Good conlang webpages (and Klingon)

[Danny Wier]

Josh Roth wrote:

>>1) It was broken up into several pages, not all on one page. Though
>>it's very common to have all the information of a conlang on one page;
>>it's not a very good habit, especially considering not everybody has a
>>fast connection. It's better organization anyway.
>
>I think it's ok to have everything on one page if you don't have too
much, but
>most people do have a lot and really should split it up.

Just broke my Tech phonology page into six sections, three of them
devoted to just the consonants! The main thing slowing it down was all
the pics, and I even run an x2-speed modem connection.

Can't remember what, but one of my good friends told me that the
recommended page size is something like 500-1000 words, or 3-4 screens
(800x600), or something like that.

>> so I have to be as brief as reasonably possible.
>>I did a little trick: to represent IPA symbols like gamma and theta, I
>>use the common Symbol font, which has unaccented Greek letters and
other
>>mathematical and dingbat symbols; the only problem is I don't think
all
>>browsers can work with dynamic fonts. Of course I'll have to put in a
>>lot of footnotes explaining some of my more unorthodox conventions,
like
>>using /m'/ to represent an voiced implosive bilabial nasal or /s./ a
>>voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative...)
>>
>>The Klingon page was done very well, though it was simple and plain in
a
>>way. I prefer simplicity in web documents anyway, mostly because I
>>don't feel like fooling with real elaborate graphics, frames,
background
>>music, all that. I don't know how to put all that in my webpages
>>anyway.
>
>Use a WYSIWYG program!! They make it so easy! I finally got AOLPress
to
>(sort of) work, so I should be putting up some pages soon myself. Of
course,
>if you have enough money, go out and buy Adobe Pagemill (no this is not
>advertisement SPAM!!!).

I think it's only spam if you post the URL or something like that...

Other freeware WYSIWIG editors are Microsoft FrontPage Express (the baby
version of the non-free FrontPage), which comes as a IE4.0 plugin, and
Netscape Composer, which comes with the Netscape Communicator 4.0
package. Microsoft Word 97 also has an HTML editor. Still, if you want
hardcore HTML for a more professional purpose, Adobe Pagemill or Net
Objects Fusion would be worth the money.

>And, slightly off-topic, about the actual Klingon *language*. I bought
the
>dictionary because I thought it might be fun to see what another
invented
>language looked like (this was before I did all this lang stuff on the
>internet), and I was kind of dissapointed. The only "alien" thing
about it
>was the vocabulary, which is supposedly completely unbased on any
natural
>lang. But every sound in it occurs in natlangs; I could speak it
almost
>perfectly in a few minutes (It took me a little while to figure out
exactly
>what the "tlh" was). The grammar is very agglutinative, but other than
that,
>nothing remarkable. No creative verb tenses, pronouns, cases, or
anything
>like that. And also bothering me is the use of a capital i when the
lower
>case one is completely free and available.

The selling point of Klingon is more than anything else its identity
with Star Trek and the Klingon race and culture. Also, the Okrand
system of transcription (which is considered pretty much the only
acceptable transliteration) is case-sensitive and correspond more or
less to IPA/SAMPA conventions. Thus, the capital <I> is used instead of
the lowercase <i> because Klingon does not have /i/ except in rare
cases, just /I/. Likewise capital <D> and <S>, because they're always
retroflex (but <t> is never retroflex). I personally don't like it (I
for one would prefer a case-insensitive system with a one-to-one
letter-phoneme correspodence), but this is not my language, and it's
properly written in a non-Latin script anyway.

I think you would like the languages of J. R. R. Tolkien; Quenya is the
most famous. I like it because of it's sound and rhythm, and also its
script. I haven't seen much of Tsolyani, but that's another good one.
I myself am drawn to phonology (and history and culture if applicable)
more than anything else, and as you probably already know, I have a
thing for languages with a lot of consonants and vowels.

Do a search on the web in Yahoo! (type "Constructed Languages") and read
through stuff -- I think the Conlang FAQ is somewhere in there...

Danny