Deconstructing Conlanging

Humor me for a moment and think back to any language classes you might have had in your schooling experience, whether in your native language or a foreign language. Do you remember anything in particular that you did while learning (or expanding) your skills in that language? Perhaps you did worksheets, or translation or speaking activities, but there is one thing that I can almost guarantee almost everyone- and I say almost because I know for a fact that I was too lazy to do so -crammed using notecards before a test. Surprise surprise! That’s what I’m talking about this week.

Before you decide to unfollow the blog and close the tab, just listen. I don’t necessarily mean pounding vocab word after vocab word into your head like you’re studying for the SATs. I’m talking about something that is similar to that, but much much more effective for those who have the patience for it.

Spaced Repetition learning systems (hereafter referred to as SRS) are essentially flashcards. Digital flashcards that you can use to review or learn your material. Of course, in order to use this method you absolutely need to have ‘native’ materials. By native, of course I mean documentation. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, you must have all sorts of documentation to do anything! In this situation, many different kinds of sample translations will be best for you. The sentences shouldn’t be long, but they should use different types of sentence structures so that you can get a well-rounded knowledge of your language and its grammar.

But why would this do anything? You’re just memorizing sentences, right? Well, not quite. You’re learning the grammar and vocabulary in context. There’s no translation on the back of the card for you to memorize. You just have your particular sentence on one side and you judge yourself by how well you think you understood that. The good thing about using SRS rather than traditional flashcards is that it helps you out. The items you score higher on it shows you less frequently and the items you score lower on will come up more frequently. Of course, if you are just a beginner, using SRS might be a bit difficult at first, but once you have something to work off of it goes astonishingly fast.

So what would you be using with this SRS thing? Well, you’ve got a few options (and not all of them are included here, so do your own research before deciding for sure!):

Supermemo - supermemo.com

From what I hear, this is the original SRS client. Unfortunately, you do have to buy a license for this and sometimes it takes a bit of fiddling with, but it is worth mentioning just because most SRS programs are based off of the same algorithms that Supermemo uses.

Mnemosyne - mnemosyne-proj.org

Mnemosyne is a very lightweight client that can pretty much do anything. I personally used this one more than Anki, but it’s up to you. In order to use images and sound you will have to mess around with some HTML, so if you’re not comfortable with that you might want to either forgo images or sound or try a different client.

Anki - ankisrs.net

Anki is the most popular of all the SRS clients. There is a huge community using it and the program is really quite flexible. You are also able to download decks of cards or plugins or even sync your deck with the Anki server so you can study away from home! New versions of Anki are released pretty often too.

Even if you’re not completely comfortable with the idea of studying notecards, I do urge you to at least try it out. Just take a few minutes every day for a week going over your deck. Then you can decide whether or not it is doing something for you. Some people don’t like SRS and some people love it. Learning a language- whether conlang or natlang -is all about being flexible and working how your brain wants to work in order to learn the best you can.

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Resources and Additional Reading:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/aim-to-fail

http://omniglot.com/language/srs.php

http://www.spanish-only.com/2009/06/srs-practice-srs/

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/popping-bubblewrap-tips-for-better-srs-sentence-items

We left off last time at the break between the Loglan Institute and the people who would go on to create Lojban. This was in 1987, mind you, so this was quite a bit after Loglan was created. Nevertheless, the people who chose to break off decided to create a new organization, the Logical Language Group, for their own logical language. They intended to make it freely usable and available to all who wished to learn it so that it can “grow in the wild”, if you prefer to phrase it as such.

Lojban was similar to Loglan in theory, but decided to use a completely different vocabulary. They chose words that would be familiar to speakers of various natlangs suck as Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic. Their 1300 root words can be combined to form millions of other words. Lojban was (and is) a sort of intellectual child of Loglan. And while they never recombined when the idea was put forth- all of the activity was in Lojban rather than Loglan anyway -Brown at least admitted that he was happy that Lojban was succeeding.

Lojban is somewhat unusual in that while it aims to remove restrictions on creative ad clear thought, it actually causes quite a few problems itself. In In the Land of Invented Languages, author Arika Okrent writes about a situation she ran into while researching Lojban:

“One day during my weeklong immersion in the Lojban grammar, I was watching an Elmo video with my son when a friendly puppet character popped up to ask, “What are the two numbers that come after the number 6?” I had no idea what this puppet was getting at. “What the hell does that mean?” I wondered. “There are an infinite set of numbers that come after the number 6.” I honestly did not know what the answer was supposed to be until the video told me (it’s 7 and 8, by the way).”

(234)

Ms. Okrent goes on to explain how this wasn’t really a sort of Whorfian effect, at least not in the way that was intended when Brown published Loglan, but rather, she was just seeing hidden meanings that Lojban was bringing into her view. 

zo’o ta jitfa .i .e’o xu do pendo mi
[humor] that’s not true. Please [yes/no] you are friends with me?

