Links for the Masses
Since it seems that the thing to do is make a links page, I have made one. Here it is.
Language Creation Related Links
- The Language Creation Society: The LCS is the place to find out what's going on with language creation in the world, and to get help with anything related to conlanging. They're also the folks that host this website. If you like its look, you might consider becoming a member and creating one of your own!
- Langmaker.com: This site has a lot of language creation-related stuff, including bios of many a conlang, several of which were done by me; many of which were not.
- The Conlang Listserv: This is the listserv for all conlang-related talkage. It's high-traffic, and well worthwhile. If you're not signed up, sign up!
- A Conlang FAQ: This site, compiled by Dean Easton, is for those who don't know what language creation is. It also has several helpful links for those who do. But, most importantly, it has the most delightful background! It's like looking at the wall in a hallway in a fancy hotel!
- SIL's Glossary of Linguistic Terms: If you've been poking around my site and wondering things like, "What the heck is a phoneme?!", this site's for you. Try it out! It will change your life completely, and irreversibly.
- The Skerre Web Site: Skerre is a language created by my friend, the illustrious Doug Ball, who, although he's decided to go to evil Stanfurd to get his Ph.D., is a great guy, and a top-notch conlanger. Featured is his language Skerre, and another, Tenach-a Shile. Check it out!
- The International Phonetic Association: If you've been wonderng what all the funny symbols on my site are supposed to mean (e.g., ð and ʔ and ɣ), then follow this link, and you shall be enlightened.
- Voices.com (IPA): Voices.com is actually a professional organization for voice actors, but they also have this very helpful write-up about the International Phonetic Alphabet: Its history, its use, and examples. It's a good place for the beginner!
- The Unicode Webpage: You know that IPA link above where I said, "If you don't know what this character or that character means go here"? Well, if those characters come out as nothing but question marks to you on your screen, go to this website, and they'll fix you up (hopefully...).
- X-SAMPA: Many who are online can only see your basic shifted and unshifted keyboard characters, which makes representing the sounds of the world's languages rather difficult. So it was thought, until X-SAMPA came along! Now we all do just fine. If you'd like to learn this fantastic internet-friendly IPA, go to this site, and all will be revealed to you.
- Mark Rosenfeld's Language Construction Kit: Interested in creating a language of your own, but don't know where to begin? Mark Rosenfeld can help. Simply click on the link, and you'll get all the help you need.
- The Conlang Wiki: I'm becoming increasingly enamored with the idea of a Wiki. As such, this is probably the Wiki for me.
- Conlang Atlas of Language Structures: Based on the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS), Taliesin created Conlang Atlas of Language Structures (CALS), which is an editable list of a ton of conlangs' linguistic features. So, for example, ever wonder how many conlangs have VOS word order? Or less than five vowels? Or use clicks as phonemes? This is the place to check it out! At the time of writing (June 8, 2008), the beta was just released, but already there are more than twenty languages up there. By this time next year, who knows? A fantastic resource!
- The Conlanger's Library: Donald Boozer, a conlanger's conlanger, has created a fantastic resource for conlangers in The Conlanger's Library. In the library, Don has attempted to catalog any place where a conlang is used in film, music, print, or anywhere else. It's great to look through!
- Omniglossa: Ever wondered what the word for [insert word here] is in over 20 languages? If so, definitely check out Omniglossa. It was created by fellow conlanger Dana Nutter, and I've found it to be very useful as a multilingual dictionary—and a lot of fun!
- Basic and Additional Vocabulary: Creating vocab, and don't know where to start? This is a list of English words from a book that was webified by Carsten Becker (a fantastic conlanger) that is truly ponderous. It's divided by theme, and should prove extremely useful to vocab construction.
- Some Sentences to Test Your Conlang: Got a conlang? Need some sentences to translate to test it out? This page has over 200. Gary Shannon got them from a host of elementary language resources, and edited them to make them as culturally neutral as possible. It's a great place to test your language out!
