Uptalk

  I think I previously discussed my idea for an ASL/English/partial relex. I stumbled on some information for English's discourse intonation patterns since then and I have also thought about the general prosodic patterns, and I think I have an answer. Like many things, it's synergy
  English's uptalk pattern is interesting and somewhat novel and alien. I have thought about it before, but it seems ideal here after all, not just as a joke.
  The thing about uptalk, is how it is so full of filler and unusual rhetorical tricks. Vocal fry goes hand in hand. Someone said it sounds really aggressive and I would agree. It is ideal for a conlang because people revel in it, who use it, and it's empowering, and it holds the floor wonderfully. It's not some wimpy speech thing, it's demanding and pushy. When that's coupled with language learners demanding to be given the floor and hold it, it is both obnoxious and charming.
  The pacing is especially useful, because the rate of speech of someone talking is rather slow, often, and not that diversified. Using filler words like "thing(y)" and "stuff" is great for learners too. Uptalk and slang are where I would rather be, and I think they represent the turning of 2000 years of argument centering around explicit logical form and argumentation. Now it's back to informality and tribalism.
  Uptalk reminds me of questioning speech that invites the listener in, but also the continuation pattern in English, like in French at the end of prosodic words (coincidence?)--meaning it might seem like an invitation, but it's possibly just the speaker stalling for time, like a tag "um" or "y'know".

Intonational collocations, tropes & memes

  Hi all!
I'm trying to do more with the wiki again. It's just there's so much material. Do I start with Bolinger? Where do I start with the wiki? I wish I could get some sense of the overall structure. I think I will have to begin with ToBI's structure anyways. Arnold's notation is somewhat convenient but it isn't as interesting as it should be. Bolinger has 3 basic structures but lots of micro prosodic variation that doesn't show up again 'til we get back to IVIE or RAP e.g. pitch shifting.
  It's hard to get to a critical mass. I want to get enough going that other people can run with it and see it develop a life of its own...but other people won't do your work for you. I'm also concerned about making sure I don't borrow too much in fair use. Fortunately most of the ideas are easy to extend.
  What can other people do? A lot actually. Intonation should be intuitive; lots of people remember movie lines and can come up with more examples pretty easily when they hear one example. For instance listening to the 3rd column (HL%) here it is pretty easy to tell that the overall theme sounds very much like boredom or exasperation/irritation. It's not much stretch to hear a little kid saying some of those things, e.g. Ralphie from "A Christmas Story" or some of the sassy girls from "Mean Girls"; and from there to produce a specific quote someone can find via youtube or by renting a movie.
 Another concern is easily loading and hosting audio files from my device. SoundHost doesn't cut it because they want to play all the sounds in your album instead of just one at a time.
  I've found a very good book called "Prosody & Meaning" which has a fantastic article about lexicalization of pitch contours. As it turns out, they're essentially memes. This changes a lot of things, if micro prosodic variation is really so shifty. It means there's likely to be no underlying structure, and the rest is fashion. But, the authors point out that the same system that operates on focus and topicalization phenomena operates on the discourse functions, which include back channel responses, tags, etc. Which means that, very frequently, structures reappear just because without much meaning. They give the example of "meatball" and "school" showing up often with stereotyped patterns.
  They discuss other things like upstep and how it probably belongs in ToBI, and how pitch scaling may or may not matter. Other articles discuss how well-formed and discrete categories in intonation actually are. Turns out, not very. They're very slippery, and in fact TOBI categories appear to bleed into each other. Hence the usefulness of a exemplar-based theory of lexicalization, where lexemes come with a few available patterns. It also makes me wonder whether its worthwhile having a theory only so far as it helps organize the data. Too bad the data is so thorny, otherwise we might already have a TVtropes-styled wiki...Oh wait, I made one (it's just not useful yet.)
  Cheers!
 

Intonation of English

  I should just change this blog's title to English Intonation.
  I've been reading things written in ToBI and it's hard. There just aren't great pedagogical resources for learning ToBI. The MIT course, this chart, etc.
  This article in the recently published 'Prosody & Meaning' is impressive in that it establishes the existence of a variety of lexico-accentual collocations (aka tropes) in the English vocabulary. This is significant; it means that intonational theory doesn't have to focus on abstract examples as much as exemplars, which tend to have very specific meaning tied to them. This is an approach to grammar I really do enjoy, and you see it pop up in conlangs sometimes e.g. Kalusa. They also point out that the accents, besides being prominent in terms of discourse functions, also recur in ordinary words; Calhoun, the author, points out that 'meatball' and 'government' have very particular and common contours that don't seem to have a discourse function; that's just how they're most often said. This is a fantastic insight, & it has all kinds of implications for learning languages. They didn't get too much into boundary tones (not at all in fact); they also pointed out various trouble spots with regards to ToBI analyses (e.g. speakers' ranges effecting perception of local maxima, upstep's neglect). The greatest boon was listing the tables of profiles & the words that fit into them. I think using the list could help make a writer more accessible, and I'm going to see if I can't get this kind of thing into TVTropes. These clever turns of speech are just too much to ignore; and though I think speech gets short shrift on TVT, I think this may be a chance to really improve that.
  I'm also looking into making a comic but I don't think I have the time or the will. I also don't have a story right now that isn't one of those "Gee whiz! Why don't I..."-derivative things. I think something is cool until I get down to it and I realize I don't feel strongly about it--or even writing, for that matter.
  I was looking into 3D software anyway and I realized there are a lot of mediocre webcomics that use CG. I think it's because they never spend more than 15 minutes on the visuals or the plot; perhaps too, CG is too demanding and they get roped into designing too much background. The characters are also unattractive.  Not too mention, emotionless. Unremarkable. The camera focus is usually in need of a lot tweaking. CG is one of those things where I feel like there should be several drafts and therefore several people involved telling you what looks bad, at least. It shouldn't be too hard to do those drafts on the other hand though. If there's one thing about CG, it's that no-one appreciates how much really work actually goes into it. No-work comics with stick-figure art usually at least have punch lines though, and most CG comics are serious rather than humorous. The thing about both bad stick art and mediocre CG is that they're both really consistently something on one level (for stick art, it's its inconsistency) while for CG it's consistent but it's consistently not what it's supposed to be representing.
  Hey, there isn't any reason why a very mixed style a la Klimt shouldn't work. Or Sealab.

Gregg Shorthand, learning

  I was preparing a version of this already, but I didn't like it. I only have time to do things piecemeal, so anyone reading this, I apologize for my posts from now on, they'll all be shorter and more piecemeal. It'll be like putting together a puzzle's pieces.
  I've been learning Gregg Shorthand for awhile, in a piecemeal way. I write fast but I don't know all of the theory, so I need to get faster.
  The basic way to learn the alphabet and the theory is to pretend Gregg is another alphabet, that comes with ligatures and abbreviations. Getting fast at translating eventually transfers to recognizing the shapes themselves but this is, I think, an important in-between step. It would be easier if people learned the abbreviations first actually.
  Cue this idea. There's a Gregg phrasal/entry dictionary that lists Gregg words in ASCII format. It's great but it's a little hard to read because it spaces all the graphs, digraphs, and trigraphs with dashes. If it just did it like the normal written language the abbreviations would be easier to learn; for example, the phrase "he can go" is just <ekg> (I know, ha.)
  ru ar oot ad haPND? 
  Are you <ru> aware <ar> of what <oot> had <ad> happened <haPND>? 
  Are you aware of what had happened?
  DTe g eththm OR n?
  Did he <DTe> go <g> with them <eththm> or <OR> not <n>?
  Did he go with them or not?
  This would be super-easy to use for a lot of texts if I could just get an automatic translation key working.