Lojban is a language that tries to be many many things. It wants to train one’s mind in formal logic. That is probably the most basic of goals one can pick up on regarding Lojban (and even other similar loglangs). But it also wants to stay both culturally neutral and open to all different worldviews. It’s interesting how one conlang can juggle all of these goals and yet still be as successful as Lojban has been. It is doubtful that it will pick up and be used by any kind of large-scale audience, but it wasn’t really intended for that purpose even when it was Loglan that was the big loglang around. The fact that there are enough people still interested in the language to be as big a part of the conlanging community as they are is more than a little cool. And hey, if they want to distinguish between all the meanings of “a pretty little girls school”, that’s their choice.

——-

References and Additional Reading:

Arika Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Spiegel & Grau, 2009. 

Stephen D. Rogers. A Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Adûnaic to Elvish, Zaum to Klingon- The Anwa (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons. Adams Media, 2011.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/lojban.htm

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban 

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/lojban

http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/

So you’re finally ready to learn, you think? Got some experience with language learning under your belt and some impatience with having to wait to start? Well, then, just take a moment to breathe. Because we’re finally talking about something that brings you one step closer to learning your conlang: learning methods.

As I mentioned before, the reason why I did a whole spiel (and miniseries) on learning a more mainstream conlang was because you need to experiment with different methods of learning and find what works best for you. It’s not really all that good to trust what has worked for you with a natural language because there is just so much more available native materials for natlangs. If you had just relied on the sorts of things that you used when learning, say, Spanish or something, then it will be a surprise to see that you can’t really use all of the same input methods because of the sheer lack of things to choose from. Especially if you are learning your own conlang. Unless you have made hours and hours of “native” material to study off of, an input-based method is not going to work all that well. Even if you are fond of that sort of thing (as I am myself).

That being said, documentation is on your side here. Make sure to document everything you can about your language before you start to learn it. As mentioned in previously, if you do not have a well-enough-developed conlang then you are sinking yourself from the beginning. You need to have something to learn, and if you are planning on making it up as you go then you may not be as well-prepared to learn your conlang fully and efficiently as if you decided to complete as much as you can to get a full overview of how the language works as a system. This doesn’t only include things like basic phonology, vocabulary, or general syntax and word ordering. This also includes things such as stress pattern and other oft-overlooked items for a newbie conlanger.

But if you’re confident that you have all that down, that you’ve learned enough about how you want to personally learn your language and you know how it works enough so that it is not only usable in a real-life context but you don’t have to wing it every time, then it’s time to start discussing how you’re going to choose to learn this language. There are many different ways to decide how to go about this, so let’s take a look at just a few of the methods you can learn to help you in your conlang learning.

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References and Additional Reading:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=4709&PN=1

http://joe-perez.com/blog/2011/07/the-indescribable-happiness-of-learning-a-constructed-language/

http://conlangs.livejournal.com/408243.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010222075152.htm

This is more of an article of interest rather than a specifically related post.

If there were to be a subgroup of conlangs or artificial languages that are most interesting from a technical standpoint, it would have to be logical languages. But how many logical languages do you know of off the top of your head? Do you even realize what a logical language is? Why can’t all language be logical? Well, those are good questions. And to answer them, I think we have to go over the most well-known of the logical languages: Loglan and Lojban.

Before we get onto the connection and story between these two languages, we’d might as well start with the original. That would be Loglan, which is short for Logical Language. It was created by Dr. James Cooke Brown i 1955 in order to create a completely unambiguous language that could act as an interface between people and computers. Brown was such a believer in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (also called Linguistic Relativity) that he believed that if he were to create a language different enough from natural languages that people learning this language might learn how to think differently because of it. At least, Loglan was a test to see if that would be the case or not.

“Professor Brown, someone is here who wants the proof of the Whorf Hypothesis.”

Loglan is designed so that you have to say exactly what you mean. Its lack of ambiguity means that there is no way to say something that might mean two things. Each statement is like a mathematical formula in that it can’t tell you whether something or not is true, but it does a pretty good job of telling you what conditions you must meet in order for it to become true. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I did run into a joke once that demonstrates the concept pretty well.

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb? Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light.

Obviously this joke refers to those who are for Lojban and not Loglan, but you get the point. And it’s not like the languages are unrelated anyway, as you shall see in the Lojban post.

While Brown created Loglan in 1955, he didn’t publish it until 1960 when he published a sketch of his language in Scientific American. He had a much different opinion on his language than many other language creators of the time did. This was because it was not meant to be an auxiliary language, but a language meant only to test out the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. His approach to the language was much less enthusiastic and much more rational. This made Loglan different from the various other invented languages like Interlingua or Esperanto which claimed many things from being the easiest language to learn to becoming a world language that will be used by all.

Na le mutce pasko nadzo gu, teba pa cmalo sorme, Hue la Mioksun, ja satcycue go mutce kukcea gu, E nu namci lau la Elsis, la Leisis, la Tilis. I teba ji sei pa sitlii le dampai je le cuthou.

