#loglang

[risotto38]

an example of Kinskan math! this is a quartic equation that I attempted to figure out

[aeniith]

Hey conlanging folks! The 11th Language Creation Conference list of presentations and registration are now up! April 11–13, U. Maryland (College Park).

LCC11 will have over 26 hours of content (over twice as much as our last in-person conference); two invited speakers (Deaf linguist Dr. Erin Moriarty Harrelson and blind linguist Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen); ASL and BSL interpretation; two tracks; multiple specialty sessions, including sign languages, loglangs, and writing systems; both open and private meetups (Christian, pro conlanger, ASL signer, autistic, disabled, plural, queer, and trans & non-binary); and a special conlang-centric performance from the Riddlesbrood Touring Theater Company.

Please register by March 4th to have a say in scheduling and time allocations (it's in the registration form).

Register by March 11th to get early registration discount, and to order an LCC11 shirt (and to contribute your conlang to its design).

Regular in person registration is $95, online $30 — with discounts for early registration and LCS members, and as-able rates for self-declared financial need. Shirts are $20 plus shipping (if any), only available if ordered by March 11th.

We look forward to seeing you all there! Please, I would ask anyone who sees this to spread the announcement and news far and wide. It would really help us get the word out about our event! This year’s conference is *by far* the largest and most ambitious LCC yet.

Fiat lingua,

Margaret, LCS President

on behalf of the LCC11 organisers

[adhdo5]

toki pona loglang or whatever

[goddessinamber]

I love you toki pona. I love you ithkuil. I love you loglan & lojban.

[fiatlingua]

Dr. James Cooke Brown, creator of Loglan, born on this day in 1921

On this day Dr. James Cooke Brown was born in 1921. He was an American sociologist and science fiction author. He is notable for creating the artificial language Loglan and for designing the Parker Brothers board game Careers.

Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages (loglangs), which also includes Lojban.

[hydralisk98]

Utavah

Inspired from current Utchwen(~Ed.6) specifications

Specs for Utavah

Braindumps:

Initial dumps:

Iktate dis Faza magel de Endekrieg

Ke kalef kachte von daz

Len Machtu bat lel makh

Hebd Wer maktel den Zaraster y cia del klei

Elvich Nis Bouk-Hern

Du iktater y Hawa? Nim, ke ikem a Faza fez peer.

Perche aud mit mer leid

De Makh do gudtu

Uku mag daz Umux makh, chwe bid tiz?

Nil Nu Dis Dre Kwe Kai

Ke ika Klara Ker und du iktat welkom aud mi Herz

Per da Zaraster len da karta

Day 0′s

Asharstan hast di nil karta

Auder las den kenen bayare kezen

Di, di hast, di hast mich

Kustavus Aldofus, Kirmea et impera, aberkus et ingens, augusta pen alustas

Ika mich mir das video aud Maya

Nihss, ist das dev Maya? Ja Klara, das it dev Maya.

Staras und de drei oror

Haken den 8 ath peersen

Videatex und de dum terminata

Sayao mem dichi kinder

Du bis wake ath 4 oro? Iken mag dis nim aud du.

Bashar ele-Assad und die Syriak ama krieve

Socialis or Komitern? Na danke, ke bista aud der Neue Beo-Sindikalia.

Ketern auvene ista ay 240 bloken vex minata kronon

Jahissaren baka de Brazilie

Ded dah di MPLA ud di UNITA!

Chalpemoldin ikete ay nis pawah, bi taka las kronon-sawan

Woodrow Wilson mistus ben ded daya 1912, nay 1920.

Havar vas en union aud camraden im dai hen mille AD on Erden.

Hexdi ikset magal dei aud Utchwendira legen

Kronos lang gan und fay yhed, ikete Klara beyon duktu dere

Ava siktet erin siphen sys aud 12 symbols iti fayex kramar spelen

Dich bas abby, dankei chon Erke Realis

Ke bis deyde dus, Vi videatex edaya proseson bun

Saya has du Laika de len los katoren?

Day 1′s

Day 2′s

Day 3′s

Day 4′s

Day 5′s (I wrote several new statements to get inspired from and then the site removed them by clipboard death)

Goals (changes)

Verb system overhaul [Cha/Asha, Nae, Uti, Lio] (from Utchwen V5-V6′s to a full verb catalog derived from Utchwendira [after several centuries or even more of evolution?])

