who is late life deaf could communicated to the Deaf (and understand some % of what they get back) or more likely, two users of Basic ASL (both late life deaf or HH) would use basic ASL to talk to each other.

Anyhow, I’ve already learned Basic ASL, I got 500 words that me and my fiancee plan to use with Baby as part of Baby ASL and when I start to lose my hearing like my Dad and my Uncle, I’m ready to do do Old Fart ASL.

People are very good at using a language they are competent in for whatever– fart jokes, recipes, religion and philosophy. So after you construct a language, people will write about whatever and it won’t really feel like there is much connection to Rastafarianism or Nihilism as you had hoped. But let’s not give up home right away, let’s look for ways get some philosophy into language or use philosophy to make some languages.

Squashing a philosophy into a religion is sort of like trying to get culture into a language. We will want to go beyond just bare claims. Just says, “oh language x is so Nihilistic” strikes me as about as meaningful as when nationalists make outlandish claims about their favorite language.

Running Metaphors. E.g. sheep and nautical metaphors all over the place in Icelandic. I figure an Asatru new language would use a lot of traditional Norse mythology metaphors.

Transparent Derivational Morphology. If you can crack open a word as a user and see the parts, you can see the cultural implications, e.g. Goodbye (used to be God Be With You, compare to Icelandic sæll og blessaður which is something like ‘you are happy and blessed’– the Icelandic version feels more Christian)

In both cases, these can be dead metaphors– it’s the recommended and common phrase, but maybe no one thinks about what the implications are. Icelanders don’t really confuse sheep and paper and coin cash. Atheists say “goodbye” and don’t seem to care about the implications.

Obligatory Grammaticalizations The language we speak forces us to consider certain things for every verb or noun that requires a grammatical rule to be applied. In a philosophical language, one might try to create a language to express a philosophy of thankfulness and have users mark each verb for how thankful the speak is about the sentence and how thankful the subject is or should be. A proficient user of such a language would have to develop a metaphysical obsession with thankfulness and think about it so much that they can make those judgments subconsciously at a high speed.

Jargon (having a root word for something specific). It is easier to talk about Buddhism if you can resort to talking about nirvanna, ahimsa, dharma and so on. It’s nice to have nice short tidy words for something. I don’t think this actually requires a full language– you can add jargon to English too. Laadan had this problem– some of the lexicon had nice short tidy words for things that are useful when discussing a woman’s world, but if that was all that was going on, then why bother with a whole language, just to get some jargon? So handy as part of a full strategy, but not handy enough to warrant a new language if that is all there is.

Sapir-Whorf Inspirations. I think I read that one of these guys said something about how American Indian language were polysythetic so this made/reflected how Indians saw things holistically– just took everything in and understood it as an interconnected whole. Unscientific, but it might inspire you to do something. Maybe centipedes or gypsies that live on the rail system might prefer to speak an agglutinating language that symbolizes their chainlike-segmented bodies or the rail cars they ride on. Anyhow, from the user stand point– I’m pretty sure they will not notice the symbolism or experience any effects.

There is a How-To-Learn-Any-Language where people compare notes on how they acquire languages in general– comparisons of flash card software, dictionary copying, “shadowing” (where you repeat the foreign dialog as you hear it), one-parent-one-language, etc. Sometimes people discuss learning Esperanto or other non-natural languages there, but the real focus is how to learn a language with a living community. New languages don’t have a living community and learners of natural languages don’t have to decide how to deal with creators, fans who decide to extend or branch the language, nor law, etc

I plan to avoid the problem of too many subforums, but here are some possible subforums I might include:

Have a Language-Need a Language
Promotion and search would go here as a way to match language designers with people who study new languages recreationally or for some purpose. Yes, there will be auxlang promotion here, but with the magic of moderation, it won’t devolve into my auxlang is better than your auxlang.

Fan-to-fan language promotion would go here.

