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

At 1:52 pm -0400 2/10/00, Jonathan Chang wrote:
[....]
>
>    ::curiosity aroused:: What is Yiklamu?
A conlang devised by Mark Line (Another missing member, so I guess Yiklamu
won't be on the T-shirt).

It aimed to have a very large lexicon, so that each word could be properly
defined and discourse could be unambiguous.  Mark, if fact, took the
complete WordNet list and generated a separate word for each item in the
list.  I forget off hand how many words Yiklamu was given - but it was
*lots*, far more than most conlangs get endowed with.

Morphosyntax was kept to the minumum needed for communication IIRC.

This phase was called "Classical Yiklamu".  The idea was to present, what
Mark called a "Russian Lawn", i.e. you wait to see where people will
actually walk before defining any paths across your lawn.  In otherwords,
it would usage that determined the more detailed 'rules' of the language.

The site address I have is:
http://www36.pair.com/waldzell/mpl/yiklamu

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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