February 12, 2009
Call to Conlang
This March 21-22, at Brown University, there will be the 3rd (almost-annual) conference on constructed languages (CONLANGs). The organizers are accepting proposals and suggestions for sessions — in addition to all that’s already in store. More below!
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Glossopoesis and Glottotechnia:
The Art and Science of Language
The Third Language Construction Conference
The Language Construction Society and the Brown Department of Literary Arts is pleased to announce the 3rd (almost-annual) conference on constructed languages (CONLANGs). The conference is open to contributions and discussions about all forms, techniques, and especially motivations for creating languages, whether as works of art, subsidiary components to literary efforts, solutions to communication problems, research tools, or teaching tools. We particularly look forward to the interaction of language creators and interested writers of fiction and poetry.
The conference will be held on the Brown University Campus in Providence Rhode Island March 21-22, 2009. Traditional conference sessions and literary readings are limiting for the kinds of broad interaction that we would like to foster so we are planning on several types or participation, so that everyone will be able to contribute:
- Posters: Many people want to talk about projects that completed or in progress. A poster may be the ideal format, writing systems, sample sentences, points of grammatical interest — put whatever you’d most like to show off in your project on a big piece of paper and be ready to talk with people who are interested.
- Traditional papers: For those whose research results or critical thinking demand a structured argument or presentation, there will be presentation sessions.
- Tutorials: How-to information is always welcome. Tutorial sessions on topics like “creating your first language,” phonology, syntax, languages human brains can’t seem to understand (just to pick a few at random) — all would be welcome. No-one understands all about how natural languages work — and constructed languages are not even constrained by that, so tutorials at all levels can be informative for everyone.
- Unconference sessions: at LCS 2, Panel and discission sessions, as well as other collaborative activities were verey successful. We’d like to continue and perhaps expand that tradition by taking some ideas from the Compter world and having slots for self-organized group sessions, where we’ll help attendees organize conversations around topics of interest.
We have been lucky to be able to schedule the conference in the Brown/RISD Hillel House, and as we overlap with the Brown vacation, we have access to the building as a whole, meaning that we have room for posters, presentation sessions, impromptu meetings, and formal readings. We will even be able to enjoy the garden, weather permitting!
We will make every effort to document the proceedings as fully as possible in images, sound and video, and to make these available on physical media and the internet.
Providence is a frequently overlooked gem. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is an art school with a great small museum; Brown has some great library collections, and a beautiful campus; Benefit street, a few blocks from the conference location, has one of the highest concentrations of restored colonial homes in the country; Johnson and Wales University downtown has a fantastic cooking and hotel school, so that good food and restaurants are abundant, and the presence of university students also means that there’s good food cheap for those on a budget.
We are accepting proposals and suggestions for sessions (tell us what you want, even if you can’t do it all yourself, as we may be able to make it happen) immediately. We will be updating the site and sending further announcements with more practical details and program news.
This is a great opportunity to meet interesting people, learn and share knowledge, and have fun with a group of people in a small city with the amenities of a much larger one, due to its fascinating history, friendliness to artists, world-class educational institutions, and enthusiastic citizens.
February 14th, 2009 at 4:25 am
As the “International Year of Languages” comes to an end on 21st February, you may be interested in the contribution, made by the World Esperanto Association, to UNESCO’s campaign for the protection of endangered languages.
The following declaration was made in favour of Esperanto, by UNESCO at its Paris HQ in December 2008. http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=38420&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html
The commitment to the campaign to save endangered languages was made, by the World Esperanto Association at the United Nations’ Geneva HQ in September.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7vD9kChBA&feature=related or http://www.lernu.net
March 1st, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Sai Emrys, LCC3 co-organizer, sends word of three elit-oriented presentations planned for the conference:
John Cayley
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.
Diana Reed Slattery
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.
Mary-Anne Breeze (mez)
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 language mezangelle. 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.