Designing for Usability- Engineering a New Language
Problem solving for new language creators who want to keep usability in mind, but hopefully without dwelling too much on issues tangential– such as the politics of choosing loan words.

And problem solving for how to just design a language to it’s “end”– as getting a language done is chore and incomplete* languages are not usable. *incomplete in the sense of “remnant languages” where there is so little to them that you can’t really say much in them or about them.

Techniques for Learning
Problem solving for the real world issues involved with using new languages– such as deceased designers, description and lexical gaps, a need to rely on books and text to learn instead of audio and people (at least for early adopters)

Governance and Designer-User Relations in General.
A place to post questions about licensing, copyright, real world language academies, how designers can react to people making derivatives or suprising uses of the artifacts of new language creation.

Dealing with the Empty new Forum Syndrome
Anything new that intends to get users needs to have a reason for use immediately. A forum can’t sell itself on it’s promise of great content as it gains new users, it needs to have content from the start. So I figure I can post what would have been blog content to the forum instead.

Audience
The audience is primarily “people who learn languages.”

I posit that there is a new sort of odious habit forming, solipsist conlanging.*

The gist of it is that someone creates a language (or claim they have), usually based on the Elvish sort. They go to forums and mailings lists ostensibly to discuss fake languages and instead spend time shouting down non-Elvish-like languages, engaging in design discussions only to keep saying, “well I create this language for no one but myself, your input is wrong but what I do is right”. It’s just a conversational trap so that at the end of it, the solipsist conlanger can feel smug and smart about himself, oddly, one of the motivations of the auxlang promoter– the desire to feel big and important.

Bummer Points about Solipsist Conlanging:
It unsociable.
It’s pretentious.
It’s uncreative. Copying the habits of Tolkien is just as restrictive as copying the habits of Zamenhoff. Elvish and Esperanto have already been created and are done, and if you do feel the urge to make an another Elvish, you don’t have to hide it in the appendixes (or do what Zamenhof did, promote it for global (!) use– be creative and do something different.
It’s duplicitous. On one hand you want people to somehow interact with your language, but should anyone try and it cheeses you off, you say your language isn’t for anyone’s consumption but your own or it’s not supposed to be consumed that way.
It unduely pessimistic about getting fans, users or what ever you want to call them. Yeah, if you tell the world to get-off-your-lawn and pick fights on mailing lists and forums, of course you have no fans. If you don’t even try, of course you have no fans. If you don’t actually listen to the audience and write art solely for yourself, no surprise the customers find it unpalatable. Take your lexicalized grammar (aka naturalistic irregularities) and keep them– lexicalized grammar is the first thing people drop/fail to use when they learn a new language.
It precludes testing your language with real human communication. Just because the auxlang promoter wants the world and is deluded to think he’ll get it, it doesn’t mean that getting a single person to read your conlang’s supporting docs or memorize enough words to use it is delusion.
People copy this behavior, much like auxlang promotion led to more auxlang promotion as people decided they liked the message (the idea of a new language with a glorified creator sitting at the top, but thought they should be the messenger instead.)
Bundled with a paid contract, solipsist conlanging will help make sure there isn’t a 2nd contract. Okrand and Frommer sparked communities– had they not, had people just said, “oh isn’t that a pretty reference grammar” directors would have said, “Gee, no one gave a fart about making a real language, everyone experience it as pleasant sounding gibberish, next time I’ll just get something from the sound effects department”

Good points about Solipsism
You can win arguments with it. Because in your imaginary world, what ever you want to be true is. Now why you have to discuss, let alone argue, any of this with me is beyond me. If in your imaginary, solipsistic world Mandoa is an ugly language, keep it to yourself.

How to avoid it and them
Understand that people create languages for various goals. Relative to someone’s goals, Mandoa is a fine language. If you apply your solipsist values to Mandoa, you aren’t fighting for truth an beauty, you are just farting and feeling proud about it instead of noticing you’ve committed a social faux pas. For a real solipsist, this isn’t a problem, they just reimagine their reality until they feel good about themselves again.

