Constructed Languages - 2018-02-08 (page 1 of 2)

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1:45 AM

coi ro do

jan ali o, toki

if the site is supposed to focus on making languages, rather than languages already made, wouldn't they have called it "Constructing Languages"? :-Ъ

i think it's supposed to handle both.

yeah, I would think so too

brb

my own attempt at conlanging has been a complete failure so far, so I don't have any enlightening insight on that topic :-/

I had fun making a pile of locative prepositions and some Eo-type grammatical endings, and then fizzled out, lol.

oh, and pronouns too

i haven't gotten into creating languages (yet), but i'm very interested in tolkien's languages.

anyway, i have to go for now - have a good night!

1:59 AM

the pronoun system had the odd quirk of including first- and second-person "non-person" pronouns (for example "nes" means "we, who are not persons", lol), for which I invented weird "in-universe" explanations involving AI, but the real reason was that they fit in my tidy little table, and... I like tidy little tables XD

@heather good night!

2 hours later…

4:08 AM

I think the language-development tag should be for questions about how a conlang has developed through use over time, beyond the initial stage of definition by its creator. (Not all currently tagged questions fit that definition.) Does that sound like a good definition? Can anyone else think of a better tag name for that type of question?

And what about a tag "unnatural-features" for questions about designing conlang features with no parallels in natural languages?

4 hours later…

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7:41 AM

language-development is used for questions about creating a new tag, what you said is what the conlang-history is for. If you want to suggest a rename, you can ask for it on meta. However, both tags would require a rename then

It's private beta and all these tags have "beta" names

@curiousdannii

I think I should get the rep for review queues. It's needed here...

@Adarain I wish I could get rep as fast as you :P

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8:35 AM

Better description of what I mean is now posted as an answer for your question

2 hours later…

10:11 AM

Couldn't help it. I saw "gender" discussed above. There is a difference between gender and sex. In language, gender should be an anachronism by now.

Signed, opinionated.

Sex is what we're born with, like it or not. Words are invented, not a product of chromosomes.

. . .

More generally, any language that distinguishes between noun and adjective when describing a person disturbs me. I am not "a [noun]." I might be "[similar adjective]," among so many other attributes, but not simply that noun.

10:28 AM

For ridiculous instance, to make a point, i'm not even "a human." That is so stereotypical. But I am "humanoid" and love it. Nouns are so limiting. Signed linguistic editor.

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Is there some good software to design a language? So it would let me to design words and symbols affiliated to them

@humn while I personally don’t use it, gender is a pretty sensible description of noun class systems which do actually classify nouns into a masculine and a feminine class

@labela--gotoa , the universal language?

ie indo-european, afro-asiatic and dravidian for example

@Adarain , I know many of those languages and wish they'd tidy up.

10:32 AM

I just prefer using the more general noun class

eh, that’s a pretty opinionated statement

I don’t think this is the place to discuss it

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@humn ?

@humn I'm designing a language for my game and I would need some tools to easily design it's characters and words.

@labela--gotoa , what are the moves in the game?

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@humn What do you mean?

I'd make the words match the moves, somehow.

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@humn It's a language a single race uses

It's not used for the whole game

But I know what words I need, but I need symbols to represent them

and making them in Gimp requires much work

10:36 AM

Simple opinion: closer you stick to ASCII the safer.

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@humn No, I'm not gonna use Latin letters

Do you even understand the question?

Now i do.

The next simplest is phonetic alphabet, but i don't think that's what you want either.

How large is the lexicon?

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But I know what characters I want to use, I know what I do plan! I said that I'm searching for software that could let me easily design symbols the language uses.

.... now i really understand the question and don't know the answer ... sorry ...

I haven't designed fonts for decades.

Would you need the symbols in different sizes or just one specific size?

10:39 AM

so what is it you’re looking for exactly? a program for font design?

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kk

something like that

one specific size

if so, preliminary warning: font design is literally the hardest thing in conlanging

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I know

I wish there was a way to do that easier

Mostly the language does mostly depend on geometrical figures

Old school is Metafont.

Metafont is a description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into e.g. PostScript. Metafont was devised by Donald Knuth as a counterpart to his TeX typesetting system. One of the characteristics of Metafont is that all of the shapes of the glyphs are defined with geometrical equations. In particular, one can define a given point to be the intersection of a line segment and a Bézier cubic. == Mode of operation == Unlike more common outline font formats (such as TrueType o...

