Archive for the ‘Conlangs’ Category

Esperanto Day

July 26, 2024

Probal Dasgupta notes on Facebook the significance of 7/26: on 7/26/1887, L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 1859 – 14 April 1917) published (in Warsaw, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto) his Dr. Esperanto’s International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro), describing what has become the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language (PB is, among many things, an Esperantist).

So this is Esperanto Day — also, I note, the birthday of psycholinguist Eve Clark (an old friend and Stanford colleague, recently elected — wow! — to the British Academy: born 1942) and of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger (still rocking, even though he’s almost as old as I am: born 1943).

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Posted in Conlangs, Holidays, Linguists, Music, Names | Leave a Comment »

Extremely famous in a very small world

May 27, 2024

In my Friday (5/24) appointment with my rheumatologist, David Fischer, the doctor reported that he had found me cited as a distinguished linguist, in writing by a lexicographer whose name he couldn’t quite recall, except that it had a K in it. (It’s always a good thing when your doctors treat you as a knowledgeable person of consequence.) I allowed that I hung out with lexicographers and that I was in fact extremely famous in a very small world. We then had to press on to my arthritic gout and its treatment, in the brief time for the appointment, but afterwards I e-mailed him with two suggestions about the identity of the lexicographer:

most likely: Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (2017), though I didn’t recall her having cited me

also possible: Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (2009), who certainly did cite me

The answer is: KS, in Word by Word. On page 196:

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Posted in Books, Conlangs, Lexicography, Usage | Leave a Comment »

Annals of ambiguity: I feel like making it rough for Schrödinger

June 24, 2020

Playing with ambiguity:

— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich

— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth

— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly

— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL

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Posted in Abbreviation, Adverbs, Allusion, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Comic conventions, Conlangs, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Signage | 4 Comments »

Private conlangs in the comics

January 5, 2019

Yesterday’s Sally Forth (by Jim Keefe):

Ted and Sally are recalling an absurd private language they constructed for themselves to talk about nearby people in public — a language that only they would know. Their Monkeyish was absurd because, with only 12 words (7 of them prepositions!), there was clearly almost nothing that they could say.

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Posted in Conlangs, Linguistics in the comics | 3 Comments »

Words on the big outside place

November 18, 2017

At noon on Friday of last week (the 10th), this event at Santa Clara University, an Environmental Studies & Sciences seminar:

Faculty will attempt to describe their research using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in English. Should be fun!

(Each talk about 5 minutes long.)

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Posted in Conlangs, Lexicography, Silliness | 2 Comments »

Klingon or Esperanto?

February 18, 2016

Recently heard a rumor that Klingon had surpassed Esperanto as the most commonly spoken conlang (constructed language, sometimes called artificial language). This is a massively unlikely possibility, for reasons sketched in the Wikipedia article on Marc Okrand’s Klingon language, Meanwhile, Esperanto flourishes as a second language in large communities of users around the world, and new Esperanto translations of literature continue to appear. (I’m not an Esperantist, but a number of my friends and academic colleagues are.)

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Posted in Conlangs | 2 Comments »

Two from BZ

February 10, 2015

I don’t usually pass on postings from other blogs, but on the 5th Ben Zimmer blogged two notable things on Language Log that are worth drawing attention to: one on an amazing headline from Bloomberg News and a death notice for Suzette Haden Elgin.

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Posted in Compounds, Conlangs, Death notices, Headlines | Leave a Comment »

On the conlang patrol

October 15, 2014

Lee Tucker on Facebook yesterday:

I must be going mad Arnold Zwicky. I just read an article that included the phrase “voiceless uvular ejective affricate.” For the record, I flinched.

That article would “Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented” by Joshua Foer in the 12/24/12 New Yorker, where we read:

More than nine hundred languages have been invented since Lingua Ignota, and almost all have foundered. “The history of invented languages is, for the most part, a history of failure,” Arika Okrent, the author of  [In the Land of Invented Languages (2009)], writes. Many of the most spectacular flops have been languages, like Ithkuil, that attempt to hold a perfect mirror up to reality.

Ithkuil is a conlang (constructed language), very much in the spirit of the 17th century. And yes, it has a mind-boggling assortment of phonemes, especially consonant phonemes.

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