The Conlanging Librarian

I realize it’s been awhile since I posted the first foray into Barsoomian on the blog here and have been remiss in not following up. By now, everyone knows that the John Carter movie was not the blockbuster success which was hoped for. (Sigh) The visuals were well done, but the story seemed overly (and unnecessarily) complicated. However, we still have the books which started it all. That’s the important part.

The reason for this post (in addition to simply getting back on a regular posting schedule) is to acknowledge and begin to thank Fredrik Ekman’s wonderful in-depth replies to my previous posts. Fredrik has great insights into the language of the Red Planet, has written extensively elsewhere on them, and interviewed Paul Frommer about his version of Barsoomian. The fact that he took the time to respond to my musings is very humbling.

His comments were posted on Conlang-L which is why you don’t see them here for now. I posted a message on that listserv that I had written up some ideas and provided the links to my Barsoomian “theories”. Fredrik then responded, and I have not had the opportunity to respond yet. Yes, I know it’s been months. Yes, I’m a little embarrassed by that time lag. So, now I begin to attempt to make amends.

What I plan to do is post links to the comments here as a start. I may not be delving deeper into Barsoomian right away, but for those who are interested, Fredrik’s comments provide an excellent alternative viewpoint:

• Ay, Ra, Co… Counting in Barsoomian! – Fredrik Ekman’s Comments provide excellent points to consider.
• Barsoomian Familial Relationships – Fredrik Ekman’s Comments. My reply to his reply
• Ekman reply to my reply to his reply
• Hek, Shahek, Ron, Phai: All in the Barsoomian Family – Ekman’s reply
• Dejah Thoris Phai-Dara! More Barsoomian Vocabulary – Ekman’s insights
• Adventures in Barsoomian Continued… – Ekman’s reply

I believe that’s all of them. Of course, these aren’t the only postings at Conlang-L that have to do with Barsoomian and ERB. Feel free to check out their Archives, too. Hope you enjoy the links to the discussion above. I know I did!

I just finished Spellwright by Blake Charlton (Tor, 2010) . The story follows the adventures of Nicodemus Weal, a “spellwright” who can’t spell. The most fascinating thing about the world that Blake Charlton has created is his novel system of magic where spells are formed within one’s body or peeled from the pages of a book. The master wizard, Agwu Shannon, is a great well-rounded character and could probably have sustained a book of his own. There are lots of other secondary characters and intriguing plots. But, since this is a conlanging blog, let’s see how Charlton handles language.

The first thing to know about language in the world of Nicodemus Weal is that language is Power…literally. The magical languages include Common, Numinous, Magnus, Wrixlan, Pithan, and the all-mighty Language Prime. One could think of these magical languages almost as computer code or prose. One who knows one of these languages can form the sentences, phrases, and paragraphs within their bodies and construct wonder-working spells. But be careful of misspellings! They can kill you. That is Nicodemus’ problem. He is a cacographer or one who is magically dyslexic, inadvertently misspelling even the simplest of spells.

To followup on the idea of writing instructions out of magical languages: In one section, a “bookworm” (a monstrous creature that eats magical texts or “malicious language that invades manuscripts. They eat all the prose and use it to make copies of themselves”) is caught and its text is parsed to figure out where it was supposed to return (i.e., it’s been programmed and its captors are going to re-program it). The book even describes “textual intelligence” as a required string of instructions: “if this happens, then do that; if that does not happen, then do this…”

The way Charlton described the magical languages is very evocative:

• “A sudden, golden jet of Numinous prose exploded…
• “…a bookshelf burst into a molten ball of silvery Magnus.”
• and maybe the best: After a struggle, someone’s face is “crushed by blunt words”

And since these languages all have writing systems to go with them, this could be a hey-day for some inventive con-scripter!

Humans are the primary beings in this world, but there are a Chthonic non-human people who dwelt in the land prior to humans’ arrival. We get one word of their language: tulki = masculine form of “interpreter”.

