Here is my paper (pdf) for my talk on "Conlanging 101" at 26C3.

It needs to be turned in for printing by the 7th, so any and all comments appreciated.

( Goals )

So I just went shopping for cards to use for the conlang card exchange.

The local mega-Safeway and mega-Long's have a reasonably large selection of Christmas cards. And they all annoy me.

Why?

* saccharine imagery of nonexistent snowy suburbia-idylls (also, candy canes taste awful; I don't want to see them)
* crass commercialism (Mickey Mouse? seriously?)
* advertisements for the card company, and pricing details, on the card itself (fuck off, Hallmark, I don't want to be your flack)
* sappy and presumptively irrelevant text on the inside and outside - are there really so few people who can write their own damn messages?
* loudly colorful / glitzy styles that seem aimed more at toddlers and other pre-sentients than adults

I'd have bought 'em if they offered cards that simply had tasteful imagery on the outside, a blank inside and back, and just shut the fuck up and let me be the one to write.

As is, they couldn't do that.

So I just bought some blank cards at the office supply store instead. I'll print 'em myself.

*grumph*

Stuff like this makes me wonder whether the majority of people really are such lowbrow, unimaginative consumer whores.

Doesn't anyone do classy any more?

But then, people complain when I use words like "moot" and "qualia". So maybe I'm the weird one here.

If that's true, then well... fuck that shit, I don't wanna be normal.

I'm going to be doing a preview / test run of my Conlanging 101 talk for 26C3 at Noisebridge, Thursday Dec 10 ~7-8pm PST.

I'll try to make sure it's simulcast @ http://ustream.tv/noisebridge or http://www.ustream.tv/conlangs . I'll also have some mechanism to comment live in a way that I'll see - either irc on freenode #lcs or skype - so remote people will get to participate.

So please come by or get online at the time. Any suggestions for improving it will be appreciated.

So, I submitted a talk to 26C3 on "Conlanging 101". And it actually got accepted (with flight paid!).

Which means I get to go to Berlin and attend an awesome hacker conference, and all I have to do is give a talk I'll enjoy. W00tage.

The talk is a) an intro / overview to conlanging (like an expanded version of my lightning talk at Toorcamp - http://conlang.org/toorcamp.pdf) plus b) conlanging-by-crowd-committee where I'll (albeit very quickly) go through actually making a new language on the spot good enough to translate part of the Babel text (like a super-compressed version of my Berkeley DE-Cal class). Plus workshop afterwards.

Most likely what I'm going to do is spend ~10 minutes giving a fairly fast-paced overview, ~35-40 going through making a language on the spot, and anything left over on Q&A.

Anywho:
a) got ideas for how to improve the talk / workshop? (German speakers: anything I should be aware of, or any good jokes to make? Ich spreche keine Deutsch. :()
b) anyone else going?
c) anyone in the area (even vaguely, as in Western Europe; I'm somewhat tempted to make it an excuse to visit other places in Europe) who's either interested having a visitor or willing to host me for a couple days? (if yes, please email me directly)

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRnXASa1VM

Transcription: 3a23a e 5'45e 35a24a a 5'35; e 45'i 24o 25a25i; è 25i25i 24o 25'25o e; e 25'a25ó e; a 25'a25ó 35'o 3a23a 35'e; e e a a

Translation - http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbqrbUJbrkeOZGRiOGJ4NWNfMTA5Z2pqcnZ3MnQ
Grammar - http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbqrbUJbrkeOZGRiOGJ4NWNfOTVneDU0OGtkZg&hl=en
Vocab - http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjmetJxi-p0VcC1yN0VlcnhfbkVJQ0stNnVuME55R1E&hl=en

Original CONLANG translation thread, by Herman Miller: http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0906d&L=conlang&T=0&O=D&P=26349

First off, for those of you looking me up, here're my slides:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/saizai-public/toor_tcpa.pdf
http://s3.amazonaws.com/saizai-public/toor_meditation.pdf
http://conlang.org/toorcamp.pdf

In sum:
* awesomeness was had
* dust devil almost maimed me
* talks went well
* lots of cool people (if you're one of said people, please IM/email me so we can continue our conversation)
* excellent atmosphere
* way too hot and dry for my taste
* nuclear silos are 'holy fuck' cool
* should've brought sandals
* very ad-hoc planning &c
* Levitate pissing off a whole bunch of hackers and hacker friends is probably going to cause some problems for them

Currently on the road on the way out - another 12h or so to go before getting home, writing this off laptop on a tethered G1. And I'm tired and hungry, so the details will have to wait for later.

