See also
Wikiquote has quotations related to Mark Rosenfelder .
| Available in | en |
|---|---|
| Created by | Mark "Zompist" Rosenfelder |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | None |
| Launched | 1996 |
| Current status | Active |
Zompist.com is a website created by Mark Rosenfelder a.k.a. Zompist, a conlanger. It features essays on comics, politics, language, and science, as well as a detailed description of Rosenfelder's constructed world, Almea. The website is also the home of The Language Construction Kit, Rosenfelder's article introducing new conlangers to the hobby.
Many features of the site have been noted by the press, including its culture tests, [1] humorous excerpts from phrase books, [2] its collection of numbers in over 5000 languages, [3] and The Language Construction Kit. [4] [5] [6]
The Language Construction Kit [7] [8] was originally a collection of HTML documents written by Rosenfelder and hosted at Zompist.com intended to be a guide for making constructed languages. The LCK proceeds from the simplest aspects of language upward, starting with phonology and writing systems, moving on to words, going through the complexities of grammar, and ending with an overview of registers and dialects. This sensible progression, as well as the warnings against common oversights, frequent use of examples from natural languages, and healthy dose of humor, has earned the LCK its popular and respected status among the Internet conlanging community. It has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German by fans, and came out in book form in March 2010. [9] Rosenfelder has published several follow-up works: Advanced Language Construction and The Conlanger's Lexipedia, which get into more detail on certain aspects of conlanging, and The Planet Construction Kit, which is geared towards creating whole fantasy worlds. [10] In 2015, Rosenfelder published the China Construction Kit. [11]
The website has a corresponding bulletin board, formerly hosted with SpinnWebe but now with its own domain at www.verduria.org. The Zompist Bulletin Board (often abbreviated ZBB) is an online forum created for the purpose of discussing conlangs, conworlds, and Mark Rosenfelder's own constructed world, Almea. Members of the board share and showcase their own conlangs and conworlds, as well as discuss aspects of the world's languages.
Almea is a fictional world constructed by Mark Rosenfelder, which Zompist.com is mainly dedicated to. It is populated by several races, known as the Thinking Kinds. The Thinking kinds include the humans, the ktuvoks (swamp mammals with reptile characteristics considered demons by most Almean humans), the iliî (singular form iliu, ancient wise aquatic race, playing a role similar to elves in Tolkien's mythos), the flaids (said to be 'friendly but insane'), the elcari (hard-working mountain dwellers comparable to Tolkien's dwarves), and the icëlani (more primitive relatives of humans). [12] Almea's main continent, Ereláe, has several nations, including Verduria, which is the most detailed and closest Almean counterpart to real-life countries, Dhekhnam, which is a ktuvok empire (meaning that humans function as slaves to the ktuvoks there), Xurno, a nation ruled by artists, and Skouras, a detailed maritime nation. [13] Ereláe also has a detailed historical atlas, which was inspired by the New Penguin Historical Atlases.[ citation needed ] In addition to the various atlases and languages, there is also a wiki called the Almeopedia, which works as an encyclopedic reference. The part of the website devoted to Almea, Virtual Verduria, also includes a range of stories and guides to various subjects, including drawing and maps.
Languages of Almea described on the website include:
Most words in those languages have etymologies, being derived from proto-languages (like Proto-Eastern above) by means of sound changes, and are given historical backgrounds, resulting in the presence of loan-words.
Fictional languages are the subset of constructed languages (conlangs) that have been created as part of a fictional setting. Typically they are the creation of one individual, while natural languages evolve out of a particular culture or people group, and other conlangs may have group involvement. Fictional languages are also distinct from natural languages in that they have no native speakers. By contrast, the constructed language of Esperanto now has native speakers.
