"The Course of Honor" by Lindsey Davis

Two thumbs way up for The Course of Honor by Lindsey Davis. Historical fiction.

A fictionalized version of the love between the Emperor Vespasian and his mistress, the freedwoman Caenis. When I first started reading The Course of Honor, my reaction was a bit WTF? And I won't lie, the writing style is unique to the point of peculiarity. At a certain point, however, I fell in love, peculiarities and all. I have only one way to convey how much I adore this book: A month after I finished it, I picked it up again and re-read it. Cover to cover. Because now that I knew how much I loved it, I wanted to enjoy all of it, without the hesitation of the WTFiness I had originally experienced at the beginning. Caenis, oh prickly brave unsentimental Caenis, is you have dethroned Jane Eyre - yes, Jane Eyre - from my post of favorite romance heroine. And Vespasian, unlike almost all romantic leads, is worth falling in love with. Now, great characters falling in love and hooking up is all well and good; what makes this book worth re-reading - and the reason that I have labeled it "historical fiction" rather than "romance" - is how heartbreaking it is. To me, a romance cannot be truly great without a contrasting sense of mortality and loss to put the love into sharper relief. That's what this book does. It's not about love, really - well, it is - but beyond that, it's about the bravery necessary to balance love and duty. I won't recommend it unreservedly, because it's peculiar and unique and not for everyone. But me, I would want it on a desert island.

In the hall the steward Aglaus was hovering. Caenis spoke to him calmly. "Aglaus, I shall be going out this afternoon." She laid her hand for a moment on Vespasian's togaed arm as he followed her. "This gentleman is someone I have known for a long time. If ever he comes here he is to be received as a friend of the house. Mind you" - she lifted her hand again - "he's the type who turns up for one or two meals, kicks the cat, spanks the kitchen maids, then disappears again for twenty years."

"Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare

Thumbs up for Julius Caesar (No Fear Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare. Drama.

I've never read, nor watched Julius Caesar, and it seemed like a good addition to the other Roman historical fiction I've been wallowing in. Reading it was an illuminating experience, as throughout I kept thinking: "Oh, that's where that quote is from!" And this is indeed a damnably quotable play - now one of my favorites, I think. As for the No Fear edition, I liked the format and found it enabled quick reading. I tend to get terribly distracted by the notes in most editions (I find them too interesting); so the complete lack of them here was actually a benefit. The "plain English" version on each page facing the original text was useful for the occasional quick glance to confirm that I had interpreted things correctly, but as it was the exact opposite of interesting it never distracted me from the flow of reading. ("Plain English translation" = Shakespeare dumbed down to a middle school vocabulary, which is just as painful as it sounds, but useful.)

CASSIUS
I know where I will wear this dagger then.
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong.
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.

Avoiding the "Boing"; or, What is Conlanging?

There have been a few times recently when I found myself wanting to send friends to a website that explains what conlanging is, particularly in reference to languages created for works of science fiction and fantasy. Nothing out there suited me precisely, so - here is my own.

Conlanging is making constructed languages. A conlang is a constructed language and a conlanger is...well, guess.

A conlang can be as simple as a list of names for a fantasy world, created to make them sound consistent; or it can be a sprawling, life-long project with grammar, phrasebook, illustrated website, searchable dictionary, newsletter, and flag. Most fall somewhere in between. A carefully-thought-out world to go with a conlang is, of course, a conworld.

There are a few kinds of conlangs. Most conlangs are artlangs, created for artistic pleasure. Tolkein, with his Elvish languages that he tweaked and obsessed over his whole life, was the father of all artlangers - even if he would have had no idea what that meant!

Tolkein's languages (Quenya and Sindarin, among others) are also fictional languages, which means specifically that they were created to go with a fictional universe. Klingon is a fictional language; the linguist Marc Okrand was hired to create it for Star Trek. A fictional language that does not have an extensive grammar, but just contains words to name people and places in a science fiction or fantasy setting, is a naming language.

The next type of conlang has a few different names. An engelang (engineered language), loglang (logical language) or philosophical language is designed to be "logical" from whatever the viewpoint and philosophy of the creator choses. A full explanation is here. The most famous loglangs are Loglan and its offshoot Lojban, though calling them "famous" is probably an overstatement.

An auxlang is created to be an auxiliary language to facilitate communication between people who do not share each other's native tongues. If intended to be used on a large scale, it might also be called an IAL (International Auxiliary Language). Esperanto, created by Dr. Zamenhof, is a famous auxlang. Because this is my personal website and not a Wiki that is supposed to present a neutral view, I am going to say that anyone who truly believes that enough people will ever learn an invented language for it to be genuinely useful as an IAL is kidding himself. Like it or not, English has taken that place in the modern world.

The opposite of a conlang is a natlang - a natural language. Naturally.

Examples of conlangs

For a particularly nice example of well fleshed-out conlang, check out Teonaht, created by an English professor who goes by the pseudonym Sally Caves. She is also the author of "Hollow Pursuits," the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which Reginald Barclay first appears; if that isn't geek cred, I don't know what is! (Way cooler than the fact that my uncle's name is in the Tron credits.) This is a very old website now, but I still find Teonaht so pleasing that I revisit it once and a while.

Another of my favorites are Mark Rosenfelder's Virtual Verduria, which is an entire world; and Irina Rempt's Ilaini, of the Valdyan people. For a more engelang take, check out Sylvia Sotomayor's Kēlen, based on the concept of a language that has no verbs. And David J. Peterson, the president of the Language Creation Society, has the honor of being one of the few people to actually get paid for conlanging: HBO hired him to construct the Dothraki language for their version of Game of Thrones.

