2014: Laozhea

I have wanted to create a new language toy to play with for a long time, but now I am actually doing it. It's called Laozhea. Don't think that I don't take it seriously just because I call it a "toy." I take my toys very seriously.

All of my conlangs have a common purpose at the base of them: they are meant to be used, in some capacity, even if it is only by me. Ea-luna was also an experiement in method and was meant to break me out of the rut that my first conlanging efforts had dug for me. Nevashi was originally created to be a project built in the open, shared on the Internet as it was developing. Both languages had a fictional culture of some sort attached to them, but they were both intended to for general purpose use in this world as well. Laozhea makes this its central purpose. This is a language I am building for my own everyday use.

I want to learn the language as I create it. That's the end goal for this project. Any culture built around it will be in this world, for my own amusement. I love the idea of creating artifacts from fictional worlds and cultures, so it may even make an appearance in the real world. (At the very least, I'd like to paint a "Welcome" sign for my house.)

The very first thing ever translated into Laozhea was a quote from The Addams Family: "Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." (It seemed appropriate, somehow.) This is what it looks like in Laozhea, written very messily with a mouse in MSPaint:

Samza lafeda. Tia samza n'ebetsa, tia bekeda n'emeska.
Normal illusion. Same normal (of/for) spider, same wrongness (of/for) fly.

Not a verb in sight! I do have some verbs waiting in the wings, but this didn't require any. The "same...same" construction is an idiom lifted straight out of ea-luna.

All the words end in -a because they are all in the same noun class/gender (animate/abstract/action) or agree with one of those nouns (in the case of tia). I was going to say something about na, but it isn't obvious that it also (coincidentally) ends in "a", since it lost its "a" to the following initial vowel.

Na is a sort of all-purpose connector and preposition. In addition to "of" and "for," it can also mean "to", "toward", "at", etc. In some contexts, it might mean "with." I am working out several different functional words that will probably do some heavy lifting; I found that was one of the things that worked very well in ea-luna, for whatever other flaws the language may have had.

Bekeda covers a whole range of disorder, insanity, sin, clutter, and general wrongness. The similarity to "pecado" is entirely coincidental; I only noticed it sometime after the initial creation of the word. That will be a handy memory tool though.

The similarity of emeska to "mosca," on the other hand, is entirely intentional. It has a good memory hook for me. Likewise. ebetsa for "spider" comes from "itsy bitsy". Other words have no basis in any language I know, but seemed to be right at the time (samza, lafeda). This method seems to be working, since I was able to remember every word and exactly what each one does in those sentences.

More remarkably, I could re-write it without referring to my notebook if I wanted to. I usually create writing systems later, after I've already gotten used to seeing the language in the Latin alphabet, but this is the other main point about Laozhea-- the writing system and the language are being developed together.  It's a logographic writing system, which turns out to be a whole lot of work, and I spend a lot of time drawing, redrawing, and evolving each logogram. I think this is turning out to be good for the language and for my learning of it. (It's being developed as if intended to be written with a ballpoint pen. I figured I might as well go with the tool I will actually be using.)

This is my project for 2014.

Summer Conlanging Project

I am too old to go to camp, so I've decided to do a summer conlanging project between May 26 and August 26. I realize that's not the usual range for "summer," but August 26 is my first day of classes for the next semester, so that's the end of my summer.

I want to create something I can learn and use as I go over this summer. A priori, but nothing too exotic, then. I am going to do a little prep work over the next week to make the jump start a little easier-- I'll work out some general idea of what I want it to look and sound like, and I would like to start with a list of roots/concepts to be created first for the sake of getting off to a quick start. I may do a little research before I get started, too, to help me narrow my focus and work out a general plan.

And I think I will post stuff here as I go. Conlanging isn't great as a spectator sport, but (a) I welcome any suggestions or participation from anyone who comes along, and (b) I know a few people will be interested.

I am looking forward to giving it a better name than "summer conlanging project".