What is a reddit?

When I said awhile ago that I needed a very special kind of news-site, I didn't realize that reddit fit the bill to a T. It's crazy, people create their own forums (aka subreddits) on the fly! All that's missing is a wordfilter thing like lernu.

Pirahã, Simplicity, & ASL

  Article about ditching recursion in clause subordination for "ontological promiscuity" aka storytelling.
  My head hurts. I've just basically learned that storytelling, rhetoric, and metaphor are all interchangeable tools, and I've been trying to learn language (specifically Gaeilge) with Where Are Your Keys? and I know I'm not getting it. It's just that when I look at the set-up I see all kinds of different things being brought to bear on what should be a simple situation but which isn't. Even the use of demonstratives i.e. 'this' and 'that', are not simple. Why don't we just use 'it'? What's the point of the game? The most difficult part is that it switches between role-playing, where you have to give a response, and copy-catting, where you're passively learning. I still don't get the hang of transitions. It's probably because I've never really actually played with another good player. It's just not viral. What's the point? I'm talking about coffee? And then it hits you, "Yeah, I'm talking about coffee in another language and by playing along other people can too!" That is the craziest feeling ever, but it entails a loss of will you don't really feel unless you're already an author, I think. It's very hard for poets to do that, because it means sinking into a language rather than carving it out like poets do, creating an antilanguage. You don't have to understand exactly what's going on, or that there are several options available to you (I think those come up later, in more fluent speech, and aren't too tricky? But maybe I'm wrong. I found variations in the use of this/that based on empathy and perspective in English; crazy but cool! And they're just a casual everyday part of the language!)
  This is why I wanted to dig around for a language that truly needs no more distinctions than just pointing, naming, and describing. I'm talking about ASL. Why not create a language that does for ASL what ASL did for English when they made Exact Signed English? Basically, bend English to ASL's rules like when they bent ASL to English's!
  ASL has no words for articles, like Latin. Unlike Latin, and like Chinese, it has classifiers, and a whole host of other exotic phenomena. Notably, it tends to drop the inanimate pronoun (relying on context) and of course, deixis and pronouns are merged under ostension (aka pointing at stuff) so there's only pointing at yourself or other people. English is a German language, which has the least dropping of any language family, but that is changing somewhat in America (where pronouns tend to be left off the beginning of sentences sometimes); other languages like Japanese and Piraha tend to not need pronouns at all except as almost like nonce titles (like 'I' actually meaning 'yours truly', etc.) On the other hand, Japanese has a very complicated animacy hierarchy which does a lot of work circumscribing what cannot go into a sentence's interpretation. These languages which do not need pronouns are in the minority.
  The ASL situation actually reminds me of the deixis in some languages, which marks for near, far and out of sight; similarly, we have me, you or him or her, and the people I can't gesture at. The latter are particularly interesting, because they are the language's other innovation: signing space. Basically, this little piggy goes to market, and this little piggy...The storyteller points to spaces he has established as being occupied by imaginary entities, of which there can be at most 8.
  This trick takes advantage of natural tendencies of the human mind, e.g. the Roman memory trick. It also breaks down very difficult recursive sentence structures and turns them into stories. Pirahã does it super-effectively to get around using clauses in any sort of difficult fashion. It seems like the stories unfold in a way that makes it easy to keep track of the referents, but not that easy. In fact, this shows why clauses exist at all, to make telling the order of events in the way you want, easier. On the other hand, subordinating parts of sentences means that some phrases and clauses are not going to have the same bearing as other sentences, they're going to serve other sentences. This has an effect on the breaks, or cesura, between clauses. To the Pirahã, this is perhaps unacceptable. The Pirahã don't just speak their language like other peoples—they mumble it, they whistle it, etc. There's even an effect whereby the few consonants in the language can swap out for each other at different times. You cannot make this up; its called the 'Sloppy Phoneme Effect', whereby what matters to the speakers is the syllable structure in terms of tone (Pirahã is a  tone language like Chinese), stress, length of vowels and length of consonants. The language is highly musical as Keren Everett says.
  What this means, and I'm just guessing here, is that Pirahã prosody is a pain. It's fully loaded with all the distinctions the language makes already, so it cannot carry the additional burden of, like English, telling speakers what sentence focus and informations structure is—so they resort to a highly conscripted definition of a clause and a sentence, and don't differentiate between different levels. Perhaps it's not so much that they cannot speak, but that all the prosody that can be carried over into whistling, etc. determines the baseline speech. In other words, the whistled speech could be the bottleneck for the spoken speech—which is unprecedented. It's like if texting determined speech, and everybody stopped talking on their phones and just—oh wait. But in truth, the written word has functioned over the years...much the same way. How much gets left out from the written word, when compared to speech? Yet we use it, in the past to write letters. Our words carried over long distances to reach others' ears. How is a whistle any different?
  This post is still about ASL, the only language that is still more easy to understand orally/visually than in any form of writing. It is also, perhaps, the one language I still really care about, because you can talk about things you see and experience. It seems like the purview of all language nowadays is writing, and fiction at that.
  I thought it would also be cool if a sign language became oral like is suggested as the source of all languages by some researchers. That could mean that a conlang could really take off the ground, and that there may be many origins of language!

Intonation; ToBI Revisited; Where are your keys?