Q: are you deliberately conflating “language” and “script”?

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10:42 AM

oh. latex

LaTeX won’t help you making a font

Pre-LaTeX: TeX. I think Adobe still uses it.

I mean, you could make the symbols in TikZ, but like

why would you

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@Adarain IK, but Metafont is made by TeX author

TeX (, see below), stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system (or "formatting system") designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces, TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time. TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users. TeX is a popular means of typesetting...

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10:43 AM

> METAFONT, the font-making programming language by Donald E. Knuth, and incidentally for TeX

It's archaic, but a good lead.

Whatever Adobe does use nowadays is based on it.

I’ve not personally dabbled in font design, but I feel like there are modern programs that would help you more

I suspect the same.

Unless you want to infiltrate unicode, you're kinda on your own.

@humn unsure what you mean with that, unicode has private use areas for exactly this sorta stuff

! good to know !

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10:48 AM

I thought you know, since like 30% of Unicode characters is tagged "private use area"

@Adarain , thank you for the update.

and even if those are not enough, you can always just misuse the rest of the codepoints too. no one’s forcing you to make an A character at U+0041

it’ll just render as an A instead of a box when someone looks at your text without the font installed

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I even once created a font for a single programming language .-.

Your own programming language?

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yup

esoteric one, made for fun

10:53 AM

Me too. It was fun! I called it "recurve" for making fractals.

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Well, I didn't finish it because I hardly find time for anything, except browsing SE .-.

Side note, perhaps elsewhere: Programming languages certainly seem like "constructed languages."

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a bit so

but not at all

@humn I disagree, on the simple notion that they’re constructed to fulfill a different purpose

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there was a discussion about this in Area 51

10:55 AM

. . . guess I didn't read all the liner notes. Apologies . . .

a programming language is made to give instructions to a computer; a language is there for communication between humans (or, in a broader sense, sentient entities)

and I’d find it rather hard to talk about my day in C++

of course there is definitely a blurry line

but I’d say “a system created with the intent of facilitating communication” is a reasonable definition of a constructed language

(cue counterexamples)

s/facilitating/enabling

Cue vocal tone!

er…?

I understand most of what someone says to me, in any language, just based on vocal tone and gestures.

Written language is so different from that.

Most humans do not know how to write.

the jargon is intonation btw, tone has a specific meaning in linguistics that is distinct from what you are talking about

hence my confusion

tone refers to phonemic contrasts in pitch

e.g. what you find in mandarin

and not in english

11:00 AM

I interpret (almost) daily between Mandarin and Spanish speakers.

I'm immersed in those languages without knowing much of each.

But when someone feels alienated by another's language, it's time to step in.

I do like your distinction between intonation and tone, @Adarain.

not mine, that’s just linguistic terminology :P

Another word to throw in is prosody.

yea, prosody exists :P

But how to capture all that in text?!?!?!?!?

Classic Greek had musical accents over the vowels.

those represented tone

not intonation

11:05 AM

Do you publish? Want an editor?

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O.o

@humn pretty much not, but puncutation and emoji/emoticons do a decent job at conveying such stuff

at least to some extent

it’s still problematics, but humans make do

@humn nope, I’m an amateur. I just read a lot

^_-

I’m not even studying linguistics

I’m in physics

You've found an enjoyable balance!

I too.

11:08 AM

@humn You may also be interested in the phonology tag.

I did consider going into ling for a while and I feel like I could’ve done pretty well there too, but in the end I decided that I’d rather study something I can get a job in if academia doesn’t work out

and physics allows me to become a teacher, ling doesn’t

alien-alphabet seems pretty superfluous to me

why not just neography or writing-systems

>>>>>>>>>>> something's wrong with the site. It's not letting me log in or sign up <<<<<<<<<<<

go through the invite link again

@humn Use this link.

didn’t work otherwise for me either

11:11 AM

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmuch better!

I’m kinda annoyed that to edit tags you have to do a full post edit thingy, causing activity

I feel like that’s a flaw in SE’s system

can’t do much about it tho I guess

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there's no privilege to edit tags; eg. rename them?

idk, I can’t do it at least, but what I meant is like if a post has a tag you don’t approve of you have to edit the post

can’t just like, change the tags

Only moderators can rename tags.

oh yea about that, how are moderators determined?