Charlton also has some fun with the word ghostwriting which is the spell a spellwright can use to exist after death.

Finally, we get the name of a few spells: madide, latere, sceaduganga. The last one, as I read, triggered some sort of Old English ancestral memory or something. So, I set off to check my available online Old English dictionaries. Sure enough, sceadu-genga occurs in Line 703 of Beowulf: Cóm on wanre niht / scríðan sceadugenga “In the colourless night, came / slinking the shadow-wanderer. (Click here for a good online Beowulf in Old and Modern English). The spell does indeed allow one to walk in the shadows or, in other words, to become invisible.

So, Spellwright is worth the read. A fascinating magical system, playful use of language, and interesting characters. It does drag a bit in spots being a little overly-reliant on exposition, but the action and overall story make up for these shortcomings. In fact, I thought (after reading it) maybe we should refer to ourselves as langwrights instead of conlangers. Just an idea.

I went back and re-read that recent NY Times article on conlanging and realized it mentions that Paul Frommer (of Na'vi fame) has been hired “to develop a Martian language called Barsoomian for ‘John Carter,’ a science-fiction movie to arrive in March.” That gave me some hope! If that is the case, it’s even more unfortunate that they included the Martian “Decoder” and Martian Translator on the movie’s official site. Why not start promoting Barsoomian now? Build some buzz? I also had the thought that, even though Dr. Frommer is a “professional” language creator, any Barsoomian he comes up with will be no more canonical than something I or anyone else devises. The only Barsoomian canon (from my perspective) would be that devised (or sanctioned by) Edgar Rice Burroughs (or, I suppose, his estate). So, with that in mind, let’s continue on our own little adventure into the speech of the Red Planet.

Last time out, we gained some new vocabulary and could say things like Hek dar ron “The father guards his son” with articles, tense, and pronouns supplied telepathically (or by context). This time, we’ll turn to measurements and see what we can puzzle out…

According to ERB, we have on Barsoom the sofad, ad, haad, and karad measurements with the following relationships:

• 10 sofad = 1 ad
• 200 ad = 1 haad
• 100 haad = 1 karad = 1 degree of Barsoomian longitude
• 360 karad = circumference of Barsoom at the equator

So, the ad is the basic unit of measurement. This means the prefixes sof, ha, and kar must impart some meaning to the basic term ad. Judging by my previous post, it doesn’t appear that these three are numerical. It would seem strange (even for Barsoom) for sof to mean something like “1/10″. Unfortunately, sof does not appear in any other Barsoomian name. On the other hand, both ha and kar do appear: Haja (princess of Gathol), Tor Hatan (Odwar of the
91st Umak), Okar (a city), Kar Komak (odwar of Lothar), Torkar Bar (Kaolian noble). How do reconcile these different uses? My suggestion: sof means something like “small, minor, lesser” and ha “bigger, major, greater”. Kar, on the other hand, since it refers to measurement “around” the planet could mean something like “long, lengthy, extended” and by extension in the vertical plane “tall, high”. I could even go so far as to say that kar is the final comparative degree: “biggest, greatest”. You may remember we also had -dak (< jeddak) and -dara (< jeddara) as superlative markers. A better term for these two might be an augmentative (i.e., the opposite of the “-y” or “-ie” in names like “Tommy” and “Susie”). This would give us degrees of comparison (smaller, original, bigger). That means then that we have:

• sof “small”
• ha “bigger”
• kar “biggest”

We could even use these in the opposite direction and get:

• sof “small”
• hasof “smaller”
• karsof “smallest”

I could see Kar Komak‘s first name meaning something like “The High” (as in “your highness”). Sure, why not? We’re also saying that modifiers come after the word they modify. So…

• Calot ha dar phai karsof jeddak “[The] larger calot guards [the] jeddak’s youngest (i.e., smallest) daughter”
• Darseen sof banth “[A] darseen [is] smaller [than a] banth”

And finally…

• John Carter sof Tars Tarkas than-dak “John Carter [is] smaller [than] Tars Tarkas, [but he is a] great fighter” (Once again, taking advantage of the telepathic component of Barsoomian)

