Re: What's Yiklamu? (was Re: Lahabic Syntax)

> From: Jonathan Chang
>
> In a message dated 2000:10:02 3:24:44 AM:
>
> >In a message dated 10/1/00 2:30:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> >
> >taliesin@NUTS.EDU writes:
> >
> >>  and nothing covering the rest. It's not that târuven pulls a Yiklamu,
> >>  it's just that the semantic space is somewhat different to
> put it mildly.
> >>  Makes translations quite hellish to do :)
> >
>
> ... then , Estelachan@AOL.COM writes:
>
> >I know how that goes, aside from the mention of Yiklamu....
>
>     ::curiosity aroused:: What is Yiklamu? and pretty please
> describe as much
> as possible.

Classical Yiklamu was/is a conlang created by a once controversial member of
this list named Mark Line.  Mark aimed at a maximally disambiguated lexicon
and accomplished this by computer generating lexemes and randomly assigning
them to all of the lexical concepts in WordNet.  Each lexeme was independent
and the language had no derivational morphology.  The result was a lexicon
with over 90,000 entries (surely the largest conlang lexicon ever). Conlangs
with very large lexicons or those that aspired to be such are often referred
to as being in the Yiklamu tradition.

Mark was interested in exploring the possibilities of communication with a
lexicon of this type rather than the aesthetics or even morphosyntax of the
language.  IIRC, he specified very little of the latter.  This was an
interesting approach, but lacked the artlang flavor that I prefer.  In
particular, I missed the relationships between words of related senses that
is usually exposed by a derivational morphology.

I say that Mark was somewhat controversial in that he was a professional
linguist with very strongly held opinions and seemed to rub and be rubbed in
all the wrong ways while interacting with the list members.  However, I had
several rather long off-list correspondences with him before he disappeared
off the face of the internet and found him to be an extremely interesting
personality.  I have no idea what has become of him.  Has anyone else?

David