  I believe I've spoken before on the discontents of using ToBI before and briefly mentioned some of the alternatives (the British school, Bolinger, Rhythm & Pitch or RaP, etc.)
  I personally think it's challenge lies partly in its presentation; if you could condense it into punctuation and diacritics people might like it more and it would be easier to use (not to forget, punctuation in English seems to focus mainly on the "cesura" or breaks, much as the Break Index part of ToBI does, but people have been using it forever, and its not conventionalized but it serves its purpose well enough for the times and the fashions…but I digress. Another time).
  ToBI is tricky too because of the lack of audio recordings and quality presentation. So can you imagine my surprise when I found this website? It's absolutely fantastic because for the first time ToBI is presented succinctly and with a clear sense. I can finally hear what's behind it, and its not so bad after all. It seems fairly well-organized albeit focusing on rather pronounced and unusual distinctions, but I like it. I also notice that there are several correlations with the British tradition, in that there are low falling, low rising, high rising, etc. patterns, though in ToBI they represent phrasal interactions. One remarkable thing is that the British "Mid" seems to match the "High flat" and that there isn't a corresponding category to the British "High fall" (reference: John Maidment's NEWTON program, online; though it must be noted that the British tradition doesn't have a distinction between, for the most part, between the boundary tones that I just mentioned, and pitch accents.)
  On the other hand, there are pitch accents which more nearly correspond to the idea of "nuclear tones" in British. There is one final stressed syllable in every intonational phrase (but what is an intonational phrase? other researchers have suggested that we focus on breaks, continuation patterns, and cesura to better understand that, but again that's for another time); this bears the stress that truly matters. That's what the British tradition says, and that may well be true—for the British. However, the appeal of ToBI lies in being able to distinguish between say, for example, a "peaking"pattern that can spread left, and one that can spread right. The stress falls on a specific syllable, and the syllable aligns on its left or right side—this is remarkable, and compelling moreover. (Certain words, like 'America', generally have boundary tones on both sides of the pitch accent; they're special, but ToBI can still work for them.)
  It surprises me that there are only 22 combination tones (or is the page mistaken? I am not an expert anyway). It's almost like we can just have 22 punctuation symbols. Awhile ago, a Frenchman tried to introduce extra punctuation, for instance a symbol (in place of a period) for endearment, another for sarcasm, and so on. (Entertainingly the romantic pronouncement mark looked like a little heart.) I don't think it's a bad idea at all, though it would mean people would have to do one more thing to read well—maybe it would catch on, if people could be educated as to its systematic use. It would be brilliant for texting.
  The problem with intonation, though, is that there seems to be no end. It's apparently bottomless. The distinctions made in ToBI in one paper were found to be gradient rather than categorical, meaning that they bleed into one another with wide overlap. They compared them to the vowelspace where they all bleed into one another, and that may be true, but…I feel there is a lot more. The quality of the peaks and valleys, their acceleration , gradation, etc. do not fall under the purview of ToBI; I think a resynthesis and integration of the kind of insights I saw in Bolinger, with the appeal of ToBI, would work wonders.
  Whenever I read the British schools' works I can't help but read it in that dramatic, over-accented Downton Abbey-esque bombast that the actors over the pond seem so fond of.
  I read that there were attempts at integrating the British and ToBI but it cannot have been too successful, they split hairs differently. I'll still have to go look for them again though.
P.S. I should be able to potentially use ToBI to pick out tunes to use in role playing. This should be especially useful for making plausible scenarios happen during Where Are Your Keys? gameplay, which currently vary amongst "game masters" as to the communicative goal of various interactions. These vary from language to language and are tricky, but I think just focusing on them will bring the right focus to gameplay, and what it should be about—in other words, functionl, pragmatic use of intonation to make small distinctions and split hairs in the ways natural languages do (split hairs, that is.)
P.P.S. I can finally get started on my Intonation Wiki that I've wanted to work on for so long! The ToBI examples are great, and I can easily think of scenes from movies that they pop up in.

Reddit, Seddit

I love reddit, but…There needs to be a site out there for people to read out and record their funny comments so I don't have to. I don't care that it would require a lot more dataspace! It could be called Seddit.

Tonality, Tone, Tonicity, Intonation, etc.

  I don't believe I've spoken about this before but this is one of my passions.
  I have recently begun to research prosody in English again, and I 've found a fair amount of OK resources.
  First of all, I use Google Scholar mostly, for those who would like to know, as well as publications.  I've read Bolinger's works and a book by John Wells in the British school's recent work.
  I have not been satisfied by what I've read of ToBI, and there is a lot of work with it in other languages but it's challenging enough for English, the very language it was designed for (though perhaps it suits Dutch better).
  My biggest gripe is the use of separate symbols rather than using some sort of diagram or iconic diacritic, but there are reasons. The second biggest is that ToBI's tradition rarely contrasts examples in the literature. It also tends to wave things away as sandhi effects, and pretend that most things dictated by syntax.
  This is not a problem with ToBI per se, but moreso the standard of research. If you open up Professor Well's book 'English Intonation' the notion that you are limited by the options available disappears. On the other hand, the British school doesn't mark a distinction between boundary tones a.k.a. spreading tones, and pitch accents, i.e. pitch "excursions" associated with stressed syllables (not to be confused with the phenomena in Japanese and Swedish.)  Notably boundary tones may be associated with the left or right side of a pitch accent.
  ToBI's other weakness is not distinguishing lexical and sentential stresses and their interaction (remedied to an extent in certain adaptations, which hilariously have ToBI as a phonological level and go further into detail in a "microprosodic" phonetic level; ToBI is in addition somewhat like the generative syntax/transformational grammar tradition in referring to the sandhi rules as a "grammar".) It does have a "break" tier to show how closely together words and phrases are tied together (which is replicated in the afore-mentioned systems as well.)  The assumption is that syllable structure, segments, and suprasegmentals don't interact directly, hence autosegmental theory.
  The most difficult aspect of intonation is that it can be stereotyped, but it is essentially gradient everywhere. They are "fuzzy" categories in other words with exemplars and marginal cases. (They were compared to vowels in that study but I think vowels may be more cut-and-dried.) This may or may not have to do with the study being about reproducing intonational contours. I think maybe they are like "best practices" for a language, and they accumulate from people speaking and living in a language. Over many generations they are refined, and the language itself is more streamlined and refined so that all parts fit together better and don't leak oil. Much of language is analogous in some sense to fashion.
  Going back, Bolinger's prototypical profiles include two which are contrasted by 'rising to' and 'rising from'. Astoundingly, when I discovered the right and left boundary tones, they reminded me of this. I'll have to go back and look but I think that maybe he was referring to L+H* and L*+H, respectively, in RaP (Rhythm and Prosody). My notes from that were unfortunately destroyed (don't write with Frixion pen and then put a warm coffee mug on top) but I feel this is very promising.
  IVie is an extension like RaP to ToBI albeit older; it was used in a large-scale research project on the comparative prosody of the dialects of English in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
  There are interestingly applications in copular study in cognitive research and in Austinian speech [illocutionary] acts. This is all so very up my alley. It just seems very overwhelming. I already have a very obtuse personal Wikipad dedicated to this, and I can never get it in order. The first order seems to be a better platform for hosting recordings than SoundCloud, because I don't want to stream everything at a time. The other difficulty lies in the production of these intonational profiles; they're not easy. I wonder why, if they're used as they are in conversation. So curious.

Duolingo

  I've been going steady with this service for quite awhile now and I'm very impressed. Basically, its very basic but comprehensive. My only concern is that I won't be able to keep my pace up, because I have to revisit sections now because they're still adding new material. Each section grows, so you revisit sections on, for example, food with new vocabulary and expressions after a time. You go through new sections to unlock more things, but obviously if you have to redo the same stuff it's hard to grow. In a way it reminds me of the skill grid in a game like final fantasy 10 (ten or x—lol) except instead of battle you do tests. I'm good at tests but it's a little disheartening to strike out occasionally like I do, or only get one heart out of three (plus 10 for making it at all—but I get hung up on is junk).  Speaking of hang-ups, I always say "How fascinating!" and row my arms up whenever I make it or screw-up. It's supposed to release illogical, unnecessary negativity and make criticism fit in its place rather than take over and discourage your perspective because, let's be realistic, it's a fantastic thing you're learning language. Mistakes mean you've learned the error of your ways so you have those chances to fix them again. Realizing you forgot also means you remembered! Capiche? Life is about growing, and you are still growing if you are alive. Do stuff that doesn't restrict your growth!

P.S.
I don't think there's any difference between these. These are all ways to ask "What's that?" in French.

...
C'est quoi?
Qu'est-ce?
Quel(le) est-ce?
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?

I know, right? How fascinating!