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more…

And so we come to the next installment of our expedition into the language of Barsoom. This time I’m going to examine some of the titles from the stories to see if some new vocabulary can be puzzled out. It will be instructive to simply list out the offices we will be looking at:

• than “soldier”
• panthan “mercenary”
• gorthan “assassin”
• kadar “guard”
• padwar “lieutenant” (reports to a dwar
• dwar “captain” (reports to an odwar)
• odwar “general” (reports to a jedwar)
• jedwar “warlord” (general of generals)
• jed “lord” (subordinate to a jeddak)
• jeddak “king, emperor”
• jeddara “empress, queen of kings”

Okay, let’s start at the beginning: than means “soldier”. That’s straight from ERB. So, obviously pan- and gor add some sort of meaning to than to make them mean “mercenary” and “assassin”. There don’t seem to be any negative connotations to a panthan. My suggestion is that pan means something like “free, unattached, unaligned, etc.” as in someone who is not allied or paying service to a specific lord. Whoever is paying for his services, that’s who he fights for. “Assassins” don’t seem to have as positive a connotation as “mercenaries”; therefore, gor might have a more negative meaning. Maybe something like “freelance” in the sense of “out for one’s own gain” as opposed to a panthan that is, although paid, in the service of a particular city. The gorthan, on the other hand, is only loyal to himself. In light of that, we could extend the meaning of gor to “selfish, greedy, self-centered.”

Kadar was mentioned last time along with kador “those inhabiting heaven; those having something to do with heaven.” Ka- then appears to mean “those having something to do with (the word to which it is amended)”. I’m going to say that, like the attested monosyllabic verb sak “jump”, dar means “guard, watch, keep an eye on, etc.”. The synonyms would be specified telepathically.

Then we come to the military officers and royal titles:

• padwar “lieutenant” (reports to a dwar
• dwar “captain” (reports to an odwar)
• odwar “general” (reports to a jedwar)
• jedwar “warlord” (general of generals)
• jed “lord” (subordinate to a jeddak)
• jeddak “king, emperor”
• jeddara “empress, queen of kings”

First of all, note that we have both jedwar and jed. It appears that the d can disappear because jedwar is obviously jed + dwar. If that is the case, we can break these terms down into their constituent morphemes:

• pad+dwar
• dwar
• od+dwar
• jed+dwar
• jed
• jed+dak
• jed+dara

This being the case:

• pad “inferior, subordinate (to a)” “captain”
• dwar “captain”
• od “superior (to a)” “captain”
• jed+dwar “lord-captain”
• jed “lord”
• jed+dak “lord+emperor (dak can also be a masculine superlative marker)”
• jed+dara “lord+empress (dara can also be a feminine superlative marker)”

Taking these, we can (well, I’m going to say we can) construct phrases like these:

• Banth odarseen (i.e., od+darseen) “A banth is superior to a darseen.”
• Mors Kajak sha gor “Mors Kajak is not selfish.”
• Dor sha-pan “Heaven is not aligned” (i.e., “Heaven is not on any one person’s side.”)
• Dejah Thoris phai-dara “Dejah Thoris is the greatest daughter.”

Once again, the telepathic aspect of Barsoomian would come into play. Where there is ambiguity in the spoken words, telepathy would fill in the details and take care of synonymous meanings. Dor sha-pan is only three syllables but could mean “Heaven is not on any one person’s side.” (Ten syllables) With this being the case, the writing systems of Barsoom would have to explicitly express these telepathic components which is maybe why each city or region came up with different scripts on the planet. You can express similar concepts with the mind, but how they get expressed on a writing surface can be very different. I’m not ready to tackle the writing systems of Barsoom quite yet, but we’re not done looking for more vocabulary. Stay tuned…