In the Land of Invented Languages has been getting a lot of press lately.

(Another interview will be up later today, and my own will be up on the LCS Podcast shortly as well.)

I'm glad to see that. It's a great book.

I need to borrow a MiniDV camcorder (or player - so long as I can rip from it) to rip the video from LCC3.

There's about 20 hours of video, so it'll probably take about a week to rip.

So... do you (or someone you know) have one I could borrow?

Thanks in advance!

... damn that thing took a lot of work. Yay for dedalvs (and the handful of people who really helped out during the event).

It was quite fun, though. Lots of neat people, good talks, etc etc whee. Blast was had.

I hope Henrik can handle more of it for #4, though.

And there's *still* going to be a lot of work to do in followup stuff... I sure hope we can get someone not-me to handle the video editing.

... I just got a pre-release galley copy (signed!) of Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages.

Whee! :)

Every other week we'll release another video from the 2nd Language Creation Conference.

First up:

2nd Language Creation Conference, Day 1, Talk 6 - 7 July 2007
Donald Boozer - Drushek: The Sound of No Voice Speaking

High quality video: http://conlang.org/lcc2/video/Donald%20Boozer.mp4 (194 MB)
Faster, Flash based video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7329529495190435592
Talk PPT: http://conlang.org/lcc2/Donald_Boozer.ppt
Program: http://conlang.org/lcc2/LCC2_Program.pdf

The Drushek speak a language devoid of voicing and employ a gestural component to denote semantic functions and some morphemes. How does one transcribe the hisses, clicks, fricatives, and silent gestures of such a language?

Don Boozer lives in Ohio and is currently a Subject Department Librarian in Literature at Cleveland Public Library, one of the nation's largest public research libraries. He has increased the library's holdings of relevant books in the field of conlanging by purchasing copies of the Klingon translations of Gilgamesh and Shakespeare, Elgin's dictionary and grammar of Laadan, and Salo's A Gateway to Sindarin, among others. He has also presented programs on conlangs in literature and films and the basics of language creation, as well as published articles on conlangs including an upcoming one on introducing conlanging to teens. His interest in the "secret vice" stems from an early fascination with languages and scripts going all the way back to discovering On Beyond Zebra! by Dr. Seuss in his elementary school library. His on-going projects including working on languages for inhabitants of his conworld, Kryslan, which include Umod, Elasin, and Drushek and learning ancient Egyptian as part of an online study group.

Again, to subscribe if you haven't yet:

iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=298778513
any RSS reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/conlangs?format=xml (e.g. for http://reader.google.com)
via email: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=2710897&loc=en_US
take-your-pick: http://feeds.feedburner.com/conlangs
manually: http://conlang.org/podcast.php (the latest episode will also be on the front page)

The LCS podcast is now live!

To subscribe, you have various options (they all result in the same thing):

iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=298778513
any RSS reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/conlangs?format=xml (e.g. for http://reader.google.com)
via email: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=2710897&loc=en_US
take-your-pick: http://feeds.feedburner.com/conlangs
manually: http://conlang.org/podcast.php (the latest episode will also be on the front page)

If you have subscribed before (e.g. while we were experimenting with the RSS feed), please try it again; it should work now.

Our expected release schedule is every 2 weeks to start; this may increase as we get more contributions.

Upcoming podcasts include interviews with Donald Boozer, Sally Caves, Sonja Elen Kisa, Tony Harris, Thomas E. Payne, David Peterson, and Sylvia Sotomayor (among others).

We are actively seeking people interested in contributing, particularly:
* interviewers who can seek out and record conversations with interesting conlangers (or topics of interest to conlangers)
* Interviewers and conlangers interested in doing "making of" conversations, going into the specifics of some particular conlang-creation decision - what was chosen, what was rejected, why, and how
* people who can write and record original material of interest to conlangers - e.g. news, linguistics tidbits, brief (or extended) tutorials, etc
* music in a conlang to use in outro sequences
* original theme music to use for intro & outro sequences and branding

If that sounds like you, or you have another idea for something you'd like the community to hear, please email us at lcs@conlang.org.

