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Re: [announce] Invented Languages magazine

From:Alex Fink <000024@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 0:06
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