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.)
Posted in Conlangs, Lexicography, Silliness | 2 Comments »
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.)
Posted in Conlangs | 2 Comments »
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.
Posted in Compounds, Conlangs, Death notices, Headlines | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Conlangs | Leave a Comment »
You are currently browsing the archives for the Conlangs category.
