Mark Rosenfelder

For those interested in constructed languages, I recommend checking out Mark Rosenfelder's website http://zompist.com/. His Language Construction Kit in particular is a great resource: http://zompist.com/kit.html

The best 'defense' of English spelling I'm aware of is https://www.zompist.com/spell.html, which at the end admits: > I doubt that this page will convince anyone that English spelling is a good system. There's too many oddities. [...] What I hope to have shown, however, is that beneath all the pitfalls, there's a rather clever and fairly regular mechanism at work, and one which still gets the vast majority of words pretty much correct. It's not to modern tastes, but by no means as broken as people think. Which is to say, English spelling is definitely messed up. But it's not some insane thing that lacks any hint of sanity that some people try to portray it as.

One of my favorite single pages on the web is this author’s take on what it would look like if English were spelled with characters inspired by (but not copied from) Chinese hanzi. He calls it yingzi (“English writing” in Chinese) but it's designed entirely for English. The point of the page is not to create a new writing system (it doesn't go nearly that far) but simply to give an impression of what Chinese writing is actually like and what effect it has had on its speakers’ perception of their own language. Give it a read, it's super fascinating. https://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

If you want to write English using kanji I recommend starting here: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

> Zompist That's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. This website has the best guide (afaik) on how to create a conlang[1]. Or at least it was the best guide back in the 2000's, probably something better has been written since but I've been out of touch with the conlang subculture for over a decade now so I have no idea anymore. https://www.zompist.com/kit.html

https://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm is a great example that shows how Chinese ideograms work by reinventing them for the English language.

As an antidote to this, I recommend Mark Rosenfelder’s Hou tu pranownse Inglish [http://www.zompist.com/spell.html], which gives a set of rules to correctly predict the pronunciation of English words from their spelling ‘over 85% of the time’ (using a sample lexicon of 5000 words). English spelling is certainly horrible and irregular, but it isn’t unmanageably irregular. (To illustrate the point, I supply a quote from said article of a fact which seems to be ignored curiously often: ‘George Bernard Shaw's ghoti … illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee.)

Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't enough data. There probably will never be. As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against each other, the search space explodes and you start finding matches. Dozens. Hundreds even. A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail: http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)

> I know next-to-nothing about Chinese, but it seems to me that if a language can be spoken, it can be represented with a phonetic alphabet. You might be interested in this: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm One interesting thing I learned from it the logographic aspects of written Chinese have influenced spoken Chinese by encouraging short, phonetically-ambiguous abbreviations that tend to replace the original phonetically-distinct words. > Those sentences which only make sense in traditionally-written, not spoken or phonetically-written Chinese, would obviously be a huge cultural loss. That's already happened to a degree. The Chinese dropped written Classical Chinese for written Mandarin, which is based on a vernacular. That's akin to the West dropping written Latin in favor of vernacular writing. I understand Classical Chinese needs to be translated to be understood.

The single best resource for fantasy cartographers is the Cartographer's Guild forum. https://cartographersguild.com Mark Rosenfelder's site is an amazing rabbithole of world-building. http://www.zompist.com/howto2.htm http://www.zompist.com/virtuver.htm He's also written The Language Construction Kit and The Planet Construction Kit. There's some great Google Plus communities around fantasy cartography, like Map-Making in Games https://plus.google.com/communities/105897774940532146183

How is this news worthy? Intervening in foreign elections has been a cornerstone of US foreign policy for centuries. Would be more surprising to see high ranking officials opposed to this practice. For starters, check out this timeline of US intervention in Latin America since the mid 1800s: http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's explanation: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

My favorite page on the internet about the regularity (or lack thereof) of English orthography; oldie but a goodie: Hou tu pranownse Inglish. http://zompist.com/spell.html

A fun and fascinating resource for anyone interested in artificial languages is Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit [1]. And if you want to get extremely into it, I highly recommend Paine's Describing Morphosyntax for a detailed tour of diverse grammatical systems from across the world [2]. [1] http://www.zompist.com/kit.html [2] http://www.amazon.com/Describing-Morphosyntax-Guide-Field-Linguists/dp…

If you want to create a complete language (or just understand what would go into such a process), I cannot recommend this book highly enough: http://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/09… See also his website: http://zompist.com/kit.html

The thread is about Lojban (I remember interacting a lot with one of the main promoters of lojban on Usenet in the 1990s), but since there is also mention of Esperanto in the thread, I'll mention one of the best online resources about Esperanto: http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ I have studied a great variety of natural languages, from several different language families, and made my living for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter or translator. Conlangs are fun hobbies, but they have not enjoyed conspicuous success at solving any of the real-world problems for which they are proposed as solutions. A good general site about conlangs is http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

