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Another Web Page Becomes Solid Pages
May. 20th, 2010 08:20 pmWow! Look what came riding in on the mail truck today!
That’s right, dudes: Mark Rosenfelder’s mighty work, The Language Construction Kit, has climbed out of the internet and onto my coffee table!
I have a real soft spot for the Language Construction Kit. I won’t say it was my first exposure to conlanging—like so many nerdlets, I started doing it myself, long before I discovered that there was a word for it.* However, the Kit came soon after that to provide me with structure, a deeper understanding of what the hell I was doing and how to accomplish it, and some really nifty ideas.** I still go back to it when I need a boost on some point or other of a language.
So hell yeah, I will temporarily break my Amazon ban and shell out fifteen bucks for this thing. After years of fun, I have to show my appreciation somehow.
The book is good, too! Fleshed out, as promised, clear, concise, and filled with a few terribly amusing typos. (My favorite is when he left the t out of native English speaker and Autocorrect apparently decided to help him out. Frankly, naïve English speaker works pretty well, too.) I am going to suggest we get it for the Liberry. They will look at me the same way you are looking at me now.
I don’t care! This book has word lists, dammit! WORD LISTS. How can you resist WORD LISTS?
*I think I got hooked on linguistics in Spanish class, but I also want to give some credit for my descent into madness to the excellent Who Talks Funny: A Book About Languages for Kids by Brenda S Cox. It pretty much outlines all sorts of cool features of other languages, and totally blew my wee little mind at the variety of languages out there.
**For example, how to be more efficient about making words. The first time I decided to make a full conlang, I distinctly recall putting together a bit of a syntax and morphology, then sitting down with a notebook and a dictionary and quite simply starting with the A’s. Somewhere I think I still have that stupid notebook, which details how to say such core vocabulary words as “abandon,” “abyss,” “acrobat” …
That’s right, dudes: Mark Rosenfelder’s mighty work, The Language Construction Kit, has climbed out of the internet and onto my coffee table!
I have a real soft spot for the Language Construction Kit. I won’t say it was my first exposure to conlanging—like so many nerdlets, I started doing it myself, long before I discovered that there was a word for it.* However, the Kit came soon after that to provide me with structure, a deeper understanding of what the hell I was doing and how to accomplish it, and some really nifty ideas.** I still go back to it when I need a boost on some point or other of a language.
So hell yeah, I will temporarily break my Amazon ban and shell out fifteen bucks for this thing. After years of fun, I have to show my appreciation somehow.
The book is good, too! Fleshed out, as promised, clear, concise, and filled with a few terribly amusing typos. (My favorite is when he left the t out of native English speaker and Autocorrect apparently decided to help him out. Frankly, naïve English speaker works pretty well, too.) I am going to suggest we get it for the Liberry. They will look at me the same way you are looking at me now.
I don’t care! This book has word lists, dammit! WORD LISTS. How can you resist WORD LISTS?
*I think I got hooked on linguistics in Spanish class, but I also want to give some credit for my descent into madness to the excellent Who Talks Funny: A Book About Languages for Kids by Brenda S Cox. It pretty much outlines all sorts of cool features of other languages, and totally blew my wee little mind at the variety of languages out there.
**For example, how to be more efficient about making words. The first time I decided to make a full conlang, I distinctly recall putting together a bit of a syntax and morphology, then sitting down with a notebook and a dictionary and quite simply starting with the A’s. Somewhere I think I still have that stupid notebook, which details how to say such core vocabulary words as “abandon,” “abyss,” “acrobat” …
