Wasabi

From Langmaker

Conlang	Wasabi
Author	Mari Bandoma, Deise Benitez, Allison Buckley, Pablo Cabrera, Marc Callado, Patrick Chan, Charles Chang, Sarah Choi, Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich, Julie Gutierrez, Norma Guzman, Helen Khlystova, Jason Lin, Tom Nosewicz, Miriam Ochoa, David J. Peterson, Chris Ramiro, Michael Rivera, Adam Simpson, Amy Soong
Year Began	2002
Language Type	jargon
Lexicon Size	300
Etymologies	No
Grammar	No
Sample Texts	No
Primer	No

Wasabi, a jargon, was developed by Mari Bandoma, Deise Benítez, Allison Buckley, Pablo Cabrera, Marc Callado, Patrick Chan, Charles Chang, Sarah Choi, Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich, Julie Gutiérrez, Norma Guzmán, Helen Khlystova, Jason Lin, Tom Nosewicz, Miriam Ochoa, David J. Peterson, Chris Ramiro, Michael Rivera, Adam Simpson, Amy Soong. It has been used for a translation of the Babel Text.

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Language sources

The phonology was minimalist, and based on what I thought would provide the least phonological ambiguity. (The phonology was: a, i, u, p, t, k, m, n, l, s). I based the word-forms themselves on: (a) my wordlist from an earlier experiment of this nature; (b) a few words from a couple of my languages; (c) Hawaiian, or other natural languages I thought no one would know; and (d) whatever I felt like. As I said before, there was no grammar I imposed, so the only influence was the language knowledge each student brought to the experiment (mostly English, and L2 knowledge of various Indo-European languages, with one or two L1 Spanish, Tagalog, Korean and Chinese speakers).

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Design principles

Again, no design principles.

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Interest of others

I intended to make this class into a senior thesis, and to get that thesis published in a linguistics journal. Unfortunately, the experiment didn't go as planned, and a uniform spoken language didn't evolve. I'm to blame for this, as I assigned too many at-home, individual writing assignments, and didn't emphasize speaking enough.

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