P.P.S.
I look forward to reading comics soon, which is really the whole point of all of this. Then I might continue with French For Reading, but even that is really too dry. It should be pretty clear that Duolingo fills a functional gap in learning a language in a fairly traditional way without too much effort. I've had enough classroom training for me, and I am tired of it all.  Hopefully I can fix my mistakes and just speak soon. I can almost hear the language now when I read, which is a personal benchmark that the testing tries to bring out. That's heartening!

Hashing

  I ran across an issue of some importance several years ago that's gotten little acknowledgement. Basically, its how well a lexicon uses the distinctions amongst its phonemic inventory.  It's a step away from phonotactics.
  Essentially, it makes a little sense to distinguish sounds if they don't contribute to the distinctiveness of words. It's slightly contentious, but some languages test this more strongly than others, in terms of  allophony (some languages' phonemes are very flexible, like in Pirahã). There can be extra ways to distinguish words e.g. syntax, prosody. So the level of redundancy probably varies as well.
  The point tho is that, if the words in your language are, eg CVCV...etc. and you have syllables A, B, C, and D, and a lexicon of a few words using them, e.g. AB and CD, then you can do several things, because they're not utilizing the inventory very well. Maximally, if these are the only 2 words in the language, you actually only need two syllables in your inventory, with this lexicon, eg AA and CC (or any other pair of syllables) maybe even condensing the words to one syllable eg A and B.  Anyways, this process is known as hashing and it was solved for optimality in 1992.
  So I'm not a programmer or anything but its cool. It lets you know how important words are to the sound of the language eg testing the high frequency words and sounds of the language, and testing polysemy, etc. it would be good for designing a shorthand e.g. adapting PLOVER to a language, and its how a stenotype for Japanese uses only 10 keys, basically a home row.

Internet jargons & slangs

  Wow, it's been so long since my last post! To say I'm busy is part of it, but its mostly with very different things, none to do with language.
  I'm revisiting an old idea of mine, and I've found out, others: collaborative crowd-sourced conlanging. Essentially, how can we create a language together so that we understand it, use it, and develop it, and how do we inculcate English monoglots, e.g. newbies? That seems to be one of the biggest things...English messes up, and waters down everything.
  You see this in Internet slang, where catchphrases go from being catchphrases to slang shibboleths, eventually becoming idioms, then euphemisms, and finally becoming synonyms. That slowly happened to Boontling, the real-life dialect that developed out of some bored children's games in slang in remote California. This happens in countries where English-speakers settle and fail to learn the language, and then everyone bends over backwards to accommodate them until their language fails to attain new speakers and status.
  It's strange because English suffered the Norman invasion in 1066 AC but the people didn't learn the French of the Norman invaders--they kept their English, which was severely bastardized until it reached Middle English, but they apparently didn't care. Then, the King at the time said, "Let us speak French in the court!" and that then and there gave English its new ascendancy.
  How do you make people learn? That is what I've tried to find out, and it seems like you have to do quite a it of the work for them, and they'll cover the difference. Other posts have covered what kind of a system I think would be needed (essentially a news site and message boards and people with a lot of time on their hands).
  What would these people have in common? They would need context to discuss things in a world, and the virtual world doesn't cut it. There have been efforts (e.g. on kickstarter) to create immersive videogames but they look bad, hence they're not immersive. 2nd life and minecraft don't really work well either IMO, tho minecraft is extendable by the users. I'm not aware of whether minecraft has vocal interaction but that would probably be necessary. The thing is, if its public, people don't feel the need to socialize in some cryptolect.
  Anyways, Kalusa the first and really only language like this worked pretty well until someone decided to start stuffing the ballots, but in actuality suffered from the same problems as other conlangs. It had words for things which no-one would ever have the opportunity to speak in public, like for animals. If conlangs were realistic they would have native words for computer guts, Internet chat forms, and the various things you can see/learn about in fictional worlds or pictures. Inevitably, they would come to be like counting the bricks on the inside of a jail cell. That's why we have real languages, so we can go to them.
  It's just that conlanging hasn't touched on what people want most:  money, food, power and sex.  Esperanto, because its totally against hegemony (well, really any 2nd language would be too) throws out power. Not using English throws out power as a motivator, so that's I don't know how many people? It does allow you to potentially get a date if you're not a total boar...in theory. If people have time they're spending on language study they may or may not have a lot of money, and hence enough food. If a language is going to take hold its going to have to have both a significant amount of grammar and work units translated into a target language, without a further incentive to translate more original works.
  Essentially, it has to be a fun game.
  Gary Shannon discussed awhile ago away to change English into another language. That would be pretty fun and workable right? The grammar would be expressed thru a longish article slowly changing the language into the target deformation, gradually building up until the whole thing is totally replaced. At least, that's one way. It could be reinforced with funny limericks, etc.
  This works a lot better if there is a simple pattern which people can extrapolate, e.g. phonetically and grammatically backwards English aka Shilging, which is more than either a game or a relex, and certainly sound fun (hardest thing? reversing the prosody, which might be impossible).
  On the other hand, it seems like people will always move on. And that's not something any language can deal with.

Representing tonality via text

Note: this is adapted from elsewhere but it's more appropriate here.

You can use adverbs in the quotation. E.g.
(Mockingly) Why not?
"Why not?" [she said] mockingly.
WHOA  sounding surprised
"Really?" he says, pretending to be serious because he wants to steal her pocketbook while she's not looking, but she mistakes for cheap moves--and so she looks away, saying "I'm not that easy," only to look up again and find them both gone.
Why not? --he said laughing --I'm game.
Etc.
The last example is rather like in Polish; every change in speaker is presented with a dash, and quotations are offset with a helping phrase because it is spoken by a narrator (the "she said" part). (Note that it's not capitalized tho, so its not a new sentence.) It may not be easy to come up with words for every sense you're going for (tho there are lots of words in English," he said, being droll) but then you can make up words for those manners of speaking. The strikethrough is a way of making it seem more meta like for making comments in programming code; stuff that's written and crossed out is understandably not officially part of the text tho still there. You can present implied subtexts that way too, like how it would be if you spoke and intoned those words. It basically imitates the effect of speaking by sneaking in more, it doesn't necessarily give the reader a blow-by-blow of it. I like to italicize the text that is crossed out too.
E.g.
--I would hate love to have you over more often.
--I like that but I hate everything else.

What is weird, is that some languages e.g. Japanese present solipsistic speech (i.e. talking to oneself) in young children by talking in the 3rd person. It sounds kind of crazy to English people, like something a mad person might do. There's even a trope of characters using quotatives for their own speech, which definitely sounds dissociative. It's funny tho when that character is speaking in a monotone, and their narration adds how they intend to be heard, or hear themselves. [url=http://hasegawa.berkeley.edu/Papers/Soliloquy.pdf]Here's some more on soliloquy in Japanese.[/url]

"That's absurd," I murmur irritatedly to myself.<--Here the utterance is performed; tho it is kind of a lie if you don't say it too. Maybe "I write in anger" is more honest but it makes less sense. Both incidentally are performatives.
"Sarah thinks its crazy," says Sarah quietly to herself. Or "she says~" <--Japanese style example

Libreoffice gives you a ton of text formatting options e.g. Small capitals, double, triple lining etc. I like punctuation marks for beginning sentences too á la Spanish e.g. ¡ ¿Why do you ask?? You could always innovate new punctuation marks.

