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Re: CONLANG Digest

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Saturday, May 6, 2000, 7:54
> From: Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...> > Subject: Re: Great Moments in Con/Auxlang Filmmaking > > I saw an extract of the movie, and I must say the actors really spoke a > very good (without accent) Esperanto.
What _is_ the 'canonical accent' of Esperanto?
> From: Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...> > Subject: Re: WARNING: Virus Alert (and this one's for real) > > VBS/LoveLetter.worm also attempts to download and install an > executable file called WIN-BUGSFIX.EXE, a password stealing > program that will email any cached passwords it finds to the > mail address MAILME@SUPER.NET.PH. > >>>>> > > I don't know if that email address just given is a real one or > not. But what would happen if we all crashed into that mailme > address? Perhaps it is possible to get back at that little > devil for ever creating such a monster.
Well, .ph is the Philippines [just pretend I spelled that right]... I don't get a response from such an address at the moment, but whether that's because the machine is down or because it doesn't exist I can't say.
> From: Christophe Grandsire <Christophe.Grandsire@...> > Subject: Conlang Presentation (all participants of the Starling's Song
Relay
> concerned) > > What I would like is to use > the Starling's Song Relay as an example of what is done on the list, and > thus I ask for permission of all conlangers that participated to it to use > their texts in my presentation.
Is that on the web anywhere? (other than the list archives of course)
> From: bjm10@CORNELL.EDU > Subject: Re: R: Re: Baby Babble Early Human Language? > > On Fri, 5 May 2000, Dan Sulani wrote: > > > And then pretty soon they drive you nuts with: > > "Can I have the car tonight?" :-) > > At least I can legitimately go "Ask your mother.", since I don't drive.
Sure, but then _I_ can ask "Who _ARE_ you?", since I don't have children.
> From: bjm10@CORNELL.EDU > Subject: Re: Religion, Philosophy & Politics > > On Fri, 5 May 2000, Carlos Eugenio Thompson (EDC) wrote: > > > in how food is comming to you. If an ancient nomade hunter-gathering
tribe
> > had come to a plantation of a primitive agricultural village and eat
from
> > the plantation, they don't stop being hunter-gatherers. If we can bring
the
> > That depends upon whether one considers raider-thieves to be > hunter-gatherers...
That ain't necessarily so. Weren't there some culture somewhere that allowed (or required) leaving part of the farm produce for people like that?
> From: John Cowan <jcowan@...> > Subject: Re: Religion, Philosophy & Politics > > > Can an organism that is "fit" fail to survive? That is, is it possible > > for organisms to fail to reproduce due to circumstances that have
nothing
> > at all to do with a "design"? > > Certainly, as when an asteroid falls on them.
I thought "fitness" would involve some sort of being able to sense large objects falling out of the sky at you. ;)
> From: Peter Clark <pclark@...> > Subject: Lojban program and conlang software ideas > > Next order of business: has anyone considered starting up a Open > Source/Free Software (take your pick of terms) line of conlang software > and tools? How many programmers do we have on the list? I really wish that > a.) I had more time and b.) knew a decent programming language (I am still > teaching myself C in my officially non-existant free time), because I > would try to whip up something for others to work off of. I am aware of > Kura, Boudewijn's language database program/Shoebox replacement,
Hoo, where can I find this?
> but it > would be interesting to see a truly cross-platform set of tools be > developed.
I'm working on writing one. That's not to say that it'll ever be usable, much less finished--just something to fritter away the time with in Java.
>Here just a wee little wish list... > o Random word generator - I have found several on the web, but aside from > LangMake, these are primitive at best. Of course, I do my word generation > the old fashion way (just today I decided that the number for 24 should be > "cits" /kits/. Enamyn is base-8, in case you are wondering why 24 gets its > own name.) Still, it would be nice (should I ever need a quick-and-dirty > list of words) to feed in phonemes and syllable structure and frequency > tables and get a reasonable list back. Jeffrey Henning's LangMake program > comes to mind as the closest to reach an ideal so far (I love the > transformation feature), but why not take a good thing and make it better?
Mine had plans to do exactly that, except for the frequency tables (which I had forgotten about...)
