Léon Bollack and His Forgotten Project

November 1, 2011 — Fiat Lingua

H. S. Chapman is a Justice of the Peace in Wales, U.K. He speaks Welsh, and has a good understanding of Breton and Cornish. He learned Esperanto in 1967, and has used it on his travels in some fifteen countries since then. He has a reading knowledge of both Ido and Interlingua.

Abstract

León Bollack (1859–1925), creator of the language project Bolak or Langue Bleue, has been neglected in recent decades. He was born in the same year as Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, but, while the two men were Jews and both wanted a more peaceful world, their approaches to language creation differed widely. The fact that Bollack invested huge sums in his unsuccessful project shows that finance is not the only problem facing the creator of an auxiliary language.

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Case Marking and Event Structure: One Conlanger’s Investigations

September 1, 2011 — Fiat Lingua

Matt Pearson is an associate professor of linguistics at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. He specializes in syntactic theory and cross-linguistic variation, with an emphasis on the structure of Malagasy. He has been creating artlangs, and collecting examples of artlangs from SF/F literature, for many years. While completing his Ph.D. at UCLA, Matt was hired to design the alien “hive” language for the short-lived NBC show Dark Skies, and also did dubbing and dialog coaching for the show.

Here, Matt has written up his LCC1 presentation. You can view a video of that presentation here.

Abstract

This paper explores how arguments are distinguished using case marking in different languages, with particular reference to the ways in which case marking is affected by factors such as animacy, definiteness and specificity, the aspect of the clause (perfective versus imperfective), and the event-type of the predicate (including whether it is stative or dynamic, telic or atelic, durative or punctual). The paper includes both a typological and an autobiographical component. I begin by briefly illustrating how case marking interacts with argument and event structure in various natural languages. I then show how my own efforts at language construction have been informed by these phenomena, and how my attempts to invent a unique yet naturalistic case system have broadened my understanding of argument and event structure in natural languages.

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