Okay, since this is installment three of my Barsoomian escapade, I think it would be prudent to state very clearly that I am under absolutely no illusions that what I come up with (now that we’re going to be veering into uncharted and unattested waters more and more) is in any way remotely like what Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) had in mind when he created the words used to describe native Barsoomian customs, titles, names, etc., etc. I’m sure that ERB had a solid idea of what he wanted names to sound like, obviously keeping morphemes like mad “human, man, person”, kadar “guard”, dwar “captain”, in mind; but ERB was a storyteller not a conlanger. With names from Aaanthor to Zodanga and everything in between, ERB’s primary desire was to make his characters and locations sound “exotic” (at least as it was defined in the early 20th century). And that’s cool! I’m obviously a fan, and my point is that he’s provided just enough vocabulary that a conlanger has a nearly blank slate to play around on. Which is what I’m doing. Other conlangers would be able to use the same source material and come up with completely different rationalizations, but these are the ones that I’ve developed in trying to stay as true to the original as possible…and to have some conlinguistical fun in the process.

Last time, I promised some explanation of hekkador, the title of “Father of Therns” Matai Shang. Okay, here’s where we really start to go off the beaten path, so stick with me. It might be a bumpy ride…

• The Valley of Dor is consistently referred to as the Valley of “Heaven” (“This is the valley of love and peace and rest… This, John Carter, is Heaven” – Tars Tarkas, The Gods of Mars). My contention is that dor itself means “heaven, love, peace, rest”.
• Keep in mind that there is a strong telepathic component to Barsoomian language. The spoken word may be Dor, but the concept communicated to John Carter can be “heaven” or “love” or “peace” as the specific case requires. To alleviate the cognitive dissonance between spoken and telepathic Barsoomian, John Carter records phrases like these alternatively with their Barsoomian and English equivalents: The Valley of Dor = The Valley of Heaven.
• Now we turn our attention to hekkador which has the morpheme dor. It appears that hekkador has some equivalence to “Father of Therns”. Well, obviously the Barsoomian word thern is not present so what about dor. We know the therns are often referred to as the “holy” therns. My contention (granted on flimsy evidence and wishful thinking, I realize) is that dor along with ka- as a prefix comes up with a word meaning “holy ones (i.e., ones associated with heaven)”. I’m not sure how exactly I see ka- functioning, but we’ll revisit that later.
• So, if we have hek then left over, what could it mean? hek-”holy ones”. The title means something like “Father of Therns”. My choice is that it means “father”: hekkador “Holy Father” (like the Pope) or “Father of the Holy Ones”.
• Do we have any other terms or phrases where the modifier follows the head of the word? Actually, we do: “I could see Tars Tarkas explaining something to the principal chieftain, whose name, by the way, was, as nearly as I can translate it into English, Lorquas Ptomel, Jed; jed being his title.” – A Princess of Mars. The comma between Ptomel and Jed is merely a convenience of the English translation. The Thark’s name is evidently Lorquas Ptomel Jed with jed functioning kind of like a modifier. At least that’s my argument and I’m sticking to it.

I can also rationalize the dor “heaven, peace, etc.” in Shador, too. Shador is the prison island on the Omean Sea. In this case, prison has an absence of peace and rest, it’s not heaven. In fact, it’s the opposite of heaven. So… sha in this case signifies the opposite or negation of something else: Shador “Anti-heaven; Not-heaven”. What about the hekkador‘s daughter Phaidor? Read on…

So, along with *ron “son” we now have *hek “father”. Can we come up with “daughter”. My loosely-connected neurons say “Yes”.

• Matai Shang had a daughter, “Phaidor, daughter of the Holy Hekkador.” Again, we encounter dor “heaven”. My choice this time is that phaidor (note without the ka-) means “daughter (of) heaven” or “heaven’s daughter”. Given the ability to add specific meaning telepathically, I could even add phai means “daughter, maiden, girl”, and, using that line of reasoning *ron would mean “son, youth, boy”.