Maybe there's a history of using emoticons, comics, or ideograms of authors' feelings?

Diminutives, denigratives, honorifics, etc make attitudes more explicit. Certain sentence-final particles in Japanese serve only stylistic purposes. Of course there's an endless number of ways to change narration to capture speech. Otherwise you'll have to dig into intonation which is a big field. I'm digging into [i]English Intonation[/i] by Wells, but im using ad hoc labels for several things which aren't finely distinguished in the different methodologies. None are really super-comprehensive for what a native speaker knows about the language tho. For instance, 'disbelief' and 'incredulous' accents have very similar profiles (tho they are distinct; they have different  height spans and different onsets within their syllables); overall, you're better off just labeling them.

On the other hand, certain gradients that people are super aware of, are handy to have a notation for. For instance, "Tell me." Say the first word high and the 2nd one lower. There are several minute variations on it. If you pronounce "tell" gently rising, you'll sound urgent. If you keep it level, it will sound neutral, and if you pronounce "tell" sloping down, you'll sound confident maybe even reassuring. (That example is from Bolinger's [i]Intonation and Its Parts[/i], page 225. That general profile is considered an A-profile in his terms, with different "glides".) I still think its more convenient to use adverbs here, tho e.g. urgently, flatly or plainly, and confidently or reassuringly. I honestly think its a bit tedious labeling stuff with [url=http://blogjam.name/?p=9070]intonation diacritics[/url]. (Almost forgot to mention, but the American and British approaches have only been partially reconciled, that program uses a British accent. It should still be useful, but you may want to do some work.) Same reason I like audiobooks tho.

Updates

I kinda like languages
Basic Esperanto dictionary
Esperanto shorthand
Esperanto hub
Vikipedio pages read aloud

I have the strongest urge to write lessons for Novegradian or Alashian, but I can't see doing it. Who'll read it?  I'm digging into French again but I don't see much point. I have the pronunciation and 
intonation down pretty much pat,
 if not the liaison, but it's so ridiculous.

I was looking into imageboards source code and I like shimmie but I don't really have the time. Maybe I could get the Esperantists to help? The idea was to have users upload their photos and other users would tag them. It's kind of like the basic english word list, except this would be over 9000.
 The other alternative is to somehow use it for conlangs so that tags from several (all) languages would display at once. Frathwiki people might be tempted I think.

Blissymbols & language hunting

I've been trying to sponge up as much language hunting/where Are your keys and its slow going but it feels good. The hardest part is that I've not yet been able to teach someone anything yet.

I'm trying to do esperanto first because its easy. The problem is, I don't know enough of the game to teach what I know in esperanto! The videos for irish Gaeilge and chinuk wawa take time to go thru and a lot of the WAYK wiki is either abstract, or links to dead videos. I bought the book for language hunting but that's slow go too. I've made my way thru 40/400 pages.

Meanwhile, other languages, like Elvish & Alashian are actually within my grasp, at least for first steps. So too is Esperanto, but there's a lot more game time mileage in learning quenyan "What is that?/make me say yes/make me say no". I might have to make up words for the other basic parts of the game for quenya, but maybe not.

One thing I've thought about is making Blissymbols to match up with the use of sign language as a bridge, but this time for the written page. Each Blissymbol could be a morpheme or lexeme and function as a kind of visual gloss, one per hand sign. Since it's Signed Assisted (insert X language here) it doesn't need the full grammar of sign language, its being used principally for the physical stimulation and iconicity...so using Blissymbols instead of signing symbols could make sense.  Unfortunately I haven't found explanations for all the Blissymbols but I have found a dictionary.  Some signs are more iconic than others.

One surprising thing I've realized about WAYK (actually it was a first impression) was that its a lot like a game that elementary girls play that goes something like this:
"What is that? -That is a stick. -A stick? -A stick. -Oh a stick!" There's a variation that involves a fuck instead. WAYK's big difference is that it uses sign language simultaneously, and goes into things a lot deeper. Yeah, pretty big differences. But I can see how it's called a game.

Fusion in conlanguages

Matthew D. Martin is a conlanger & he has a neat post about creators giving their fans a hand in their design.  I agree with the sentiment and think that while their have been many collaborative conlangs, few have been truly crowd sourced.  I think it would be great if creators found a way to impart dynamism to the communities that they want to grow. So far, like with Esperanto, that has meant tinkering inside the grammar and coining new words, but nothing allowing that grammar to grow. If there were enough glue to hold a language together while not being a closed loop, that would be fantastic.

I realized something awhile back, that when words are made up of morphemes those morphemes can still be bound, or the meaning dictated by convention. In other words, meaning isn't created in those words by their composites. Instead people create little folk stories that help them learn the word and its meaning, sometimes even it's pronunciation. The process sometimes even works in reverse if people are really pressured into needing a way to remember it...Which is where much conlang design comes in. Esperanto is really good for this. However, the process isn't really regular, and I don't see any reason it should be honestly. So lets say you want people to actively work on the language, Why not let people change the language fairly often? Ere are languages that glom together words all the time, and those words' morphemes can have different forms, different meanings, etc. And the thing which eventually works out is convention. What's popular catches on and gains currency. People work out little stories for themselves.

This happens slowly somewhat in English. A word like "acorn" gets reparsed as meaning "egg" + "corn" = "eggcorn" = "acorn" (That might be a "typological pun" but bear with me.) This is not too productive in English because its language community is huge and people are all literate, and because English isn't hugely fusional, but you can see it in other ways.

In English there are two morphemes, "-in'" and "-ing", and believe me they are two morphemes. In ye dayes ov olde our language had separate endings for the gerund and active participle, but fashion and vowel changes shaved them down. However, rural speakers retain them still in certain places and mark a distinction between them that urban speakers have long lost to syncretism. It's a mistake that most speakers of English make when parsing these that they can't tell there's a grammatical distinction present. We make a story that these speakers mean the same word as we do, but chop off the <g> at the end...It's not actually a natural sound change, and its not being lazy. That's our prejudice as more fashionable less conservative, more innovative speakers of a different dialect with more prestige. This language change can happen more rapidly in a small community of speakers hashing out a language speaking to each other. People will crush and mangle words and misunderstand each other and contrary to most conlanging that's natural.

I've said this before, but I really like lernu's forum dictionary. Now if its going to work with the above, users need to be able to add entries like urbandictionary. That way they can give derivations...if they choose. Or leave it to other users to puzzle out.

P.S. A while ago there was a guy posing as a philologist by the name of Edo 
Nyland. He was trying to relate all the world's languages to Basque by fusional processes. His energy is good, and a different kind of Conlanging, one which I nevertheless respect. It would be a shame to not let it in the picture.

Language hunting & my prosody wiki

This is amazing and shows you how eliciting an entire language's grammar can work fairly painlessly. It also shows why some redundancies I've noticed in the process are important. Here's another video. This time it's the astonishingly hard-to-pronounce Georgian language being hunted.

  Right now I'm working on a language hunt for Esperanto with anyone I can snare, but I have to get over this laryngitis first. Esperanto is coming along; I've already read several forum posts. I think I have memrise to thank for teaching me the correlatives, and the Intense-EO flash card app, as well as the fantastic lernu! website with its automatic translations.

