Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

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 →

Barsoomian is public domain, unless it is the most recent movie version. But here is one that I just notice: Parrot from Doctor Dolittle: “Ka-ka-oi-ee, fee-fee” “Is the porridge hot yet?” Oh, boy. How shall we do an interlinear gloss … Continue reading →

Finishing a conlang is a lot of work. So can fans provide an incentive to new language creators to finish it, say by pledging $ in return for a variety of prizes to be given to the fans? Possible rewards: … Continue reading →

Sorry, I just thought that would be a nice title. I subscribe to Pinker’s idea that those pretty metaphors in our language (MONEY IS WATER) are by and large dead metaphors since the context where they were made passed long … Continue reading →

So, some things my baby likes to say (he’s 2 months old, so according to most charts he’s not supposed to express any communicative skills for 2 more months). At about 3 weeks he said “no, ba-gwa, no, ba-gwa, no” … Continue reading →

Sometime after the internet boom started, auxlang promoters finally had access to the means to send unsolicited messages to people who care about languages but don’t care about the auxlang project and auxlang advocacy became the new body odor, odious … Continue reading →

Recent research with fetus’s and newborns show that babies can hear and appear to be processing information even before they are born. This isn’t to say that we as adults can relate to their state of mind, I’m sure it … Continue reading →

Did you know that there is some overlap with recreational linguistics and politics? And language policy to the extent it exists at all, in the US, more than possibly any other legislative area is driven by willful ignorance of anything … Continue reading →

Not fake language related, although, if you are interested in fake languages, the deaf, blind and deaf-blind industries surrounding those communities is chock full of fake language proposals (fake as in constructed). I am a NERDA (not-even-related-to-a-deaf-adult). I study languages … Continue reading →

So when I am sitting around, staring at the ceiling, trying to thing of an idea for a new human communication system, I try to imagine what would be different, preferably really different. From reading “Atoms of Language,” one gets … Continue reading →

20 searches for “Kelen Forum” ended up at my blog. This actually could be as few as one or two people. In case you are wondering, Sylvia says she’ll take question and the like at her blog. Jim Henry reports … Continue reading →

This is a condensation of Sai’s article on Conlang Evaluation, minus the geek code stuff. (Update: Sai wrote a later article that express the same thing more clearly)  Everything seems to fall roughly into seven categories. 1 How artificial or … Continue reading →