Conlangs – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
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).
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:
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
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
Posted in Conlangs | Leave a Comment »