  This is my wiki about intonation. I'm sorry its so bare and forlorn but I have a wikiPad with a lot of information on my desktop. I think it's going to be hopelessly messy no matter how I start it so I should just get this thing together anyway. One thing is that I may need to split the wiki according to accent which I'm not looking forward to, but it all depends on who joins up on it.
  I've mentioned French is coming along fairly well albeit slowly. I've given up on buying stuff in French because I don't have the resources anymore. Comics just keep climbing in price.
  Y'know what I've never seen before? Pictures and poems together. That would be gorgeous. I guess in anthologies they go together but they're not usually visually juxtaposed. I think I've seen that with Japanese tho e.g. Karuta cards.  Speaking of karuta, I've been thinking of printing a deck for my friends when they visit for the first time in a year since finishing school. I found this awesome website.
  I've been practicing my ocarina too. It's a transverse 12-hole model and my substitute lately for talking what with this laryngitis.  I picked up a sogeum PVC flute off eBay too recently, but that won't come for a while.  I'm thinking about picking up PVC whistles off Becker too. They're very affordable.  I wanted to buy a PVC flute but I haven't found anyone yet. I already have a shakuhachi but it's really difficult to play and requires a lot of breath.  I don't want to make my own because I don't have the time or the skills. Conceivably, one could make a Bohlen Pierce flute or whistle but its more of the same, I mean in terms of difficulty. There are also no plans available.  That scale would suit the ethos of the shakuhachi well tho. OTOH these are all kind of goofy anachronisms...I mean, the appeal lies in the potential for using these woodwinds as clubs am I right? Because that's the real benefit to using PVC, tough and cheap. At least, that's true of the shakuhachi (it was designed as a weapon first, instrument second.) This, despite the fact the design predates PVC.
  Meanwhile I should be composing iPad music for a certain contest...I find the less I think, the easier it is to accomplish things. I have a tendency to just make things balloon out of control when I should be pursuing the opportunities available to me in the moment. Planning, planning, while nothing is happening, and then forgetting the plans.
  I've practiced pen shorthand too and I've found that its not too hard to write at 80 words per minute.  I gave up Plover tho. The computer keyboards, even if they have NKRO, aren't suited for shorthand IMO, so it's a waste of time or worse.
  I still really love pen shorthand. It's gorgeous and easy, but the more I'm used to writing the more I get annoyed with it. Writing really doesn't cut it as an information transmission vehicle. My reading shorthand is finally catching up to my writing. Maybe my attitude will change the more I practice? I doubt it tho. How does anyone ever write a book? Dragon was my saving grace until I contracted this laryngitis. Man is it annoying.
  On the other forefront, I'm considering a special business venture. I've still got to think it thru. I'm not sure how I would start it.

Intonation & texts cont.

...texts should be sorted according to the length of time the discussion has been ongoing. This could be based on an average, so recent exchanges wouldn't change the status of a very long old post too much. (There would be no such thing as necromancy.) I don't think any site does that.  So oldness, length, average length of posts (verbosity), and average span of time between posts (slowness). (I think this is a useful way to categorize texts and their discussions). Furthermore, old content should be stored for posterity.
  Chats are different in that you don't have to respond directly to people, however I'm not sure that's a behavior that should be encouraged. In a sense forums do this (if they're not IMDB forums). (I like quotes in that you can respond to people anywhere in a thread and it orders the thread chronologically. IMDB doesn't do that, strictly. On the other hand if messages are short, just respond to the message, a là message boards.) Similarly, it would be more like natural language scenarios but I am not sure simultaneous messaging should be allowed. This would show overlap between the times of different posters texts/utterances.  However, it could become like a party line.
  In all of these, the real difference between natural conversation becomes the delay and the lack of FaceTime, and there's no real getting around that unless you use Skype.  But then there's no record of anything, or helpful info. This is all about data management.
  It would be cool if there were a word checker to suggest translations etc. while writing something, but that seems like a little much, especially if the focus is on dictation. Otherwise it would be very useful for encouraging grammaticality and conscientiousness.
  The other thing I wanted to get into is the issue of anonymity. I encourage its use, but I think people should still be kept track of like Wikipedia does ISPs, but do it privately for admins to see. Forums don't do that enough, cloak their users ID if they so choose, and I see no problem with it. The only thing is, you shouldn't be allowed to double post or respond to your own posts. That should clear up a lot of problems with sock puppets and pseudo-ostension, the rest will just require a smart admin. Also if you just find someone annoying you can block a cloaked user but not someone entirely anonymous. Alternatively, they can change the name of their "cloak" to something besides anonymous, so long as no one else has it. There should be an option for partially registering names so that several people can go by the same name e.g. Anonymous, but Anonymous would be the only one no-one could partially register. Once you stop using a partially registered name it's up for grabs, and you can only partially register one name at a time, so that one person doesn't start hoarding names. Blocking/ignoring someone would not depend on their name at a given time, so that they couldn't avoid ignores. Similarly, you should be able to look in that person's backlog of posts, although they could block access to certain times/names. In the computer, they would be associated with one user. I don't know how to avoid snoopy people in that regard. Maybe the only use for the actual user info would be for statistics about the corpus? I'd have to think about what that could be. Otherwise, other users could only search for the posts affiliated with a given public name, so they couldn't connect a user's names. The only way they could do that would if they played tricky games with their ignore list, but it would have to occur over a long period of time.
  This would all mean people start talking to their smart phones again.

