Constructed Language stuff

• {gjâ-zym-byn}, my psychological experiment conlang
• The Caligoi, a long-term world-building project including several naturalistic conlangs
• Glossotechnia, the language invention card game
• 1996 Conlang mailing list archives
• Links to my own messages (1999 to present) in the listserv.brown.edu CONLANG mailing list archives
• Links to my own messages in the listserv.brown.edu AUXLANG mailing list archives
• Generating phonologically redundant vocabulary for an engineered language - draft article, with Perl scripts
• Iterative Conlang Design, or, Build One to Throw Away — my engineered language project
• Information on Esperanto; learning resources; lerniloj, recenzoj, tradukoj, ktp.
• Information on Toki Pona in English and Esperanto
    Baza lecionaro de Tokipono
• Sketch of a briefly contemplated revision of Konya, with partial Babel Text
    Main Konya site
• My texts from Conlang Translation Relay 13:
  • Volapük
  • gjâ-zym-byn
  
  (texts from relay 14 and the Inverse Relay to follow later)
• Materials on Kalusa¹, an ad-hoc collaborative conlang I was much involved with in mid-2006

1996 Conlang archives

Here are some messages I saved in 1996 from the Conlang mailing list. I discovered that the list archives at listserv.brown.edu and Yahoo Groups don't go back that far, so I'm making these available.

• Miscellaneous mid-1996 conlang messages
• A thread about Loglan/Lojban
• A thread about prepositions/postpositions (which discussion was a major influence on the design of gjâ-zym-byn a couple of years later)
• The 1000 most common words on Usenet

Conlang list archives from 1991-1994 are available at
http://www.geocities.com/raiu_harrison/conlang/
and also at John Cowan's homepage, which has archives from July 1995 to November 1997 as well.

Archives from 1998 to the present are at:

• http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/conlang.html
• http://archives.conlang.info/
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/

The list is currently hosted at brown.edu; Yahoo Groups mirrors it. I personally prefer the web interface at listserv.brown.edu (no advertisements), but if you already have a Yahoo Groups account it may be convenient to use that and not have to create a new account to subscribe directly through brown.edu. Be warned that the Yahoo mirror is not supported and that if you have any problems with it the list administrator will tell you to unsubscribe at Yahoo and subscribe through listserv.brown.edu.

The archives.conlang.info site has a better search and threading capability than the other sites, but it does not let you subscribe, unsubcribe or change your subscription options.

My own messages posted to the Conlang list since 1999

I've omitted the most trivial ones. See the page on gjâ-zym-byn for links to messages specifically about gjâ-zym-byn and my experiences learning and using it.

• Languages of the Caligoi

  • Thauliralau swear words
  • TTambroc gender and number #2

• General comments on natural and constructed languages

  • Comment on standardized set of sentences for testing and demonstrating conlangs
  • Reasons for deciding to learn languages - 9 June 1999
  • Briefly studying vs. seriously learning languages - 10 June 1999
  • Tools for manipulating conlang lexicon #2
  • On Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction, its influence on my conlangs
  • Tiny lexicon languages and twenty-word language challenge #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7
  • Independent invention of language by isolated children
  • Writing system design
  • Words for "vocabulary" in various languages (Aug 2004) #2
  • Becoming fluent in one's own conlang - June 1999 #2
  • Meaning of "conculture" for a personal language #2
  • Wrong-headed statements about universal placement of Esperanto particles, soon corrected by Mark. P. Line #2
  • Unusual number inflections
  • My unidentifiable accent
  • Disappearance of irregular plurals in English
  • Report on conlanging and linguistics fun at Boston Worldcon, 2004
  • Argument structure of "to bless" in English
  • Antonymy and negation
  • On absolute constructions, and the lack of them in gzb
  • On Wikipedia's attitude toward conlangs
    Draft conlang policy discussion at Wikipedia / #2
  • Response to Sally Caves' Lunatic Survey (long; including philosophical comments on the nature and purposes of conlanging)
  • Ways to lexicalize "die", "kill", and various modes of being born
  • Genitive postpositions in gzb
  • Comments on Pinuyo and Harpelan, 2D writing-only languages
  • Proper name marking in gzb, Konya, Toki Pona, and Vorlin #2
  • Proposed peer-reviewed journal of conlangs
  • Case systems #2 #3 #4
  • Unusual number inflection, and tense for time travellers #2
  • Articulating lingual phonemes
  • On Plan B, an engelang in which each phoneme had a vowel and a consonant allophone
  • The languages with the fewest phonemes
  • Darwinistic taxonomy in biotic terminology
  • Anthroponyms #2
  • Idiomatic expressions and idiomatic compound words in English, Esperanto, Volapük, Spedwords and gzb #2 #3

• Specific comments to other conlangers on their conlangs

  • Comments to Yann Kiraly on language sketches he'd posted (August-September 2004) #2
  • Questions about his tense marking, with gzb examples
  • Comments to Joshua Tanaka on sample sentences he'd posted (August 2004)
  • Comments and questions for Tamara Woodcock on her alien conlang plans
  • Comments for Steven Williams on his curious pronoun system in Gi-an-nain
  • Comments for Gregory Gadow on his postpositional language Glörsa #2
  • Comments for Shreyas Sampat on how to make his orthography stranger
  • Questions for Chris Bates on a sketch and sample sentences he'd posted
  • Comments for Reilly Schlaier on migjan laggvage
  • Comments on Tunu
  • Brief comments on Elomi, especially treatment of foreign names #2 #3

• Comments on constructed international auxiliary languages
  (mostly from the AUXLANG mailing list)

  • On Esperanto, in itself and in comparison with other languages
    • Relative ease/difficulty of Vorlin and Esperanto; no language is truly "easy"
    • Comments on Zamenhof's choice of agglutinating grammar for Esperanto
    • Comments on Umberto Eco's views on Esperanto
    • Gradual increase in ambiguity over Esperanto's history
    • On Zamenhof's advice to ignore auxlang projects rather than give them free publicity by criticizing them
  • Grammatical and semantic issues
    • Rendering "do-it-yourself" into Esperanto and Interlingua
    • Self-segregating morphology and animal/plant terminology
    • Causal and explanatory conjunctions in Latin, Interlingua, gzb and Ceqli #2 #3 #4
    • Marki metaforon kaj ironion en arta lingvo; deviga aux nedeviga gramatika markado #2
  • General design issues
    • Research on mandatory vs. optional marking of various grammatical categories in an IAL #2
    • Thinking in an auxlang vs. mentally translating into it; creolization vs. deliberate auxlang design; necessity of grammar for true language #2 #3 #4 #5
    • Trade-offs in conlang design; need for language diversity and the evils of language extinction #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11
    • More on trade-offs; prospects for one-time reform of Esperanto when/if it's officially adopted; attitude of Esperanto speakers toward minor auxlangs #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10
    • Types of neutrality, and central concerns for an IAL; chances for a non-Euroclone IAL to grow a speaker community #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13
  • More on Vorlin - 10 June 1999
  • Rick Harrison's final comments on Vorlin
  • Comments on Volapük (the "inflection is excessive, but at least it's excessive enough to be interesting") #2
  • Comments on Volapük, its relative difficulty, Schleyer's 30 reasons why Volapük is better than Esperanto #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7
  • Comments for Andrew Nowicki on Ygyde #2 #3

My home page
Email me: jimhenry@pobox.com.
Last revised February 2008.

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