11:14 AM

There will be a Constructed Languages Meta post asking for nominations.

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@Adarain In beta - by site admins; outside - by election

election by whom?

Then the Stack Overflow Inc. staff will choose usually three members of the community to serve as moderators pro-tempore.

who gets to vote?

@Adarain All people with 150 rep, after graduation.

11:15 AM

graduation to public beta or out of beta?

Out of beta.

and also, who are the current moderators?

Now that i've gotten to look at the above links, i conclude that you are a troublemaker in the best way, @Adarain. Glad to have met you!

@Adarain There are none yet on Constructed Languages.

There will be if we make it out of private beta.

@humn which links are you referring to?

11:17 AM

Especially neography.

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@Adarain About editing tags, even if it works via post edit, it works a bit like an independent action

@humn I remain confused :P what about it makes me a troublemaker? I’m just trying to somehow get some standardized terminology going

You can edit just what tags are on the post without using the entire edit thing at 1,000 reputation (during private beta).

(After we enter public beta it'll be 2,000.)

I see. time to get 1k rep then

(And after graduation, 10,000.)

11:19 AM

(Too true. I went crazy at Puzzling.SE just to see others' deleted posts again.)

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@Adarain btw, can you tell what magic trick you use to gain this much rep so fast? :P

I would like to know that as well

I just answered all the low hanging fruits early :P

I suppose you might also have managed to get here a day before me technically

there were some interesting questions within the first few hours and I was the first to get a decent answer in on those

11:21 AM

I feel like it's easy to max out the rep gain (It's only noon here and I'm already at 150 rep gained today

And, i must say, this seems like a very supportive site already!

I maxed out rep gain on the first day

but not on the second, and it’s not looking like it’s gonna happen today either

But maybe that's just because there are still relatively low hanging fruits

@Adarain , don't get hooked.

That just happened to fall within my areas of interest

11:23 AM

I also got 100 association bonus, but I have no idea how since this is the first SE I’ve used at all

maybe because I referred some people during commitment?

You have an A51 account, don't you?

yea

I also got that, and I didn't refer anyone

I spent years at SE before realiszing where i'd visited all those times.

So when you gain 200 reputation on a site, and you have an account on any other SE site, you'll get +100 to all accounts.

All new accounts will start out with 101 rep.

11:24 AM

huh, curious

The SE network has a lot of quirks.

I’m starting to notice

It takes a while to become familiar with all of them.

299

Q: What is the association bonus?

I was just awarded +100 reputation on all of my Stack Exchange accounts. What is this bonus for? It simply says "Association Bonus" on my reputation overview. Return to FAQ index

support faq bonus-reputation association

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@Adarain And btw, why did you actually copy my answer on meta? Your is almost identical in what you described

regarding the tags?

it’s not quite the same, I can delete the answer if you think it’s superfluous, see also my comment on your answer

11:26 AM

Unsolicited opinion: the best questions belong both on-site and on-meta.

anyway, lunch is ready, I’ll be back

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@Adarain fine, but could you help me out there? OP downvoted my answer for no actual reason and argue in a way like he didn't read the answer

I’ll look at it after lunch

Let it digest, @Adarain! (That's an endearment.)

@labela--gotoa , what was the post? Let gapemouths chime in.

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@humn conlang.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/47

11:32 AM

OWOW! The main site seems nutritious but the meta site looks brutal!

Ain't this supposed to be about "constructed" languages rather than "destroyed"?

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haha

(Sense of humr helps)

But if you want DestroyedLanguages.SE, recruit me. I've destroyed Suomi/Finnish, just for starters, then English, then a bunch of programming languages, then music theory, and probably not yet done.

@labela--gotoa Don't slander me please.

Also NEVER on any site in the SE network, accuse anyone of downvoting anyone, unless they admit to it. Votes are private for good reason. That's faux pa number one on Stack Exchange.

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fine

maybe i didn't behave well, but I think you too should fix it

I read your answer. I understood it. I disagreed with parts of it. I thought parts of it were badly argued.

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11:41 AM

Also, chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/72865

> @curiousdannii Everything was discussed on the chat and everybody agreed on this, we didn't started a meta discussion, because there were no reason to. We would rename the tags but we can't. Why do you downvote, when renaming the tags would solve the problem

Chat is not where such decisions get made.