Intonation & Text

  This is in a similar vein to another of my earlier posts about what a fully integrated website platform might look like. That was in turn inspired by the format of lernu! and various imageboards, message boards, and data repositories.
  First some background on these things, forums are places you go to post stuff and have discussions. You may contrast them with chats, which are much faster and spool out ridiculous amounts of data...tho the most popular forums and message boards are about as fast as the fastest chat. Chats are not private like instant messages between two people. Twitter is very similar to the chats and message boards, with lots of short texts, but its more like blogs in how people connect to you and interact; tweets are like a soapbox. In a message board, the newest message bumps the entire topic to the top (unless the respondent wishes to see the topic not be pushed: see SAGE(ru) a Japanese term), but how long it stays up there depends on how active the topic is. Unlike a forum, message boards show part or all of each topic in-line on the main page, while in a forum, each topic is linked to from a main page with a title and an optional subtitle. IMDB forums are neat in that they show the tree structure of the conversations i.e. who responded to who; they do that by indentation.
  Now all of these have the same linking structure, i.e. clicking a link will bring you to a certain kind of page. In a Wikipedia, that means entry/category/talk/edit/etc. pages.  What if each link were treated as a kind of object you could interact with by clicking on it and pulling up a menu...Maybe you could shift+click it, or alt+click it, to do things faster, like a videogame.  Right now it's the individual pages that are affiliated with links, and according to their structural template (e.g. Wikipedia entry pages have talk, edit, etc. pages) but what if it was the data on the pages themselves that needed specific entry pages? This is the idea I got because every esperanto word on a page at the lernu forums can be clicked on to find its definition, in addition to the possibility of using that same data as URL links. (I got this idea from the drop-down menu format used in certain new adventure games where the text is alive and the only way to interact with objects. Clicking on a hyperlinked object pulls up a number of applicable action verbs or METHODS you can use on it, in addition to various objects you can do those actions to it with. See Quest Adventure games.)
  The 3rd thing that I thought was really important was the need for more audio online. The only advantage text has over audio is that it's faster to skim and search. Well, what if every audio object had a text? There is a minimal level formatting that would be useful, so that instead of skimming, we just click a mouse and skip to the relevant portion. What would that require? Very little. Dragon already does a darn good job inserting punctuation into documents on its own now without needing to even end your sentences by saying period. This is a much easier task, associating word/clause/sentence boundaries with spaces/commas/periods/etc. Thats not much more than some basic thing you cna do in Praat (altho I'm not sure you can just click on words and play audio, see Praat). Unless we want to go whole hog and just speak to our PCs and let people sort out what was actually said when the computer malfunctions and mistranscribes something. Where did I get this idea? From Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can actually go into Dragon, and check what you really said and whether it matches what the computer wrote.  I can see people getting used to that and not wasting time writing anymore.  Opera has a good voice synthesizer but this would be putting speaking before writing, which is really the way it should be. Speaking is easier, faster and carries more information.
  So that's several layers of information--dictionary, audio, links.  Lets add another. What if there were several tropes layers? Tropes are patterns. One of the best expamples is in intonation, inflection, how we say things. Intonation is very poorly studied and readers really have to read between the lines to get it right. What if we had a crowd sourcing effort? It would be much easier with an audio corpus, and for the first time this seems possible because everyone has audio recording functionality in even the most basic computer models nowadays.  Essentially, a text would be analyzed according to its audio and annotated with tags at the syllable, prosodic word, intonational phrase, etc. levels.  There is no specificity whether this folksonomy should be holistic, like emotions e.g. "Angry", or based on paragons e.g. "Y'know", or if it would break up and be more fine-grained and take into account gradient phenomena. At the very least, it should be able to sort out like from dislike, and provide good audio. (That's another thing, audio should be marked for how natural it sounds, as in atypical or poorly enunciated.)
  The basic structure of the platform should take into account older vs. newer discussions, but ongoing discussions should be allowed to survive. I suggest sorting topics by their busy-ness, and the stretch of time

Duolingo

  I've found a really good new service to compete with busuu and memrise, called duolingo.  It's really neat, and the translator in it is very encompassing, it covers almost all the possible translations I could think of for a given phrase in say, French. That puts it well above anything else in my opinion. Unlike Rosetta Stone, it only focuses secondarily on how well you pronounce things, but given how spotty Rosetta Stone is with regards to that, that's not a bad thing. The only beef I have is that when I'm typing on the iPad it's too easy to mess things up--like I've been getting everything wrong by only one letter. Oops! I missed a space so I got it wrong! Thank God it doesn't matter so much. I've been passing with flying colors overall. A lot of translation involves mixing and matching words to make sentences which the iPad is ideal for. Overall the pacing is very slow, even slower than working thru Madrigal's French, but faster than Rosetta Stone (marginally) and you're given the option of testing out of things, and you can plow thru stuff pretty well anyways. Audio is nice and fluent tho clearly copy-pasted together.
  French for Reading is coming along pretty well but still slow, tho that's to be expected. I'm not sure how close I should be paying attention, and I can't tell if I should overlearn now or later...Probably now. The prices for French comics seems to always be increasing so I'm not sure if ill be able to keep my fluency for very long. I mean, le français may be la deuxiéme langue pour les mangas but it means little if there's only meager access to resources. I'll have to look around some more, but i have a feeling it'll be easier when I know the language better.
  I wish there were an online French Where Are Your Keys? but there isn't. The Gaeilge resources are great and I can't wait to getting back to it.

Audio & chat resources

 This post is going to be more of a list format because I haven't tried all of them. Well, any of them.
 i) Skype, the ubiquitous telephony service for the web. I think it uses video too.
ii) irc, the ubiquitous chat service typing service; downsides include killing lots of time, and killing lots of time typing. It doesn't exactly bring people together...
iii) image-chat, which are just more quality goof off time. You could make some graffiti in your foreign language...Which is fun right? Would be cool if it had a video connected with sound so you could chat to each other while drawing but I don't think anyone has invented that yet.
iv) teamchat
v) youtube & Vimeo are good for video messages, also lockerz
vi) ...I'll have to think of some more.

Memrising

 Okay, I promised a post on Memrise so here it is.
 Memrise is great but flawed. It's not as good at some things as a true flashcard program like Anki, but there are some cool things here and they are why I use it.
 Memrise is an online program for associating bits of information with other bits. When it comes to language, this is usually words and glosses.
 You're presented with the information and at the same time you're given a choice of user mnemonics or memory tricks to remember it á la Heisig. You can also write your own, which you can associate with a picture from their database or upload.
 There are several as you're tested: by having to click the word, or its definition, or you're given the word and have to type the definition, or vice versa.
 My problem with these kinds of things is that I get bored hammering stuff into my head, tho I do quite well at this. There are problems due to growing pains with the site but I learned the Esperanto correlatives like a pro with it. I'm also writing my own courses. for several planned languages, tho I feel like focusing on Esperanto right now...and French, then Spanish.
 It also has the single best setup for learning the places of the predicates in lojban, if that's your thing.
 There are also all-image courses e.g. Japanese.

Where are your keys?

 There is a remarkable little language game going on.
 It's called Where Are Your Keys? and it's basically an "elicitation" game meaning you learn to 'draw out' linguistic forms from a speaker and then copy them. The second part is that you teach simultaneously to the person you're eliciting from.
 It uses ASL but it uses most of the same signs for each game across different languages, whether Japanese or Finnish. So the first language you learn will probably be the hardest because you're learning the ASL for the 1st time. ASL is neat because it's i) simple, ii) iconic, and it iii)disambiguates (so you can get by mumbling). There are more benefits but you can see them for yourself when you try it.
 Here's the core game. There's brief Descriptions of some of the techniques on the WAYK wiki but it isn't kept up to date. It's been used for conlangs (e.g. Feayra, Mohuana, lojban) but also Irish and there are more videos on the way. There are courses for various endangered Native American languages e.g. Chinuk Wawa, Squamish.
 One of my ambitions is to write a WAYK curriculum for Esperanto and then film it. It would be a good bridge language too for later lessons in other languages. (I would like to do the same with another conlang with the permission of the creator.)

Remarkability of True Interaction

The Internet has changed immensely since its beginning. Way back, there were MUDs. Multi-User Dungeons, they're something like today's WOW. Today people still write them, but the feel is different. They can use hyperlinks instead having to type commands, and instead of typing commands they type out the game itself. The difference then is that the hyperlinks allow people to choose actions or methods as appropriate to the objects. So what this means, is that every link can mean there are several associations. So instead of a traditional wiki, or any other kind of specific link due to the structure, it's more flexible, you can have several. This can be more simply done, or it can be as a full-on game with various puzzles being built into the structure of the different objects. So the data can be active.

Interaction & the online corpus

What I'm going to say goes for a lot of languages, tho what I'm going to reference most often aren't the natural ones, but the planned ones, e.g. Esperanto.

 How do you kickstart a language community? There are several interesting ways that have not yet been fully integrated. Note that all of them, like most sites nowadays, will need a dedicated webmaster to avoid Internet mischief.

