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I've been programming my heart out at
work this month and haven't had much time for langmaking fun,
or for updating this site. I have been following the Auxlang
mailing list though. Inspired by recent criticisms of Esperanto
on it (people don't like the -ino feminine ending, don't
like the accusative case, don't like the table of correlatives,
don't like the alphabet, think with some changes it would be great...),
I wrote the following and posted it to the list. Not a word. Not
a peep. Maybe it's really bad. But in the hope that its not (you
can tell
me if it's lousy!), I post it here. (For any of you outside
the reach of American music in this otherwise radiowave-saturated
world, it's sung to the tune "Desperado,"
by The Eagles.)
For the record I'm teaching
myself Esperanto and like it, but I'll poke fun at anything.
Desperanto
(with apologies to The Eagles)
Esperanto, why don't you come to your senses,
Your simplified tenses aren't enough anyhow,
Oh you're a hard one, but I know that you've got your reasons,
The cases that were pleasin' you, accuse you now
Don't you call the queen reg^ino boy, she'll king you if she's
able
You know what kind of queen wants a name that ends in -o
Now it seems to me extreme things have been set out in that table,
You should corral your silly schemes, you know
Esperanto, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger,
You age and you hunger, and you're all but unknown,
And English, oh English, well that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
Don't your circumflex now circumscribe
The speed we type and the speed we write,
It's hard to circumcise it either way,
And you're writin' X or H or gripes,
Ain't it ASCII you were plannin' for, I say?
Esperanto, why don't you come to your senses,
Stop manning those fences- open the gate
You may be failing, but there's ways to rearrange you
You'd better let somebody change you,
Let somebody change you
You'd better let somebody change you,
Before it's too late...
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Teach Yourself Esperanto
Desperado
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| Paul Bartlett |
Paul Bartlett has
been a tireless documenter of past IAL
projects. He carefully typed and formatted The Master Language,
by Stephen Chase Houghton,
a language proposal published in 1907, and he has kindly given me
permission to include his documentation of this language here.
Magistri Linguio (its own name within its vocabulary, yet ironically
never called this in its proposal) is based on Latin, which of course
for a long time was in fact the international
auxiliary language of Western civilization. The language uses a
modified Latin vocabulary with English word order in place of the
Latin declensional system. Houghton did not actually develop a dictionary,
instead specifying how existing Latin words would be transformed
to their Magistri Linguio forms. An interesting project for someone
would be to actually adapt the Latin
lexicon to provide a dictionary for the language.
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| Padraic
Brown |
Thought-provoking quote on CONLANG: "Conlanging on the whole
is fairly subversive... Second-rate poets and fourth-rate guitar
strummers performing in hole-in-the-wall bars, starving artists,
raving rock stars, self-centered Holywood movie stars: they're all
part of the romance of Art. But where do we fit in? We're the ones
that scrape the paint off the canvas, pick apart all the threads
and then weave it back again as an afghan; we take meticulous measurements
of a guitar, then turn it all around by making the body out of metal
and the strings of wood, and then end up drilling some holes and
playing it like a flute; we write out on papers how a poet can put
together words, the sounds he can use, crafting conventions of prosody
and maybe some notes on the culture that speaks these words, but
rarely if ever actually write a poem." - Padraic Brown, "Re:
conlanging, the ultimate feminist subversion", CONLANG, 7/31/99.
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