LCC3 Speakers

The Early Central Mountain Ordinal-Aspectual-Modal System

The Central Mountain (CM) languages are polysynthetic, head-marking and incorporating. I will discuss the obligatory ordinal-aspectual-modal marking present in the early CM languages, as exemplified in pre-Proto-Central Mountain (pPCM), the family’s earliest reconstructed ancestor. Words in pPCM mark two orders (the manifest and the unmanifest), three aspects (the continuative, the imperfective and the perfective) and two modes (the indicative and the imperative). Tense, strictly speaking, is not marked. In the indicative mode, marking of one of four levels of evidentiality is mandatory: (1) by firsthand experience, (2) by secondhand experience, testimony, hearsay or common knowledge, (3) by deduction or implication, or (4) by assumption, guess or speculation. The imperative mode divides into sub-modes consisting of imperatives proper (the immediate imperative and the delayed imperative) and two others associated with the imperatives: the obligative and the hortative, which deal with suggestion and urging.

Reading Unreadable Chinese: A Brief Introduction to Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky

Between 1987 and 1991, the Chinese graphic and fine artist, Xu Bing (born, Chongqing, 1955, and a MacArthur laureate), designed a ‘vocabulary’ of four thousand characters which appear, in terms of their graphic form and structure, to be Chinese, but which are entirely unreadable in terms of natural linguistic signification. None of them appear in Chinese dictionaries, and they do not relate to any living or dead, spoken or unspoken language on earth. During the same period, Xu personally carved (in reverse) the pear-wood type from which he eventually had his Tianshu (or Book from the Sky) set and hand-printed in a small book-making factory in China. As a conceptual art work and printmaking tour de force, Xu Bing’s Tianshu has been seen by some critics and scholars as one of the most important works of late 20th-century Chinese art. This talk will briefly introduce Xu Bing’s work based on my recent extended essay and description of his book. In particular, I will address questions of the relationship of Xu Bing’s non-language to linguistic practice and language art.

Designing non-linear two-dimensional writing systems

What if we took systems like flow-chart diagrams and made them fully expressive, so we could communicate anything with them? What if we did the same thing to sentences that Chinese or other ideographic systems do to words? Or paragraphs? This talk will try to answer these riddles. Schuyler will trace the evolution of his conlang, Ouwi, and then examine the general advantages and perils of this class of writing systems.

A Gripping Language

Alex and Sai—partners brought together by conlanging (a rarity, indeed!)—are making a covert language mediated entirely by touch. This gripping languageallows two people to converse freely while appearing to be doing nothing more than holding hands. It includes a system specialized for discreetly commenting on an ongoing spoken conversation.
This talk will be “hands on”, so please be sure to sit next to someone you like!

Alex Fink is in his third year of the PhD program in math at UC Berkeley, before which he lived in Calgary, Alberta where he was born. He’s been conlanging since 1999ish, and in that time has created a couple of relay-worthy languages of the naturalistic sort (Sabasasaj, Pjaukra, AhH?) and a great spray of sketchier projects. Alex co-ran LCC2 with Sai and is chuffed to have a partner also into the secret vice.

Lingua Ignota

Lingua Ignota, meaning “Unknown Language,” is a network of interactive installations that use computer graphics, text and sound to represent multilingual mobile phone text messages. Through text message dialogue between the U.S. and the Philippines. Lingua Ignota seeks to link people from different walks of life through an artistic treatment of auxiliary language as a platform for exchange and a space for contemplation on the ways in which a person’s thoughts, functions and assumptions are shaped by the constructs of their native language. Text messaging, a ubiquitous form of communication in the Philippines and U.S., is Lingua Ignota’s forum. Here, writers and laypeople from depressed areas of the Philippines may participate in global storytelling without the use of a computer. The data visualization system of Lingua Ignota transforms incoming SMS text conversations into three-dimensional animations projected on sculptural surfaces. These animations of SMS conversations are in a constant flux between their native languages and neutral concept space of Blissymbolics: an ideographic language composed of easily drawn and recognized symbols. Lingua Ignota employs Blissymbolics to reveal the visual poetry of cross-cultural themes that emerge from multilingual SMS conversations. At this juncture, physical proximity between the symbols in Lingua Ignota indicate the relationships between international communities — communities formed not by location, but by shared ideas and storytelling.

Samantha Gorman is a first year MFA Candidate in the Electronic Writing Program at Brown University. She graduated from Brown University in 2006 with joint degrees in Digital Media and Literary Arts. Recent projects have incorporated studies in constructed artistic and auxiliary languages. She is particularly interested in the literary possibilities that emerge from the intersections of old and new technologies and languages.

The languages of our souls: Conlangers’ fluency in their own conlangs

While most conlangs are too incomplete to be learned, and most creators of even very well-developed conlangs make no attempt to become fluent in them, there are a few exceptions, conlangers who have become more or less fluent in their conlang, whether intentionally or as an unintended side-effect of developing and using it. I will present the results of a survey on conlangers’ fluency in their conlangs and present some preliminary analysis of the results, hopefully showing commonalities between these atypical conlangers and sharing stories from their experiences.

Rikchik: A Speechless Orthography

Rikchik is a language with no phonetic component. I’ll present a quick introduction to its writing system and discuss the general design of the language.

Stick to the Script: Orthographies, Fonts, and Philosophy

In this chautauqua, David discusses the nature of writing systems, how to create them, and why they’re so neat. He’ll also touch briefly on some of the issues that face a conlanger creating a font for an orthography.

