m. c. de marco

I’ve been working on my constructed language recently, so it’s about time to post this link from the livejournal conlangs community. But for a better list of references I recommend wikipedia, especially Essays on Language Design.

Today I picked up some books I saw recommended while I was searching the new conlang list archive. The Unfolding of Language is a fascinating, well-written book about language change aimed at the general language-changing public. Historical Linguistics has the nitty-gritty of sound change laws and the like, with plenty of examples.

Here’s a Lorem Ipsum generator that does Quenya, Esperanto, and various non-constructed languages as well.

In the quest for elf names that led me to Quenya, I also discovered a vertical tengwar of Tolkien’s that I’d never heard of: Sarati. Writing the following Quenya pseudo-text in Sarati is left as an exercise for the reader:

Via LangMaker: #16 on the Top 200 Conlang Countdown is Pig Elvish. Hécccó útoen héten Igpën Lvïshéth ránslátórtë!

Via Slashdot: In Learning a Language in the Digital Age, UmmRa reviews several flashcard programs:

For the money, features, or whateverthehell™ else you take into account, iFlash is the best language program out there. Sorry Windows users, this one is only available for Macs. Not only does it support a sizable (and free!) library of user-inputted decks, but you can also add image and audio files to your cards. The ease of use and organization here are superb.

Needless to say, you can make flashcard libraries for your conlangs, too.

Suzette Haden Elgin lists nine steps to a usable language.

I’ve been learning Metafont from Christophe Grandsire’s Metafont Tutorial, in order to make a font for my conscript. It was going pretty well, except that I couldn’t display the dvi proofs; I had to convert them all to PDFs instead.

Tonight I found a clue in the MacOSX-TeX mailing list archives and came up with a final solution to metafont problems: