Re: [announce] Invented Languages magazine

On Fri, 30 May 2008 09:03:12 +0200, taliesin the storyteller
<taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:

>Multi-language conlang crssword, what a brilliant idea!
>
>I do think only languages with vocabularies online should be used
>though, so it is possible to look words up!
I'm in the camp that'd find crosswords in conlangs (one or many) that one's
not familiar with tedious as opposed to puzzling, just an exercise in
looking things up in lexica.

Some sorts of puzzles I'd imagine might work in a conlang publication are

- the "five sentences" game that we've played at Bay Area meets once to
date: given a handful of sentences in some language and their translations,
figure out the workings of those parts of the grammar which have been
deployed.  By way of testing one's solution one could list some other
sentences as challenges to be translated, from English to conlang or vice
versa.

- of somewhat smaller scope, puzzles like Joe Fatula's one at
  http://archives.conlang.info/qhe/shaurson/vulcheirzuan.html
  http://archives.conlang.info/di/cuankhen/ghodhoelphuan.html
though it would require more ingenuity to have a whole series of these: once
you've used a trick (here, nofgenpg inyhrf bs srngherf punatvat juvpu
srngher gurl orybat gb, respectively orvat Ratyvfu onpxjneqf) once it's far
less interesting to encounter it a second time.

- diachronic reconstruction puzzles: comparative (how can you get these two
langs to come from a common ancestor?), internal reconstructive (can you
provide regular antecedents for these irregular paradigms?), ...

In fact most of the problems appearing in the linguistics olympiads like
http://namclo.linguistlist.org/ would probably make good conlang-magazine
puzzles (although this particular source has some of more computational
bent, which wouldn't really).

Alex