Nonspoken text in Tenata’s written language

Tenata uses a combined phonemic and logographic writing system. The language is not written linearly. A word in Tenata has at least three parts – a prefix, the root, and one or more suffixes. The root is written with an alphabet and the prefix and suffix or suffixes are written above the root. Data source statements are written vertically, expanded in size (or repetition) to fit the length of the sentence they apply to. Elements of the writing system (most often data source statements, though also others) can be repeated, eliminated, and written in varying sizes, to add meaning that usually isn’t included in spoken Tenata.

Xenolinguistics

Wikiuniversity offers a wry definition of Xenolinguistics: “the scientific study of languages of non-human intelligences. Publications in this field tend to be speculative as few people have made the claim to have understood an alien language, at least not reliably.” The encounter with aliens and their languages is also an aspect, though by no means a universal one, of the psychedelic experience. Terence McKenna’s experiences of a hyper-intelligent, multidimensional form of visual language in the DMT experience; of the teaching voice of the Logos in high-dose psilocybin trips; and of glossalalia-like utterances experienced as the underpinnings of language develop these themes.

It is within this barbarian discourse that I frame my own tale of how I became a xenolinguist, through the construction and investigation of the Glide model of a dynamic visual language, and speculate on the feedback system of the co-evolution of language and consciousness. Glide, according to its myth of origin in the story-world, is a psychedelic language. Psychedelics provided the means to emerge from the cocoon of natural language into what could be understood as both a pre-linguistic state of direct apperception of the world around and inside us, and as a post-linguistic (post-natural language) realm of evolutionary forms of language. States of extended perception were used in the conception, design, and implementation of LiveGlide, and in learning how to read the writing produced.

Letters Tied Up In Knots: An Interlace Alphabet

I will discuss the Ceremonial Interlace Alphabet that I developed and now use for Kēlen names. I will talk a little about the history and techniques of interlace and knotwork. I will then show in detail how to make the letters of my alphabet.

Varkuzan: A Language Built Around The Personalities of Prime Numbers

Ayeri Relay Text

Twitterwurking

Twitterwurking is the product of an online residency completed at New Media Scotland by the code poet Mez Breeze. The residency consisted of poetry production in the form of “tweets” using the social networking software Twitter. Each tweet involved the use of the invented code-poetic hybrid languagemezangelle. To mezangelle means to take words/wordstrings/sentences and alter them in such a way as to extend and enhance meaning beyond the predicted or the expected. It’s similar to making plain text hypertextual via the arrangement and dissection of words. Mezangelling attempts to expand traditional text parameters through layered/alternative/code based meanings embedded into meta-phonetic renderings of language.

Cleveland Public Library Language Creation Exhibit

This major, ground-breaking exhibit on constructed languages (conlangs) was on display at Cleveland Public Library from May through August, 2008. Covering the span of conlangs from ancient history through modern times, the exhibit examined everything from conlangers’ inspiration to specific conlangs like Esperanto and Klingon. The worldwide community of conlangers was instrumental in putting the exhibit together with gracious submissions of biographies, photos, and Babel Texts.

The tache of language

Peter Ciccariello’s digitally rendered image poems are multi-disciplinary, cross genre visual/poetic objects that are modeled in a three-dimensional virtual environment and texture mapped using real-world photographs, found image, and various source texts. His work is an ongoing, serial experiment with the interstices of language and text in the visual world. A form of postliterate, asemic writing, the language these images speak are at once pure conception and simultaneously notes from the realm of dreams.

Recent work has appeared both in print & online in, amongst other places, Poetry Magazine, Sous Rature, Angel House Press, Fogged Clarity, MOCA The Museum of Computer Art, and Otoliths. His book “Uncommon Vision” is available at Liminal Spaces. He also blogs at Invisible Notes and Hope Street.

Cartoon Theories of Linguistics

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language

This is a pre-release galley copy of Arika’s book. Arika has kindly donated three signed copies for auction, inscribed in whatever language / manner the winner chooses and to be received in May with the book’s public release. Proceeds go directly to benefit the Language Creation Society and future conferences. Please talk to David Peterson or Sai if you would like to place a bid.

Just about everyone has heard of Esperanto, which was nothing less than one man’s attempt to bring about world peace by means of linguistic solidarity. And every Star Trek fan knows about Klingon, which was nothing more than a television show’s attempt to create a tough-sounding language befitting a warrior race with ridged foreheads. But few people have heard of Babm, Blissymbolics, and the nearly nine hundred other invented languages that represent the hard work, high hopes, and full-blown delusions of so many misguided souls over the centuries.

In In The Land of Invented Languages, author Arika Okrent tells the fascinating and highly entertaining history of man’s enduring quest to build a better language. Peopled with charming eccentrics and exasperating megalomaniacs, the land of invented languages is a place where you can recite the Lord’s Prayer in John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language, say your wedding vows in Loglan, and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Lojban.

Welcome to LCC3 (in Ilaksh & Ithkuil)

The Infernal Alphabet

Tapissary: Hieroglyphic Collages 2

Since childhood, Steven has been strongly attracted to manuscripts. The subject of this exhibit introduces his invented hieroglyphic language called Tapissary, to which he has devoted thirty-two years. On the gallery wall hang four greatly oversized ‘pages’. Similar to the embellished initials of a medieval parchment, Steven enjoys investing his symbols with detailed flourishes. He liberally sews the seeds of image and text within the silhouette of each of the four hieroglyphs until an energetic ‘language-scape’ is achieved.