Jeffrey's Langmaker book

[zompist]

I'm like the worst publicist ever... but anyway, Jeffrey Henning's book, Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, is out, for both print and Kindle. See here, if you dare, for the story of why the Kindle version was annoyingly late.

Also see the first link for what's in the book. Oh OK, I better at least summarize: it's all Jeffrey's general essays on conlanging (back when he called them "model languages"), his reviews of various good (Tolkien) and worse (Barsoomian) professional conlangs, and a good selection of his own conlangs.

Plus, for historical interest and to give the flavor of the Langmaker site, a version of the "Conlangs at a Glance" section with about 1100 entries. I worked on this quite a bit to give more information, though far too much has fallen to linkrot, and many people didn't give very much information. You might be there!

(I'm not going to say it's a passion of mine, but I do think conlanging has a history, and it's good to have a permanent record of it. Some histories of auxlangs include long lists of old projects, but of course these are out of date. The only other readily accessible list I'm aware of is the one in Arika Okrent's book, which is pretty terrible (it just has language name, creator's name and not even the full name, date).

[Raphael]

Right now, I'm trying to spend 6 months without buying anything from Amazon. The 6 months will be over in April, and as soon as that's the case, my plan is to buy the book and make it what might end up as my only Amazon purchase this year. Looking forward to it!

[Yalensky]

I already have the book but have only read the first few sections, which so far are pretty elementary in content (e.g. how to make a naming language) for anyone who's already conlanged, though I expect sections to get progressively more in-depth as I read further. I'm more looking forward to the latter parts of the book.

(Zompist, I am keeping a little tally of typos I come across, if you'd be interested.)

[zompist]

Typos, my nemesis... yeah, it'd be helpful if you mail your list when you're done.

Just to set expectations... if you've read my books (or taken university courses) you probably won't learn much that's new to you linguistically. He was writing for people who didn't know where to begin.

My approach, which so far as I can see is widely shared on this board, is highly naturalistic. Jeffrey does that sometimes, but a very valuable part of his book is that he also talks about and exemplifies other approaches— auxlangs, loglangs, philosophical langs, weird alien langs.

[Bob]

I'm like the worst publicist ever... but anyway, Jeffrey Henning's book, Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, is out, for both print and Kindle. See here, if you dare, for the story of why the Kindle version was annoyingly late.

...

Oh, I've got to buy a copy eventually!

It was his website that inspired me to to most of the documentation and decipherment work on the Klingon guy, Marc Okrand's, other other invented language, Atlantean, back in 2006. I also read a bit more of his website and maybe forum and have missed it over the years. It seems a good time to sell a book about conlangs would be like when the next Avatar movie comes out or some other such work with conlangs in it. Just recently, there's been more conlangs in the Star Trek tv shows and a year or so ago they gave a whole season subtitles in Klingon. But we're maybe a ways away from when Avatar came out and the more conlang-heavy parts of Game of Thrones.

But there's been various movies and tv shows where the Game of Thrones languages guy, David Peterson, inserted some invented languages. I remember eventually buying his book at a Barnes and Noble.

...

You, Zompist, also have a book on conlanging or language invention, The Language Construction Kit, by Mark Rosenfelder. I don't have it yet but have been meaning to get it for years now.

And then there's also a notable book that maybe few have which I also recommend, on the Lulu website, called something like Introduction to the Vulcan Language by Mark Gardner. This is a book made from his old Vulcan Language Institute website. This is actually yet another Klingon guy aka Mark Okrand invented language, for Star Trek, which was greatly expanded in vocabulary by Gardner and his team, maybe in the 1980s and 1990s. It's the greatest expansion of an invented language from books, television, and movies, which I have ever found, and they did a great job of it. So I recommend that one.

...

Oh, there's also The Klingon Dictionary (and grammar) from the 1980s, * Lunatic Lovers of Language (sic), and * In the Land of Invented Languages, other books that come to mind and * often occur as recommend or required books for university and community college courses. From memory, though, I don't remember Lunatic Lovers of Language or In the Land of Invented Languages as being especially recommendable, or accurate depictions of language invention as scientific exploration, artistic expression, or hobby. Maybe someone just gave their authors a request to write a book discouraging people from "usurping" the grand powers of academia, or the armed forces, or such, and become academia's "chosen expert" on the topic. For a quick comparsion, consider all the excellent and readable presentations of linguistics topics in the works of Margalit Fox, such as "Talking Hands" (on sign languages) from 2007.

