Interest meme

[pne]

Comment on this entry and I'll choose seven interests from your list which I'd like you to explain.

ifeedformula asked me about these:

Almea

Zompist

These are connected. Almea is a fictional planet invented by Zompist (Mark Rosenfelder).

The most detailed country on that planet is Verduria, which he originally created as a setting for a D&D campaign, along with its language, Verdurian.

I came across Verduria because Zompist also hosts the sci.lang FAQ: frequently asked questions about linguistics (since I've always been interested in languages), and poked around his site a bit. (This was even before he got zompist.com.)

I learned some Verdurian (and made some conjugation/declension utilities for some of the languages) and was a bit involved in what was happening, though I haven't paid close attention to the site or the world for quite a while now.

I think Verdurian was probably also what got me interested in constructed languages, and it's one of the most elaborate/complete conlangs I've seen so far.

Ancient Greek

Languages again!

I learned Modern Greek when I went on a two-year mission to Greece and Cyprus; from there to Ancient Greek, it's not that far. (The languages are closer than, say, Modern English and Old English, or so it seems to me. Perhaps more like Icelandic and Old Norse.)

Also, Ancient Greek is a fairly significant language in European history/shared culture, along with Latin (which is also a language I'd like to learn at some point if I have too much free time, or wish I had been able to take at school).

I never formally learned Ancient Greek, but the Modern Greek I did learn helps some in understanding things, as did the grammar of Ancient Greek for (Modern) Greek schoolchildren I acquired while in Greece. I've now also got a couple of dictionaries.

(And I would have had an AG–French as well if I hadn't left it behind in Greece due to weight restrictions: it was something another missionary's parents sent her, since they just saw "grec–français" and didn't know that the variety "grec" in the dictionary wasn't the kind that would be helpful to their daughter! So she gave it to me since she knew I was interested in languages.)

The Jargon File

The Jargon File has a Wikipedia article. Briefly, it's a dictionary of hacker slang, in the positive sense of the word "hacker".

I first got hold of, I think it was, version 2.9.8 and printed it out and read it; later, I got 2.9.11 and I also acquired two book versions and a T-shirt.

While, as later editions note, some of the "jargon" contained in it is dated, it's still an interesting read IMO. And it also sheds some light on the early days of computer enthusiasts and the culture that surrounded them, since that time was rather different from now where computers and networks are ubiquitous and a part of people's life that's often taken for granted.

The current version is now maintained as HTML files by Eric S. Raymond (ESR) rather than the plain-text file of earlier incarnations.

(Some people object to ESR's editorial style and the kind of words he dropped and added, as well as a few other things, to which he posted a response. Also, some don't like the fact that the HTML version is now the source. In principle, I don't think there's anything to stop anyone "forking" the Jargon File and producing a "better" version, but I don't know of anyone who has done so, so the version maintained by ESR is the current one TTBOMK.)

toki pona

Another conlang, toki pona is "the simple language of good".

It's a language with a very small vocabulary (just over 100 words); the author (sonjaaa describes it as "a minimal language that focuses on the good things in life". (That page also has a brief introduction to the history and philosophy of the language.)

It's an interesting language, and I like the simple aspects of it. It sometimes makes me a bit sad when people want to express complex things in toki pona, or get very specific nuances—as I understand it, it's meant to be simple rather than precise.

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a character encoding for Unicode. Roughly speaking, it's a way of representing letters and symbols from many languages and scripts on the computer, and probably the most popular one for Unicode interchange right now.

(You need an encoding for Unicode since Unicode only maps characters to numbers—then you need some way of representing those numbers by actual bytes in a computer, and there are various ways of translating from Unicode code point numbers to bytes.)

It also has some fun properties such as self-segmentation which appeal to the geeky side of me: UTF-8 needs multiple bytes to represent most Unicode characters, but you can always tell by looking at a byte whether it's the beginning of such a sequence or a continuation byte.

Klingon

Another constructed language, created by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek franchise, and designed to look specifically unusual or un-Earthly, in its choice of phonology (which sounds occur, and also which sounds do not occur—such as alveolar/dental t and retroflex D but not alveolar/dental d or retroflex T) and grammar (such as the object-verb-subject word order, which is the rarest among Earth's languages).

I don't remember how I came across it (though I think I came across it twice, but looked at it only briefly the first time).

I've since bought The Klingon Dictionary (the definitive book on the grammar and basic vocabulary of the language) as well as a couple of other books and cassettes, and put some energy into learning the language at one point. (I passed the first two levels [taghwI' "Beginner" and ghojwI' "Intermediate"] of the Klingon Language Certification Program as assessed by the person marking the tests, though I don't have any official confirmation of that [yet?]. I also haven't spent much energy maintaining my proficiency since then.)

