Category: Artificial Languages

Federation Standard, eh, English translation follows: HIja’, tlhIngan Hol vijatlhlaH. qaStaHvIS wa’maH DIS, jIQummeH Hol vIlo’, ’ej SeQpIr lutmey vImughta’. qatlh vIghojmeH vIwIv ’e’ choyu’, tlheybura qatlhaw qaH. reH jIHvaD Daj Holmey ’oghlu’bogh. ghojmeH ngeD chaH, ghojchu’lu’meH DuH tu’lu’, ’ej Hol mIwmey waHlaH. maSterS vIHaDtaHvIS, HolQeD qaD lIngpu’ ghojwI’, tlhIngan Hol lo’taHvIS. jIHvaD chu’ Hol. […]

Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto? We know what Orwell was satirising, and why he was annoyed with Esperanto. Don’t worry about it. Orwell was if anything more annoyed with Basic English, and would likely be annoyed with any conlang. (One of the examples he gives in Politics and the English Language is from a text […]

Explicit predicate structure of arguments. Which throws natural language notions of case out the window (although prepositions are included as well): it really is a matter of argument #1, argument #2, rather than accusative, dative, etc. Very explicit, computer-parsable syntax, with spoken brackets for syntactic structures. Logical, rather than natural language, notions of negation. (Again, […]

My bio for Esperanto says Kabeinta Esperantisto, lingvisto: “Esperantist who has done a Kabe, linguist” (for explanation on Kabe, see question details). So I guess I qualify to answer. I have been corresponding with Clarissa Lohr a fair bit in Esperanto recently. I don’t think that means I’ve un-Kabe’d though; Clarissa is hardly a verda […]

https://www.quora.com/topic/George-Soros As in George Soros? Likely Esperanto. “He will soar”. Possibly Hungarian: “Next in line”. His father was called Tivadar Schwartz, and was an important figure in Esperanto culture (Teodoro Ŝvarc): not so much for stuff he wrote (including under the pseudonym Teo Melas—yes, the guy knew his Ancient Greek: Melas = Schwartz = Black), […]

User has mentioned in comment to question the magazine El Popola Ĉinio (“From the People’s China”), and I remember its impeccable glossiness and low-key propaganda. Argh! I did read about this at a bookstore the other day, in a collection of essays about the posterity of Mao’s Little Red Book. But no, I didn’t buy […]

My guess: no. If anyone would have written articles in an Esperanto psychological journal, that would have been the late Claude Piron, who lectured in psychology, and who also wrote a psychoanalysis of people’s attitude to international languages. (No, I’m not endorsing that kind of thing.) I’ve looked through his now defunct fan page at […]

I’ve spoken Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon. And as I’ve posted elsewhere, I have a soft spot for Interlingua and Interglosa. There are studies, but the numbers are hazy. The numbers mentioned here though are congruous with what I know. Esperanto would be in the hundreds of thousands; Klingon in the hundreds, Lojban in the much […]

Three candidates. Lexical aspect: the distinction between achievement, accomplishment, activity and state it took from Vendler. It’s not inherently inscrutable, but rattling off Vendler’s nomenclature is not the way to make people understand it. The shades of difference between abstractors: nu, du’u, sedu’u, ka, su’u. The distinctions are real, but they are more confusing, and […]