There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Conlanging in XKCD
From: Logan Kearsley
1b. Re: Conlanging in XKCD
From: Aodhán Aannestad
1c. Re: Conlanging in XKCD
From: Aodhán Aannestad
1d. Re: Conlanging in XKCD
From: Muke Tever
2a. Re: Beautiful vowel diagrams using LaTeX
From: H. S. Teoh
3. OT Arabic question
From: Roger Mills
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Conlanging in XKCD
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2013 10:44 am ((PDT))
Randall Munroe's epic comic-within-a-comic "Time" recently ended
(http://xkcd.com/1190/, click through the image to see the whole
thing) and the last bit of the story includes encounters with some
foreign beanie-wearing stick-figures who speak an unknown language.
Wired wrote a piece on it, and apparently the Beanish language is
actually a real conlang, intended to be indecipherable for greater
verisimilitude:
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/xkcd-time-comic/
There's also an XKCD blog post about it, but strangely that actually
has less detail: http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
Sadly, the fact that it's supposed to be indecipherable probably means
that Randall won't be releasing any documentation on this conlang.
-l.
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Conlanging in XKCD
Posted by: "Aodhán Aannestad" [email protected]
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2013 12:01 pm ((PDT))
On 8月3日・土 12時44分, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> Randall Munroe's epic comic-within-a-comic "Time" recently ended
> (http://xkcd.com/1190/, click through the image to see the whole
> thing) and the last bit of the story includes encounters with some
> foreign beanie-wearing stick-figures who speak an unknown language.
>
> Wired wrote a piece on it, and apparently the Beanish language is
> actually a real conlang, intended to be indecipherable for greater
> verisimilitude:
> http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/xkcd-time-comic/
> There's also an XKCD blog post about it, but strangely that actually
> has less detail: http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
>
> Sadly, the fact that it's supposed to be indecipherable probably means
> that Randall won't be releasing any documentation on this conlang.
>
> -l.
>
Some romanisation would be nice, so we would at least get a sense of
what it sounds like! :P It doesn't really feel like a real 'language' if
you can't hear it.
On a tangential topic, the dialogue from this comic would make a
wonderful language test. It's meaningful, connected and natural-sounding
while still being fairly simple from a vocabulary standpoint. There's a
few exceptions ('castle' is kind of a culturally-specific word, for
example); but overall, it seems like a great way to actually 'write' a
story in your conlang if you don't want to actually write an original story.
Now to find(/make, but ugh no please) a text file with all the dialogue :P
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
1c. Re: Conlanging in XKCD
Posted by: "Aodhán Aannestad" [email protected]
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2013 12:02 pm ((PDT))
On 8月3日・土 14時01分, Aodhán Aannestad wrote:
> On 8月3日・土 12時44分, Logan Kearsley wrote:
>> Randall Munroe's epic comic-within-a-comic "Time" recently ended
>> (http://xkcd.com/1190/, click through the image to see the whole
>> thing) and the last bit of the story includes encounters with some
>> foreign beanie-wearing stick-figures who speak an unknown language.
>>
>> Wired wrote a piece on it, and apparently the Beanish language is
>> actually a real conlang, intended to be indecipherable for greater
>> verisimilitude:
>> http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/xkcd-time-comic/
>> There's also an XKCD blog post about it, but strangely that actually
>> has less detail: http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
>>
>> Sadly, the fact that it's supposed to be indecipherable probably means
>> that Randall won't be releasing any documentation on this conlang.
>>
>> -l.
>>
> Some romanisation would be nice, so we would at least get a sense of
> what it sounds like! :P It doesn't really feel like a real 'language'
> if you can't hear it.
>
> On a tangential topic, the dialogue from this comic would make a
> wonderful language test. It's meaningful, connected and
> natural-sounding while still being fairly simple from a vocabulary
> standpoint. There's a few exceptions ('castle' is kind of a
> culturally-specific word, for example); but overall, it seems like a
> great way to actually 'write' a story in your conlang if you don't
> want to actually write an original story.
>
> Now to find(/make, but ugh no please) a text file with all the
> dialogue :P
>
Oh derp, that was easy, though it's not in any really nice and clean format.
http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Dialogue_from_the_Comic
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
1d. Re: Conlanging in XKCD
Posted by: "Muke Tever" [email protected]
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2013 12:11 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, 03 Aug 2013 13:02:50 -0600, Aodhán Aannestad
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On 8月3日・土 14時01分, Aodhán Aannestad wrote:
>> On 8月3日・土 12時44分, Logan Kearsley wrote:
>>> Randall Munroe's epic comic-within-a-comic "Time" recently ended
>>> (http://xkcd.com/1190/, click through the image to see the whole
>>> thing) and the last bit of the story includes encounters with some
>>> foreign beanie-wearing stick-figures who speak an unknown language.
