Re: LUNATIC SURVEY: 2005

A. PROFESSION, DEMOGRAPHICS, INCLINATION:

1.
name: Damian Yerrick
languages: Vo and Co

2.
New to Lunatic Survey.

3.
No web site yet, but once I do, it'll be linked from
http://www.pineight.com/etc/

4.
Part before the schwa: tepples
Part after the schwa:  spamcop dot net
(Spambots just try to parse that.)

5.
Age: 24

6.
Gender: M, straight

7.
Nationality: American, living in Indiana

8.
L1: Bjelamerican, my private name for standard American English.
(Etymology should be obvious to any Eminem fan who knows
former Soviet geography.)

9.
I studied Spanish for four years in school and Japanese for a
couple months on my own, but I'm not near conversant in Spanish
and I can't even understand song lyrics in Japanese.

10. (was 13.)
Graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a B.S. in
computer science.

11.
I'm looking for a job.  Are you hiring recent CS grads in northeast
Indiana?

14.
I have worked off and on on Vo and Co since 2001.

15.
I started in third grade with _Codes and Secret Writing_.  My
first real effort was a squarish RTL abjad, designed to vaguely
resemble Hebrew but not be Hebrew. I used it for writing clues
(in English) in a point-and-click adventure game I made back in
sixth grade or so.

16.
I'm a video game developer, and I needed a world to set games in.
Because of the difficulty of explaining FTL travel and time travel
to the point where I could use them as gameplay devices, I'd need
languages for the people to speak that have no connection to
anything on Earth. Inspirations included Swift, Grimm, Collodi,
Wells, Tolkien, Butcher, and even Playskool, but once I discovered
the true extent of copyright, I had to change all the names and
faces to protect the innocent.

17.
I had heard of Volapu:k, Solresol, and Esperanto by the time I
progressed beyond neographies to sketches of grammars.  Tolkien
came later, but I was too busy playing Sonic the Hedgehog at the
time to absorb too much of that.

18.
Once I have said a few things in the only other someone else's
conlang that I've learned.

19.
I have worse mental pathologies than conlanging.  Google
"Asperger syndrome" for the gory details.

*20.
I'm a programmer.  Everything else I do is nerdy or geeky enough
that conlanging wouldn't matter.

"A life" is a mushroom with green and white polka dots.

21.
I can sing and play the piano OK, though probably not well enough
to land a record deal.  I used to play the recorder and the trumpet.
I've tried composing, but even with computer assistance, everything
I make eventually sounds like something I heard on the radio.
After a bit of research, which included the discovery of the
distressing precedent in _Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music_,
I almost stopped once I realized that composing music is dangerous.
http://slashdot.org/~yerricde/journal/36125

22.
Yes, I enjoy working with numbers, lines, and other mathematical
constructs.  It takes a lot of math to make a graphics engine.

23.
Other creative hobbies include drawing, story writing, map making,
etc. to the extent needed to make video games.  And choreography,
if making StepMania simfiles counts.


B. FEATURES OF YOUR INVENTION

1.
Vo and Co are artlangs.

2.
The people in my conworld have no contact with Earth, and I don't
feel right making a BS excuse that "by coincidence, Rigellian is
just like English", so I guess the languages have to be a priori.

4.
I've made various scripts, not published on any web site, but none
have been linked to the conlangs.  Yet.

5.
Vo is VSO, and Co is SOV.  Vo has phonology similar to Italian,
and Co to German.  Both are accusative and somewhere between
isolating and fusional, like many European languages.  There's
nothing really innovative yet, partly because 1. I haven't
been on the list long enough to get a taste of the more exotic
conlang efforts and 2. familiarity would in theory make it
easier for voice actors to learn what they're saying.

6.
You love to skip numbers, don't you Sally? :)

7.
I haven't got very far with vocabulary.

8.
When I start to build vocabulary, I might take words from any of
several languages and distort them.  Or sometimes I generate some
random words using a phonotactic Markov process and then see which
words best fit meanings from the Toki Pona list, the Furbish list,
the Swadesh list, the Basic English list, etc.  Words not on a
"basic" list are often compounds.

Both Vo and Co are intended to be descended from Old Nognian.

3.
Yes, these languages are for a conworld.

*9.
The conworld hasn't been "open sourced" yet as it's not fleshed out
enough to leave "cathedral" stage.  And no, I'm not into making
RPGs; platform games and shooters are more my type.

*10.
This conworld is currently called, for lack of a better name, _|_
(pronounced "the perpendicular world").  It's an Earthclone but
with humanity forking into different species at various points
on its timeline.

*11.
The One God:  Operates countless Earthlike planets as experiments.
Elves:  Created by God in his image.  They didn't eat the apple.
Most speak Vo.
Humans:  They ate the apple.  It's a tradeoff.
Dwarves:  Forked from humans.  Live below ground level.
Most speak Co.
_P:  About as tall as dwarves, with large heads, large eyes,
simple minds; often raised by siblings due to high orphan rate.
_6:  Like humans but with no legs.  Close friends with dwarves.

Currently, only _P are thought to have less capacity for making
and understanding language.

12.
Not complete enough.

13.
Not complete enough.

14.
I do plan to provide sound clips (in .ogg format; burn all .mp3s)
once the languages are complete enough.

*15.
Both the script and its Latin-1 transliteration would be
morphophonemic with some predictable irregularities, much like
real-world natlang scripts.

16.
When it's complete enough, I do plan songs.  I don't see using a
xenharmonic scale, given that 1. the just/meantone/12tET foundation
of western music seems easily derivable from basic acoustics even in
cultures separated from the western world, and 2. western federal
judges can't tell the difference.

*17.
I'm not sure what is meant by gibberish.