Enjoy,
Sai Emrys & David Peterson

This was written in response to a thread on CONLANG-L about semantic primes, in which the OP was asking how one might go about getting to the atomic roots of meanings. (In a long tradition of hilariously failed attempts, including such company as Leibniz...)


It seems to me that words *cannot* ever be fully defined concepts. For this reason, they cannot ever be atomic; there is always some further division of meaning that can be made, as there is always further definition that has not yet been elaborated and excised in previous cuttings.

The reason is that all concepts, indeed all communication, depend on a shared experience between the people talking.

Gödel, for example, proved that any (mathematical) system necessarily has certain axioms that cannot be proved within that system. They must simply be accepted, or not; if one does not accept them, then no fruitful discussion can be had - they're not things one can argue to be correct without going into a homunculus fallacy.

This is true of languages as well. Any "atomic" idea that one might want are necessarily not truly atomic; calling them so is, at best, an axiom that one may or may not share with others.

For this reason, any ontology of language - any list of semantic primes - is at best a list of axioms. Someone else can always come to that list and say, "I view this as actually a combination of things".

If this were not true, it wouldn't be easily possible to define the word. Definitions are, as it were, a tweezing apart of the meaning in the word.

So, IMHO, any ontology is doomed that does not acknowledge this, and does not acknowledge that:
a) choices of how to divide or define a concept are necessarily arbitrary; and
b) choices of what concepts to adopt as 'atomic' are equally arbitrary.

Being arbitrary is OK. Conlangers do that all the time; eventually one decides what goals one has, what one considers to be aesthetically pleasing, how to balance choices that require tradeoffs. These things cannot be really justified more than, at root, they feel right.

So yes, you can create a language based on semantic "primes". Indeed, I think it's a useful idea; it gives rise to elegance like Arabic's triconsontal semantic roots.

It simply will not ever be universal, and chasing universality - chasing some sort of Truth of semantic primacy - will only lead one into yet another form of qabbalah or OTO.

The world has enough of those, IMO.

Based on Alex's post on CONLANG: http://archives.conlang.info/pha/jialzau/badeirfal.html

[xposted from CONLANG-L]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 11:48 AM, Sai Emrys wrote:
> recently we started figuring out how we might be able to make a conlang entirely mediated by touch (of the sort where we could talk to each other discretely, masked by normal behavior like holding hands).

So, we discussed this again more recently.

To specify the domain better, the language we're trying to make should be:
* able to communicate simple and maybe meta* things (doesn't need to be capable of Shakespeare or neuroscience)
* communicable entirely by the speakers' hands being grasped together or the like (as is socially normal for couples in most situations - though I'd like to expand this to other forms of casual touch also)

By "meta", I mean that the grip-language may occur in parallel to an ongoing, and separately sensible, acoustic language - and would act as some sort of meta-commentary to it in real time.


First, one thing came up that's a philosophical? question of analysis.

One phonetic feature of the domain is that the primary two grips (opposite hands gripping, thumbs same direction, palms together, fingers interlaced) are symmetrically asymmetric - A's thumb is either outside or inside B's.

Switching between these two grips (let's call them A or B dominant based on whose thumb is on the outside) is a relatively elaborate cascade or disengage-reëngage process, thus seems like something that would not be done frequently.

Alex's analogy for this was to vowel harmony & suprasegmental features more generally, which I think is apt.

The question is, does one analyze the words [k2r2m] vs [korom] as: a) being phonemically /k2r2m/ vs /korom/, with an non-semantic rule that vowels are supposed to be frontness-harmonic, or b) being phonemically both /k$r$m/ where $ signifies a mid rounded vowel, frontness unspecified, and frontness is a separate bit property of the whole word

Another example from ASL is hand dominance. E.g. HELP is dominant hand /A/ resting on base /B/; dominance is a non-phonological property in ASL (except in explicitly visual-spatial context). One could however analyze this as actually being two distinct signs, left A on right B vs right A on left B, with some handwaving about some signers preferring one over another form, but being allophonic.

However, suppose that I were to create ASL', in which using reverse dominance to one's true dominance carries ironic pragma. How then would one analyze it - as being a feature of each phone, of each phoneme, of each "word" (granted that 'word' is a bit ambiguous in ASL), or of a sentence / utterance overall? At some level it is specified, and at the levels below that it is not.

