Yes, just reading the posts of RAM that I did, it never seemed as though it was his idea to be part of the list.
The "big monograph" is definitely a landmark of conlang design.
I am amazed at just how long RAM sustained his interest in the conlang. I would have probably bothered to nut out a few key ideas about it, but when it came time to trying to devise a vocabulary list I would have gotten bored very quickly.
Where does he discuss picking the phonological inventory? I've got my own ideas about phonological inventory, as I am sure most other people do. On one hand, I like Lojban's idea of only using letters from the standard ASCII character set, but on the other hand, I would probably assign to those letters their standard IPA pronunciation.
I can think of a wealth of ideas I got from reading Rick's monograph. Lojban did not believe in "forcing" distinctions like tense or number, yet as Morneau asserts, the speaker will always know which alternative he means, so it hardly matters whether he is "forced" into it. I also wondered which way Morneau would go on the issue of SOV/SVO/etc. syntax. His rationale that the language be purely right-branching (VSO) seems the perfectly logical and culturally neutral solution.
Hmmm... I'm not sure exactly when I first heard of Rick Morneau, but it would almost certainly have been while I was studying Lojban. I definitely remember that the crucial phrase that I used to Google to him was "machine translation interlingua". And the second I started reading his work I was hooked. When I read his criticism of the Loglans as poor machine translation interlinguas, I found myself very sympathetic to the points he was making. I particularly laughed my assent when he noted that Lojban contains more than twenty times the number of production rules than is necessary to create an expressive human language.
It's always interesting to me to read about what other people have chosen to do with conlangs. The way that language works to create me
aning and the myriad of different ways it can help you to reconceive ideas by re-encoding them is a fascinating process. As a programmer, it is also interesting for me to look at the way that different programming languages work as well, for the very same reasons. Each new programming language--particularly the ones that reflect different paradigms--gives you a new way of approaching problems. And some problems map more clearly onto some paradigms than others. I guess that the equivalent with languages is to speak of things like languages for law--Latin was supposed to be this; and languages for poetry--ancient Greek was supposed to be this.
I couldn't agree more about the value of this list introducing like-minded conlang fans. =) Mailing lists are probably the main way that I would have to communicate with such people, considering that it is very much a minority interest.
Geoff
2008/10/29 faqsphinx
<FaqSphinx@aol.com>
I don't think RAM was ever the point man on the list when it was in full swing. You would see him post but the idea was that there would be a sort of moderator who was most visible. I also got the idea that RAM was convinced to become part of a list, not that he was strongly motivated to start one.
I am fascinated by the big monograph RE: Machine translation interlingua because of its analysis of a method for conglanging. I fancy myself a conlanger bent on world communication. RAM has great ideas.
Most conlangs peter out before they get as far as RAM in terms of analysis and structure.
RAM has a nice view on how to pick the phonological inventory.
The big monograph is also an excellent education for a conglanger in the making.
I first heard about RAM reading the archive of a listserv. Several posters were arguing some linguistic point and one of the says "You force me to quote Rick Morneau".
I prefer the RAM approach to what I see in loglan, lojban and other conlangs, but reading the work of conlangers gets my creative juices flowing.
And hey, look how this list introduces like minded conlang fans.
:-)
Yes, there never were a large number of people exchanging ideas on this list, and I have my own pet theory about why. I think that many people join mailing lists for conlangs because they want to learn the language, and the communication with others helps them learn. And it was certainly a big disincentive for a lot of people from learning Latejami that it changed forms--or at least lexifications--so often. But I still liked to visit Rick's site from time to time just to see what he was up to, so it seems sad that his work is now discontinued.
One thing I liked about Latejami was that it was trying to accommodate the maximum number of things that all languages communicated. its ideal was that if some language could communicate it--or at least a significant number of them--then Latejami ought to as well. I liked this better than the way that Lojban would simply arbitrarily create whole new linguistic structures and see what speakers did with them. I know that some people hold out high hopes for Lojban with thought reform of all things, but I never found it useful for that.
When I first discovered Latejami--back when it was still called Nasendi--I wrote to Rick a couple of times at ram@hidden.email. But I never received any replies from him. When I discovered this mailing list I thought that all my Sundays had come at once, because Rick was actually on this list and would reply to people who posted to it. I was hoping that he still posts to this list, but from the looks of it, he does not.
Geoff
2008/10/29 Mark Lippmann
<mark.lippmann@gmail.com>
Another more recently arriving lurker here. I'm hoping Morneau will do a brain dump at some point about how he's dissatisfied with the current state of Latejami and what he'd do to improve it if he began actively working on it again.
-M
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:41 PM,
<FaqSphinx@aol.com> wrote:
Rick Morneau's system is the best I have seen. There were never a large number of people exchanging ideas on this list. There were lurkers, me being one.
I get the sense that that folks managing the list found other things to do after a while.
FaqSphinx
Hi,
I just thought I would check out Rick Morneau's machine translation interlingua to see what else he has done with it since I last studied it. But sadly, it does not appear to have been updated since October 06, 2006. =( Still, of all the rationally-designed conlangs I had seen on the internet, this one looked the best by far, so I am very glad that what reference materials there are of it are still online, and that the lexical semantics in particular is as comprehensive and thoroughly thought out as it clearly is.
Geoff
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