> o Dictionary program - something where the user could type in the word and > the translation, and the program would insert generate a Conlang<->Natlang > dictionary. It would definitely have to handle multiple meanings; grabbing > an example from Russian, if I type in "jazyk" for the Russian word and > "tongue" and "language" for the English definitions, I should be able to > find "jazyk" under both "tongue" and "language" in the English section. It > should also work the other way as well; if I type in "probovat'" and later > "starat'sja", I should find both under "try." It should also be able to > indicate special forms, like "djen'gi" becoming "djenjeg" in the genitive > plural.
Mmhmm...
> Plus, it should have an Export To HTML feature, for that web page > that I keep meaning to create... :)
Of course ;)
> o Transformer (I can't think of a better name--it's getting late) - this > would apply regular sound changes across the board.
I found a (nother) tool to do this just today, at zompist.com --a different system than langmaker's, it lets you define sets to apply changes to... That is, in Langmaker (so far as I know) every change has to be done explicitly: p > b k > g t > d etc... this 'sounds' utility can set up variables to do sets of changes: S=pktc Z=bgdj S/Z/_ (change these unvoiced 'S' to the voiced 'Z' counterpart in all cases) S/Z/V_V (change only intervocalically, assuming you set V=aeiou@) etc..
> o Grammar generator - This would be incredibly cool if someone could > actually manage to pull it off. The program would run through a list of > different grammar options (nominative/ergative/active/mixed; SVO, SOV, > VSO, etc.; isolating/agglutinating/fusional/polysynthetic; and so on) and > spit out a grammar. Of course, listing all the millions of different > variables would be a nightmare...
Eeek! I couldn't wrap my head around such a thing.
> o Simulator - Since I am now officially dreaming, imagine a simulator > where the computer takes two or more languages and builds a simulation of > how they would change and interact with each other. How close would the > computer come to Brethenig? What would have happened if Alexander the > Great had conquered Japan and left a significant speakers of Greek (or > Macedonian--is there a difference?) in Kyoto?
Ooo, an automatic pidginizer. EVIL.
> Mmm...just think about piping a list of syllable structures and > phonemes into a word generator, which pipes its output to a dictionary > program which randomly assigns meanings to words, then proceeds to pipe > the resulting dictionary to a transformer which creates half a dozen > daughter languages.
Doesn't Langmaker have a wizard to do exactly that? ;) (Well, except maybe the daughter languages)
> Well, if anyone wants to spearhead such a project, I volunteer to > beta-test, which is about as much good as I am worth. :( Anyone else have > a good idea for a conlangish program that they would like to see?
You forgot to add: o Rules Checker Take a word and verify it matches a language's phonotactics (izzat the word?) and if it doesn't, find the nearest/most likely form the language would 'borrow'. [You could test it against something like all the English -> Japanese loans...] o Con-script editor Set up a specific font, a keyboard mapping (useful if you have "normal" characters from different areas of Unicode), and a mapping to something like the IPA, so that phonemic transcriptions can be produced at will. o Reader :) Given the kind of information from the above con-script editor, do text-to-speech on a conlang corpus. o Interlinearizer (like Shoebox's, or better) And you can keep going on from there...
> From: Ed Heil <edh@...> > Subject: Re: Lojban program and conlang software ideas > > On Sat, May 06, 2000 at 12:01:44AM +0400, Peter Clark wrote: > > > > o Grammar generator - This would be incredibly cool if someone could > > actually manage to pull it off. The program would run through a list of > > different grammar options (nominative/ergative/active/mixed; SVO, SOV, > > VSO, etc.; isolating/agglutinating/fusional/polysynthetic; and so on)
and
> > spit out a grammar. Of course, listing all the millions of different > > variables would be a nightmare... > > So you'd get to make choices at each step of the way? That'd be > fascinating, especially if it applied typological universals for > defaults... e.g... > > "Does the language have a dual number? YES" > "Does the language have a plural number [default due to typological > universals: YES]"
Hmm... a kind of wizard setup to create a kind of default grammar and something to start with... [sound of grinding gears turning inside a skull]
> From: The Gray Wizard <dbell@...> > Subject: Re: Lojban program and conlang software ideas > > > From: Peter Clark > > o Dictionary program - something where the user could type in the word
and
> > the translation, and the program would insert generate a
Conlang<->Natlang
> > dictionary. It would definitely have to handle multiple meanings;
grabbing
> > an example from Russian, if I type in "jazyk" for the Russian word and > > "tongue" and "language" for the English definitions, I should be able to > > find "jazyk" under both "tongue" and "language" in the English section.
