MOTD

So, I'm super-stupid for Sona right now. I even set up a wiki, the <a href="http://s94851334.onlinehome.us/Main/Index">Sona Uiki</a>. It actually turned out kinda nice. I got a free Website from <a href="http://www.1and1.com/">1 and 1</a> during some promotion they were doing, and I installed <a href="http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/PmWiki/PmWiki">PmWiki</a>, which may be the easiest wiki software of all time.

On top of this, Maj and I have been doing research on the language's author, <a href="http://s94851334.onlinehome.us/Main/KennethSearight">Kenneth Searight</a>. Searight was an English officer in India, a polyglot, a friend of E.M. Forster, C.K. Ogden, and G.L. Dickinson, a pederast and all around bad freak.

Anyways, we got intrigued about the guy, Maj started applying her super-librarian skills, and now we're going to <a href="http://www.wikitravel.org/en/article/London">London</a> and <a href="http://www.wikitravel.org/en/article/Cambridge">Cambridge</a> to do more research. How weird is that? We might write a book... we'll see.

So, I'm a big fan of <a href="http://www.langmaker.com/">constructed languages</a>. Like, y'know, <a href="http://www.esperanto.net">Esperanto</a> and stuff. Actually, I'm a big fan of all languages, but conlangs are fun and easy to learn since, being consciously authored by one or a few individuals, they lack that wild-eyed complexity that natural languages have. They just don't have that existentially nauseating feeling of something that exists beyond the human mind.

Where was I? Oh, yeah: I especially like <i>isolating</i> languages -- where the words of the language don't change for tense of verbs or case of nouns. And <i>agglutinative</i> ones -- where you build up words from smaller root parts (like "non-", "pro-", "-ly"). I guess I also am down with <i>minimal</i> languages -- languages with a really small set of root parts.

I was kind of into <a href="http://www.pigdog.org/auto/esperanto/link/2705.html">toki pona</a> for a while, but then I got kinda bored by that language's primitivist mind-control. Screw you, toki pona! Stay outta my head! Then I started grooving on this <a href="http://www.ebtx.com/lang/eminfrm.htm">Earth Minimal</a> language instead. Just 220 words in the radical lexicon. But, y'know, it doesn't seem that well-thought-out. And the author is a serious crank. Yeah, you have to be a crank to make up a conlang, but not a real serious crank.

So <b>now</b> I'm totally digging on <a href="http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/sona.html">Sona</a>. It's got 360 radicals, plus 15 particles, which, y'know, is not really all that much. It's short and sweet, but seems well-designed and aesthetically pleasing. I wrote myself a <a href="http://zork.net/~mrbad/sona">language drill file</a> that works with the <kbd>quiz</kbd> program from <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/bsdgames">BSD games</a>. Soon I will be a genius of Sona! Bwahaha!