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”
In the much former now, three somethings x were small sisters, Said the Dormouse, who began to speak very hurriedly [quick-becoming-ly], and were named (list) Elsie, Lacie, Tillie. And the same three somethings x who will now be refered to as s(orme) inhabited the bottom [down-part] of one well [water-hole].

Unfortunately, even though Brown did receive a small grant for his project in the beginning he didn’t have much luck getting support for it later on. Nonetheless, he did have a group of followers that he surrounded himself with. He made the Loglan Institute for his language and with the lack of success with funding, he turned it into a membership-funded organization. Unfortunately, by allowing his followers to become members of the institute they expected to have a bit more control over the language. However, Brown refused to accept that other people could have control over his language, eventually landing him into some trouble and driving away the people who liked the language in the first place. (Sound familiar?) It got to the point where Brown refused to allow materials about the language be released without one first signing a statement acknowledging that the institute controls the language completely and that royalties must be paid.

This, of course, did not please people and the supporters of Loglan decided that it was worth splitting their small community in order to have a bit more freedom in working with their logical language. Those who broke off instead created Lojban.

To be continued.

——-

References and Additional Reading:

Arika Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Spiegel & Grau, 2009. 

Stephen D. Rogers. A Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Adûnaic to Elvish, Zaum to Klingon- The Anwa (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons. Adams Media, 2011.

http://www.loglan.org/

Comic and translation example taken from this site.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Loglan

I am so sorry that our posts have been lacking! All of us here at Deconstructed Construction are full-time college students and so I don’t think it’s any surprise that we are constantly busy. We will be picking this blog back up this summer! Thank you to all our amazing followers for sticking with us throughout this busy time! 

Now, it would be wrong to discount the two more recent conlangs that have gained not only notoriety within non-conlanging circles and communities behind them. That is why in the last post of the Learning Mainstream Conlangs miniseries I will be going over them at once. Just please note that I myself have not tried to learn Na’vi or Dothraki, so do your own research if you are interested in learning either language. Now that that is dealt with, on with the post!

The first conlang we are looking at would be Na’vi, a conlang which came into view in 2009 with the release of the film Avatar. It was created by linguist Paul Frommer  and the base wordlist that Frommer used to create the language had a sort of “Polynesian flavor” to it. It contains unusual features such as ejective consonants and a lack of voiced plosives (like b, d, g) since it was intended to be an alien language.

Learn Na’vi Forums - forum.learnnavi.com

No matter the language r subject matter, looking at or joining in on conversation on forums are usually a good bet. There are many subforums, both about Na’vi and other subjects. If you are interested in joining more a community around the language, this might be a good idea.

Na’vi in a Nutshell - learnnavi.org/docs/Navi_in_a_Nutshell.pdf

While in my first read-over I noticed a few statements that were a bit… problematic for those who fall on the more descriptivist side of the language debate, but it is a good enough overview of the basic grammar. I would advise that if you want to use this as a resource to look over linguistic terms first. There are some concepts beginners may be unfamiliar with.

Definitive Na’vi Dictionary - eanaeltu.learnnavi.org/dicts/NaviDictionary.pdf

This one is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a dictionary. Good for looking up vocabulary. Some knowledge of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) recommended.

Na’vi might be an alien language, but there are plenty of people lining up to learn it. Granted, there probably is not as much interest in the language as there was in 2010, but there still is a community around the language. Paul Frommer himself even keeps a blog about the language for those who want to learn it or learn about it.

Of course, just because Na’vi has gotten out of the conlanging spotlight does not mean that there hasn’t been another language to take its place. In fact, there is a newcomer who is getting a lot of attention by those who want to learn. The language in question is Dothraki, created by well-known conlanger David J. Peterson. We’ve discussed one of Mr. Peterson’s conlangs, Kamakawi, last week. Dothraki was commissioned through the Language Creation Society for the television series Game of Thrones.

At this point I am finding very few resources for learning Dothraki, even fewer than Na’vi, but that may be because there has been less time for it to really get out there and get well-written learning materials (other than those that Mr. Peterson have made for the show itself)

Learning Dothrakion the Dothraki Wiki - wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Learningdothraki

This wiki seems to have all of the information currently publicly known on the language. Since Game of Thrones is still airing, there is still much Dothraki that we have not seen. This wiki page has pages on the different things you would need to know about the language.

It’s a bit difficult when the languages have not been around for as long as something like Klingon (which also was a language used in television/movies), but i you really want to you could learn something like the above if any other mainstream conlangs don’t interest you. Just have fun with it and choose what you are most interested in. Whether its one of the languages I have suggested or something else, if you put a little work into it soon enough you’ll be playing scrabble in Sindarin or writing to your Lojban penpal!

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References and Additional Reading:

http://www.learnnavi.org/

http://www.learnnavi.org/docs/Navi_in_a_Nutshell.pdf

http://eanaeltu.learnnavi.org/dicts/NaviDictionary.pdf

http://podcast.conlang.org/2010/04/interview-with-paul-frommer/

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1977

http://www.dothraki.com/

http://dothraki.conlang.org/press/

http://wiki.dothraki.org/dothraki/Learningdothraki

http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/06/language-creation-for-game-of-thrones/

First of all, the writer apologizes for her tardiness in getting this post out. I had to completely rewrite it after my tab was closed before I saved it. I have tried to reconstruct what I can, nonetheless, so I hope you enjoy it!

