Author Archives: matthewdeanmartin

Conceits and Lies

Posted on April 6, 2016 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

Posted in toki pona | Comments Off

Why it’d be cool to be able to search for Esperantists on AirBnB

Posted on March 13, 2016 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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Draft for tp++ as toki pona superset for a toki pona cross compiler

Posted on January 2, 2016 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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What is an erasing cross-compiler? Is it conlang related?

Posted on January 2, 2016 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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Enumerating all sentences

Posted on August 29, 2015 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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C++ for Conlanging

Posted on April 19, 2015 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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Meanings of Small in the area of Languages

Posted on January 21, 2015 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Valency in Lojban and toki pona

Posted on December 27, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

Posted in lojban, toki pona | 1 Comment

Dictionaries for toki pona

Posted on December 14, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

Posted in lexicography, machine assisted conlanging, Virginian Algonquian | Comments Off

Paragraphs and machine assisted conlang work

Posted on December 5, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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Inferences from toki pona utterances

Posted on December 3, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

Posted in machine assisted conlanging, toki pona | 1 Comment

The Heart of Esperanto

Posted on December 3, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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Math and logic subsystems in languages

Posted on November 25, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

Posted in machine assisted conlanging, toki pona | 2 Comments

Observations While Editing Toki Pona

Posted on November 20, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

1) People create incorrect proper modifiers constantly. 2) People give up trying to use proper modifiers and just use their native language for all proper modifiers. 3) li get dropped for 3rd person subjects. 4) People essentially invent new constructions … Continue reading →

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Abusing the word morphology as a pragmatic matter

Posted on November 18, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

So I have a syntax that relies on sentence templates like this: [subject] li [verb phrase] li [verb phrase] [Prep Phrase] [Prep Phrase]. Phrase are made of words and phrases have their slots. Then come along negation, emphasis, and uncertainty … Continue reading →

Posted in toki pona | 1 Comment