 1) image boards: these are very popular for various types of discussions, tho despite their format they're not often used for ostension a la Rosetta Stone. Nay, they're better for bizarre visual jokes, tho what is remarkable is because of that, they very easily innovate very opaque jargon and slang. What's more, there's the capacity to generate and enforce vocabulary shifts front the top down via "wordfilters" and these are a very tried and true method for creating these sorts of changes.

They can be incrementally introduced this way, for example, you post a picture of a cat and say, "This is a jurgol." Someone says, "No, that's a cat," but 'cat' gets changed to "jurgol". I think it would be fun to have an up-front automatic translator for your text so that it does a lot of the work for the user right away,and you add increasing layers so that it's not just a standard calque. Like, maybe have a separate grammar that stipulates OSV word order, implement the word-translation software at a global level, and implement a voting system that would hopefully help police well-formedness.

Active moderation would help too, and I think it would help to be able to retroactively change messages. It should be encouraged to tag posts for content as well, and potentially implement a wiki for the sorts of tropes regarding that content to make it easier to find for people.

2) forums: they would have the same moderation system as above, with karma for users and the ability to thank people for posts as well. Unlike most imageboards content should be archived. Also, posts should be treated as potential 'talk' pages that can be associated to a more traditional sandbox page; that open-to-edits quality is what separates forum posts from more general content pages, and i think that should be something up to a user, whether his post is editable.

I think it would be fantastic to have an ordering of texts, like a separate section for newsposts, user generated fiction and texts, and responses to those; at some level, there would have to be an ontology of posts and certain kinds of aggregators. Certain actions should create their own level of article, e.g. Creating a group for derivative works based on one work of a particular author, or aggregators that decide to group together certain constellations of data for future access and monitoring. What's more it should be possible for these groupings to be private or public, and thus shareable. At a global-level everything would be visible to administrators. Which brings me to...

 3) dictionaries, like urban dictionary or wiktionary. Ideally these would be implementable globally, so that translation back and forth from the target language would be easy. Lernu! does this for Esperanto, but only on certain parts of the site. (It's a godsend for a language learner.) It could be possible to have a user-generated level and a creator-level. I actually think it's not a bad thing for certain things to be private, which is the opposite of much of the Internet, and somewhat inline with some of the aspects of Facebook.

4) Kalusa: there was a conlanging site awhile ago that allowed users to vote on how close to the aesthetic a given text was; people would just vote whether it was right or not. There should be a level for bringing utterances to the attention of the group for checking and parading as exemplars of grammaticality. These could include clever jokes in one post or another, but I don't think they should necessarily be the origin of texts, nor should whole texts be under scrutiny at one time. Nor should grammaticality for conlangs be necessarily a criterion, no more so than in natural languages; some of the best sayings break the rules.

Now one of the chief difference in all of these forms of venues is, how much of a preview do you get? What snippet do you see? With blogs, it tends to be several lines of text before it cuts to the next post. With tweets you see the whole thing, tho images Lways need expanding. Image boards tend to be a mix of long and short posts of great variance, with small thumbnails of pictures beside them, which can be clicked on to open in a new tab (tho it usually can be recognized without expansion.) Wikis show only briefs when you search, just like a typical search via google, but may or may not tell you what a link looks like on the other side of a page. Forums give posts space on a page depending on length, but giving a minimum size depending on the avatar size and user information (Reddit and BBS message boards improve on that by disallowing much user info or avatars.) The ability to ignore users is a benefit to the IMDB forums; being able to focus or block out content depending on a user's whims is an important thing. It should be possible to implement this via tags and tag-filtering that go into a user's preferences. These tags would combine with any particular search tags a user chose on a given search. (Part of this is inspired by the need to encourage creative works a la the massive databases on fanf*ction websites.)

Books for traditional langs...A big research project

Spanish is the semi-ubiquitous language of the U.S. Dialects and accents are quite divergent, and regionalism is strong. Not to mention, the language tends to be spoken very quickly. Nevertheless, Mexico is right under our American border and it has the largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, so it's not so bad to learn and there are lots of good books available.

South America is quite fun to vacation in and most of the countries officially speak Spanish...or Portuguese, which is like Spanish...but easier grammatically and harder phonetically. Different parts of the Amazon use that and Spanish, sometimes mixing them both into riverense portunhol/portuniol, with perhaps a few hundred Native languages like Guarani. Amazonian Portuguese aka Caipira tends to also have an unusual minimal inflection and an /r/ much like American English, making it perhaps the easiest language to learn for American English speakers; Brazilian already generally uses a much reduced conjugation. Argentinian Spanish is very different phonetically with a very strong influence from an Italian dialect substrate due to immigration. Syllable final r-dropping or substitution with /h/ is prevalent for instance, and reminds me of British versus American English.

  Madrigal's Magic Key is a fantastic resource and don't be put off by its size. The method it uses requires you to chunk together sentences and is very empowering. You will also immediately be using words that Spanish shares with English to make them, and it's got cute little drawings by Andy Warhol. There is a very similar course online that reminds me of by Marcus Santamaria. It has more words of encouragement than Madrigal's and is spread out over a much larger bit of text, so I definitely think it would be useful if someone needs that kind of intensive format. It also mostly covers the present tense for practical needs while Madrigal's jumps in at the past tense because it's good for telling stories and is more regular than the present tense (not that Spanish is that irregular compared to most other languages.)

There's a Madrigal's Magic Key for French that comes highly recommended but for some inexplicable reason it's out of print and costs as much as college course in basic French (depending on availability), tho some would argue it's worth your money. Theres also a German version.

If you just want a taste of Spanish there's See It & Say It In Spanish which is a bit like Rosetta Stone...except it came before Rosetta Stone. It also costs $7 not $500. And it's illustrated by Andy Warhol--crazy huh? There is a version of this for French that comes highly recommended because it's the only book I know of that shows the obligatory liaisons, which is the French word for the phenomenon of actually pronouncing the end of a word in French (you'd be surprised, it doesn't happen that often.) Not to mention there's a basic book by Madrigal for Italian, German and Portugese.

 Another good book, but it can be very imposing, is Spanish for Reading. This is also available for French, but I think it works well with Spanish because Spanish orthography is easy to sound out as you go (more so than French's at least.) French for Reading is likewise quite good but out of print (I recommend the version with the eye on the cover, it's more recent.)

 If you need audio to go with these there are a ton of Memrise courses. These are good because of the crowd-sourced mnemonics that people think up for them too, and there are pictures too! And you can make your own courses and have your own forums! It's like a better Rosetta Stone for free. But I'll leave some more for another post.

Learn languages like a boss

Welcome. My name's Nay and some would say I'm too old to be learning languages. I have far too much to talk about. Here I will discuss things some things I am doing with languages; the purpose of sharing these things is hopefully to help others and myself improve these methods--of learning language.

 This is something of a personal quest. I'm an American and did not face the challenge of learning another language until high school, when I was put into the undignified position of having to learn how to sign along to stories about cats beating up rats in francais mauvais. The teacher wasn't all that happy about it tho.

 Language learning shouldn't be impossibly hard I think and it shouldn't require a hit to the learners' egos, so what you'll see here may be just as scattershot as my own experiences but in the privacy of your own home. Nor should it require huge gobs of money. The scope of the blog will encompass everything from Spanish to conlangs to shorthand to xenharmonics. (Yeah, I just said shorthand; I know shorthand.)