The Elvish languages of Middle-earth, constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien, include Quenya and Sindarin. These were the various languages spoken by the Elves of Middle-earth as they developed as a society throughout the Ages. In his pursuit for realism and in his love of language, Tolkien was especially fascinated with the development and evolution of language through time. Tolkien created two almost fully developed languages and a dozen more in various beginning stages as he studied and reproduced the way that language adapts and morphs. A philologist by profession, he spent much time on his constructed languages. In the collection of letters he had written, posthumously published by his son, Christopher Tolkien, he stated that he began stories set within this secondary world, the realm of Middle-earth, not with the characters or narrative as one would assume, but with a created set of languages. The stories and characters serve as conduits to make those languages come to life. Inventing language was always a crucial piece to Tolkien's mythology and world building. As Tolkien stated:
The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.
The English philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created several constructed languages, mostly for his fictional world of Middle-earth. Inventing languages, something that he called glossopoeia, was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens. An early project was the reconstruction of an unrecorded early Germanic language which might have been spoken by the people of Beowulf in the Germanic Heroic Age.
Brithenig, or also known as Comroig, is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it. Officially according to the Ill Bethisad Wiki, Brithenig is classified as a Britanno-Romance language, along with other Romance languages that displaced Celtic.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists.
An artistic language, or artlang, is a constructed language designed for aesthetic and phonetic pleasure. Language can be artistic to the extent that artists use it as a source of creativity in art, poetry, calligraphy or as a metaphor to address themes as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalizing world.
Engineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages, logical languages, and experimental languages. Raymond Brown describes engineered languages as "languages that are designed to specified objective criteria, and modeled to meet those criteria".
LCK may refer to:
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of geography, a backstory, flora, fauna, inhabitants, technology and often if writing speculative fiction, different races. This may include social customs as well as invented languages for the world.
Talossa, also known as the Kingdom of Talossa, is one of the earliest micronations – founded in 1979 by then-14-year-old Robert Ben Madison of Milwaukee and at first confined to his bedroom; he adopted the name after discovering that the word means "inside the house" in Finnish. Among the first such projects still maintained, it has kept up a web presence since 1995. Its internet and media exposure since the late 1990s contributed to the appearance of other subsequent internet micronations.
Tsolyáni is one of several languages invented by M. A. R. Barker, developed in the mid-to-late 1940s in parallel with his legendarium leading to the world of Tékumel as described in the Empire of the Petal Throne roleplaying game, published by TSR in 1975. It is detailed in The Tsolyáni Language, Part I and II.
Langmaker was a website run by Jeffrey Henning that acted as a database of conlangs, neographies, and other resources related to conlanging and conworlding. Prominent articles and the conlang directory were collected published by Yannia Press as Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, with an introduction by David J. Peterson. As of June 4, 2009, the site was offline. An unknown source has taken over the website, and hosts virus files.
Finnish is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli are official minority languages. The Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian county Troms og Finnmark by a minority group of Finnish descent.
A constructed language is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language, or a fictional language. Planned languages are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning.
Quenya is a constructed language, one of those devised by J. R. R. Tolkien for the Elves in his Middle-earth fiction.
Verdurian is a constructed language created by Mark Rosenfelder, first published in 1995 and hosted at his website, Zompist.com.
Arden Ray Smith is a member of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship and holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published numerous articles relating to the languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien. He was a columnist and editor of Vinyar Tengwar, for which he wrote the popular column "Transitions in Translations", in which odd elements in translations of Tolkien's work were described and commented upon.
David Joshua Peterson is an American conlanger who has constructed languages for television series such as Game of Thrones and The 100 and movies such as Thor: The Dark World and Dune.
Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues is a 2017 documentary film about conlanging – the hobby of constructing artificial languages and the people who make them. The film features conlangers David J. Peterson ; Marc Okrand and David Salo, as well as Paul Frommer, linguistics professor and creator of Na'vi, and Christine Schreyer, anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, who hopes to be able to apply conlanging methods to endangered languages. The film also looks at the history of the hobby and modern-day conlangers. While the film was made available for online purchase in 24 August, a premiere was held on 22 July at the University of Calgary's Plaza Theatre. Production began in 2015, and received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, but the film's future was secured through an Indiegogo campaign that raised $25,000 during August 2016. The Language Creation Society provided $3,000 worth of funds towards the film and held an interview with Watkins.