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This week I thought we would consider a language that is not so old or academically-focused as some of the previous example. Kamakawi is a language created by David J. Peterson. Unfortunately, due to the confusing and unclear nature of the internet, is is difficult for me to know exactly when Kamakawi was created. But my best guess says sometime before 2009. It is important to look at more modern conlangs- especially those done by respected conlangers like Mr. Peterson -because there is a world of difference in the artificial language-making* community of years ago and the conlanging communities we have in place today.

Plus this language is very good for beginning conlangers to look at because it is a good example of how to take inspiration from a natural language and make a conlang based on it rather than make a relex based off of a natural language. In this case, Mr. Peterson’s language of inspiration was Hawai’ian and other Polynesian languages.

I will not be doing a whole historical overview nor a complete summary of his grammar, but it is very readable even if you do not like grammars and can can be found here. For the sake of keeping things interesting, I’ll just be going over some things that jumped out at me while reading about Kamakawi.

Ka li ei i nawa ke nevi i eine.
I gave a fish to a woman.

First things first, the phonology. It is quite small, but not small enough to really start becoming limiting. I also think that it is important to point out that he has rules for sound changes, which are something that I have neglected to mention before and I see a ton of beginning conlangers forgetting. 

Beyond that little mention, the thing that really jumped out at me on my first read-through for Kamakawi was his pronoun sytem. Mr. Peterson not only distinguished between the singular, dual, trial, and plural (as he also does in his noun system) both inclusively and exclusively (which means that he has different ways to talk about groups of one, two, three, and four or more and in the first person it distinguishes between whether we would include who is being spoken to or not) , but he also has five different genders for his third-person pronouns. Those would be male, female, neuter, non-gender specific, and general.

According to him,

“There is absolutely no excuse for the pronoun system, as it is (regarding gender in the third person, not regarding number). The reason the third person pronouns have so many forms is because Kamakawi began as a Mary Sue language (is that a term we use? If it isn’t, it should be), and I wanted a distinction for everything I could think of. Once I encoded it in the orthography, the forms stuck. If I were to do it over, there’d only be two forms: pea (specific) and kou (general), and the latter would derive from an earlier honorific, and might double as a second person pronoun.”

Source can be seen here.

but I think that it is an interesting addition, especially because he does not have grammatical gender elsewhere. He has some affixes called derivational affixes- which essentially turn one word into another -that relate to physical gender, but not grammatical gender.

Au emimu uila emi takemi u iema poe takoiki oi pou ikopuku. Au aemu omoko oi foyoko ti upea ae ha’ala’i i ikaika tie takeolaka ea.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Of course, I would be lying if I said that I thought the previous was the most interesting thing I found in the language. I didn’t even mention anything about verbs or other features, but I don’t want to tire you out before I get to the really interesting things. Or rather, what might be most interesting thing for me personally at this point. If you would like to guess, take a look at the images I have chosen this time.

…If you guessed the orthography, you would be right! Kamakawi actually has two orthographies. One of them is the native script, the Kamakawi Writing System and the other is the Zhyler Kamakawi Alphabet. Zhyler is another one of Mr. Peterson’s languages, this time based on Turkish. 

The Kamakawi Writing System (or Kacaka o Puvupo “Elders’ Script”, as it is called on Omniglot) isn’t just a plain alphabet. It is a complex script that involves pictograms and logograms and ideograms in addition to a syllabary. Mr. Peterson definitely shows his creativity in creating writing systems in this. The Zhyler Kamakawi Alphabet, on the other hand, shows more of a creativity within the conworlding aspect of conlanging. Mr. Peterson himself said that it was within a “made-up made-up world”, that being a made-up world that doesn’t actually exist but that doesn’t change the relationship shown by this script. I don’t believe that I could describe it well enough, but luckily for us, Mr. Peterson has commented on his orthography:

“There are two orthographies for Kamakawi: One native, one imported. This has to do with the cultural context. The Kamakawi have lived on the Kamakawi Islands for quite some time, but in recent history, Zhyler speakers moved from the main land and colonized a large island to the northeast (rocky and not very hospitable, which is why the Kamakawi ignored it, for the most part). They brought significant technological advances to the Kamakawi, and brought them a “civilized” writing system that they insist on using, rather than learning the Kamakawi “picture writing”. The native orthography is described here, and the imported one (think Pinyin. It’s a modified version of the Zhyler orthography) is described here.”

Source can be seen here.

This relationship of speakers that caused this situation of multiple orthographies really got me thinking about how one can (and perhaps even should) think about the relationships between languages and their speakers within your conworld.