>>>
>>> Wired wrote a piece on it, and apparently the Beanish language is
>>> actually a real conlang, intended to be indecipherable for greater
>>> verisimilitude:
>>> http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/08/xkcd-time-comic/
>>> There's also an XKCD blog post about it, but strangely that actually
>>> has less detail: http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
>>>
>>> Sadly, the fact that it's supposed to be indecipherable probably means
>>> that Randall won't be releasing any documentation on this conlang.
>>>
>>> -l.
>>>
>> Some romanisation would be nice, so we would at least get a sense of
>> what it sounds like! :P It doesn't really feel like a real 'language'
>> if you can't hear it.
>>
>> On a tangential topic, the dialogue from this comic would make a
>> wonderful language test. It's meaningful, connected and
>> natural-sounding while still being fairly simple from a vocabulary
>> standpoint. There's a few exceptions ('castle' is kind of a
>> culturally-specific word, for example); but overall, it seems like a
>> great way to actually 'write' a story in your conlang if you don't want
>> to actually write an original story.
>>
>> Now to find(/make, but ugh no please) a text file with all the dialogue
>> :P
>>
> Oh derp, that was easy, though it's not in any really nice and clean
> format.
>
> http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Dialogue_from_the_Comic
More specifically there is also
http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Beanish
And a few other pages with 'Beanish' in it on the wiki.
*Muke!
--
frath.net
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: Beautiful vowel diagrams using LaTeX
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2013 3:36 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Aug 02, 2013 at 10:13:25AM +0200, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> On 31 July 2013 16:31, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >
> > Actually I started with gb4e first, but ran into a limitation in
> > that it can't handle interlinears with more than 3
> > vertically-aligned lines, and it doesn't support interlinear
> > preambles.
> >
> >
> The first one is a hard limit, but I find it acceptable. Interlinears
> with more than 3 aligned lines are evil.
They may be evil, but sometimes necessary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss#Structure
The example given there has 4 aligned lines. In my conlang interlinears
sometimes I like giving IPA transcriptions on a separate aligned line as
well.
> As for interlinear preambles, gb4e handles them just fine: anything
> between \ex and \gll(l) will be treated as a preamble, no need for a
> special tag.
Fair enough.
> Personally, I find Expex simply too clever for its own good. It's too
> complicated and low-level (which it has to be, since it's TeX-based
> rather than LaTeX-based), and demands too much fiddling to get nice
> results. And then despite giving us nearly everything and the kitchen
> sink, it doesn't even handle more than one level of example embedding!
> What's up with that?
Really? Heh, I guess I never bothered to look so far. Why would you want
more than one nesting level for examples anyway? ;-) (OK OK, same reason
why I need more than 3 aligned lines in interlinears. :-P)
> Anyway, give me a nice LaTeX wrapper style around it and I might
> consider using it. But as it is it doesn't separate the semantic from
> the presentation issues enough.
I'm not sure I understand your point -- I use it as-is in my LaTeX
sources and it works just fine.
As for fiddling, that's done in the preamble, so shouldn't really matter
as far as the separation of semantic vs. presentation issues are
concerned.
> > I haven't tried referencing examples yet, but my main use case is
> > interlinears with more than 3 aligned lines.
> >
> >
> My only question here will be "why?". Even the Leipzig glossing rules
> never go further than 2 aligned lines. Too many aligned lines gets
> confusing.
[...]
True, but I often find myself wanting these lines:
- Unanalysed orthography
- IPA transcription
- Orthography segmented by morphemes -- may differ from surface
orthography due to phonological mutations in the latter
- Morphemic gloss
- Free translation (non-aligned)
I like the IPA line aligned so that it's easier to tell how the actual
sounds map to morphemes, since the third line doesn't have any
phonological transformations applied, just the bare morphemes, so
sometimes it's not so easy to tell how it's actually pronounced.
For Ebisédian I used to have another line for indicating morpheme
categories as well, though nowadays I'm lazy and just write (V), (N),
(ADJ), etc., in the morphemic gloss line.
T
--
One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the
internet is that they never crash in any significant way: the free
software underlying the internet is reliable to the point of
invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from the article "Giving it all away"
Messages in this topic (11)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3. OT Arabic question
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2013 6:07 pm ((PDT))
A certain woman with surname Abedin has been in the news lately over here; and
in Indonesia I knew a gentleman named Zainal Abidin. What does the word mean?
(Is it by chance the plural of abd- 'slave, servant'?). And while I'm at it,
what would Zain(-al) mean?
Messages in this topic (1)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> Your email settings:
Digest Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
