Tolkien Week on September, 2024: Little Known Holidays and Dates?

Tolkien Week 2024.

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Little Known Holidays and Dates?

i know these cause theyre in my birthday month. lol

SEPTEMBER!

national waffle week: 5-11

line dance week: 13-18

tolkien week: 19-25

be late for something day: 5

wonderful wierdos day: 9

felt hat day: 15

talk like a pirate day: 19

bi-sexuality day: 23

shamu the whale day: 26th? i forget.

How could i create my very own language in one week?

How could i create my very own language in one week?

Search the web for 30 day conlang. Me and at least one other person have tried it. I ended up writing about methodology. To do a seven day small conlang (since you mentioned toki pona), here is what I'd do: [And keep in mind, if you want a tolkien-esque, or esperanto-eque or Na'vi/Klingon/Dothraki-eque conlang, you'd need a different recipe!]

1) Create a phonotactics. Pick a phonetic inventory, pick some rules of the sort like, CVC, CVCCV, but not CVCV.

2) Machine generate your words. Optionally remove minimal pairs to reduce confusion or add minimal pairs to make rhyming easier. 20 and 50 words is probably too few, 125 is about as low as you can go, 500 and 1000 words is small enough to be easy to learn, but not so small as to be hard to use. The key characteristic of a small language is that almost all word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives) are closed. In most normal natural languages, only some classes are closed, such as functions words, prepositions, copulas, etc.

2a) Assign meanings to the words. I recommend using semantic maps. You assign meanings to pre-existing words and then via metaphor or other linking methods, assign more related words. Google the conlanger's thesaurus for a better description that I can give in this bullet point.

2b) Describe the recipe for creating new words. For example, are new words compound words, are they build of derivational prefixes and suffixes? Are the going to be loan words? Will all new lexical entries (things you have to memorize like words) have to be phrases made of discrete words, like toki pona?

3) Pick the "parameters" of the language. I recommend reading either "Atoms of Language" or "Describing Morphosyntax" to get a feel for what possibilities have been observed. Alternatively, for a bit less technical read, just look for features that you admire in the language descriptions in wikipedia-- it all depends on how technical you want to get.

4) Describe your syntax and morphology. OR write text, kind of babbling it along and make up rules to justify what you wrote. Small languages often use BNF style notation to express the syntax. An example is,

S = subject + verb

Verb = adverb + verb + time marker word

etc

In a small language, you probably can create a template for most of what you need with 20-50 rules.

If your language uses morphology more than syntax, describe the templates for building a word. In English, we have

derivational prefix + stem + suffix (for plural or possessive)

5) Interlinear gloss your sample text. A gloss is a rather literal translation of your text that tries to show how the words were built, with markers for each prefix, infix, suffix and root word.

6) If syntax-- that is word order-- is more important that morphology, you will want to graph your sample text.

7) If culture matters, adapt your language to the target culture. This can be your own culture, or as is more fashionable nowadays, fictional culture. Culture can be "small" as in a pronoun system that reflects a certain way of viewing people and things, or it can be "big" as in a large vocabulary of words that only make sense when used in a certain cultural context.

8) Assign a user license to it and publish it. You can either set it free (public domain, creative commons) or lock it up (copyright it, patent it, add a trademark name).

9) Invite fans and build a community of users (be careful about being seen as an auxlang promoter, some people have explosive feelings about auxlangs), sit back and admire it, or use it for your personal writings.

Most Recognisable Authors?

Most Recognisable Authors?

Homer

Edgar Allan Poe

J. R. R. Tolkien

Brent Weeks

Charles Dickens

Harper Lee

Herman Melville

Also on this date Sunday, September 1, 2024...