*18.
I haven't played online language games.

19.
The phonology and structure are easiest for me to think of.

20.
I start and stop big time.  There have been a lot of abortive
attempts before Vo and Co.

21.
A "complete" conlang is one where a speaker can speak eir mind and
be understood.

*22.
The conworld came first.


C. PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETIC:

1.
I have a dulled sense of aesthetics, apparently due to my
mental disability.

2.
I try not to steal aesthetics _too_ closely, especially with
lawyers holding all the cards in my country.

3.
Difficulty is a goal only to the point where it makes a language
look natural.

4.
I'm not trying to make the linguistic equivalent of PKZIP; I
understand that spoken languages need some sort of capacity for
correcting errors due to noise.  But on the other hand, having
the end of an utterance cut off due to it taking too long to say
is an error as well.

5.
Natural enough to fool a trilingual European is all I care about.

6.
Working on phonology gives me a h*rd-*n, and I have no idea
why.

*7.
I don't swear beyond the occasional "shit" or "damn".  But I
understand that characters in drama will need to have the
occasional flamewar.

8.
I don't believe in magic beyond Christianity, but I do believe
that having been created in the image of the Creator, we are
called to subcreate.  Imagining the consequences of Adam and
Eve doing the wild thing before biting the apple let me play
Gosh so that I can better understand God's side of the story.

9.
Conreligion isn't discussed yet.

*10.
Novel words for novel ideas? Not really yet.

11.
Can't say yet.

12.
I've realized that unless I can pull a distant appeal to
onomatopoeia with a given word, I just don't give a care about
sound symbolism.

*13.
I don't do anything like the following:

  for each word in (Swadesh union Toki Pona)
    generate a random one- or two-syllable utterance

and keep it at that, if that's what you're asking.  But I do use
computer assistance.

*14.
It's a hobby because I don't get a paycheck.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.  If "Fountain" and "Piss Christ"
are art, then anything can be art.  If you want to know what art is,
go download DDREI.com's Tournamix 2 through 4 on eMule.

*15.
The consumers would be the people who have enough of no life
to sit down and figure out what animated characters are really
saying, beyond the English subtitles ;)  And any other conlangers,
of course.

*16.
Auxlangs are an economic tool. (period)

*17.
Between Given prescriptivist reforms (e.g. 18th century English
by linguists who got their jollies from Latin), reconstruction
of literary languages into spoken languages (e.g. Modern Hebrew),
and adoption of a newly formed creole as a natural language
(that'd be Tok Pisin), I'd claim that the distinction between a
conlang and a "tinkered" natlang can be very fuzzy, and anybody
who claims to rigorously define "conlang" is a conartist :)

*18.
I'm undecided on "miniature" and "model".  To me, "model" connotes
an artificial notion of beauty out of fashion magazines.

*19.
"Is a conlang more like a glimpse of something lifesize?"
More likely, yes.

*20.
As I said, nothing I've made has been too experimental.

*21.
See my answer to #17.

*22.
I skim grammars of languages.  I read papers about linguistic
phenomena.  Occasionally, I look in a database of linguistic
universals.

*23.
Whether an unnatural language can function depends on how you
define "function".  Clearly, in the field of programming,
obviously unnatural languages have no trouble expressing the
steps of a computation.

*24.
I'm not so sure about how conlangers can help linguists.


D. THE LISTSERV

1.
I heard of CONLANG (schwa) LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU through another
conlang-related site.

2.
I've only been on CONLANG for a couple weeks, and I was almost
considering skipping this year's Lunatic Survey because I was
so new and would have an embarrassing quantity of N/A answers.

*3.
Because I'm not as comfortable with the listserv format as
with, say, a web board, I lurk until a topic that particularly
interests me springs up.

*4.
N/A

*5.
The list has helped me overcome some of my fears (see the
"Introducing myself" thread from earlier in February).

6. What books have you consulted? On your own, or because you heard of them
on the list?

*7.
Sometimes I look at other conlang sites.

*8.
N/A yet.

9.
I learned a bit of Toki Pona, Sonja Kisa's conlang, to where
my Toki Pona is almost as good as my Spanish, and that's not
saying much...

*10.
No, I don't often look at Langmaker.com because conlanging
isn't one of my highest priorities at the moment.

*11.
I can't afford expensive programs, but I do use GIMP and a
sound editor.

12.
No, I don't have any conlanging friends off-list.

13.
No, I don't have any conlanging friends off-list.

*14.
I was on tokipona@yahoogroups.com for a while until my interest
in Toki Pona waned.

*15.
N/A yet.

*16.
I want some sort of dynamic script and font support in web browsers.

*17.
N/A

*18.
I don't really have an opinion about publicity.

*19.
"inutile and obsessive activity"?  It's hard to say with my
disability that carries mild obsessive tendencies.  I'm just
glad I don't have full-on OCD.  But nothing that sharpens
skills is "inutile".

20.
"Go learn a real language."
"Would you have said that to Tolkien or Okrand?"

*21.
When I looked up the definition of "pasigraphy", it just screamed
"Chinese" to me.

But anyway, conlang has come out of the closet with the advent of
Usenet and the Web.

*22.
See #21.

*23.
As long as there is language, and there is the drive to "model"
the world (in the sense of model trains, not scantily clad anorexic
women), there will always be conlangs.  A particular style might
become overplayed like popular music, but the fact that Britney
Spears gets too much airtime doesn't mean that music itself is old.


> Finally, may I have your permission to use any of this material of
> yours for my academic work on conlanging? First name? last name?
> pseudonym? anonymous?
Yes. Consider everything I write on this list to be under
Creative Commons Attribution License where applicable.


--
Damian