The death of the small town seems like it was fore-ordained by simple economics. In big cities, you can afford to have businesses like restaurants that aren't Sysco retail outlets, movie theaters that show more than the five most popular films on Earth at the moment, libraries that have books beyond romance novels, bestsellers, and out-of-date nonfiction. Moreover, cities are the economic drivers, even in the agricultural world: https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html > But don't cities arise from and depend on agriculture? No: all economic progress originates in cities, [Jane] Jacobs tells us; and cheekily adds that all agricultural progress originates in cities. Great advances, such as mechanical reapers and electricity, were invented and adopted in or near cities before being applied to agricultural regions farther out. Productivity improvements in agriculture always begin near the cities and spread out. > What we think of as purely rural activities often began in the cities. In premodern Europe, the quintessential cottage industry was weaving; but before cloth was woven in cottages the art was rediscovered and practiced in cities. Dark Ages peasants lived on gruel; the art of breadmaking was recovered first in cities (and based on city-grown bread; a medieval city had its own fields). In our own rural areas there are vast ranches where animals are fattened before slaughter; they are transplants from the city stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago. > Driving the nail in…

Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it. What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages. With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.

Most important piece of the following post? http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html I'm not an economist, but I've gotten the impression from reading lots of articles like this, that it is net negative overall, as in, world wide. But I have never, ever seen a source claim that it is net negative on a national or local level outside of very, very narrowly defined parameters. I have, however, read academic papers that state the opposite. Let's use NAFTA as an example as the canonical example. A corporation that makes tires moves to Mexico. As a result, tires for everyone in America are now half price, people who had no jobs in Mexico before now have jobs, which helps build out Mexican infrastructure, 20k people across the US no no longer have jobs; but the US economy is healthy, so those people will hopefully be okay and the US economy will likely not even notice such a slight change in labor demand. Net result: 320 million people have cheaper tires in the US, Mexicans get better jobs, infrastructure and technology, 20k us lose jobs, the corporation saves money, and hopefully reinvests in something to stay competitive. Using the above scenario, it is easy to see why any legislation against this behavior is seen as damaging and a net loss. Lets further assume, that the US passes legislation that trailer hitch manufacturers have to pay an import tarriff from Mexico. Using the above scenario, an economist would say not only are you damaging what should be a net positive…

Yes. Countries were relevant back in the days when territory was the most prized thing and war was the best means of acquiring it. Countries evolved as a means of ensuring territorial integrity, via means both explicit (borders enforced by militaries) and implicit (cultural/linguistic homogeneity, leading to xenophobia and other such barriers). But territories are no longer the most prized thing: economies are. And economies are produced by cities, not countries.[1] Moreover, the rise of the importance of cities is genuinely a challenge to the institutions of countries, not something that is merely happening in parallel to the ongoing importance of countries. This is because the factors which allow cities to thrive -- internal diversity and external trade -- are almost diametrically opposed to the factors which allow countries to maintain their territorial integrity. Of these two forms of power, I'm betting on cities. 1: http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did. > Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

Look up conlangs (constructed languages). https://zompist.com/kit.html https://conlang.org/resources/

You might be interested in: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Very true - and every demonstration of “English is hard to spell/pronounce” focuses directly on the exceptions which exaggerates the problem. One analysis I’ve seen puts it that with a single set of rules, 59% of a sample corpus of 5000 English words can be pronounced perfectly from the spelling (of course, there will be regional accent and dialect differences so that percentage will be a bit different for each one) and up to 85% can be pretty close with only slight errors. Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions. 1. https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

I think you mean this article on “Yingzi”: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

> aren't those words from an English point of view? No, many words are multiple characters. I think this is a pretty good explanation of the structure for English speakers: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

I'm glad the Wikipedia article included the link to this page (http://zompist.com/spell.html) that give a good breakdown of the actual general rules of English spelling - granted there's almost 60 of them.

Hou tu pranownse Inglish: http://www.zompist.com/spell.html EDIT: Just realized that the link is already mentioned elsewhere.

> Extreme example - ghoti: Pronounced fish. The gh from tough, the o from women, the ti from nation. Works in American English. :p http://zompist.com/spell.html Initial 'gh' can never be pronounced 'f', final 'ti' can never be pronounced 'sh', and 'o' is only pronounced 'i' in one word.

This is a list of USA interventions in latin america until 1996: http://www.zompist.com/latam.html We could find many more examples of fights against authoritarianism, for instance: "The 1953 Iranian coup d'état,[..], was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United States [..] and the United Kingdom [..]" "Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP) and to limit the company's control over Iranian oil reserves" From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat