Fantasist's Scroll

Well, maybe not so mighty, but I think it’s cool!

So, I finally did it. I went and made myself an on-line sound changer. It’s based on The Sound Change Applier by Mark Rosenfelder and utilizes the Lingua::SoundChange module from CPAN. Other than that, though, I did the whole thing on my own, just using the examples and the Internet. So, I’m really proud of this one.
As far as I know, there’s not another one like it on the web, so enjoy it. And, now, I’ll be taking a break from doing any programming for the site. So don’t ask!

(The poem from which I stole my title, BTW, is Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley.)

It’s been a little bit since I mentioned anything about conlanging, so I thought it was time.

I was tooling around on Project Gutenberg the other day and came accross Mr. Honey’s Tourist Dictionary, English-German. At first, I thought it was just sort of interesting, but then, I started looking at it, and the other “Mr. Honey’s Dictionaries”. Suddenly, it clicked! What a great source for phrases to translate into a conlang! I already have Conlang Phrasebooks, but here are even more ideas for phrases that people use in daily life. In some of these, there is even generic or generalized technical jargon. For instance, there’s the Banking Dictionary, the Insurance Dictionary, the Large Business Dictionary, the Small Business Dictionary and even the Workstudy Dictionary.
In any case, these all really sparked some ideas about how language is used and what really goes into a real, fully-formed language with complete vocabulary.

Well, not really. But they had binary code!

No, really! According to this news story at the Independant, the Incas had a kind of knot code that was very similar to our own binary coding. They seem to have kept fairly detailed messages in a seven-bit binary code knotted into decorative textiles. So, now we know how it was they had such a detailed, complicated society and legal systems without seeming to have a written language! They just had a kind of writing that we never considered.
I guess it was too hard to imagine a “primative” culture capable of creating binary code. And, really, knotting thread is a pretty inventive and creative way of recording information. The tie-closure on a bag could describe its contents and owner. Shoot, it could even have a shipping address included in it! Such a code could have been woven into other textiles as well. Even the simplest of fabrics could have had messges in them.
Obviously, this is pretty exciting to me. The ideas that this spawns for a created culture are almost endless! And, think of how original it would seem to the average reader of fantasy fiction. After all, this has sat in front of experts for ages before they figured it out, so to we who are less experienced in such things it’s nothing short of brilliant and new and, well, fantastic!

Well, I’ve really done it this time!

Yep, I made a name generator based on the Conlang Word Generator and the Conlang Generator. It’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself! Now, keep in mind, the names aren’t perfect and they’re based on the languages in the drop-down list, but they aren’t from the language. In other words, if you choose “Chinese” as your base language, you won’t get Chinese names, but conlang names based on Chinese phonology. And, if you choose “Tsolyani”, the names will be in the correct “format”, but not really quite like names from Empire of the Petal Throne. Still, it is fun. And, if you’re an author looking to crank out some names fast, it works pretty well.

In any case, I had fun doing it, so enjoy!

A young fan of my site challenged me last week.

Nikhil Sinha saw my ConLang Generator and thought it was cool, but needed a little work. I hate to admit it, but it really did need some improvements. I had a problem with duplicate created words. The script on which I based my version of the Generator didn’t sort out duplicates and I hadn’t gotten around to working out why. Well, thanks to Nikhil, I finally got off my big butt and did it. So, thanks, Nikhil, for getting me going on that again.

Oh, Nikhil has a conlang, too. It can be found at Nihilosc.

Okay, so it’s not quite dead…

This is from the May 15 Wired News e-mail, under the section called “Furthermore”:

Recentis Latinitas
The Vatican’s Latin lovers — that is, those who love the ancient language of Rome — are issuing a new dictionary on how to say contemporary words like FBI and videophone. The book may never become a liber maxime divenditus — a best seller — if only because of its steep cost of 100 euros, but its release is causing a major buzz in literary circles. The Italian-Latin dictionary, Lexicon Recentis Latinitas, which joins two earlier volumes, A-L and M-Z, offers students of Latin, still the Roman Catholic Church’s official language, a way to refer to things that didn’t exist in Julius Caesar’s time. FBI, for instance, is known as officium foederatum vestigatorium. TV correspondents embedded with U.S. military units in Iraq might be amused to know that they filed stories via a telephonium albo televisifico coniunctum.

Cool.

After yesterday’s entry, I got thinking about other fun linguistics books and it occured to me that Forgotten English by Jeffrey Kacirk fell into that category.

English has gone through some really amazing changes over the years. It used to resemble German much more closely than it does now, but over time, meaning and pronunciation have changed significantly. This book looks at some of the more interesting changes.
It’s broken up into categories, which are further divided by word. Each entry is a page or so long and has interesting historical, as well as linguistic, information about the word, it’s usage and where it went in our modern language. It’s really fun and much more literate bathroom reading than junk mail!
My first introduction to this book was actually through a calendar. It was one of those “word-a-day” types and used to really tickle me and make me think. If nothing else, it gave me some idea about how a language might change over time. Always interesting literary possibilities in that.
I have to admit that I found mine in a used book store, but you can click that link above and get it from Amazon.

New and Improved!

Way back when I first put the ConLang Word Generator on this site, my ultimate goal was to have something that created an entire language via CGI. There were lots of tools available for making words and even languages, but they were all limited in some greater or lesser way. For instance, the very good LangMaker by Jeffery Henning, is for Windows only. Chris Pound’s Name/Vocabulary generators require going to the command line, and it helps if you know a bit of PERL, too. But, I wanted something that would crank out languages on the web. Originally, I have to admit, I was trying to figure out a way to charge for this, but it’s just too fun to keep it to myself, so it’s free.
My ConLang Generator is based on Chris Pound’s PERL scripts, but with heavy modification. My English source files come from a number of sources, but mainly from resources associated with LangMaker.

So, standing on the shoulders of giants, I have finally made a free ConLang Generator. Enjoy!