Language contact is a phenomenon in real life and will not only add a bit of naturalness and fullness to your language, but it might make you want to create more languages and see what kinds of effects they can have on one another. This is especially important if you choose not to make families of language because it gives you a chance to look at the ways that languages change when put under different circumstances, whether time or contact with another language or something else. Whether it will affect your writing system, like Kamakawi, or something else, it is something to think about.

Kamakawi is a more modern sort of conlang, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t show us anything about language and creating them. Keep in mind as you decide to research conlangs to not just concentrate on the old ones or the famous ones. You can get knowledge and insight from all kinds of conlangs, whether new or old, well-made or needing improvement.

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Resources and Additional Reading:

*Please note that I did not use conlanging community here. Typically the phrase “conlanger community” refers to the more modern online community of language creators and really should not include older language creators like Zamenhof, etc., just because of the difference in the opinions regarding constructed languages. But this is my opinion, so your mileage might vary on this point. Still, I am trying to refer to more than people who identify as conlangers. 

http://dedalvs.conlang.org/kamakawi/main.html

http://cals.conlang.org/language/kamakawi/

http://conlangery.com/2012/01/16/conlangery-33-suprasegmental/

http://omniglot.com/writing/kavaka.htm

Second image is from here. The first is from Mr. Peterson’s website.

Even if a person does not know what a conlang is or has no knowledge of something like Esperanto or Sindarin or any of them, chances are that they will know of one conlang. That, my lovely readers, would be Klingon, language of the Klingon people from Star Trek. Of course, the Klingons do not call it “Klingon”. The true name of the language would be tlhIngan Hol. And you don’t have to be a Trekkie anymore to learn it. (Although that makes it a hundred times cooler.)

Klingon is a more difficult choice of mainstream conlang to learn, especially when compared to Esperanto, but it also is more interesting and foreign and could help a lot with finding new and interesting ideas to perhaps incorporate into your own conlang. It is also useful to learn something more different and unusual like Klingon because it may make it easier when you are learning your own (presumably easier) conlang.

noH QapmeH wo’ Qaw’lu’chugh yay chavbe’lu’, ‘ej wo’ choqmeH may’ DoHlu’chugh lujbe’lu’
Destroying an empire to win a war is no victory, and ending a battle to save an empire is no defeat.

But just as warning: as mentioned before, there are some… weird features in Klingon, for lack of better phrasing. When one is learning Klingon, it is very important to keep the following in mind:

• The Latin orthography is quite unusual in that uppercase and lowercase letters stand for different sounds. So while q may stand for an aspirated voiceless uvular stop, Q stands for a voiceless uvular affricate.
• Speaking of phonology, the actual sounds of Klingon are…not what is to be expected. There are gaps in the phonology, particularly in the area of velar plosives (Klingon has none) and sibilants (it only has one sibilant, /ʂ/), and some of the sounds that Klingon does have are a bit difficult for some.
• The grammar of Klingon itself is a bit difficult, with 29 total suffixes for nouns in five classes and even more complex verbs. The syntax is also a bit unfamiliar with the most common word order being object-verb-subject, the complete opposite of English.
• Klingon’s lexicon does not contain many words that you might want to use. It takes some creativity to say certain things with Klingon’s limited vocabulary and grammar.

Nonetheless, if you would like to take on the challenge (and I encourage you to if you are interested at all!) here are a few resources I was able to find online Please note that I have not tried to learn Klingon myself seriously, so check them out for yourself:

Klingon Language Institute - kli.org

I couldn’t just not mention the KLI. It is The Place to look if you are interested in finding out more about Klingon and the community of speakers and learners interested in it. They release a quarterly journal called the HolQed as well as provide resources about the language.

Klingon Language Resources - klingon.org/resources/languages.html

This page has links out to other resources that you may or may not find useful. In my opinion, if I was looking for a page of resources online I would probably deem this the most acceptable one and go from there to find what I need. It has links to everything from mailing lists to the Klingon Language Certification Program.

Klingon Wikibook - en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Klingon

I recently found this wikibook, but it looks like a good place to start if you are not sure where to go from. It doesn’t seem like it is completely finished, but as for basics it might work. It also has good background information on Klingon, which is always nice.

You can also always go out and get something like The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand as well. Klingon might not be the first choice of some as a conlang to learn, but it is really is interesting and if I personally had more time I would totally try to learn it. Unfortunately, as far as I know, Klingon does not have the same amount of different lessons and teaching or learning resources as something like Esperanto, but why not try anyway? There are plenty of fun things to do in Klingon from reading Hamlet to watching opera and much much more. Just try it out. yIghoSDo’! (Good luck! Or literally, go onward with fortune!)

