Monthly Archives: April 2011

This question is taken from my google referrer log. Why does anyone study any language? The languages on the shelf at the book store are uniformly lingua franca’s, i.e. languages that may have large populations that speak it as a … Continue reading →

Wikipedia, and many other people who write about conlangs like the tripartite taxonomy of auxlangs, engelangs and conlangs. Some people use conlang interchangably with artlang, some (like me) use it to mean non-natural languages in the broadest sense. Users of … Continue reading →

Nothing will make you feel as humble as reading cutting edge linguistic papers about language features. If a language, say Cree, has a feature and no one in academia agrees on how it works, one can still go that community … Continue reading →

The combination of phpBB and letting users add non-text crap to a page has created some of the most breathtakingly ugly, MySpace-like websites ever created. I don’t like avatars, signatures or gratuitous images on forums. And I don’t like the … Continue reading →

Why not go to the movies? Without a strong economic incentive to learn a language, any recreation is just is good. Presumably people are rational and will choose recreation that suits them. If learning rare languages is recreation, then governments … Continue reading →

This article is inspired by a google search someone did to discover my blog. Step one, pick a goal. Do you want to read a reference grammar and peruse a dictionary for amusement? In that case, read all sorts of … Continue reading →

A language is a system of communication subject to some constraints. In English, we can’t independently decide to start using clicks, dispense with -ed for past tense, etc. In a revived language, speakers will still be subject to these constraints … Continue reading →