So, there you have it. Five new morphemes in our (Neo-)Barsoomian vocabulary:

• *hek “father”
• *phai “daughter, maiden, girl”
• *ka- prefix meaning to be determined
• *sha “opposite, negation, absence of”

We could also extrapolate a word for mother: *shahek “opposite of father”.Going back to our second installment, we could “say” something like Tardos Mors hek Mors Kajak and Dejah Thoris phai Mors Kajak. Granted, we’re not translating the International Declaration of Human Rights, but it’s a start. Next time, we’ll begin to dissect some of the titles of Barsoom and see how we can extrapolate a few words from those.

Last time we looked at Barsoomian numbers. This time, we’re going to examine how relationships (mostly father to child) are stated in the language of Barsoom.

To begin with, anyone who has read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories knows that a good number of characters have names of the form X son of Y. There are some interesting variations, however, and these can be used as clues for some new vocabulary. It will be easiest to simply provide examples first and then explain their significance. To highlight the relationships a little clearer, let’s turn the names around:

• Kantos Kan, father of Djor Kantos (a son) (of Helium)
• Vas Kor, father of Hal Vas (a son) (of Dusor)
• Than Kosis, father of Sab Than (a son) (of Zodanga)
• Had Urtur, father of Tan Hadron (a son) (of Hastor)
• Tardos Mors, father of Mors Kajak (a son) (of Helium)
• John Carter, father of Carthoris (a son) (of Helium and Earth)

• Tor Hatan, father of Sanoma Tora (a daughter) (of Helium)
• Thuvan Dihn, father of Thuvia (a daughter) (of Ptarth)
• Kal Tavan, father of Tavia (a daughter) (of Tjanath)

Notice that the majority of male children take their father’s first name (in some form) as their last name. Daughters, on the other hand, take their father’s first name (for most part) and change it. (Could Kal be a title in Kal Tavan?) Leaving aside Carthoris (although the syllables in his name follow the royal Heliumite pattern set by Tardos Mors and his son Mors Kajak), four of the five father-son pairs show no variation when the sons’ names are formed. However, Tan Hadron shows the pattern Had + ron: ron then would seem to be a suffix like “-son”. So, Tan Hadron is Tan “Had-son”. My contention is we add ron “son” to our Barsoomian vocabulary.

I find it interesting that most of these names follow the pattern X Y, father of Z X except for those of the Heliumite royal family. It’s even more interesting that John Carter follows this pattern with his son.

Daughters names are a little trickier (evidently). Here we see the suffix -a (e.g., Tora from Tor + a) as well as -ia (e.g., Thuvia from Thuv + ia derived from the father’s Thuvan minus the -an suffix. Same goes for Tavia). My contention is that ia does not represent two distinct vowels but rather a glide and a vowel and is pronounced something like “ya” [ja]: Thuvia ["TUv.ja].

It could be rationalized that -ia and -a are simply variations of the same suffix. We have other female names that end in these: Thuria (Phobos the moon, *daughter of Thuran?), Uthia, Llana, Valla Dia (daughter of Kor San). I’m not ready to say ia means “daughter”, but it must have some lexical significance. It’s interesting that John Carter could be seen as following this as well: His last name could be broken down as Car and Ter (Tar?) and his daughter’s name if Tara (Tar + a).

Next time, we’ll look at one more possible familial relationship using the Barsoomian word Hekkador, title of Matai Shang. Stay tuned…

As mentioned in my last blog post, I’m really hoping for some Barsoomian language in the upcoming John Carter of Mars movie. In that post, I whined about the lack of any conlinguistical features in the movie promos thus far (and the presence of the Martian “Decoder” and Martian Translator.)

Well, I’ve decided to go back to the source material (i.e., the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB)) and try my own hand at puzzling out some basic vocabulary and grammar. This has already been done (most astutely by Jeffrey Henning and David Bruce Bozarth), but I felt there was such a goldmine of opportunity that I couldn’t resist wading in.

