Con Lang

Short for constructed (artificial) NaturalLanguage. Making them has been called a "secret hobby".

http://www.langmaker.com/ has an astonishingly large list of them.
http://www.rickharrison.com/language/faq.txt is the Artificial Languages FAQ.

ConLangs of special interest include EsperantoLanguage, LojbanLanguage, DuttonSpeedWords, and OccidentalLanguage?. (Not to mention QuenyaLanguage, SindarinLanguage and KlingonLanguage - all languages created for particular fiction settings.)

See also ChoosingaConLang.

Supposedly, WilliamSidis (who knew at least 200 languages and could learn a whole language in one day) supposedly constructed a language called Vendergood, but the manual has proven impossible to find.

The need is to find a way to represent your experiences to yourself. The reality is that your representations consist in the arbitrary arrangement of public signifiers, at once too private & too inadequate to describe with clarity either the nuances or the peak moments. The trouble is that language isn't really a virus from outer space but more like a school uniform where the deviations from standard wearing must carry the whole burden of distinguishing one personality from another. Conlangs seem to offer a solution, their meanings available to all but their signs not yet exhausted by commercial usage. - One might call this whole tendency (which is the 21c.'s triumph & lament) an instance of spiritual perversity (the will to be unreal, "skewwhiff"). It is to be dispossessed, not only of one's proper language, but of the connection to any language that a rooted person naturally enjoys. (Hence the need to transcend irony.)

Ever wanted to "invent" your own spoken or written language? That's what Model Languages are all about (as far as I can tell).

Speaking for myself only, I've learned a lot about how programming "works" by looking at how ordinary languages (English, Japanese, etc.) "work".

May also be known as Artificial Languages.

-- DanNovak

The following experiment-in-progress presents a new miniature ConLang without explaining all the rules of its construction. The language influences are suggested, and readers are invited to decipher it as a riddle or word/math puzzle. It was created in TiddlyWiki and inter-links with other knowledge that is far-flung and unrelated.

I welcome answers to each question of the riddle, and critiques of how it was conceived and presented. There is a node of the C2 wiki that directly relates to its secret.

http://remuse.tiddlyspace.com/#RiddleOne

ArtificialLanguage: Not to be confused with ArtificialIntelligence or GenuineStupidity?. Of course, everyone who has worked with computers is acquainted with ArtificialStupidity. (We didn't plan it that way, it just happened. Bug ::= unanticipated feature. Etc^2.

These are languages you make up, usually for some personal or academic purpose. JrrTolkien was supposed to have taken enough delight in this kind of thing as to actually design a language, compose poetry in it, and then create a background for the whole thing. And we know where that led! -- BobBockholt

I think ArtificialLanguage is better than ConLang, but I'm too lazy to refactor.

The term "constructed language" has been in use for a long time, it wasn't made up on the spot for this wiki page, therefore refactoring is perhaps not in order regardless of which one you prefer.

The real problem lies in the use of "natural language" to refer to Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Russian, Japanese, Estonian, etc. These are the languages that already exist and are referred to as "natural languages", naturally (if you see what I mean) suggesting that one should use the term "artificial language" to refer to a language that has been deliberately constructed. None of these terms are ideal, but at least the term "constructed language" describes its origins while avoiding the question "In what sense artificial?" The only sense in which any of Esperanto, Lojban, Quenya, Sindarin or Klingon is artificial is simply in contrast to being "natural".

My idea of a good artificial language is one loosely based on the idea of syllabic diphthongs, a pairing of a consonant and a vowel in that order. This is sort of like Japanese.

The consonant and vowels should be chosen so that there is little, if any, aural ambiguity between syllables.

Essential punctuation should be explicit in the grammar. For example, each utterance should be preceded by a syllable indicating that it is a statement, question, reply, exclamation.

Additionally, nouns, verbs and modifiers should also follow this pattern so that any noun can be verbed or modified.

Ideally, when constructing the initial vocabulary care should be taken to create classes indicated by leading syllables. Exceptions become unavoidable as the vocabulary grows, but at least the most common words would be regular, instead of the other way around as it is with most languages I know of. (not many)

Most, but not all, of the above points are covered in LojbanLanguage. In particular, LojbanLanguage takes a different approach to this last point. ''I understand. But another goal is not to sound or look very much like any existing language. I don't want to leverage the spelling of existing vocabularies. Esperanto always sounded/looked like sombody kept switching from, say, spanish to german in mid-word.
- The look of statements in the LojbanLanguage leave me cold, and, because it's a human language, that's a Bad Thing, to me anyway. -- BobBockholt
  - Perfectly valid comment, but I don't understand it. In what way does the look of statements leave you cold? What is it about "mi klama le zarci" that you find particularly problematic? Or "mi tavla do la lojban"?

Yeah, I don't get that; both Loglan and Lojban seem to me to have achieved JCB's goal of relative mellifluousity, similar to Italian despite the range of roots. P.S. is JohnCowan still hanging out here? -- DougMerritt

The goal of machine intelligibility might be too bold. I'd settle for just tagging essential parts of speech. For example, orange as a modifier as opposed to a noun. (Lots of the ChatBots I've tried were disappointing in this respect.)

The LinkGrammarParser does this for you.''

Is this off topic? -- BobBockholt

Yes, but that doesn't in and of itself mean it's uninteresting.

I always had a soft spot for Hogben's Interglossa - see http://www.rickharrison.com/language/interglossa.html. IIRC, Hogben said we all know more Greek than we realize (so many scientific terms have Greek roots in them), so this provides a readymade international word base. For instance, it's pretty obvious what "U palaeo gyna in horta" must mean (horta is from Latin, but you get my drift). --PaulMorrison

CategoryNaturalLanguage