Understand that there is more than just Lojban, Elvish and Esperanto in the world. Create a language, be open to other people participating, don’t be an auxlang advocate on one hand and don’t rush to the extreme other end and become a ill mannered solipsist on the other.

Don’t focus on the artifacts of language in language creation. If you enjoy creating fake dictionaries and reference grammars, maybe you can move on to creating fake refrigerator manuals, too. If a language really is just a dictionary and grammar, where are the con-refrigerationists, with forums and mailing lists of people artisticly creating fridges that exist only on paper? (and woe to those who try to make one of these fridges, they are only for the creator’s amusement!) A language is a tool of communication, it doesn’t really exist unless you try to communicate and that means interacting with people and all the complications that entails. Real people want to use the language for surprising ends– are you flexible enough to cope with that? Real people tend to like things to be easier than harder, expressive over less expressive. Real people, (unless you specifically track down such a subculture) don’t give a flying fart about naturalism.

I am not a solipsist. You exist and are independent from me. As a language consumer, your precious artlang that only you can use is as interesting as a refrigerator manual, have fun, follow your joy, leave me out, I never asked to participate in the first place. So I think I’m pretty sure, the artlang game is not one I want to play, certainly not with living solipsist conlangers, I look forward to crossing their path as much as you look forward to meeting the auxlang promoter with a brochure on the street.

I’ve said many times that the most common taxonomy for conlangs: auxlang, artlang, engilang seem to just categorize Esperanto, Elvish and Lojban respectively with their imitators. And you can tell fart jokes in all of these, so the inventors original intention is important as, well, fart. Its only the nationalists that can get away with saying language X is more suited for purpose Y for natural languages. So I tend to be skeptical/ignore purpose claims that appear to have just been slapped on, although some claims may be valid– e.g. is it easier to speak it underwater as compared with say French or Elvish?

Esperanto’s key technical feature is that the hyper-loan word lexicon strategy, everything is borrowed. Esperanto’s imitators vary on from whom they borrow and what criteria they used.

Now some languages are a priori– and the language inventor calls it an auxlang. The goals of the inventor don’t make the language what it is, especially if the inventor has abandoned the project, is dead, or if the community is small enough that a culture of Esperanto style promotion hasn’t taken hold. I think these shouldn’t be grouped anymore in the auxlang category anymore than Elvish or Lojban or Icelandic should be lumped in with auxlangs just because one person somewhere said that it would be cool if governments world wide adopted it as a lingua franca.

I’m going to make a stab at the common features list for these apriori so-called auxlangs and see if there is something about them outside of their inventor’s goal.

- They have simplified grammar.
- Are analytic or have regular morphology, but not too many forms
- Are phonetically simple
- The basic lexicon is small

Since the language isn’t small (content words appear to be an open set), I think a better portmanteau is “easylang”

They aren’t small languages because there is no bound on the lexicon size, and there isn’t any bounds on how many kinds of sentences you have. [Regarding what it means to have a "small" grammar, this is sort of hard to express. Toki pona has a grammar that about 20 rules in BNF can describe and that is it-- its all variations on one big sentence. This compares with English which can't be described in BNF and defies formal description that can cover all the possibilities. Having a formal grammar helps fans put an upper bound on the amount of complexity the language can hold. An informal grammar, of the 15 rules sort in Esperanto clearly puts no bounds on the syntactic complexity, which is good if you want to use it talk to your girlfriend, bad if you want computers to parse it too]

