In thisthread about a lunatic who believes that Latin and Yiddish are both ripped off from Basque, a few posters are discussing conlangs–specifically Esperanto, brainchild of Ludwig L. Zamenhof. Reading this brought to mind a fantasy story i wrote once in which, through magical time travel & universe jumping, Zamenhof meets J. R. R. Tolkien and Jacob Grimm, and the three of them work together at devising a common language for a multi-racial society of fabulous creatures. It is, without a doubt, the single nerdiest thing I have ever produced.
But surely it’s not the nerdiest thing ANYONE here has ever done.
I haven’t written anything that singularly nerdy but I have done some nerd-class research.
For verisimilitude in throwaway lines I have googled such things as: the equivalent of 555 numbers in London, the equivalent of “John Doe” in French, whether Cocoa Puffs cereal is sold in Canada, what year Playboy Magazine started up.
I also spent a while looking at a Turkish Cypriot gay message forum for research purposes. I’m neither a Turkish Cypriot nor a gay man myself.
I have frequently proposed, on a blog, that we do all of these things, perhaps all at once:
Normalize English spelling, including all the irregular verbs becoming regular.
Get rid of the apostrophe, since we are able to do fine without it in natural language (speech).
Drop qwerty keyboards in favor of alphabetical arrangement, like phones and some other devices.
Make the number pad on keyboards like phones and not obsolete adding machines.
While we’re at it, re-arrange the order of the alphabet so that it’s easier for kids and immigrants to remember, like all the straight letters before the curved ones, with mixed in the middle, according mostly to the number of strokes or something
And while there, might as well get rid of Q and maybe C, which can be replaced with S and K, depending.
But, yanno whut? If you publish your Piece De Le Resistance to Nerdom, other nerds will buy it and then a movie will be made about it and nerds will go see it and then nerd conventions over your work.
•I drove a 150 mile round trip to find out what the interior of an aircraft carrier smelled like. For a fanfic.*
•I once wrote this. I count at least five cultural/historical/technical in-jokes.
•And, on a story I’m working on now, and hope to sell, I’ve rigged one sentence to work as a hidden pun if it was read in the Latin-offshoot that the characters would be speaking and thinking in. The language isn’t, at this point, used in the story at all.
I can probably come up with more examples, if ya want to cry.
*Slightly exaggerated, I’ll admit. There were other reasons, artistic research related and otherwise. But that was technically one of them.
I’ve worn this maybe three times since I made it, and have gotten a LOT of compliments on it. If only it were 1981, I could fill the pouch up with quarters and be the most fabulous girl at the arcade!
I bought a hardcover book explaining Lojban because I needed an obscure language to go in a story, and Esperanto wasn’t obscure enough. Also, I was writing the story in Esperanto.
Last year, I gave a powerpoint-style presentation about rammed-earth passive solar houses to an international audience in Esperanto.
When I was in high school (grade 10, I think), I wrote a Tolkien-style fantasy story for English, and illustrated it with comics, and added a huge map in which I drew every single individual tree. The map far overshadowed the story.
As a speaker of Esperanto, a reader of Tolkien, and a sometime writer of fairy tales, I want to read this. Publish it, please.
It was background for the novel when I was thinking through the details of a universal translator. I know I started a thread about it, and I’m pretty sure you participated it in, because you said something about the translator working best if it always had a “base” language to use as an intermediary. Unfortunately search isn’t working for me right now.
Anyway, Grimm was wearing his philologist hat in the story, not his folklorist hat. (Of course those hats are related.) He and Tolkien spend most of the tale arguing.
In the story, the three linguists are working on a common language for the creatures in my fantasy world, who have decided, for political reasons, to recruit humans to help devise their common tongue. Three guesses what language wins out–and it’s not Esperanto.
I travelled to England (okay, it wasn’t just for that by any means, but I definitely nudged the itinerary a bit) so I could see the area where the protagonist in my six-novel Shadowrun fanfic series lived. While there, I also had to track down his family coat of arms, just so I’d know what it looked like.
As a kid, I once wrote a story where a couple of space-alien characters’ names were chosen based on the first letter of the colors of the letters in another name (for example, if the original name was “Spock,” and S’s are blue, then the first letter in the new name was B). Yes, I’m a color-grapheme synesthete, though at the time I had no idea it had a name.
As a teenager, I did a detailed study of casino gambling and odds because my protagonist at the time was a casino owner and a master gambler, so I had to know what I was talking about.
Researching cellular sat network topology and interviewing a friend who used to work at a company in the field, all for a fairly minor plot detail in a story.
Thanks! It took me a rather ridiculously long time to design the pattern, mostly because I kept tinkering with the positioning of the ghosts, but once I got that done the rest was fairly easy. I’m really happy with how it came out.
Ha, that’s a cute pattern, I do NOT need a new craft hobby! I sometimes think I should learn to knit, but I don’t have the time (or money) to get caught up in two crafts.