Methods and Madness

I am very interested in how people create their languages and why they do it the way that they do. Sometimes I lurk in the various places that conlangers gather online and wait for them to mention their methods. Sometimes I get in their faces and ask questions directly. I am a little like a trapdoor spider in that regard, except that I only ask questions when I spring out of where I am lurking. I hardly ever devour my conlanging friends.

...As far as you know.

So here's my method-related confession: I often start new conlangs just to try out new methods of building them. That is the ultimate origin of both ea-luna and Teliya Nevashi. In each case, I started out with a few goals related to the language itself and the method of creating it.  Both languages were experiments, not intended to be realistic nor to have the sketchy fictional cultures that my imagination later attached to them.

ea-luna was meant to be more organized and systematic in the way it was created than my previous efforts, while being as different as possible from those earlier language sketches and hiding the fact that the base vocabulary was built in a systematic way. I made it appear more random than it actually is by assigning words from an old version of the Universal Language Dictionary (plus other words I felt were necessary or culturally relevant) to a handwritten list of all possible one- and two- syllable words, moving across the columns instead of down (with four columns to every two page spread). In retrospect, listing all those words ea-luna-to-English in ea-luna syllabary order may not have been the wisest choice for looking things up later. There are a few elements that work as affixes for derivation, but, for the most part, new words are compounds of the words in the original notebook, which was all well and good except that I kept that list in a different notebook that was lost in one of our many moves. The lack of documentation of ea-luna grammar is a nightmare all these years later-- what remains are unlabeled and sometimes untranslated paradigms, examples of sentences of different levels of complexity, and cryptic notes to myself.  

I scrapped that method of word generation after ea-luna, although I do see value in a basic "must have" list of concepts to be adapted to the project. There's value in knowing what kinds of words are possible and having a bunch of them sitting around at any given time, just waiting to be assigned a meaning, as a convenience. I see some merit in building through use/translation, but if I were using that method now, I'd describe all the new emerging features as they emerged, rather than trying to figure out the rules I used later. 

I began work on Teliya Nevashi with 3 things in mind: I wanted to get used to using the computer in my conlanging (specifically so that I could share my projects online more easily), to experiment with verbs, and to build a word-by-word crafted language. Nevashi was started with a barebones grammar with a few dummy words first, and then I  built words one at a time as needed (or derived them from existing words). I have an idea of what Nevashi words should sound like, but the rules for arriving at that are incomplete at best. This is at least in part because everything that starts with phon- is horribly boring to me. 

It turns out that creating words one at a time as needed is also tedious, and creating whole lists of words at once is right out the window; I always end up with a bunch of words that sound too similar to one another when I create a lot of words together. Using the computer turned out to have a number of  advantages aside from making the language easier to share: there's the searchability that is lacking in handwritten documents, I can easily make a second copy so that I can make changes without losing what I've done before, and because I save my work on Google Drive (formerly Google Docs), it is accessible from any computer on the Net. 

I mention all of this for several reasons. First,  I intend to try out some new methods soon, and I have a few different language ideas floating around in my head. I'd like to work on a naturalistic/realistic, diachronic, a priori language with a whole cultural background n'at*, and an a posteriori could-be-an-auxlang-if-it-weren't-so-lazy kind of conlang. I've got some long overdue collaborations that I need to get down to also. Looking at where I have been gives me some idea of where I ought to go. Or at least where I might go. Secondly, I am thinking about interviewing people about their methods, and it's only fair to show mine before asking anyone else to show theirs. Lastly, this is my answer to why I haven't collaborated on anything with Jeff Burke (there at LCC2, and here at LCC3) despite the fact that we talk to each other all the time.  We share a lot of the same madness, but none of the same methods.

*I live in Johnstown, PA. I knew I'd started to go native the first time I heard myself say "n'at" ("and that"). I haven't started saying "yinz" though. I am from the land between "yous" and "y'all", and I still fall on the "y'all" side of the fence.

The Least Useful Phrasebook of All Time

In a comment over on the Conlangs group on Facebook, I composed a sentence in ea-luna containing only vowels, which, coincidentally, was also composed entirely of  two-letter words: ai ui ia ue ea-au. This means "The snake wakes up again at noon."

