conlangs and codes
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The Secret Languages of Ireland : Sampson, John
The Secret Language of Vagabonds and Traveling Hobos
Not surprisingly, vagabonds and traveling hobos have their own system of language which I’m sure dates back decades, if not centuries. Some hobos now communicate via cellular phones and e-mail. But the classic American hobo of early this century communicated through a much more basic system of marks–a code through which they gave information and warnings to their fellow Knights of the Road. Usually, these signs would be written in chalk or coal on a trestle, fence, building or sidewalk, letting others know what they could expect in the area of the symbol. Check out the list of Hobo Signs & Symbols which seems a rather apropos addendum to the photo essay I mentioned a while back on The Underground World of Real Life Vagabonds .In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent
I just picked up this book at ConGlomeration (our local SF con) -- it's utterly fascinating stuff. by Apr 17
Solresol language and stenographic script
Origin Solresol was invented by François Sudre (1787-1864). He started working on it in 1817 and work on it continued until 1866.
Lojban class at Logfest 2011, San Mateo, California, USA. Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. It was made well-known by a Scientific American article and references in science fiction Lojban has been built over five decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters. Lojban has a number of features which make it unique:
Lojban
Tenser, said the Tensor: "Darmok"
Monday December 11, 2006 "Darmok" [This is part of an ongoing occasional series about linguistics in science fiction .voynich
Ranto (JBR AntiZamenhofism)
Learn Not To Speak Esperanto has moved into this ToC-ified subdirectory to allow more room for appendices. Rather than maintain the latest revisions on both editions I've reduced its original location to a redirector. (Latest changes asterisked) A1: Contents
Copyright 1979 by W. John Weilgart, Ph.D. (1913-1981) What?! Another Auxlang? With great trepidation we offer up another proposal for an international auxiliary language : a philosophical a priori language, which is unique and unprecedented in design so that adding yet another prospect to the list seems warranted. In deed, it is not really a newcomer, except to the internet world.
aUI, The Language of Space
The "Language of Space" By T. Peter Park Probably the most bizarre artificial "universal" language of recent times is aUI (pronounced "a-OO-ee"), the "Language of Space." aUI , meaning "space-spirit-sound" or "space-language," and advertised as the "Pentecostal Logos of Love and Peace," was launched on Planet Earth in the 1960's by John W. Weilgart, an Austrian-born Iowa psychiatrist who claimed to have learned the language as a young boy from a little green elf-like humanoid from outer space. The little green spaceman told Weilgart that aUI was the literally universal language used by intelligent beings on all planets throughout the Cosmos. aUI , according to Weilgart, is a perfectly logical and rational language, and learning aUI can actually cure a person of irrational thinking patterns.
High Strangeness: The "Language of Space"
How 18th-Century Copiale Cipher Was Cracked
In an oft-cited letter in 1947 to the mathematician Norbert Wiener, he wrote: “One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’ ” That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate — and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages. Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century.
Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer The Copiale Cipher is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780.
Copiale
The Codex Seraphinianus
DISCUSSED: Extremely Limited Editions, The Metamorphic Bicranial Rhino, French Booksellers, Grievous Errors, Italo Calvino, Pliny’s Natural History, Hieronymus Bosch, ’70s Pop Art, eBay, The Voynich Manuscript, Italian Aristocrats, Bodoni, In Watermelon Sugar, Ovid, Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Children, Hypertext Fiction, Taxonomical Surveys, Alchemical Etchings, Billy Joel Image from Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus . Click to enlarge. Who were the people who had invented Tlön? The plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity. —Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”Peter Schwenger Codex Seraphinianus , Hallucinatory Encyclopedia This symposium, various no doubt in the approaches taken and examples offered, is gathered under the sign of Seeing Things. But this unifying sign splits, and may be seen in two ways. First, if we say "he is seeing things" we are understood to be speaking of hallucination --the visual manifestation of unreal entities. To be sure, this definition can apply as well to such things as mental imaging, dreams, and the imaginative participation in fiction. 1 We must add, then, another condition: that the one having the hallucination feels, while it endures, that it is real.
Peter Schwenger Codex Seraphinianus
Serafini's Codex: the Allien Encyclopedia
The CODEX SERAPHINIANUS The Codex Seraphinianus was written and illustrated by Italian graphic designer and architect, Luigi Serafini during the late 1970's. The Codex is a lavishly produced book that purports to be an encyclopedia for an imaginary world in a parallel universe, with copious comments in an incomprehensible language. It is written in a florid script, entirely invented and completely illegible, and illustrated with watercolor paintings. The Codex is divided into a number of sections (each with its own table of contents, the page numbers are in base-21 or base-22!)They say that the text of the Codex Seraphinianus was never meant to mean anything; all the same, I mean to treat it here as if it was. Sounds crazy? I tried being sane once, and it nearly drove me mad. Anyway, don't blame me; it was Luigi Serafini who started it. I don't own a copy of the Codex ; I'm working from some notes I took in Michael Everson's library .