I’ve tried to stay as true to the vocabulary provided by ERB as possible, but, truthfully, there really isn’t a lot to go on since he didn’t define a lot of terms. I did take the word lists at Bozarth’s site and broke all the names, places, vocabulary, planets, etc., etc., down into their constituent syllables to get a feel for the sounds. I came up with 329 distinct syllables (and I’m not completely satisfied with them), with over 200 having either an initial stop or a fricative. I’m planning on several posts outlining my work on this. For the most part, it’s just a fun little conlang exercise. I am neither a linguist nor an ERB expert, but I think I can justify and/or rationalize all my choices. Bear with me and enjoy the ride. This first post is going to “teach” you how to count from one to ten and beyond in Barsoomian:

The Barsoomian page at Langmaker.com has a run-down of possible numbers, but Henning stays very cautious in his interpretation. I’m going to throw caution out the window and say, “Here is how to count in Barsoomian…”

Many of these will look identical to Langmaker.com since we’re using the identical source material. Ay is from Ay-mad “first man”. Ov is from the name of the hormad Teeaytan-ov “synthetic man Eleven-hundred-seven”. On the other hand, I have filled in more holes. Let me explain why. As has been pointed out, the bar in Barsoom (ERB’s name for Mars) means “eight”. We also have names for five planets, all ending in soom. I posit that soom means “a body of the solar system” and (at least) the planets (except Jupiter – more on that later) are simply Rasoom “2nd planetary body (Mercury) (the Sun is *Ay-soom “first body of the solar system”), Cosoom “3rd body of the solar system”, Jasoom “5th body of the solar system” (The moons get counted first!, so our Luna could be *Torsoom since tor is attested from Tor-dur-bar “Four-million-eight”), and, and finally Barsoom “8th solar body” (counting Cluros “Deimos” and Thuria “Phobos” as 6 and 7, respectively).

So, that gets us a good ways to filling up the numbers. The hormad names give us 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 100, and a million. The names Il-dur-en and Dur-dan give us pause. What to do with il, en, and dan? My rationalization is that the final syllables in both Teeaytan-ov and Tor-dur-bar are single digits. Il could conceivably be a single digit, but we do have teeay “11″ in Teeaytan-ov. Therefore, purely by chance and with no other reason, I decided that en and dan should be 6 and 9 and simply took a 50/50 chance and assigned them.

Now, what do with il? ERB gives us terms for 10 (tee), 100 (tan), 1,000 (dar), 10,000 (mak from umak “a fighting force of 10,000″ – compare to utan “a fighting force of 100 soldiers”). So, we’re obviously dealing with some sort of base 10 system with names for pivotal numbers. So, what to do with il? I decided (again, on a whim and flimsy rationalization) to assign il a value of 50. I got the idea simply from Roman numeral L… il, “L”? You be the judge. We can then continue our counting…

We could then provide the current year in the language: ra-dar-teeay “two-thousand-eleven”. A Zodangan or Heliumite may not understand it, but at least it’s internally logically consistent (for the most part).

There you have it! The first installment of my interpretation of what Barsoomian may be like! Stay tuned for more…

Okay, the newest John Carter movie trailer is out. As I’ve stated before, I’m a big fan of the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burrough (ERB). When I heard there was finally going to be a movie, I was skeptical but cautiously optimistic. After all, I was very pleased with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and my Tolkien hurdle is much, much higher than my ERB one. That being said, when I heard that Andrew Stanton was directing, my heart sank. I love Pixar and who can argue with Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and all the rest. But John Carter? It just didn’t seem to fit.

Well, now that two trailers are out…I’m very cautiously optimistic that the movie won’t stink. How’s that for hedging my bets? The visuals look kind of cool although the tusks on the Green Men seem a little out of place. They’re described as coming from the lower jaw. And I’m a little unsure of Woola’s look. But, I’m willing to give it a shot even with those caveats and the superfluous wardrobe department on the set. If nothing else, maybe it’ll be a rollicking space adventure.