I am not sure under what circumstances I would utter such a thing, but it has inspired me to go back and look for other sentences that could be added to The Least Useful Phrasebook of All Time. (That's not a real thing, but it should be.) So, here are some other things that might go into it:

I think I bought a pregnant mouse. (Something that turned into a sentence to translate on CONLANG, which was actually just a statement of fact to begin with.)
My canoe is very large. (Suggested by my son, Nick, and posted on the Kenakoliku forums when they were active.)
I'd love to help you, but just at the moment, I believe my pants are on fire. (Suggested by Adam Walker on Facebook.)
I don't live a practical life. (My son, Liam, as a response to the suggestion that his grandmother would be willing to buy him a practical gift.)
When you turn this key, the future turns into a chicken. (My daughter, Elaina,  circa 4 years old.)
Poetry is the path to unimaginable wealth and power. (Actually, no... But it sounds good, doesn't it?)

This is a work in progress. I am going to continue to collect odd sentences and to translate them into ea-luna, Nevashi, and whatever other conlang I start sketching up. Please, if you are reading this, feel free to make some suggestions.

And I'd love to see your translations.

Chasing ea-luna: Reconstructing a Dead Conlang

ea-luna (lower case by custom) should have had a Sweet 16 party this year. That is 16 years of existence, not 16 years of development. It suffered from several years of neglect with occasional abusive attempts at reform. It's no wonder the poor thing didn't get a party. I'm a terrible conlang caretaker.

In the last few years, it has had a small revival. This has been a hard road, made all the more difficult by the forgetfulness and poor time management of its creator, as well as major losses in handwritten material, including the entire list of compound words, which make up the bulk of the full range of ea-luna words. There was no choice but to reconstruct from available materials:  The Yellow Notebook*, various other handwritten samples and notes, and material posted online. I even got a little bit of assistance from Amanda Babcock Furrow, who sent me some pre-archive ea-luna posts from CONLANG. (Thank you!)

Gathering the materials turned out to be the easy part. The Six-Million-Dollar Conlang** rebuilding process was the hard part. It involved figuring out my own shorthand notes, picking out and examining those precious compound words, reverse engineering passages written in ea-luna (both in terms of what they were supposed to mean and how they were put together), sorting things into some kind of chronological order to make some sense of the development over time, and then putting those things back together into something that might work. It's Frankenlang to some degree, but I think it maintains a lot of the spirit and charm of ea-luna-as-it-was.

For me, the point of conlanging is to get to something usable and then to use it. When someone starts to tell me about their conlang, I want only the briefest description of what's under the hood. What I really want is to get in and be taken for a ride in it-- I want to see and hear how it runs. I want to know if that engine purrs or growls when you get up to conversational speed. With that in mind, getting ea-luna back on the road was my top priority. I patch up the holes as I find them, and I've been driving it around the block when I can find the time.

The things I write in the 2012 version of ea-luna are not quite the same as the old days. I don't think I have made many changes to the basic structure; the language, as linguistically flawed as it is, is utterly impervious to improvement. I have an overly sentimental attachment to anything I think I could "fix". The compound words I create now to fill in the lost material blanks are only slightly more metaphorical than the examples I have from the earlier era. I think that the end use of the resurrected version feels a little different because I have changed. As I look over these old materials, I can see where I applied a lot of brute force. These days, I am slower, more deliberate, and more thoughtful in both the process of working with the pieces of the language and in putting them together into texts. I spend a lot more time thinking about what something really means and what that would mean in the context of the imaginary culture before I tackle a translation of it. I have a better grasp of subtlety and a broader appreciation for the natural poetry of  (any) language in use. This round of reconstruction has given me a chance to tune it up and buff out the tool marks. The language in use is better than it used to be.

ea-luna remains a joy to me. It's still my favorite toy, even if I leave it on the shelf sometimes. And now we've arrived at the part of this post where I tell you what I've learned from the reconstruction project. Here it is:

• If you have only a single copy-- handwritten, printed, or digital-- of a vital piece of your conlang, you should probably make another copy and put it somewhere else. You'll miss it when it is gone if you don't.
• Your notes won't make sense to you in five years if you aren't pretty specific. Vague notes and notes that read "see the other page" are just going to be annoying when you don't have any idea what they mean.
• Sometimes it is good to go back and look (hard) at old stuff. It really does look different when you see it with fresh eyes.

