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

> From: Raymond Brown
>
> 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
All this talk of Mark Line reminds me of another, and I think more
interesting, creation of Mark's related to Hesse's "Glass Bead Game".  In
Hesse's _Magister Ludi_, he describes a game known as the "Glass Bead Game".
The description was a masterpiece of creative writing, IMNSHO in that the
game is described clearly enough that you can feel the excitement of playing
it, but Hesse never really tells you how it is played.  One of Mark's
interests was designing a playable version of this game.  The evolution of
Mark's conlang (I believe he called it Waldzell) was integrally involved in
the playing of this game.  Details escape me now, but the project promised
to be a fascinating one.  Alas that promise was never fulfilled, for AFAIK,
Mark never pursued it.

David