by Simon Davies | Feb 6, 2023 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
Just a few steps away in the infinite multiverse, a version of you is reading this in Volapük. Volapük was the first international language to achieve any noticeable success. A German Catholic priest called Johann Martin Schleyer (rhymes with “higher”) devised it on a...
by Simon Davies | Sep 26, 2022 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
You may recall that a few instalments back, I outlined a fascinating artistic language called Elet Anta that has been all but forgotten since the death of its author. Now I’d like to present another similar curiosity, whose designer – under the pseudonym Galivad –...
by Simon Davies | Mar 28, 2022 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
In my previous article in this series, I described several oligosynthetic languages – in which the vocabulary is built up from a very small number of fundamental pieces – and I noted that the meanings of words constructed via such a system can be difficult to predict:...
by Simon Davies | Oct 4, 2021 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
One of the factors that makes Esperanto relatively easy to learn is its method of creating new vocabulary by combining existing elements: domo “house”, dometo “cottage”, urbodomo “town hall”, samdomano “housemate” and so on. But the number of these building blocks has...
by Simon Davies | Jun 28, 2021 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
“It is hard to know whether the Anta are a nation, a religion, a secret society or a mixture of all three. They have apparently been living in the British Isles for at least a thousand years, and there are thought to be between ten and twenty thousand of them,...
by Simon Davies | Mar 15, 2021 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
My previous post gave a brief sketch of Elefen, a.k.a. Lingua Franca Nova, a regularised Romance creole, and pointed out some of the ways in which it resembles and differs from Esperanto. This time I’ll be looking at how well these two languages fare at translating...
by Simon Davies | Jan 22, 2021 | [ENGLISH], Conlang Excursions
Constructed languages are fascinating. Beyond the Esperanto-dominated field of IALs (international auxiliaries), creative minds have come up with thousands of experimental or artistic languages, often purely for the pleasure of doing so. In this occasional series,...
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