I remember attending my first qepHom "minor meeting" of Klingon language enthusiasts several years ago; even though I had studied the language on my own for a bit, it was a small (positive) shock when I heard two people speaking Klingon with each other in the hallway—it was the first time that I had come across the use of spoken Klingon for communication, and drove home the point that this was a language, not just an intellectual game for people to translate sentences into in writing.

I'm still interested in Klingon in principle, and still remember some of the vocabulary I learned, but am not currently putting effort into maintaining my fluency.

Comments

Conlangs and Esperanto

[(Anonymous)]

I wish you well with your conlangs. Have you ever learned Esperanto? I recommend it for practical use. Take a look at www.esperanto.net

Re: Conlangs and Esperanto

[pne.livejournal.com]

I wish you well with your conlangs.

Thank you! Though none of the conlangs I mentioned are ones I'd call "mine" -- Verdurian is pretty strongly Zompist's, and Klingon is Marc Okrand's or Paramount's, depending on how you look at it. Even Lojban, which I've also dabbled in, isn't mine.

Have you ever learned Esperanto?

Define "learn".

I have looked at it a bit and have picked up some grammar and vocabulary both from textbooks and from reading texts in Esperanto. I can understand a fair bit of written Esperanto. But I've never spent much energy formally/actively learning the language. (I did start a correspondence course over e-mail but lost the energy after three lessons or so; especially the memorising of vocabulary was a big chore which I disliked.)

I remember a book called Tesi la Testudo in the local library in Elmshorn, back when I still lived with my parents; it was an Esperanto textbook for German speakers and had cute stories about Tesi the turtle and her friends, and I'd check it out occasionally.

I can fake writing Esperanto, probably with about as much success as I fake writing Dutch - some will be correct because I know the words; a fair bit may be correct or at least recognisable, but was merely guessed based on my knowledge of related languages; and some will be simply wrong.

I recommend it for practical use.

Hee :) I think you're overly optimistic, there. While there are many reasons to learn Esperanto, "practical use" is probably not one I'd list, except in certain specific cases.

The chance of encountering another Esperanto speaker at random seems rather low to me; the fina venko is still a long way off IMO.

Re: Conlangs and Esperanto

[billchapman.livejournal.com]

I must confess you're right about meeting Esperanto speakers at random. On looking back, that has only happened to me on only seven occasions. Twice I've met young ladies on what I call underground trains. Both were females, one in London and one in Paris. I suppose I'm a bit lazy about wearing a green star badge which allows speakers of the language to identify one another. However, on the other hand, there is a superb network of local contacts. I use the Jarlibro of Universala Esperanto-Asocio, and offer (free) services to Esperanto speakers visiting my part of Wales. People know people and soon you're at someone's house and introduced to both formal and informal networks. So I can say with confidence that Esperanto works! I've used it in speech and writing in a dozen countries over recent years.

Indeed, the language has some remarkable practical benefits. Personally, I've made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. And then there's the Pasporta Servo, which provides free lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90 countries. In the past year I have had guided tours of Berlin and Milan in the planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I've discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on. I recommend it, not just as an ideal but as a very practical way to overcome language barriers.

Esperanto

[pne.livejournal.com]

Pasporta Servo is indeed a pretty big selling point of Esperanto.

But I daresay that most of the other things are even better filled by English - not because it's intrinsically better suited for the job (it probably isn't), but simply because it's de facto an international communication language and many people learn it.

See LiveJournal, for example: many people on it write in English even if this is not their main language, and it lets them meet people from all sorts of countries.

Or consider the billion-odd people in India, with dozens of native languages. How many people there can you make friends with through Esperanto that you would never have been able to communicate with otherwise? How many through English?

I don't want to knock those who learn Esperanto for reasons of their own. It just seems to me that if, say, someone from Papua New Guinea, who speaks a dozen languages all of which are spoken essentially only on his island, wants to community with more people from over the world, he'd reach more people if he learned English than Esperanto.

He'd probably even have more chances with Russian or Chinese than with Esperanto - Russian because so many people in former Soviet-dominated countries learned Russian, and Chinese because there are so many people who learn Mandarin as a first or second tongue.

Now, if the topic is "let's pick a constructed language", then Esperanto is definitely the #1 way to speak to people; I'm pretty confident that it's got more speakers than Interlingua, Volapük, and Ido put together.

But I think it's more of an idealistic thing at the moment.