*The Yellow Notebook is the original home of ea-luna. It contains some notes on grammar and culture, as well as every possible one- and two syllable word (used and unused). It's one of my most prized possessions.

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man

T-shirt translations

I recently posted this on Facebook (merging the status and my comment on it):

I am having the urge to create a line of t-shirts bearing inscriptions in obscure and/or made-up languages that say, "I can't read my own shirt." Or maybe "I bought a shirt in a language I don't know."

I decided to follow that up with translations into Teliya Nevashi and ea-luna, both of which I got slightly wrong. My fantastic Facebook friends followed suit with their own translations into their conlangs and natlangs.

Now on to the good part:

Conlangs:
Teliya Nevashi (mine, corrected): Seya vapa nal yam yera cei.
ea-luna (mine, corrected): ewe ate lige la bagu-la-mupa
Carrajina (Adam Walker): Nu pudju ledjeri al mi camisa probja.
Alhursa (Tony Harris): Ñe móv velá lháls-rìtsän.
Tariatta (Tony Harris): A mu felia no sitaþ utte.
Kasshian (Christina Taylor): Kasasfasraç-ku pijasaç
Deini (Dana Nutter): jai kunë ni les mi ejën šyrt.
Celinese (Andy Ayres): Mo blúr né geraní. ("I don't understand my shirt.")

Natlangs:
Icelandic: Ég har keypt skyrtu á tungumáli sem ég ekki kannast við ("I bought a shirt in a language I don't know." Thanks to Lars Finsen)
Asturian: Non compriendo lo que ta escritu na mio camiseta ("I don't understand what's written on my shirt." Thanks to Andy Ayres)
Manx:Cha noddym lhaih y lheiney aym pene ("I cannot read my own shirt." Thanks to Thomas Leigh for both Manx translations)
More Manx:Ren mee kionnaghey lheiney nagh noddym lhaih ("I bought a shirt which I can't read.")

The Art of the Inside Joke

I take my conlanging seriously, even if the tone I use in talking about it is light-hearted. I may frequently experiment with different methods of language creation, but no matter what particular process I am using, I have goals for that I am working to achieve, and often it really is work. Conlanging takes too much time, effort, and brainpower for me to not take my own projects seriously, even if I write about them in a less-than-completely-serious tone.

Nonetheless, I do find ways to integrate some humor and personally meaningful references into my languages in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways, hidden in places that it can delight me without standing out as a joke to anyone else. For example, I recently created a word for "dragonfly" in Nevashi, ti'izirí. The word literally means "catfly" being made up of the words for "cat" (ti'i) and a general term for "flying insect" (zirí). It contains both a meaningful personal reference from my life and an inside joke: ti'i was the way my youngest daughter pronounced "kitty" when she was first learning to talk, and now that she is 7-years-old, we have long discussions in which I claim to not be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dragon because they look identical to me, and she patiently explains to me again the ways in which they are different, hence the substitution of "cat" for "dragon". The official explanation (if anyone asks) will be that the long tail and big eyes of a dragonfly remind Nevashi speakers of a cat, but now you know the truth.

Then there is the less subtle case of dali in ea-luna, meaning "to paint" in the artistic sense, not in the "covering something in a coat of paint" sense. This is a reference to Salvador Dalí, one of my favorite painters, but in this instance, the word pre-existed the reference in a raw list of potential 1- and 2-syllable words. When I came to that particular combination of syllables in the list, I knew what it had to mean. It's that sort of little thing that makes me smile when I come across it again in my notes, even if I never have a need to use that word in public where other people might see and get the reference.

An inside joke that you have with yourself about your personal life encoded into a conlang (as with ti'izirí) is just about as inside as an inside joke can get, but who cares if nobody else gets your little joke? I find the most subtle ones are the ones that make me happiest, especially when they are in a more serious project.