This week The Onion writes, "According to a report released Monday by the Modern Language Association, speakers of the Star Trek-based Klingon language outnumber individuals fluent in Navajo by a margin of more than seven-to-one." Don't believe everything you read. The Onion is a funny, political incorrect publication. :-) But if you're curious... The Onion says there are 7,000 Klingon speakers and 1,000 Navajo speakers. In fact, "North American languages with the largest numbers of speakers include Navajo (100,000), Cree (70,000), Inuit (75,000), Ojibwa (50,000), Central Alaskan Yup'ik (20,000), Sioux (20,000), Creek (18,000), Tohono O'odham (15,000), and Choctaw (11,000). All of these languages are in danger of disappearing. Today the majority of North American languages are spoken primarily by elderly people, in some cases by no more than a handful." Source: Encarta, "Native American Languages". Sobering stuff. According to the Klingon Language Institute, about 1,600 people have been members at different times but only dozens are fluent speakers. So Navajo speakers outnumber Klingon speakers perhaps 500 to one. Comments

Karl Jahn asks, "What's your source for the statistic of 40,000 people who've invented their own languages? That's pretty amazing." It's a fact wrapped in an assumption wrapped in a guess. Fact: 4 million people in the United States are avocational writers. Assumption: 1% of them have invented their own languages. Guess: 40,000 people in the U.S. have done it. Keep in mind most model languages might have had just dozens of words and little grammar or text. I also looked at data on the number of role-playing gamers, the number of copies of Tolkien books sold in the U.S., and the popularity of Klingon, so I am as comfortable with my estimate as possible, given so little data. I would love to someday do a statistically valid random sample of the U.S. population to come up with an accurate estimate, but I can't afford it. Comments

Odonien (Oostrom, Steve) - fictional language - 1981
Odonien is the language spoken by the Odonans, an alien race introduced by the author in his Star Trek fan fiction. When creating the language, he intentionally violated as many language universals as possible in order to produce a more alien language. Odonien was designed as an OSV language, and does not use prepositions or postpositions. Instead, it divides all nouns into adjuncts to nouns and verbs, and uses case particles to indicate the relationships. The aim of Odonien is to make sentences as succinct as possible. The language has a unique script, a primer and approximately a thousand words. Comments

Richard Adams' Watership Down is one of the classic works of xenofiction, placed as it is among and between the warrens of rabbits in the English countryside. Lapine, the language he sketches for his rabbits, is arguably the best naming language ever created, and is a minimalist virtuoso performance, a haiku of a language compared to the sonnet of Sindarin. It's amazing how much can be accomplished with how little, which is why I was inspired to document it here. Lapine went a long way towards establishing the verisimilitude of the rabbits' culture and in the process making Watership Down a bestseller. Comments

Artlangers rejoice! Duncan Duchov has prepared a Latin LEX file that can be used with LangMaker/Win so that artlangers can generate their own Romance languages. Don't want to use LangMaker/Win? You can use the HTML version of the lexicon. Want suggestions on how to begin creating a Romance lexicon? See his introduction to the lexicon. Comments

Helge Fauskanger writes on Tolklang, "I uploaded a revised version of the article about Ilkorin, with etymological comments added to every word in the wordlist. If we don't count ancestral, 'unattested' primitive forms, this means that all the Ardalambion wordlists primarily based on the Etymologies - the wordlists for Telerin, Nandorin, Doriathrin, Old Sindarin and Ilkorin - are now fully annotated. As far as I know, this is the first detailed analysis of the minor Elvish languages ever published. Printouts of the articles in question would run to more than 250 pages. If anyone wants to deny that this is a detailed commentary, please go ahead. I would be amused. My next priority will be to rewrite the Sindarin article." Without a doubt, Fauskanger has contributed the most important analyses of Tolkien's languages yet published, and I am thankful that he has made them available for free. I can imagine how much time and energy he has put into them. Comments

Duncan Duchov writes in with a tip for LangMaker/Win. "Hello! I was receiving the 'Subscript out of range' message, but it has been working almost perfectly since I downloaded your updated .exe. Thanks for the hard work! It's a fantastic program. So maybe in return I can help. This might save other users a lot of time. When you try to load LEX files without LangMaker/Win, they are opened into an Excel spreadsheet. This was good in the respect that I was able to work on the LEX files even when I couldn't get your program to work, but bad because - once they are associated with Excel - LangMaker will no longer open them. Therefore, I once thought that all the work that I had done would have to be redone, and all of the words would need to be retyped in order to perform the mutations, and so forth. Fortunately, I found that if you save the LEX file in a TXT file, LangMaker should open it. The only bad part is that your generating and transforming guidelines are gone. Well, you win some, you lose some. Anyway - maybe there are people out there who can benefit from this information. And for making LangMaker, and making it free - thanks again!" You're welcome. LangMaker/Win supports Excel 4.0 format, and if you save your spreadsheet back to that format, its directly openable in LangMaker - Excel doesn't preserve the linguistic guidelines, since they're quite meaningless in the context of a spreadsheet. A version 1.12 is also in the works, fixing a few problems others have experienced. Comments

I was frustrated while working on naming animals for a new model language of mine, as the dictionary just didn't provide enough detail about the interrelationships of different species. Knowing that fellow langmaker Herman Miller is fascinated with naming animals in his languages, I wrote and asked him for a good link. He sent me a link to The Tree of Life, which was exactly what I needed. I had wanted to come up with a Ro- or Roxhai-like classificational system for animal names, but the length of the branches on the tree convinced me otherwise. Check out The Tree of Life! Comments

Next week Carnegie Mellon scientists will demonstrate spontaneous speech-to-speech translation in six languages in an international video conference. It's one small step for a tran, one small step forward to a Universal Translator. Esperantists and other IAL lovers needn't panic yet: it's a closed vocabulary (travel related) and for only six languages (the world, let alone the universe, has over a thousand languages with 10,000 or more speakers). Comments

Elijah Wood will play Frodo Baggins in New Line Cinema’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings (their web site is pretentiously shallow but pretty). Peter Jackson will direct the $130 million trilogy, with the three films being shot back to back. Current estimates are that the films will be released as a Christmas-summer-Christmas event series starting in 2000. Xenite.org reports among other rumors that a language professor in New Zealand (where the movies are being filmed) apparently offered to assist with the Elvish languages. Wish I lived in New Zealand. Comments

Teonaht (Caves, Sally) - fictional language - 1962
Sally Caves gave us a great interview about Teonaht, a language we long ago should have listed. You won't find a personal language being actively developed that is as deep and rich as Teonaht. Much is unique about it, from its word order to its verbal system to its affixing. The author's studying of Spanish, French, German, Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Welsh, Old Irish, Latin, Basque, Hebrew and Greek have all contributed to Teonaht. Her web site for the language boasts original artwork, a dictionary (listing at 500 perhaps a quarter of extant words), grammar, sample texts, unique script (heavily Cyrillic) and a primer. Comments

Chris Burd writes in about Interlingua/Latino Sine Flexione, saying "Jay Bowkes maintains a site on Interlingua/LsF. It's an excellent piece of work; among other things, he's HTML'd most of an early 1930s grammar." Comments