Another local relay was held in Berlin during November 2024. This time, I had the pleasure to translate from Henrik’s ɮɛ̃̂.kɔ̌ʔ as the last person in a circle of seven participants. Thus, I returned my torch back to Bruno, who had started the game, and who translated my Ayeri text into his Paksuta to conclude. Again, the game was run in German due to the limited, local scope. The base text was a version of Aesop’s fable The fox and the grapes. ...
A conlang relay was held in May and June 2024 by conlang enthusiasts at the Department of German Studies and Linguistics of Humboldt University of Berlin in association with a few non-Humboldtian friends, together comprising the informal Berlin Conlangers Regulars’ Table. Thinking about it, the last relay I must’ve participated in was the one on the occasion of the 4th Language Creation Conference in 2011 … Pesky little time-flies and their beloved arrows! ...
In December 2022 I posted on my Mastodon account a photo from the Berlin State Library’s Unter den Linden branch featuring a pinboard on which were posted festive tags with Christmas greetings in a slew of languages spoken by library patrons. Christmas-themed cardboard cutouts with Merry Christmas written in a variety of languages ...
I came across a website called The *Bʰlog recently, a blog about Proto-Indo-European edited by a lecturer from the University of Kentucky’s linguistics department, Andrew Byrd. The *Bʰlog was started as a reaction to the success of an article on the website of the journal Archaeology, which featured sound recordings of two short texts Byrd made using a reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language, one of the texts being Schleicher’s “The Sheep and the Horses”. ...
This is in continuation of an earlier post I wrote on trying to construct a pangram in Ayeri. I just played around with my dictionary a bit again tonight and came up with the following sentence: Da-bahatang, sa akaya para vaga lamana. so=shout-3PL.M.A, PT= swallow-3SG.M quickly pig-TOP restaurant-GEN ‘So they shouted that the restaurant’s pig was quickly swallowed.’ This doesn’t make too much sense, but it’s grammatical (vaga ‘pig’ might better trigger neuter agreement on the verb, but whatever—let’s assume this is a boar), uses all consonant characters available in the Ayeri alphabet as well as the virama diacritic (gondaya) only once, and no other diacritics are involved. Also, I didn’t have to make up new words specifically tailored to use up remaining consonants like last time: I admit, I had to make up daga ’turtle’ in my previous article on pangrams for this purpose. ...