Lexember – Coin a lexeme a day in December.
Morphambuary – Coin a bound morpheme a day in January
Febumantau – Create compound word a day for February. Doesn’t have to be a portmaneau, just needs more than one morpheme.
Polysemarch – Add a new meaning a day to an existing word in March
Auxpril- Get a fan a day. Or more realistically, get a fan in one month. Get out there are do some community building. Put out the welcome mat. Come on, are we solipsists or are we sociable language geeks?
Dis-May-course – Write a speech, novel, epic poem, folk tale, or chat log a day to fill out your examples of discourse. Or one of the above if you have a real job.
Juneme – Document or add to your phonetic inventory a phoneme a day, or add a rule to your phonotactics a day, or a Sandhi rule a day (but not all three, that would be absurd)
Julectury- Write a lecture, lesson or 140 letter pedagogical tweet each day explaining how your language works. You may need to recycle some content from the other 11 months, but this time, package it for learners. And in 10 years, after you forget how it all works, that means you, too.
Augovernust-Write down a clause of your user agreement, license, patent, copyright notice, lawsuit, Community Commons notice, membership rules, mailing list behavior guidelines each day of the month. Unless you are a solipsist, in which case you can continue to argue with yourself/us about the direction of your language.
Sentaxember – Define a syntax rule a day for September. Doesn’t need to be new– you can try to do it with BNF rules or “folk grammar” rules (e.g. don’t end sentence with prepositions) or my all time favorite “all-language-are-latin” style, where you create tables of conjugations and declensions with the same entries as for latin ones.
Novorpus – Add a new line of glossed text to your corpus every day of November. On thanksgiving, stuff your face and grow that corpus, too.

I’m going to start with a few observations about the following communities, before I get to the more boring part, the listing. Which if you are here, the list is probably not surprising, except solresol.

Groups of users of conlangs are usually disjoint. People rarely join multiple conlang user groups at the same time. In fact this is so true that while in one conlang group you might not realize that the other exist.

The creator is often absent. Volapuk and Loglan didn’t really succeed until the community abandoned the inventors and created Esperanto and Lojban respectively. In Quenya, Loglan, Esperanto, the inventors are dead. In the rest, the inventors are just strangely absent.

Communities of makers of languages often are disjunct from the communities of fake language users. Don’t tend to have conlangers interested in fans or people interested in learning conlangs on them. Both do exist on those forums & mailing lists, they just aren’t the typical ones.

There is a stereotypical real life community behind many of these. E.g. Klingon = Star Trek Fandom, ditto for Na’vi and Quenya. Lojban draws on a disproportionately technical and academic crowd. Esperanto seems to draw disproportionally from the professional polyglot crowd (translators, interpreters, and the like), although I wish I had better data for this notion.

Some languages have been poison pilled. Is is a “get-off-my-damn-lawn” language, where the inventor wants no participation from the world? Is it too frickin hard to learn as a recreational pursuit? Is it wrapped in legal copyright bombs (which may never go off, but do you want to hire a lawyer to preside in a case against Lucas Films when you publish your works in Mandoa?) Is the language hitched to a dead fandom? (Land of the Lost comes to mind) Is the inventor crazy and still alive? Does it have a capital C con-Culture that isn’t appealing to people who may have to mention it to their friends and coworkers someday? I mean, an Esperantist is at worst going to be thought to be politically lefty and maybe eccentric, but a Wardesan fan, well, see below.

What sort of community? A conlang community is one where there are people (more than one) who have invested the time to learn the vocabulary and grammar of a constructed language and use it for communication, be it twitter posts or chat or what ever. This isn’t about the community of language inventors who communicate in natural languages about the means and methods of documenting a new language. For that, I recommend the Facebook group, the Deviant Art group, your own blog and that’s about it.

So on to the list of viable conlang communities. By viable, I mean, there is a language and a community, not that it will take over the world. And by right now, I mean now. I also use google trends to find out what is hot and what is not.