It
> > should also work the other way as well; if I type in "probovat'" and
later
> > "starat'sja", I should find both under "try." It should also be able to > > indicate special forms, like "djen'gi" becoming "djenjeg" in the
genitive
> > plural. > > Plus, it should have an Export To HTML feature, for that web
page
> > that I keep meaning to create... :) > > I took a stab at developing one of these some time back to help manage the > expanding vocabulary of amman iar. I found that simple polysemy was only
a
> small part of the problem. Many words in amman iar (most?) have no simple > one-word english gloss. I had to be able to enter one or more sentences
to
> properly define them. This made generating an amman iar/english
dictionary
> trivial, but how to parse the english definitions to get an english/amman > iar equivalent defeated me and I've been programming for 35 years.
Ah, but that's not how it works ;p English-X X-English dictionaries can (or must) have two different sets of data entirely: one, the Xish words, with English definitions (be they one-word or phrasal) and vice versa! _Especially_ if Xish words don't have a 1:1 correspondence, you have two different dictionaries. hypothetical Spanish <-> English 3:2 correspondence be [am, is, was, were, are] 1 ser: soy de Argentina _I am from Argentina_ 2 estar: esta bién _It is all right_ 3 tener <calidad/emoción>: tengo hambre _I am hungry_ have [has, had] 1 tener <cosa>: tengo unas manzanas _I have some apples_ ~ estar (estoy, estas, esta, estamos, estan...) to be, used when [...] ser (soy, eres, es, somos, son...) to be, used when [...] tener (tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tienen...) 1 to have, possess: tengo diez dolares _I have ten dollars_ 2 to feel (with nouns of emotion): tengo miedo _I am afraid_
> From: Herman Miller <hmiller@...> > Subject: Re: CHAT: Reformed Latin-script writing for natlangs > > On Thu, 4 May 2000 10:03:23 -0400, John Cowan <jcowan@...> > wrote: > > >Note, however, that these are only necessary for backward compatibility > >with 8-bit character sets and fonts. The True Unicode Way uses the > >combining characters in the U+0300 block with appropriate Vietnamese > >fonts that ligature things correctly (i.e. acute+circumflex is rendered > >side-by-side, not one above the other). > > Unfortunately, TrueType under Windows doesn't have that capability, so > going to 16-bit character sets doesn't help. Yet another short-sighted > implementation on Microsoft's part. But the point was that Vietnamese > requires a lot of extra characters (whether they're specifically assigned > codes in the character set or defined as ligatures doesn't matter; they
all
> have to be accounted for at some point in the system).
Then John Cowan said:
> Try this. Download the CODE2000 Unicode font > from http://http://home.att.net/~jameskass/CODE2000.ZIP and install it. > Make it your Unicode font in Netscape. Then visit > http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15/NormalizerChart.html , > which displays composed and decomposed characters side-by-side in > columns 2 and 3. On my Windows NT 4.0 system, they are identical in > form, showing that the decomposed sequence is converted by the font > engine to the correct glyph.
Yes, but that's a function of the browser. TrueType fonts themselves don't have the technology to perform those substitutions automatically _nor_ typographically well--the combining diacritics must be something like zero-width with the contour on the 'wrong' side of the glyph, and in a proportional font it's hit-and-miss, especially on very thin or very wide letters. (I think OpenType has this kind of problem fixed somewhat?) For example, your example page very well shows the æ (ae-ligature) with an acute accent dead in the middle where it ought to be. If I try to make ae-ligature with accent using composed glyphs the accent ends up on the e. Here's a screenshot: http://ns.southern.edu/~alrivera//ae.gif (One could say that MS Word isn't doing it properly, but it's equally true that TrueType isn't _either_.) *Muke! _____________________________________________ NetZero - Defenders of the Free World Click here for FREE Internet Access and Email http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html