But, as always, this is a conlanging blog, and the bone I have to pick with the film is conlinguistical. First of all, take another look at Tars Tarkas. Take a look at the descriptive paragraph. It’s okay, I’ll wait….Oh, you’re back. Notice that it says, “Tars gives Carter the Thark name Dotar Sojat, which translates to ‘my right hand.’” Uh, no. Dotar and Sojat were the names of the two warriors slain by John Carter upon his arrival on Barsoom. Unless one was named “My Right” and other was named “Hand”, that “translation” doesn’t work. Plus, Dotar Sojat isn’t just a Thark name. All inhabitants of Barsoom speak the same language, so “Tars gives Carter the Barsoomian name” would have at least been more accurate.

But that’s not the worst on the official site. Take a look at these: A Martian “Decoder” and a Martian Translator. Uh, once again, that’s not “translating” that’s what’s called a “code” (or “cipher” if you want to get fancy), Disney. What’s worse, the “Decoder” has every letter of the Roman alphabet! Couldn’t they have even put the letters C and K together or something! This is like something you’d get on the back of a cereal box or inside a Cracker Jack prize. Disney obviously told their art department to come up with some nifty designs, and, oh hey!, there’s 26 of them, let’s call them the “Martian language.” Tah dah!

With the inventiveness of ERB’s Barsoomian naming language, I had hoped there was some effort to pay lip service to the language (no pun intended). I’m still hoping there’s something in the final film, some small scene where Carter has to learn the language of Barsoom and then use English as the stand-in for it (a la The 13th Warrior). If not, it just seems like a lost opportunity. Sigh…

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings is a very enjoyable read that might get you to take a second look at maps.

For conlangers and conworlders, there is one entire chapter (“Legend”) that deals with imaginary worlds, from Austin Tappan Wright‘s Islandia to the works of Brandon Sanderson (a college friend of Jennings). Maphead is written in a friendly, very-accessible tone and looks at everything geographical from GPS games (like Geocaching) to discussions of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science” and its relation to Google Earth.

Some may recognize Ken Jennings from his record-breaking 2004 performance on the TV game show Jeopardy as well as his previous book, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. Maphead is a fascinating, humorous, down-to-earth (pun intended) book and should be on the reading list for all those with even a passing interest in cartography and geography.

Howdy, loyal readers! (We need an English dual plural for that word “readers” in that sentence.) It’s been some time since I updated the blog and The Conlanger’s Library. Our hosting service changed the access method for the Library, and I haven’t had the time to explore the new method (Thanks for the suggestions though, David!) of updating the pages. I’m going to do it, especially since we can include the links to Amazon now (again). I’ll get around to it. Promise.

In the meantime, I do have a new book to share. Also, on the books front, be sure to check out the Fiat Lingua online journal in December for my extensive review of the new book from Oxford University Press, From Elvish to Klingon.

The one I’d like to share today is Shapes for Sounds (cowhouse) by Timothy Donaldson. Donaldson is obviously a student of Edward Tufte‘s work and Shapes for Sounds is an exquisite piece of work because of it. The book traces the development of every letter of the Roman alphabet in beautiful charts, one for each letter. There are also extensive textual parts to the book explaining the differences among the various historical fonts like carolingian, uncial, insular, blackletter, etc., etc., etc. Irish ogham even makes an appearance! The (cowhouse) in the title comes from the original names of the first two letters: aleph “cow” and beth “house”. For conlangers, Shapes for Sounds is full of inspiration for con-scripts as well as an enjoyable book to peruse just for the graphics.

There are several reviews online for Shapes for Sounds including this one and this one that have some great images from inside it. So check for it at your local library or local bookstore. It’s well worth the hunt.

(Added 11/25/2011) P.S. Donaldson’s book has one section directly relevant to conlangers and con-scripters. He has created three “conjectural” alphabets (Appendices 26, 27, and 28), actually three alternative miniscule (i.e., lower-case letters), based on three different majuscules (i.e., upper-case) of existing typefaces. The development of each of these alternative miniscules is included in each letter’s individual chart. They’re a very intriguing alternative view of what the Roman miniscules could have been like.