m. c. de marco

I couldn’t help checking out the Metafilter post behind the title “who’d bother naming something as shortlived as a cat?” The comments led me to Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD, a linguistic extrapolation by Justin B. Rye. He gives plenty of helpful background information on phonetic change. If you’re just curious about how English might sound in another thousand years, skip ahead to the examples.

There was a Guardian article this weekend [link via GeekPress] about autistic savant Daniel Tammet:

He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone.

I was hoping to see some of those Rosetta Stone inscriptions in the article. No such luck, but I did find out that he’s a conlanger. His language is called Mänti. The article makes it sound like a philosophical language:

The vocabulary of his language - “Mänti”, meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word “ema”, for instance, translates as “mother”, and “ela” is what a mother creates: “life”. “Päike” is “sun”, and “päive” is what the sun creates: “day”. Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.

The Darmok Dictionary documents the “Shaka, when the walls fell” language of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok.”

From the conlang LiveJournal community: David Salo’s Gateway to Sindarin is out.

I’m inventing a language for my NaNoWriMo novel—-preferably a wordy one. For help generating lots of placeholding gibberish until December 1st, I may try the Conlang Word Maker. But since I’m starting from a known language, maybe I’ll use the Custom Word Generator or adapt one of Chris Pound’s language machines.

The topic of conlanging manifestoes came up recently on the conlang list. I enjoyed reading the Conlang Manifesto, Artlanger’s Rant, and an Apologia pro Imaginatione. Although the manifestoes primarily defend language construction, they apply equally well to conculturing (constructing cultures) and to fiction writing in general.

The Rosetta Project is creating both an archive of human languages and a durable Rosetta disk you can buy and keep for centuries.