My preference is to analyze this sort of thing as being a bit "belonging to" the level at which it changes meaning - so if e.g. [k2r2m] vs [korom] is cat vs dog, then that's to the word itself; if it's ironic vs normal then it's to the utterance overall (unless it's just that word that's emphasizedly ironic, in which case the word again); and if yet it's indicative of deferential vs superior politeness marking, then certainly to the entire utterance or even the discourse.

I'd be interested to read y'alls' thoughts on this.


Second, we made a preliminary pass at enumerating the phonological inventory. This is divided into a few semi-parallelized channels:

* grip: A-dominant, B-dominant; possibly other variants also, not fully enumerated

* thumb disposition: default, dominant thumb under sub thumb (sub-dominant?), and dominant pointer over sub thumb (double dominant?)
- I do double dominant by leaving dom thumb as is, and just moving dom pointer over the tip of sub thumb, in a somewhat side-by-side position)

* disposition transitions: short-short, short-stroke, or stroke-* (I found stroke-stroke and stroke-short to be too hard to reliably do differently)
- short = minimal contact w/ other finger except as needed to transition
- stroke = stroke up or down other finger during that segment of the transition

* motions:
- 1..5th knuckle press (coded by recipient's knuckle, thumb = 1st)
- 1..4th gap press (1st gap = thumb web)
- 1..4th short gap press (gap press is made w/ finger extended, short gap press w/ finger pad pulled back to be against the fleshier bit)
- ? 1..5th finger squeeze (coded by squeezer's lower-ordinal squeezing finger, e.g. dom 1st squeeze = squeeze sub thumb w/ thumb & pointer)
- ? finger separation (only possible from double-dominant grip)
- ? some subset of the combinations thereof

* elbow-dominance (walking hand-in-hand, dominant elbow is in front)

* torsion (?neutral, dominant out, and dominant in - e.g. dominant out has the whole dominant thumb base outside the sub thumb)
- ? possibly these can be characterized as motions instead of states


Some possible issues with the domain:
* for me (though not for Alex), fourth and fifth finger action is not entirely seperable (so there will be noise between the two)
* we have different grip dominance preference (interlace your fingers together - which way do you prefer? I like my right thumb dominant, he likes left), so one of us is always a bit awkward with a grip
* Alex dislikes the double dominant position for being too squeezy, for making thumb usefulness worse, and magnifying grip asymmetry
* thumb disposition and grip both significantly affect the motions one can do, and the perception of them; one issue e.g. is whether to code recipient xor presser finger as phonological

Suggestions?

Anyone done similar?

Any languages for deaf-blind worth stealing from (e.g. that aren't just some originally-for-sighted sign language done using recipient hands to feel the signer's)?

Includes mentions (and samples!) of Dritok, Esperanto, Klingon, Quenya, LCC2, ZBB, and of course Don's Cleveland Library exhibit.

http://radio.seti.org/ - Show 8/7/07, "Speaking Klingon"
http://dlc.sun.com/seti/podcast/AWA_08-07-07.mp3 @ 21m35s ~ 37m00s

(Produced by SETI Institute, broadcast on PRX including BBC Radio 4, NPR, etc - see http://radio.seti.org/listening-options.php.)

Congratulations to him on the very well done interview!

FOR WIDE DISTRIBUTION - PLEASE FORWARD

See: http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=28210 for original message & more details

O fellow conlangers:

This is about the short film "Conlang" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFc3CvMMY48 - that is just a test for the real thing, set to begin production in two weeks.

( Read more... )

Matt Haupt made a blog: http://makealang.blogspot.com/

I've syndicated it at makealang; you can add it as a friend to watch it.

More or less.

Kilt's finished and embroidered; needs a couple touchups to fix pockets, one of the pocket-hooks, & snaps.

Conference is over, very successful in content but only marginally in finances. LCC3 finances will be An Issue.

Need to get the MiniDV tapes ripped, uploaded to YT/GV, and mastered to a couple dual side/ dual layer DVDs, as I wasn't able to do so with my setup (computer so slow it drops frames all over). Press things went fairly well; outcome TBD.

Tired, glad it's over, will be more enthusiastic given a couple weeks to retrospect (and time to rewatch all the video). Want to sleep for a month, but have lots of other work to do. Oh well.

http://conlangs.berkeley.edu is updated.

Will be webcast (audio) live, plus live chatroom where you can ask questions of the presenters.

We'll have at least one journalist two journalists in attendance; one freelance, the other with a major paper. I wonder if it'll get published, and what sort of story they'll be doing...