response 1 of 26:

Apr 24 00:01 UTC 1994

Note--speaking of codes, check out KINUME on IQ

response 3 of 26:

Apr 25 04:41 UTC 1994

started once.  Made a cool alphabet, arranged as best I knew to fit the order
in which infants begin to test sounds.  I
have long since forgotten it, unfortunately.

response 5 of 26:

Apr 25 20:29 UTC 1994

not in years- I have kids instead, these days.  You may notice, all the poetry
is old...

response 7 of 26:

Apr 26 03:44 UTC 1994

Ahem.

response 9 of 26:

Apr 26 06:31 UTC 1994

John, dude, there is always an exception to the rule.

response 11 of 26:

Aug 23 22:03 UTC 1994

I remember when I was younger, I made up a country adn then a language, but
then, budding word/language person that I was, I started to get into the
trying to figure out the intricacies (sp!?) of how my language would have to
be to mimic languages that developed over thousands of years, and finally I
got so frustrated that I just threw the whole idea out...

response 13 of 26:

Sep 20 10:17 UTC 1994

I can't quite explain ShyMoat... (my language for myy stories) to you.
It's sorta an experiement/learning experience.
It's my way of expressing how i've come to understand language and things.
I'm very new to much of the linguistic knowledge base however, and would
love any pointers one could give towards books, etc. on the subject.

response 15 of 26:

Nov 1 03:47 UTC 1994

When I was in high school I had planned to learn Esperanto.  No time for
improving my English anymore, much less languages I can't read anything in.

response 17 of 26:

Nov 1 14:53 UTC 1994

Esperanto is distinctly a Romance language (Latin, French, Spanish, Italian),
with some Slavic flavor to it (the creator, Zamenhov, was Polish).  E.g.
Filo amas filino (The son loves the daughter)
Cu patro amas patrino? (Does the father love the mother?)
The Cu yes/no word is distinctly Polish, but the rest of the words are
fairly distinctly Romance items.

Another problem with Esperanto in today's world is it is perniciciously
sexist.  Almost all female nouns are male forms + -in.  E.g., above:
patro = patr+o = father + noun marker
patrino = patr+in+o = father + female + noun marker
In this example, "matro" is also acceptable (although less so), but I 
know of no alternative to "filino".  "patro", of course, can also mean
"parent".
"Parents" = patroj = patr+o+j = father + noun marker + plural marker

One obvious solution would be to incorporate a masculine marker as well, e.g.,
patro parent
patramo father
patrino mother
patroj parents
But that would take community approval (and there *is* an Esperanto speaking
world subculture).

response 19 of 26:

Nov 20 01:03 UTC 2003

Re: 17: Don't forget about the weird consonants, like x
and j and s with diacritics on them, which are on the one
hand difficult to remember the spelling of for those that
can pronounce them, and difficult for a large number of
the world's population to learn (it is considered that an
international language should be as easy as possible for a
large number of people across the world to learn to
pronounce). some languages, for example, have no "sh",
"ch", "j" or even "l",

OTOH, a german interlinguist in the 19th century tried to
get around this problem by taking European words and
"mutating" them. "world speech", for example, became
"Volapuk" (with an obligatory extra linking "a" and a "u"
with an umlaut, as in German (the author was German)). -
This being the name of the language.

In this particular case, as well as the mutsation of "red"
to "lol", the mutation was perpetrated in the interests of
the Chinese, who, the author opined, had no "r" - which is
false - and as many people know, the Japanese have no "l".
Moreover, "puk" makes no concession to those languages in
which a word cannot end in a consonant (native Italian
nouns cannot end in a consonant, whilst the fact that some
italian prepositions can end in a consonant might be
explained by the fact that prepositions are often
pronounced as a "unit" of a greater "phonological word"
which includes prep + noun (in Russian, this process is
undisputed).

response 21 of 26:

Jan 17 22:23 UTC 2006

In high school I spent quite a while working on an invented language. At first
it wasn't supposed to have any cognates to any language, but they sort of
appeared as I wanted words for things. The grammar is backwards from English --
the order of parts is (for the most part) direct object, verb, subject,
preposition-inderect object. In a reverse of every language I know, the default
gender is *feminine* not masculine (though groups use the gender of the
majority). Verbs aren't conjugated, but adverbs attach to the verbs. It rarely
uses indefinite articles. It counts in base 7. One of the wierdest things is
that for subjects like racism, slavery, punishment, or evil of any sort the
words are directly imported from another language and the grammar is reversed,
with accents intentionally placed oddly (so that if this were your only common
language with someone they would notice the shift). The language is called (in
itself) _lo ergo dy or_, which translated means "the language of gold" (with
the word for "language" also meaning "therefore").

response 23 of 26:

Jan 17 23:19 UTC 2006

(I asked my mom if she knew of any language with a word order like that when I
was in the earliest planning stages; she didn't.) Does Turkish have a *strict*
word order in that order? I'm pretty sure that a lot of languages (perhaps
Latin, even) could fit that word order but wouldn't have to because of their
casing of nouns.