Category Archives: conlang design

Bag of Words Syntax

Posted on August 23, 2017 by matthewdeanmartin

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 →

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Edge cases of grammar

Posted on October 26, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

These things will make your grammar more complicated, but you can expect them to show up in any community generated corpus, like immediately Onomatopoeia. Fart noises and the like. In English, they get italicized and I’m sure someone has written … Continue reading →

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Esoteric Buddhism and Conlangs

Posted on February 16, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

I’m still reading about Esoteric Buddhism, so I’m no expert and may mis-speak. However, while reading about esoteric Buddhism, I got a bunch of fake linguistics ideas. Esoteric vs Exoteric Readings The exoteric reading is the way you’d read a … Continue reading →

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Fake Mantras and Fake Languages

Posted on November 2, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

In Hinduism, there was the idea that words said in a prestige language were magic. People at has some pre-Sassurian ideas about sound and meaning, namely that there was something doggy about the sounds d-o-g and something catty about c-a-t. … Continue reading →

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A Buddhist conlang idea

Posted on October 11, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

So a big idea in Buddhism is that you can analyze anything but break it down into parts in a way that you cannot say, ah ha! This is the Toyota! Instead you just get a pile of car parts … Continue reading →

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Syntax Coloring and Highlighting and Autocompletion

Posted on August 3, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

I wish there was syntax highlighting for English. When it is there, you see errors faster. I like autocompletion too, where you type a word and get a list of possible next words, sort of like what cell phone keyboard … Continue reading →

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How not to put philosophy into a language

Posted on February 10, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

This is a follow up to my last post, “Conlangs for expressing a philosophy“. I suppose one can use any vessel for expressing a philosophy you’d like, a prose book, fortune cookies, songs, or even a refrigerator manual or a … Continue reading →

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Conlangs for expressing a philosophy

Posted on January 22, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

toki pona was supposed to be something about daoism, in my experience, it missed that design goal. I think the historical philosophical languages were supposed to be good for discussing philosophy in general, or approached derivational morphology in sort of … Continue reading →

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365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember

Posted on January 5, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

So what conlaning methodolgy is most likely to capture the minds and hearts of recreational linguists? One based on portmanteus of month names and chapter headers from your linguistics text books of course. Did I even have to answer that? … Continue reading →

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Conlang Taxonomy Part n+1

Posted on December 15, 2012 by matthewdeanmartin

The current most common mental model for classifying conlangs is the Gnoli triangle, the idea that all fake languages are auxlangs, artlangs, or engelangs, or some combination of the three. If you substitute in Esperanto, Elvish, and Lojban you have … Continue reading →

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Conlang Design- Challenges I’m currently facing

Posted on October 8, 2012 by matthewdeanmartin

It is about 30-Day-Conlang time again, so I’m back to the drawing board. Maybe I should follow this up with the rules of the 30-Day-Conlang Challenge. Quick review: Goal wise, I had in mind a conlang that would be extendable, … Continue reading →

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Reactivating your phonetic awareness

Posted on September 1, 2012 by matthewdeanmartin

So you want to create a new language. First you will need to either pick letters or sounds. You might start with the IPA chart, you might not care and just use the phonology and phonotactics of your mother tongue. … Continue reading →

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Gloss equivallency

Posted on December 1, 2011 by matthewdeanmartin

I may have invented a concept. Well, it’s new to me. It’s similar to the idea of a relex, which is whole sale replacement of all morphemes in a language with new ones, but otherwise leaving it the same. What … Continue reading →

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In praise of the relex and how to make a better one

Posted on October 19, 2011 by matthewdeanmartin

Anyhow, I read this article on how to create a language in one day and really it is about machine generated relexes. And that isn’t a bad thing, it has a legitimate purpose. From reading the article it seems there … Continue reading →

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Singletons- A Category of Conlang in Search of a Better Name

Posted on September 8, 2011 by matthewdeanmartin

A singleton, is a conlang that may have been created for whatever purpose, but happens to be suitable for someone else, maybe for the intended purpose, maybe for something else and it hasn’t been discovered by anyone yet. Hence the … Continue reading →

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