Blockbuster, Famous (which actually means more than 10 people)
Esperanto. Search interest in esperanto on google has been declining since 2005. The long term trends, imho, are not good. That said, Esperanto has an elephant’s worth of forward momentum that will take it a long way into the future. Esperanto will outlive most people’s interest in Esperanto.
Lojban. Google Groups. Search interest in lojban has been level– not growing or shrinking much. The Logfest is happening right now.
Na’vi. Learn Navi. It is very hard to tell if Na’vi is hot or not because you can’t easily distinguish fandom from language learners, without of course visiting a lot of the web & reading.
Klingon. Diplomatic Forums. It seems that Klingon has gotten quiet. The core members of the community appear to be as enthusiastic as ever, but the community doesn’t seem to have the steady stream of newbies necessarily for growth.
Elvish. Quenya101. The massive number of languages that Tolkien created and the lack of a final form of any of them, in my opinion has poison pilled these language for fan use. Yet fans keep trying.

Na’vi, Elvish, Klingon are going to rise and fall based on the corresponding franchises.

Too Soon To Say
Dothraki. It has a forum with posts.

Unanticipated Duds
Languages that had all the technical qualifications but were paired with a lousy movie.
Atlantean. Mark Okrands language that went nowhere because the movie sucked.
Barsoomian. Paul Frommer’s language that went no where because the movie sucked.

Smaller Scale Successes
Toki Pona. The language peaked at 2007-2009 or so and is on decline. As a small language with some of the features of an internet meme, I suppose this could have been expected.
Láadan Livejournal is alive. Seems to attract more women then men, which supports my idea that people do respond to the marketing for a language (with respect to the designer’s target audience). The creator “Suzette has been diagnosed with Alzheimers” — so this will be an interesting community to watch to see if and how a community transitions from having the inventor around to not having them around.
Solresol. This historical conlang has activity right now.
Volapuk. Another historical conlang, that imho, is just surprising to have any activity at all.
Interlingua. Has a forum. I think. I honestly can’t tell if this is Portuguese, Italian or Spanish. According to google search trends, there is steady but declining interest and significantly more than lojban. I wouldn’t be surprised if this community overlaps with Esperanto’s.
Other Esperanto Also-Rans (And this would include Interlingua, too) In the comments people mentioned that I left some out. Which then prompted me to start wondering how to define these communities. Are they two like Swedish and Norwegian, where one communication systems with two spellings provides enough reason to have two sections at the book store? Or is it like Chinese, where there is one meta community where people speak mutually unintelligible languages but read a fairly homogeneous version of it? The slavic conlangs are a similar challenge. If the community is made up of people who know three romance languages or three slavic languages and then realize they can read/write the romance and slavic conlangs, are they multiple communities? To answer the question, I’d have to read through the mailing list and forum membership and see how intense the overlap is. A project for another day.

Promising Possibilities
Revival Languages. Depending on how well these were documented, they could be a interesting “forgotten” category of conlang (or thing that falls on a conlang spectrum). Massachusetts and Virginian Algonquian fall in this category.

Abandoned Conlangs.
Mandoa has a forum.
Vulcan Abandoned, but that someone reposted it, I guess is a sort of community activity. No evidence of forums. I kind of wish someone would create Loglan for Vulcan so that this Vulcan can go the way of natural languages once Esperanto takes over.

Conlangs That Could Get Fans
I’ll preface this with a warning tho… I didn’t test any of the languages for learnability or for having suitable governance (and sometimes the best governance is an absent one, as per the experience of many of the above languages).
Delang. The inventor is willing to engage the world in Delang. Old Wiki. New Delang Wiki.
Wardesan. It has a book. But it is poison pilled with a conculture that involves pederasty, isn’t available in English (or Esperanto even), and there isn’t a forum.
Ithkuil. Not sure if this is something that could be used for conversation & how that would affect the possibilities for fandom. As seen in the New Yorker article, this did get fans for a while, can’t find the forum or mailing lists though. Ah, some activity on facebook.
Usik. It’s an auxlang. I think this is the creator and he seems willing to engage the world.
Kah. This is a con-creole. The author is calling it an auxlang, imho a bad idea, makes it sound like he wants to compete with Esperanto. Addresses some of the issues that “small languages” address, but isn’t small. Haven’t really pegged this for what it could be. In any case, it has learning materials, mailing list, etc.