IN-English Dictionary

[David Parke]

Looking the IN-English diction, I am reminded of an episode of the
Simpsons. Lisa is having a conversation about Re-cycling with C.
Montgomery Burns.
Re-cycling is not a term that Monty is familiar with.
You see a mental picture of the goings-on inside Mr Burns' head. He
scrolls through a dictionary, set in an old fashioned font and style.
It pauses briefly on "Ragamuffin" and "Rutabaga" and "Rotund" but
fails to find "Re-cycling".

Like this Simpsons scene, the IN dictionary is like the one inside
Monty Burns' head. It is full of terms that may have seems
indispensable at the turn of the 20th Century. However it is full of
terms that somebody in 2010 may be lucky to recognize at all.

And there are missing huge swaths of vocabulary that are vital to our
current lives.

I think that with this dictionary, I'd have no trouble making
arrangements for the billeting of my servants on the steam-ship trip
to meet the Emperor of Siam.

[Mithridates]

Very true. I was kind of thinking of the same thing as I wrote it up,
though the Monty Burns image is a particularly good one. I see that as
a good thing myself though. It's a fairly simple matter to coin modern
terms that IN is currently lacking in, but those terms of old wouldn't
be so easy for us to come up with if we were forced to translate
something from early in the 20th century, so a lot of our work is
already done for us in a way that a new project wouldn't be able to
benefit from.

[David Parke]

It's good to see in the word creation notes that new radicals can be
added from external sources, provided there is representation in the
source languages. It's good that we don't need to generate new
vocabulary from existing radicals, or even that using existing
radicals is preferable.

A revised version of the Grammar might need to revise the usage of
"Aryan" as the description of the source languages, Although IN pre-
dates the Nazis by some decades and no offense should be taken from
it..

[Mithridates]

On May 24, 1:01 pm, David Parke <parke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's good to see in the word creation notes that new radicals can be
> added from external sources, provided there is representation in the
> source languages. It's good that we don't need to generate new
> vocabulary from existing radicals, or even that using existing
> radicals is preferable.

Yeah, the good thing about IN is it doesn't care whether you bring in
a new radical or not. On the other hand, it's often still easier to
create vocabulary from existing radicals as that will usually just
require putting a prefix or suffix on a word you already know and
that's the end of the matter. Of course, words like blog and
frappuccino are obviously just blog and frapucino. Other words should
have some discussion before they are "approved" since someone might
have a better idea. For words like to google and proxy and tweet I
might go with guglar and prokurist (that one might not be right but I
kind of liked the idea of calling a proxy that when typing up the
dictionary) and tuitar, so I would use them but note that they aren't
in the dictionary yet and be willing to listen to any other good
ideas.

One word we've been pondering for the past few days has been
mortification. In English and French (and probably others) it just
means to shock, whereas mortifikar means to kill or slay in IN, so
mortifikasion would be the act of killing or slaying. So it's either
add the abstract meaning to mortifikar, or come up with a new way to
say it. Luckily I'm not translating anything that needs to use the
word so it's not crucial to decide yet.

>
>  A revised version of the Grammar might need to revise the usage of
> "Aryan" as the description of the source languages, Although IN pre-
> dates the Nazis by some decades and no offense should be taken from
> it..

That'll be taken out in the next edition of the grammar. The first one
I typed up was in order to be faithful to the original pdf, and now
it's going to be tweaked and updated.

[David Parke]

Hi, Dave
The English word "proxy" is ultimately an abbreviation of Latin
procuratio(n). That is, it's the process, rather than the person how
actually does the procuring.

When the dictionaries are typed up fully, I can turn my hand to
formatting them into a professional-looking document. I personally
have no love of typing and I've got plenty to tie up my time with my
own conlang, But I am a graphic designer and do enjoy organizing
information and have the skills with the high-end layout and
typesetting software. I'd be happy to help with the design of the IN
dictionaries. I've have been complemented on the visual appearance of
my own conlang's dictionary which is truly a triumph of style over
substance.

Also I'd like to see if I can turn them into databases so they can be
used for automated queries. I've made my own conlang (Frenkisch) into
a Babylon dictionary and even managed to get it hosted on their site
(I suspect they mistook it for a dialect of German). Interlingua has
some excellent dictionaries in Babylon format.

I had a quick-and-dirty go at formatting your Word file of IN-English
today. It's wasn't too hard, because most of the work was find and
replace routines and use of style sheets. It did highlight a lot of
minor formatting errors though. Here's a hint: Do a search and replace
for "= " and " =" and make sure they are all the same, ie " = ". That
is, space-equals sign-space.
I can use " = " as a delimiter for the IN word from the part of
speech. If I search for "a.," I can replace it with part of speech (eg
"a") plus a delimiter from the English translations. So I replace " =
a., " with <delimiter>a<delimiter> and I replace " = n., " with
<delimiter>n<delimiter>. etc.
So it would be feasible to convert your Word files into some kind of
database.


Also I found quite a few words with no part of speech. And my personal
preference when translating verbs, is it's not necessary to put "to"
in front of them. eg instead of

AMAR v. to lave; to like.

I prefer:

AMAR v. love; like.

It makes it so much easier to get it into database format without
those to's.