——-

References and Additional Reading:

http://www.kli.org/

http://www.klingon.org/resources/language.html

http://www.frathwiki.com/Klingon_language

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Klingon

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/klingon.htm

Sample translation and picture from here.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/10873/klingon-as-a-second-language

You may be somewhat confused by the title if you have not heard of Solresol already. Especially if you are already familiar with solfege. Sol re sol? What could that mean? Well, you were right in jumping to solfege right off because Solresol is indeed based off of music. It’s one of the few relatively well-known musical languages, made by François Sudre in the 1800s. Interestingly, although we do not refer to it much nowadays, it was the first conlang to be taken seriously as an international auxiliary language (IAL).*

Sudre set out to create a simple and versatile language that anyone could learn. He based it off of the musical alphabet so that it could be expressed in more manners. One can sing, whistle, gesture, play, or even paint this language. (Explanation for the painting comment: Each syllable is associated with a particular color. So it could be possible to get your message across in that manner.)  It contains a set of 2,660 words made from do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and si arranged into words ranging from one syllable to four.

The one syllable words would be:

Do - no, not, neither, nor
Re - and, as well as
Mi - or, or even
Fa - to
Sol - if
La - the
Si - yes, okay, gladly, agreed

And the two syllable words that start with do would be:

Dore - I, me
Domi - you [sg]
Dso - self, oneself
Dola - one, someone
Dosi - other

As one goes up in complexity of words, the words settle into distinct groups separated by the first sets of syllables and classified by syllable once one gets into four syllable words. A set of three syllable words as a distinct group is would be: 

Doredo -  time
Doremi - day
Dorefa - week
Doresol - month
Dorela - year
Doresi - century

Opposites are made by reversing the order of syllables. For example, the word misol means good while solmi means bad. A word in Solresol also signifies all of the possible meanings of a word. That is why the word si means yes, okay, gladly, and agreed, because those could be considered synonyms. The problem with Solresol of distinguishing word boundaries (since with such a limited inventory of syllables this becomes a problem) is solved by pausing after each distinct word in order to separate them for the listener.

Solresol grew in popularity as Sudre held performances of his language. He would play paragraphs of Solresol on his violins and his students translated them into French. He also expanded the language and the performance of it in various ways, like singing the Solresol or translating phrases from the audience. He even developed a method to speak only through touch by separating the hand into seven different segments matching the seven different syllables of Solresol.

Unfortunately, Solresol, while very popular and entertaining, did not become a world language. It was considered more of a show than a language to be taken seriously. Still, it is an interesting and creative way to look at language, if a bit limited in comparison to some other conlangs because of its vocabulary.

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Resources and Additional Reading:

* Of course, it wasn’t referred to as an IAL at that point in time. You’ll see that auxlangs were more referred to as international languages or interlanguages.

Arika Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Spiegel & Grau, 2009. 

Stephen D. Rogers. A Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Adûnaic to Elvish, Zaum to Klingon- The Anwa (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons. Adams Media, 2011.

Useful book, but not comprehensive. A lot of the entries are disappointing. Good for general (very very general) information on a lot of conlangs and is an interesting read nonetheless. And it’s pretty~

As for the section on constructing your own language, I would say it is lacking some important information. Please, if you want to make a language, take a look at something like the Language Construction Kit, whether online or in dead trees form.

https://webspace.utexas.edu/bighamds/LIN312/Files/SolReSol.pdf 

http://web.archive.org/web/20070831060530/http://www.uniovi.es/solresol/525/rdd_e.html

http://www.datapacrat.com/True/LANG/SOLRESOL/

http://web.archive.org/web/20080407102457/http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=625

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SolresolFarben_ecritures.png

Image from here

If you have been around the conlanging community for any period of time, you have probably heard of Esperanto. If you haven’t, where have you been? It’s only (arguably) the most successful conlanging project thus far. It has native speakers, for crying out loud! Can’t get much better than that. But I am not here to talk about the history of Esperanto or its successes and failures in achieving its goal or even the affects it has had on the conlanging community. That’s a story for another post. Today we are here to think about how learning Esperanto might help us when we decide to learn another language further down the line.

So, why learn Esperanto? Disregarding the fact that it has speakers all around the globe, Esperanto is, quite simply, an easy language for us to learn. And by us, I mean speakers of an Indo-European language. It is an extremely extremely Eurocentric language. But for our use as English speakers (as I assume you are if you are reading this blog in English) it will be no problem.

As I went over in our last post, learning one language can help you in learning other languages. It flexes the language learning muscle, so to speak. Plus it opens you to a whole new area of the conlanging community that you may or may not be interested in: the Esperantists. Now occasionally Esperantists may get some flak about the whole artlang vs. auxlang debate, but to be honest, most of the people I have met through Esperanto were very nice and open to speaking in it. You also get the chance to meet awesome people you may not have before. And I promise that they are not all militant superfans.

The next question one must ask is simple: How do I learn Esperanto? Luckily for you, there are many many resources online. It all depends on what you are most comfortable with. Here are just a few that I have personally used:

Lernu - en.lernu.net

Lernu is a website with various lessons at different skill levels. It also has resources like multilingual dictionaries and a chat service that lets you speak with other Esperanto learners. It also has a community of its own and various stories and native materials. If you’re not sure where to start, give lernu a try.