Interrogative verb marking going into a new affix, so are Optative and Imperative

(Some details taken from V3): Subjunctive, Hypotheticals, Conditionals, Suggestions, Politeness, Deliberatives...

Some S-expressions’ and Assembler syntaxes for machines of retro & modern kinds to parse by themselves

Use inverted punctuations like those of Spanish ( ¿Que? ¡Por favor! )

Loglangs / Lojban-like properties to facilitate logic in such a way as to make ways to parse it without ambiguousties in at least one specialized dialect of Utavah and make it overall pretty easy to do predicate causative logic with most dialects (as from Mark Rosenfelder’s Advanced Language Construction book)

Maybe consider ways to empower autistics by more direct statements by encoding more implicit information? (Similar to the above point but from another perspective)

Keep in mind that my ideal target are most likely to be neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ folks (autistic people as per #RedInstead , not per AutismSpeaks’)

XOR, OR, AND, NOT... Causative nested statements...

More details as per this Typology and through contacting me

Links to sections to develop for Utava

Lexicon

Name base

Grammar test

Phrasebook

Translations

Affirmations lists

Parables

Stories

Informative pieces

Tutorials

Humor

Memes

Grammar reference

Video dictionary

Pedagogical lessons

Slideshow presentations

Explorable explainations

UI mockups for both CLI and GUI interfaces of many kinds

Atlases...

Esoteric knowledge docs...

Encyclopedias...

[scribefindegil]

Languages, always! I know this is a thing lots of writers address, especially nowadays, but: what is the main language of your setting? What are the minority languages? Are they related? How are minority languages treated? How did one language become dominant? What are dialects like, and what are the dialectical differences? What are other languages in your world? Where are they from? Are they related to your main-setting language, or not? If there's a lot of travel, is multilingualism common?

Ohhhh man you hiton one of the things that I’m REALLY interested in, so buckle up!

Okay, first ofall, this world is for a D&D game and while our setting is homebrew it’sstill based heavily on official publications—we work under the assumption thatthings like the Monster Manuals are actual books in-universe, which doesn’tmean that the information they provide is accurate but does mean that certainpeople in the world think it’saccurate.

As such, westarted with the “standard” d&d languages and have beenexpanding/developing out from there! I’m very lucky that one of my players isalso really into linguistics and thus supports my descent into the ConlangWormhole. There’s still less linguistic variation than is truly realistic, justbecause I can’t devote my entire life to developing fantasy languages, but Itry to keep things interesting.

(under a cut because it’s uhhhhhh over a thousand words of Language Babble)

In our setting “Common”actually developed from a pidgin that emerged from interspecies trading a longtime ago. I wanted to have a less imperialist history for this world than what’simplied if Common is just Human Language. For a while it served as a secondarylanguage for dealing with other races, but by the time our campaign takes placeit’s developed into the primary language of the world, especially in placesthat have a lot of international trading. On the continent of Ashona, where ourcampaign is set, nearly everyone learns at least some Common even if it isn’ttheir primary language. It’s represented by English, for obvious reasons. Wehaven’t gotten into a lot of dialectology, but there are innumerable dialectsof Common. The one spoken in the Underdark has diverged enough that it’s nowconsidered a separate language; it has a much stronger Elvish influence thanthe Common of the overlands.

Speaking ofElvish, we use Quenya for that because Tolkien is a much better conlanger thanI’ll ever be. Surface elves tend to be pretty isolationist in this setting, sooutside of Elvish settlements the language isn’t spoken much. However, it isconsidered something of a prestige language, so a lot of arcane scholarship iswritten in Elvish and it’s often taught to nobles of other species. As ageneral rule, wood elves will be impressed if you try to speak to them in theirown language, while high elves will sigh and correct your grammar.

