CascadianConlangersMay2016

Saturday, 7 May 2016, 2pm-4pm. Westlake Center food court, 400 Pine St. third floor food court, to the right of elevator, by windows at end.

Five attendees: Ron, Amorena, Joe, Emma, Darin.

Joe brought his latest book. Joe's conlang is based on a kind of ternary I Ching. He's writing a YA fantasy series, blurbed by Ken Wilbur. Shambhala published his memoir in 2007. His "appendices" (cf. LotR) are at his blog, http://joe-perez.com.

I hand around the hefty Ithkuil grammar. Darin shows us a picture on his phone of an older, gorgeous writing system for Ithkuil/Ilaksh. It looks like stained glass. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/403775922810979992/

Amorena posts a link to a list of progressively harder sentences to translate into one's conlang. It's on the Cascadian Conlangers page on Facebook. I think the original is here: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120427054736/http://fiziwig.com/conlang/syntax_tests.html

I am the only person who brought the suggested phrasebook for their conlang (mine is for Shklorpya). I hand it out: one double-sided page full of phrases I'd hoped would amuse people -- but they are unimpressed (I think) by the simple, isolating, agglutinative, head-initial syntax. Hey, I'm focusing on the semantics.

Darin says Marc Okrand's PhD thesis was based on notes about Native American languages taken by a linguist named Harrington. Darin also worked on the project.

Darin says the PMEG (Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko) is both more recent and more complete than the Plena Analiza Gramatiko that I have. For example, it covers things like increased use of stative verbs, e.g. "La cxielo bluas", which apparently results from the influx of native Chinese speakers in the 1980s. The book is freely downloadable. http://bertilow.com/pmeg/. Darin also notes that native speakers of Esperanto tend to use SVO syntax and omit the accusative -n.

Darin suggests watching Frisian TV. Frisian is the closest language to English. The experience is a bit weird.

More Esperanto from Darin: Word fikanto can be parsed as fi-kant-o, naughty song, or fik-ant-o, fucker.

Emma says the romantic comedy Conlang is not a feature film, but a 10-20 minute short. She has the DVD and will try to get it to me.

We all talk about Paramount v. Axanar, of course. Darin remarks he really enjoyed the fan film Star Trek: Horizon.

Darin seems to have a master's in linguistics. He says linguists are generally hostile to conlangs, but the LINGUIST list has lately had a few conlang posts.

Emma asks me to reconsider reviewing her book The Interpreter's Tale, even though it's my practice never to review anything anymore.

Darin learns that I am the first poster on Conlang-L, and also wrote the O'Reilly book Mind Performance Hacks. We chat a little in Esperanto. My Esperanto proves not up to the task; I can understand but have trouble expressing myself aloud. I need to brush up.

We end at 4pm. Emma notes that anyone can propose a future meeting.

Corrections/complaints to rwhe@ludism.org or on the Facebook group.