“Free Esperanto Course” - pacujo.net/esperanto/course/

This personally was my introduction to Esperanto. I started out with these lessons and then went on to self-teaching. (Although I will admit that I never got my diploma from this. But I did learn the basics.) If you are a beginner and are comfortable with emailing someone lessons, I recommend trying out this course.

Kurso de Esperanto - www.kurso.com.br/index.php?en

This one is a program for your computer with various lessons on it. It even includes pronunciation/listening exercises and music with the sorts of things you could get in the other lessons. It may be worth looking into if you want to make sure you have it spoken right. Or if you just want to use a computer program. That works too.

And of course, there are many other ways to learn. From books to watching native media (and yes there is native media nowadays) and much more, Esperanto is easy to find if you look for it. Plus, if you’re an average English-speaking language learner and work hard enough you should be pretty proficient in a few weeks. Enough so to be able to talk to others on the spot online. And then once you feel comfortable with Esperanto and think you are finally ready to learn your conlang, you can take the methods that worked best for Esperanto and apply them to your own lessons!

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References and Additional Reading:

http://www.esperanto.org/angle/kiel.html

http://esperanto-usa.org/?q=node/55

http://www.micheloud.com/fxm/la/la/esperanto.htm

http://en.lernu.net/

http://pacujo.net/esperanto/course/

http://www.kurso.com.br/index.php?en

Blissymbolics, is interesting in that while it is covered within books about constructed languages (Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, for example) it is technically only a conscript/alternative writing system. It was created by Charles K. Bliss as a means of international communication through ideograms. In that respect, it could be considered an IAL (International Auxiliary Language) but it has no way to be pronounced.

Bliss originally devised the system- then called World Writing -in the 1940s, inspired by the Chinese characters he saw while in Shanghai. He renamed the system to Semantography in 1947, and then again to Blissymbolics to avoid people plagiarizing him. But still, Blissymbolics was not particularly well-known until it was picked up in the 1970s by groups attempting to assist people with cerebral palsy in communication. 

The Ontario Crippled Children’s Center (now called Bloorview Kids Rehab) was a program that decided to use Blissymbolics to teach children with CP to express their needs and thoughts. They liked how symbols combined because they could fit more symbols in front of a child that way instead of having to write out separate words. After the kids had learned the meanings of the symbols they responded to it straight away.

But although the children had responded to it so well, when Bliss decided to visit the center in Toronto, things started to go… weird, for lack of a better word. Little did they know, but there was to be quite the disagreement over the use of Blissymbolics to come. 

As the program started getting more and more successful, the more he complained about how people did things. The problems were everything from the way the symbols were drawn to the symbols they chose for words (choosing the word for things that you eat that grow underground for all vegetables instead of separating them by things that grow over and underground) to the terms they used to describe his system. But the teachers were trying to use his system in order to assist the children in learning the English words through Blissymbolics. In other countries teachers using the same symbols modified them to work with the language that they were trying to teach.

Eventually in 1974, the administrators told Bliss to stop visiting the center. His criticism and threatening letters to those there had been enough for them. Of course, this just meant that he continued to try to contact them and even threatened lawsuits. These ended in agreements where he granted the center rights to use his symbols, but there was always some way that he came around that and started again.

The back-and-forth between nice letters or visits or apologies and threatening angry tirades continued until the center eventually settled with Bliss after he had started up with the lawsuits again. The center, or rather, the foundation that the center was working under paid $160,000 to get a permanent license to use Blissymbolics. Nowadays there is the Blissymbolics Communications International (or BCI) that controls Blissymbolics. 

To be honest, I cannot find much information on what its connection to the center or to Easter Seals. The About Us page on the site does not help much. But it is not far-fetched to guess that BCI is associated or affiliated with the group that got the permanent rights. 

Bliss is not in the picture anymore, having passed in 1985, but the story of his writing system does bring up a question. In fact, it’s the question that I brought up right from the beginning: Who really has control over a conlang? Is it the creator or the users? And what if there are native speakers of it? There is no clear answer to this problem. Natural languages are obviously owned by no one since there is no one clear creator. But in the case of constructed languages it is much more difficult a question to answer. Nevertheless, it is something that is worth thinking about, especially if you enjoy looking into other people’s conlangs.

——-

References and Additional Reading:

Arika Okrent. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Spiegel & Grau, 2009. 

I reference this book heavily in this post. Ms. Okrent really told the story much better than I did. I glossed over a lot of things for the sake of keeping this post relatively short. If you ever get the chance to check out her book, please do so. It is very informative and entertaining.

http://www.blissymbolics.org/pfw/
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/blissymbolics.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/thesis/ahollosi_html/node9.html

Images from here.

So maybe you’re thinking after that last post “Is my conlang really developed enough for me to try yet?”. Well, don’t worry if it is not. You still have time to learn it, and in the meantime you can put the energy that you were going to use for that towards learning a different type of conlang.

But why learn what I am terming a “Mainstream Conlang”? Well, luckily for us, Matthew over at suburbandestiny.com made a list of reasons why you might want to.