- A Map of Conlangers: Ever wonder who does this stuff, where they live, what they look like, what languages they've done, etc.? Click yourself on over to this place, and you'll find out. (New and improved with Google!)
- Khangaþyagon: Khangaþyagon is the creation of Peter Bleackley, and the language is being documented at this site. Give it a glance and let him know what you think.
- Damátir Ando: If you like IE languages, you'll love this one. The language is Çomyopregi, and it's highly diggable—and very well-constructed, if I might add. Definitely check it out.
- Mark J. Reed's Homepage: This is the cat who seriously helped me out with this whole web thing thing (not a typo). Check his page out. He's not only a language creator, but he explains stuff, including (but not limited to) the highly perplexing infield fly rule.
- Christophe Grandsire's Web-page: Dig that hyphen... Christophe's a long-time conlanger who graciously furnished me with my web space here at Free.fr. Without him, none of this would've been possible. Merci beaucoup!
- Speculative Grammarian: This is an online journal of satirical linguistic articles. Need I say more?
- Omniglot: This is the website for writing systems. I can spend centuries looking at this site. I recommend you take a look at Cham right away. It changed my life: It can change yours.
- FontStruct: Speaking of scripts, if you want to make your own script, or turn your script into a font, I recommend the FontStruct site. It doesn't do everything (ligatures, for example), but it's hard to beat the price tag (namely, free). So if you want to create a basic font (note: not necessarily a basic script, but a basic font), FontStruct works pretty well.
- Henrik Theiling's Script Teacher: Henrik is one of our best conlangers, and is great with scripting to boot. Here he's created an extremely clever method for learning foreign scripts, including Hiragana, Cyrillic, Greek, and even one of my own. Try it out! It's a lot of fun.
- The Rosetta Project: Interested in languages, created or otherwise? This site just might suit you. It's a project they've concocted to translate...something into all the languages of the world, so that they can laser-inscribe each translation onto a small, metallic disc. The reason? I have no idea. What the site has, though, is a lot of information on a lot of languages (though some languages have more info than others). It's neat to browse around.
- The Yamada Language Center: The YLC (hereafter referred to as "the Yamada Language Center"), run out of the University of Oregon (the Ducks! Fierce animals, those) is a wonderful place where you can get just about any font for any language you want! It's a dream come true!
- Single-Serving.com: This is a practical site for learning phrases, etc. in a given language, though it also has some impractical information on a few conlangs. Right on.
- Some Collected Language Creation Related Links: Why reinvent the wheel? Daniel Andréasson's collected the following links which any language creator will find very useful. So useful that they won't even have to create languages anymore. And wouldn't that save a whole bucketful of time?
- Conlang Word Generator: A very simple, very effective word generator. It doesn't do historical sound changes, but it can generate words given the phonology you give it.
- My IPA Font: Do you use a Mac? Do you want to type IPA characters into your Pages or Word documents? If you haven't had luck with other fonts, try this one, which I created. If you're used to Mac fonts, and nothing but, you should feel right at home with this font, which doesn't require you to go hunting in the Character Palette for each and every symbol you want to use.
- Word Gumbo: Now this is cool. This website has a whole bunch of online databases for a bunch of the world's languages, including a good sampling of non-IE languages. If you're looking for inspiration as to the look and feel of a language, this is a good place to start.
- Janko: The indefatigable Janko Gorenc has finally put up his site. It features what I believe to be the largest listing of both conlangs and conlangers on the internet. In addition, he's got a very large links section. It'd take days to follow them all. Also, some breaking news: Janko recently put up his collection of numbers. That's right: You can now see every number he's collected in every conlang and natlang. The list is truly astounding! See how many of my languages you can spot.
- A Constructed Languages Library: I happened upon this page by accident while googling for the recent relay results. Some of my languages were, at one time, listed there. One wonders why someone took the time to take them off...