Hallo conlangers!

On Friday 03 August 2012 09:26:02 R A Brown wrote:

> On 02/08/2012 17:50, And Rosta wrote:
> > R A Brown, On 25/07/2012 17:57:
> >> I notice that And correctly referred to Livagian being
> >> 
> >>  publicated in 1991, not published.
> > 
> > Actually I said "It is a conlang that has been much
> > mentioned on Conlang (almost always by me, of course) but
> > never publicated",
> 
> OOPS! That'll reach me to check the original and not rely on
> memory alone.

Right, Livagian has been mentioned often but never fully
publicated, let alone published.
 
> > meaning that even if you distinguish between formal
> > publication (publishing) on the one hand and merely
> > making something available to the public (publicating)
> > on the other hand, Livagian does not even satisfy the
> > laxer criteria.
> 
> Tho a couple of sample in Conlang relays did subsequently
> appear - but they were later than the 1991 quoted by Arika
> Okrent.

Yes.  And they look so different from each other (as far as
I remember them) that at least one major revision must have
happened in between.
 
> By her own admission the criteria for including pre-Internet
> conlangs is stricter than that of Internet conlangs.  But
> even so, i think it is fairly from other mails in this
> thread that there are some bizarre omissions as well as
> inclusions in both categories of conlangs.

Sure.  But at least, she gives some mention of the Internet
conlang community - which is blissfully ignored in many books
on artificial languages (though, of course, many of the books
I have read were written before our community emerged and
therefore could hardly cover it).

One of my back burner projects is a small book (in German)
about conlangs, which will cover all sorts of conlangs
- auxlangs, artlangs, engelangs, both published and online.
Of course, it won't treat every conlang I know but merely
a few selected examples of each category.  (But don't hold
your breath for that book: I have other projects which are
higher in priority!)

> >> There are some fine Conlangs published on the web
> >> which do not get mentioned; I just give two above
> > 
> > I too am fond of Liva and Kinya and their authors (tho I
> > 
> >  wonder if that's partly a consequence of my having
> > 
> > encountered them at a time when conlangs were rare enough
> > that I had time to study each new conlang I
> > encountered).
> 
> Maybe - but I think what attracted me most to Liva (which,
> for those who don't know it, is a loglang) was its
> phonology.  As many know, that is possibly the aspect of
> language I find most interesting.  Claudio has a eight-fold
> vowel system, reminiscent of Turkish, which he arranged in
> two ranks of four: four high vowels and four low vowels.  He
> follows this grouping of four through his series of
> consonants: voiced plosives, unvoiced plosives, nasals,
> laterals, voiced fricatives, unvoiced fricatives.
> 
> Thus he has a matrix of 8 x 4 = 32 phonemes.

Which is just asking for being written in a Tengwar-like
featural script!

>       But revisiting
> this, I'm not so happy about his 'laterals'.  The IPA chart
> gives symbols for his dental/alveolar, palatal and velar
> laterals, the spaces for labial (and labiodental) lateral is
> blanked out, meaning the sound is not humanly possible.
> Claudio described his 'labial lateral' thus: "[the sound] is
> obtained by putting the tongue tip between the lips and
> pronouncing a sort of 'L'."

An elegant, symmetric system that fails at the limits of the
human articulatory tract.  There is no way fixing that - you
have to choose one of the following three:

1. Include an abstract "phoneme" that nobody can pronounce.
2. Break the symmetry by filling in a phoneme that doesn't
   really fit its place in the grid.
3. Leave a gap in the grid (which also breaks the symmetry).

Such problems tend to crop up in conlangs which try to be more
regular than practical.
 
> His phonotactics were interesting - but I won't go into them
> here, except to say that they meant that "a string of
> phonemes is completely parsable both in written and spoken
> speech.  Blank spaces or pauses thus are not necessary, and
> words can be written as a continuous string."  But he did
> add: "Nevertheless, bland spaces are okay as a visual help."

I.e., a self-segregating morphology?  As much as those beasts
are out of place in naturalistic languages, in a loglang it
absolutely makes sense!
 
> It is the sort of thing I have attempted in BrSc and its
> various descendants.  Also I have long adopted, and quite
> independently, the same principle as Claudio: "There are two
> main word classes: semantic words and syntactic words ....
> Semantic words are not distinguished as nouns, verbs,
> adjectives, etc."

All of which, of course, are predicate words which means that
there is good reason to treat them alike in a loglang.  I do
treat them alike in Quetch (though I don't claim that Quetch
was a loglang).  In Quetch, "semantic words" are consonants
and "syntactic words" are vowels, which I hope is a halfways
practical way of implementing a speedtalk.
 
> As for Kinya, I find this language even more attractive. For
> those who do not know it, Kinya is an artlang with its
> fictional speakers, con-history etc. such that it could
> belong to the League of Lost Languages (it does not, because
> the LLL did not exist when Maurizio Gavioli created the
> language.

Is it naturalistic?  I expect such a fictional language to be
naturalistic, and dislike engelanginess and cookie-cutter
regularity in such languages.
 
> I like the detail that Maurizio spent on describing the
> language. It also had vowel harmony, which is a feature I've
> always liked.  Indeed, some may remember that it featured in
> early versions of BrSc.
> 
> Once again we find "[a] major peculiarity of Kinya is its
> lack of any morphological distinction between categories
> like verbs, substantive or adjective."  However, the
> language does have inflexions and the grammar is original
> and described in some detail.  I particularly liked his
> attention to metrics, which so few conlangers seem to bother
> about.

Yes, such finesses are rarely treated in conlang grammars,
even in most of the more extensive ones.
 
> On researching further, I find that Kinya was around at
> least by 1996.
> 
> >> (tho sadly I find that the Kinya site is no longer
> >> maintained)
> > 
> > I think a pdf with built-in permission to recirculate is
> > 
> >  better than webpages, for this sort of reason.
> 
> Yes - I ordinary text copy of Maurizio's description of the
> language which I could easily put into pdf format and post
> on my website.  I'll try to contact Maurizio, as IMO not
> having a version of Kinya available on the web is a great loss.

If I ever saw it, I don't remember it - I only know that there
was a conlang named Kinya, but know nothing about it.  But it
is still being mentioned now and then, which makes me curious!

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