Chris Sandow has compiled a lexicon for Folkspraak, drawing from past postings to the mailing list for Folkspraak. Thanks, Chris!
 

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...

National Public Radio's All Things Considered yesterday talked about a controversial proposal at the current International Botanic Congress to reclassify half of all plants and rename many of them, as new genetic research has provided better insights into the interrelationships of plant life. It is a rare opportunity for botanists to be language modelers. Proposals ranged from having a unified naming scheme that unites the Linnean model with the new genetic model (disliked by traditionalists because of the need to change some names) to having two separate systems of nomenclature (disliked by the geneticists, who would like to see the names reflect the new view of reality). [See The Tree of Life as well.] Comments

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.

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.

Oz (Elam, Charles Milton) - philosophical language - 1932
Paul Bartlett writes in with some information on Oz, which has nothing to do with L. Frank Baum's magical land. Like Ro, Oz is an a priori philosophical language, with a vocabulary derived not from natural languages but from a classification structure. The vocabulary was to be based on Roget's Thesaurus, but does not seem to have been worked out in its entirety. See Roxhai for an independent attempt at this type of language design.