Or rather, chat is no substitute for meta.

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Please, there is a separate chat for this discussion

@labela--gotoa There's no need for a separate one. You're already discussing it here anyway.

(Yes, please do it here!)

Chat is good for quick discussions and getting quick action, but it's not where you get consensus of the community.

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11:43 AM

@curiousdannii No, I'm not. Please, don't flood this room, when there is another one for it

It's also where you get bubbles out of pressure.

Okay... can we please calm down now?

curiousdannii is correct that chat is not a substitution for meta.

@Mithrandir I'm calm enough, just trying to catch up on all the decisions I missed ;)

Site decisions - such as tags - do belong on Constructed Languages Meta. Chat can be used to discuss it, but it's not where policies are made.

Before putting any policies into place, it should go through meta.

@labela--gotoa For the record, I did downvote your answer, because you said this:

> You can't change what they are for.

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11:46 AM

They were already set a purpose and tagged answers had the correct tags. When a "direction" for a tag is set, it shouldn't be changed, right?

I started a Meta discussion so that we could sort out what these tags are for. From my perspective I wasn't changing anything, because they didn't mean anything yet.

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Okay, okay..

@labela--gotoa You certainly can change what a tag is used for.

@labela--gotoa No, there was no clear purpose, because there was neither tag wikis, nor Meta discussions. And there were only like 3-4 questions on the tag, so it's really hard to discern from those questions what it means

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@Mithrandir But changing the purpose of tag is not a good way when it's already used for something that is used. It's like somebody said that StackOverflow PHP tag now belongs to another programming language.

11:48 AM

No, that's a flawed analogy.

This early in the beta, nothing has a definite purpose.

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@curiousdannii But I think that tags are already settled down and the thing wrong with them is only the name

@Mithrandir It has - define, shape the site

If we started using laadan for klingon questions, that'd be an issue, yes.

@labela--gotoa You can certainly summarise on Meta any prior chat discussions you had (this would be very helpful!), but it's far too early to say they're settled.

But changing the scope of a tag that isn't that clear? That's not an issue.

Another unsolicited opinion: This is a supernova. Gold is being fused.

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11:50 AM

@Mithrandir the tag would have to be erased and created from nothing...?

No, we would just have to do some retagging.

@Mithrandir And only 3-4 questions max

And remember: chat discussions do not define policy.

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But I think, as said in the meta, that tags are correct. I don't think there are needed any new/changed tags. Names aren't so wrong too, but as we seen, they produce various misunderstands

The luck we have that's easy to reshape everything, since it's yet private beta

@labela--gotoa What does you mean for a tag to be "correct" if you think that it needs to be renamed?

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11:52 AM

@curiousdannii We have the correct tags defined. A tag isn't defined only by the name

You mean that you have a usage of a tag that you think makes a useful distinction between different types of questions, but you don't think that the tag that is being used in that useful way is named the right thing?

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i think you got it

@Mithrandir the main problem with language-development is that its name is ambiguous

2

What a meta-meta-constructed-language question: What to name a new tag?

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right

11:54 AM

which makes it not that great

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and my answer wanted to propose a change in name

Question categories exist regardless of tags, so that does make sense. But what could you mean by me "changing" a tag then? I'm not proposing changing any question categories.

it’s been used for questions on how to create a language, but it’s also been interpreted differently by other users

so I’d personally advocate for using a different tag for such questions

language-creation or conlang-creation or lang-creation have been suggested

it’s less ambiguous than development, which could also refer to stuff like language change

Personally, I prefer language-development, but its usage needs to be determined by a meta discussion.

@Adarain I think all three would be clear and adequate. My preference would be in that order.

11:57 AM

Same here, again unasked, with Mithrandir's in second place. "conlang" and "lang" are too inside for incomers.

@Mithrandir lang-development does have the advantage that it would more naturally include stages other than the initial creation of a conlang, but I agree with Adarain that it's probably too confusing

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in my answer I wanted to explain what each tags are currently used for in questions, not by what I think, but what it is.

personally I don’t really care what the tags are called, as long as there is a tag that is used to mark questions asking for help on creating a language, because that is where I can help out

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same, mostly

if it’s going to be language-development then I’d just like to make sure it’s actually used that way

and not to ask questions about how tolkien created sindarin

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Feb '188

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