Draconic is the oldestlanguage in this setting because dragons lived on this world before any of thehumanoid species. A lot of geographic features have Draconic names. It’s also alanguage of lore, although dragons themselves don’t tend to write down manylong texts. They do, however, have a script for their language which isdesigned to be scratched into things with claws. Draconic didn’t have a lot ofinfluence on Common because dragons aren’t known for conducting a lot of trade.One of my Dragonborn players and I are in the process of creating a Draconiclanguage! Because our two dragonborn player characters are named Kriv and Voskiwe went with a very Slavic-inspired phonology. High Draconic, the kind spoken byactual dragons, is highly inflected and has several different registers basedon levels of formality and respect. The dialect spoken by most dragonborn haslost a lot of the formality distinctions and sometimes merges the nominativeand accusative cases. Depending on how much contact they’ve had with truedragons, kobold tribes may speak perfect High Draconic or one of several moresimplified dialects.

The Halflinglanguage has the most direct influence on Common and in some areas has mergedwith it. This is represented by the use of more “Anglish” words in Halfing vocabulary—likecalling a school a “learnstead” instead of a “university.” In more isolated areastheir dialects are less comprehensible and I’d represent them with variations onOld or Middle English.

There are severalgeographically distinct Dwarvish languages, but the one spoken in Ashona(sometimes called Conclave Dwarvish because most of its speakers areconcentrated beneath the Conclave Mountains) is represented by Þrjótrunn, analt-lang by Henrik Theiling that imagines a Romance Language based on Icelandic.Anyone who trades with the dwarves is well served to learn their language, soit’s quite well-known even in areas where everyone speaks Common. The dwarvishscript has also been adapted by a number of communities that don’t have anative writing system (such as orcs, who were historically an oral culture buthave come to accept that writing is useful under some circumstances).

Orcish and Goblinare both low-prestige languages, very seldom studied by people who aren’t partof those groups. In mixed-race settlements, orcs and goblins who speakprimarily their native language are considered “uncivilized,” because peopleare gross. I use Laadan (a conlang created by Suzette Haden Elgin as a “woman’slanguage”) for Orcish, primarily out of spite, and Sona (an auxlang based on asmall number of ‘radicals’ that are combined into compounds to make words) forGoblin. Orcish is really good at conveying emotional complexities, and Goblinuses reduplication a lot to convey degrees of intensity. Goblin ALSO has acomplex logographic writing system, but human (etc) anthropologists mistake itfor crude pictograms and insist that goblins can’t write, something which suitsthe goblins fine since they can then leave messages for each other that otherraces will overlook.

Sylvan, the languageof the fae, is the most plot-relevant campaign language, and as such I’m creatingit myself. Because d&d elves are descended from the fae, I used a basephonology similar to the earliest form of proto-Quenya and included a number ofproto-Quenya roots in the vocabulary. I’m in the process of working on thesound shifts that produced “modern” Sylvan. The spoken dialects for Sylvan varywildly, but the written form is quite standardized and has remained that wayfor a long time.

As for languagesof the Outer Planes: Celestial is represented by Hildegard of Bingen’s “LinguaIgnota,” which is really just a cipher of Latin with the nouns swapped out, butwhich I adore. Infernal, the language of devils, is represented by the conlang Lojbanbecause it’s designed to be as exacting and unambiguous as possible (the other extremely Lawful Plane, Mechanus, uses Loglang, which has basically the same structure as Lojban but different vocab, because there was A Schism). The HighInfernal dialect is also used by some Prime Material Plane lawyers when drawingup contracts. There’s also a much more simplified dialect that is the languagespoken by Tieflings and others with fiendish blood. Primordial, the language ofelementals, is represented by SolReSol, a musical conlang, because I wantedsomething with a more alien sound. Also most elementals don’t have mouths.

(We don’t have anyhuman PCs right now so I’ve been spared trying to figure out what they speak.Obviously there are a number of different languages, although there are alsoregions where most humans just learn Common or whatever other language is mostprevalent around them)

[viohra]

What is "conlang"?

"Conlang" is portmanteau of the term "constructed language". It's a catch-all term for any artificial language; terms like artlang (artistic language), auxlang (auxiliary language), and loglang (logical language) fall under this category, with natlang (natural language) being the antonym. My language Zehzhik is a conlang (specifically an artlang).