But my memory of such works is dim. Yet it's hard to list The Klingon Dictionary with them since it takes the topic of language invention - the blending of foreign language grammars - with some of the seriousness that rigorous science deserves in an intelligent and responsible society. Cough.

Maybe it's part of the American concept of encouraging American monolingualism in English. Some people may think that Americans studying foreign languages seriously undermines the pull of people to study English and American English. Whatever all it is, it comes to mind when I remember what I've read of Lunatic Lovers of Language and In the Land of Invented Language. I also think that Linguistics ("Language Science") as a discipline is small, underfunded, and embattled because its scientific ideas are "revolutionary". Almost no one knows what it is. And so professional language scientists have major hang-up's that are also historically and ideologically suspicious: They don't study historic or ancient languages much, they don't study writing systems, they hardly study sign languages, they don't invent languages or study invented languages, and they hardly compare unrelated languages from a linguistic typological perspective. I think these things will change in the future and that scholars of excellence should be aware of them.

...

To me, then, it sounds like a more welcome addition to the books available on "language invention" or "foreign language grammar blending".

[Moose-tache]

True story: I first heard of Zompist.com by reading about it on Langmaker. Jeffrey Henning made a post about "spending all night" unable to look away from all the content on the site, so I checked it out. This was back in the day when a real human being would resort to testing individual links on Richard Kennaway's page in hopes that you'd find more than a phoneme inventory and a pencil drawing of a dragon, so this was like someone handing me a ticket to Disney Land. So I guess it's good that now you're promoting Jeffrey's content. It's like webrings are back!

[Bob]

Just to set expectations... if you've read my books (or taken university courses) you probably won't learn much that's new to you linguistically. He was writing for people who didn't know where to begin.

No, that's cool. I bought the Game of Thrones' languages' guy's book The Art of Language Invention and it was just for some inspiration and nostalgia and sense of grasp of history and such. I just mull over this kind of thing because I'm so into conlangs, especially ones from books, tv, movies. I luv it.

We used "Contemporary Linguistics" in my intro class from this computer scientist, I think John Hale, who went to Yale after Michigan State U. I also got a copy of "Essential Linguistics" by one of our faculty, Grover Hudson, big on the Semitic languages of Ethiopia. But that was one of the books I donated to a public library and I miss it. So I bought a copy of "Language Files" from the 1990s or so - maybe two from different decades - and that's been enough of a replacement for me so far.

My whole suite of books from my degree, I donated them. Not because I wasn't interested any more. But for the patrons of public libraries. So I've replaced most of them with used bookstore purchases. Which is my style, my avante guarde, my raison d'etre, ... my "groove".

To me, conlanging is this whole big scientific experimentation thing. The whole hobby and art bit is not so foremost in my thought. So I see it as this great wave of the future that will revolutionize the study of language science. See, everyone will study many ancient and exotic languages in the future using extensive glosses with expert footnotes. So we're all going to be famous instead of freaks!!! They'll have our holographic busts on their cold fusion imitation fireplaces, and our two-storey portraits will loom over them as they use their monorails and flying cars to work 3 hour work days for gold-based currency. Mwa ha ha ha, mwa ha ha ha!

But then since the British like self-deprecating humor, here's a song making light of all of the above by me. But only a bit, it also adds yet another serious level of symbolism.

Dr Dolittle 1967 Film Soundtrack "Talk To The Animals"
"Discussing eastern art and dramas
With intellectual llamas
That's a big step forward you'll agree!"
( We borrowed this one from a public library, back in the day! )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpBPavEDQCk

Image: C 1890 images of the future.
https://imgur.com/gallery/ZxTFs

L2ikR9sg.jpg (123.22 KiB) Viewed 2525 times

[xxx]

So we're all going to be famous instead of freaks!!! They'll have our holographic busts on their cold fusion imitation fireplaces,

my God no...
without secret, what would remain of my vice ...