1. You learn linguistic jargon and concepts as side effect
2. It is entertaining. It’s a hobby. Occupies free time.
3. It acts as a form of encryption (stronger for conlangs, weaker for French or Japanese) – encrypting insults and other socially unacceptable speech seems to be a theme.
4. It is prestigious to have an unusual skill (sometimes, to some people)
5. An exercise in language acquistion [sic], telescoping, to make subsequent language learning easier. Especially if you don’t know what language you will eventually need to learn or if the conlang is smaller than a natlang. Otherwise, you maybe should just learn your target language first.
6. An a mental exercise to make you more intelligent in other domains, like logic or essay composition
7. S-W effects– see the world differently due to different grammar and lexicon Specific S-W effects, sense of direction, peacefulness, ability to see five minutes into the future, etc.
8. A sort-contrived common ground for making friends, the same was that sports and weather discussions are a common ground. – also to join a community, applicable if the community already exists – to join a likeminded community. Conlangs tend to attract people meet the advertised target audience)
9. * Makes an artisitic work more vivid (Klingon, Na’vi, Sindarin/Quenya etc)
10. To be used in pranks
11. To be used in music as a new and different sound
12. * To learn how to make a better constructed language (for all the various reasons that conlangs are created, recreation, economic, medical, psychological)
13. To work in the few movies, and other places that use conlangs/dead languages as an input into movies, games, plays etc. This isn’t cost effective enterprise though, few people will be able to create or learn conlangs fast enough to make it worth the typical few thousands of dollars conlangers get paid for conlang work.

Of course, there are some reasons here that really aren’t as relevant to our interests (namely numbers 3,7,10, and 11) but the most important ones I have bolded there.

1. You learn linguistic jargon and concepts as side effect

I cannot stress enough how important knowing your stuff is when it comes to conlanging and learning languages. Knowing, say, what the proper names for your cases are may not seem important now, but when you are trying to create lessons or share your conlangs with other people it becomes more of an important issue when you cannot distinguish the dative from accusative cases. 

If you have more of a linguistic knowledge (from say, learning something like Esperanto) then you can use that information to make your future learning experiences easier. Think about it like this: if you want to make some cookies, isn’t it easier for you to realize that creaming the butter and sugar at the beginning is important because it incorporates air and leavens the cookies better than just relying on the leavening agent alone. Likewise, when you decide to learn an existing language or conlang you have the chance to learn about different language systems as well as pick up information that you can use later.

You can also use the learning materials for the mainstream conlang you have chosen to learn and base your personal conlang lessons off of those if you choose. But I shall be covering this more in-depth in a future entry with a specific example.

5. An exercise in language acquistion [sic], telescoping, to make subsequent language learning easier.

If you ask around, most people will say that after they have learned their second language, subsequent languages studied become easier regardless of method of study. While learning your first foreign language you are just getting used to your techniques and are not very familiar with learning another language. So if you run straight to your conlang you may find that it is more difficult than if you decided to look into another conlang (or even natlang) first.

And since many conlangs- and especially auxlangs -are simpler than natlangs and relatively easy to learn, it is beneficial to have that to help you out. Then by the time you get to your own conlang you not only have the experience in working to learn a conlang and the knowledge and familiarity with different techniques for learning a language, you also have more confidence sing you have been through the process already.

This is not to say you should necessarily spend years becoming fluent, but spending a bit of time looking into other more mainstream conlangs and seeing how one would go about learning them is beneficial. Not to mention it exercises your brain so that you can improve your language learning potential.

12. * To learn how to make a better constructed language 

If you’re thinking about learning your conlang, obviously you think your conlang is just fine, right? I’m not going to dispute that, but there is a lot you can learn from other languages and other conlangs that might make you think about your own conlang. 

Let’s say you want to study Láadan and you notice this cool thing about it. There are these particles that talk about where you know that information from. (It’s called evidentiality, by the way.) You think it’s a very cool trait so you decide to do something like that in your own conlang. That’s perfectly valid! You can find so many weird and interesting things to do with language by studying other languages natural and constructed.

Or alternatively, you may take the Tolkien approach and decide you want to make a conlang based off of a certain specific natlang or family of languages. There is even a whole section of conlangs that do this sort of thing (albeit only with the Romance family) called romlangs. They are specifically based off of one family and made by thinking of alternative ways that daughter languages could have branched off of the mother language.

Even if you don’t want to make a whole new language like that you may decide that you might want to add a few influences of a language to yours. By looking into more languages than just your conlang and native language you get the chance to take inspiration from a whole slew of languages!

Taking a break from your personal conlang to study a mainstream conlang (or even a natlang) can be worth your time in the long run. Throughout the next few posts I will be taking a look at some particular mainstream conlangs and see what we can learn from them in the context of learning our own conlangs.

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References and Additional Reading:

http://www.suburbandestiny.com/conlang/?p=346
http://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/

I am not advocating for a certain method of learning over another at this point in the series, so please take this article with a grain of salt.

http://www.aveneca.com/whatrom.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages_(Middle-earth)#External_history