[jansegers]

TP and gender

Vikram Sundarraman Sun May  4 15:39:27 49558, Okay, we don't need to get into that whole debate again here. However, regarding your hammer analogy I have only one submission to make. If the hammer was really used properly, we should have certainly ended up handling gender more like Toki Pona (which has no grammatical gender markers at all) or Ido (which handles gender symmetrically). Even purely from the point of view of logic and efficiently, gender asymmetry is a very bad idea and I don't see any valid reason, other than a certain sense of fanatic attachment to a particular cultural notion, for retaining in it a language that hopes to become the lingua franca of the world. If you had a hammer, will you hit the nail head on or sideways? I think the design should default to neutral gender, not masculine or feminine speaking purely from the point of view of simplicity of learning and logical and efficient design.

Mike S. Sun May  4 15:39:28 49558, I can't understand why people are always floating Toki Pona in auxlang discussions.  Toki Pona makes it very difficult to discuss gender stuff at all. Since I get the impression that you want to discuss gender issues, why would you and Jan Misali tout a language like Toki Pona?  The whole point of that language is to take your mind off of complex and troubling thoughts.  It's not meant to serve as an auxlang. I myself, as a conlanger intending to publish a loglang in the near future, would never implement asymmetrical gender markings, and I would always make gender marking optional (roots epicene by default) including in pronouns.  As for why Esperanto will not change: Simply put, Esperantists consider reform-mongering to be the greater evil.

http://www.orenwatson.be/anthonymccarthy.htm

#TokiPona #Esperanto #Ido #gender #konlan #anno2019

[inefficientconlanger]

Harsh Turn

I’m a conlanger, which means that I make languages. I’ve done it for two years now, my notebooks filled with indecipherable linguistic gibberish and pages of potential letterforms. I know about phonology and morphosyntax, I know abugidas from abjads, I know how Lojban and Ithkuil work. I’m a conlanger, a fairly experienced one.

Except, I have never made a language.

Those were the words I started this blog with. A lot has changed.

Amraya is a conlang now, with fairly stable rules and a documented vocabulary of 260 verb roots, 143 nouns and 116 other words. I often have to go out of my way to find interesting phrases not expressible with that vocabulary. The blog has 343 numbered posts and 47 (now 48) other posts.

Another thing that has changed is that posting here daily has become a dreaded chore. With almost every post, my process is the following:

1. Figure out something to translate. This is often the part that takes the longest. It has to be at least somewhat interesting, sound good and preferably contain vocabulary I don’t already have. Also, I tend to procrastinate a lot during this phase.

2. Translate. This doesn’t take long, because finding the right words is just a Ctrl-F5 away and the process is largely mechanical, as although Amraya is somewhat foreign to English speakers, it is pretty much completely regular and a bit too simple. Now and then I add a bit of flair (like sebri tailfeathers, tailfin used for “river delta”), but it’s not very much.

3. Write the “Words” section. This part takes very long for some reason. Here Amraya’s loglang-y tendencies and isolating morphology take away most of the fun that could be had with polysemy and derivation. All the words have strict phonological patterns to them that make them feel samey after a while.

4. Document the words. Usually at this point I just want to be done with this as fast as possible, so I often just skip this step.

All in all it takes around 30 minutes per day. It is occasionally fun, but mostly it just takes time away from homework and other such things.

So, what am I going to do about it? First, the update schedule change to Monday-Thursday-Saturday. This should take some of the burden of my back.

Second, I’m going to change Amraya heavily to be more fun to work with. This means reintroducing more concultural elements (animism! and SPACE!), being much wilder with how the semantic space is divided, introducing some exotic grammar rules, and overall withdrawing from the loglang mindset. This language will be my playground. This will mean extensive changes.

Nu ga xalav isra kagan mu du! Find you in a fresh world!

[shutthefuckupotherkin]

What do you think of Lojban? I understand it's meant to be a logical, potentially universal language, but it sounds and looks awfully complicated. :/

Lojban is designed to eliminate ambiguous statements, so you could avoid things like "I saw a coyote using binoculars" (which has two meanings - "I saw a coyote while I was using binoculars" or "I saw a coyote, and that coyote was using binoculars"). This would make it pretty great for, say, things that cannot tolerate ambiguity, such as computer parsing systems or robots.

However, it's also fuck ugly, and while the sentiment of a universal language is nice, access to its learning materials is naturally limited by internet access - plus I suspect most of the available material is aimed at English speakers. Ambiguity in language, to me, is also a source of joy and amusement; in English, without it, we wouldn't have a lot of our jokes or poems. (I wonder what kind of jokes exist in Lojban?)