Author Archives: matthewdeanmartin

After campaigning once or twice for a conlang SE, there finally is one! And they are not getting enough questions. Writing a good question is turning out to be harder than I thought. Let’s take a few questions that I … Continue reading →

The CountVecorizor is the most audacious model of human language. It counts the words and converts the entire sentence into a vector of word counts for each different word in the sentence (or text) and by absence, zeros for all … Continue reading →

Compound Words So English has “goodbye” which most people would say is one word. But it used to be “god be with you” and somewhere in between then and now and phrase turned into a single word. Professional linguists use … Continue reading →

Esperanto is an invented language that is popular with people who enjoy learning languages and travel. It’s so successful that there are 2nd and 3rd generation speakers. Passport Service (Passporta Servo) is a pre-internet bed and breakfast service aimed at … Continue reading →

Please read the article on what a cross compiler is in the context of conlangs before reading this. The recommended way to use this, should I (or someone!) complete it and write a compiler is that certain advanced toki pona … Continue reading →

Imagine you had a script that took every English sentence and replaced “ain’t” with “isn’t”. That would be a one rule cross compiler. I think this idea is very powerful and applicable to evolving a conlang without actually teaching people … Continue reading →

So I had an idea based on a few other ideas. What sort of mantra is worth reciting? The number pi has nonrepeating digits. If you looked long enough, then eventually you wound find the digits that encode your name … Continue reading →

I just wrote a C# parser for toki pona. It was an ad hoc grammar, meaning I didn’t write a PEG or YACC or other formal description of the grammar and then process it into a parser. (I didn’t use … Continue reading →

1) Small lexicon. Incompletely described languages also have small lexicons. Klingon falls into this category. The lexicon can grow. Esperanto on day 365 was a small language. Something like a century later, it is a large lexicon language. 2) Closed … Continue reading →

Verbs have valency, which is how many “arguments” they have. For example intransitive means no arguments (or only one, the subject), transitive, means one (or two, subject and object). So a typical lojban verb (gismu) works like this: cliva x1 … Continue reading →

I read about the dictionary making for Algonquin, a highly synthetic language with few unbound morphemes. Everything of interest is a bound morpheme. Full words necessarily drag along with them a lot of other cruft, as if a dictionary had … Continue reading →

When you are teaching a machine to do something with a language, you get a surprising set of challenges that are not mentioned much in your traditional reference grammar. On the internet, people post texts and line breaks are unreliable … Continue reading →

So I’m noodling again the idea of knowledge representation with toki pona. If I say: jan li laso. And then ask: seme li laso? Then it should be easy enough to look up jan. (That is to bind seme to … Continue reading →

So I was wondering what a parser for Esperanto would look like if I only used the 14 rules. I re-read them and quickly decided that actually, at the time of the 14 rules, the bulk of the language specification … Continue reading →

So I can open a novel, and as part of being a human raised in an English speaking community, I pretty much understand everything. I can open a textbook on Calculus on Logic and while I can read the whole … Continue reading →