Why would you do that?

If you are mystified as to why someone might create languages for fun, well - I don't have an answer for you. I also have no answer for why people tell stories, paint pictures, compose music, do sudoku puzzles, play sports, or follow the scores of sports they don't even play. You can come up with a Unified Theory of Hobbies and Artistic Occupations if you want. And while you work on that, I will keep writing stories, enjoying other people's music, ignoring sports, and making conlangs....

I do know from personal experience that conlanging is a brilliant way to learn about linguistics. I started creating languages for my fictional worlds when I was kid so small I had to look up the difference between a noun and a verb! When I was a teenager, the Internet came along (what a weird thought) and I discovered that other people did what I did - and beautifully so. Flash forward some years and I was pouring over Swahili grammars, doing the exercises in Michael Kenstowicz's Phonology in Generative Grammar, and changing my mind for the Nth time about whether I wanted to mark the accusative case by a clitic or a suffix.

Of course, one problem about knowing something about linguistics is that you are frequently reminded how little most people know. (No, all languages are NOT descended from Hebrew. Shut up or I will kill you.) Which brings me to my next point, which is deserving of its own section:

Conlanging for writers

If you write fantasy or science fiction that takes place where languages other than ours are spoken, you need to know at least little bit about conlanging; specifically, naming languages.

Writers, I am going to say this once, nicely: you don't have to create full-fledged conlangs to name your characters, but for the love of God, don't use the Punctuation Shaker trope. Or the Law of Alien Names trope. Or the Aerith and Bob trope. Us readers, we do notice. You don't want me to have to invoke the Evil Overlady's rule, do you?:

All apostrophes in the middle of fantasy names are now to be pronounced "boing."
--Issendai, "The Evil Overlady Has Solved a Pressing Literary Problem"

Avoid the "boing," friends: Here's what to do instead. I think that this guy did a really good job of saying what I want to say, but in a less-ranty way than I would. Read his posts, take them to heart, and follow his excellent tips.
Why Names in Fantasy Often Suck, Part I | Part II | Part III

Conlanging links

Now, whether you are a writer or just someone who is interested in learning more about conlanging, here are links to some of the sites I've found most useful (or would have found useful, if they'd existed when I was trying to learn this stuff...grr). The International Phonetic Alphabet has a section to itself, because, frankly, I consider learning it a Life Skill for anyone who is even remotely interested in words.

Basic conlanging

• Conlang section on WikiBooks.
• FrathWiki, the conlanging Wiki.
• Linguistics glossary from SIL; SIL has done amazing and important work in describing and preserving languages around the world. They also provide useful free software and fonts.
• Pablo Flores's How to create a language.
• Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit.
• Thomas E. Paine's book Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists, the "conlang cookbook"; it's written for real linguists, but brilliant for conlangers.
• Rick Morneau's essays on language design, some suitable for beginners and some more advanced.

 

The International Phonetic Alphabet

• Interactive IPA chart with sound files.
• Phonetics and Phonology, a detailed but clear introduction to phonetics that will help you understand the chart.
• English as written in the IPA, a good way to get a quick grasp of the IPA for native English speakers.
• IPA transcription practice from nonsense and real words, with excellent videos.
• Conlang X-SAMPA, the computer-friendly transcription of the IPA that is in common use among conlangers.
• i2speak, an onscreen keyboard that makes typing in the IPA easy.

Writing systems

• Omniglot, all about writing systems, both natlang and conlang.

 

Vocabulary lists

• Swadesh list, a basic vocabulary list.
• Basic English wordlist, another wordlist that (with tweaks) can be used as a good jumping-off point to create vocabulary.
• McGuffey readers, a set of old-fashioned children's books containing usefully gradated sentences.
• Rick Harrison's Universal Language Dictionary, a huge vocabulary list.

 

Useful natlang references

• Ethnologue, a reference guide to natlangs.
• Online Etymology Dictionary, for English, but packed with great real-world examples of how meanings change over time. 
• World Atlas of Language Structures, another great reference to natlangs.

 

The conlanging community

• Conlang-L mailing list, very high-level discussions, and very high traffic!
• Language Creation Society, an international group of conlangers that holds yearly conferences.

 

Advanced conlanging materials

• Language Universals Archive; when you need this, here it is.
• Liepzig glossing rules; ditto.
• Software tools for conlanging.
• Speculative Grammarian, a webzine of linguistic satire, for when you become a hardcore language nerd.

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If you find this page a useful reference, you can refer people to it at www.bit.ly/conlanging.

Last updated: 10 August 2013 (added more links to Vocabulary section).

"The First Man in Rome" by Colleen McCullough

Thumbs way up for The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough. Historical fiction.

It takes a hell of a great writer to keep me reading through 931 pages, and then right on through the 122-page glossary because the book's still so good I don't want to put it down. In brief, The First Man In Rome is about Gaius Marius and his brother-in-law Lucius Cornelius Sulla, as Marius rises to ascendancy in Late Republican Rome. Over a thousand pages it may be, but it's a brilliant page-turner, with really heroic (if not always good) heroes and worthy antagonists. No stone of human activity is unturned: it has love, sex, murder, war, friendship, gossip, family drama, comedy, social and political maneuvering: all of it related with a kind of wise humor that made me fall passionately in love with McCullough. This book is based on masses of research, and it's all in play, but everything is explained so clearly and straightforwardly that you feel McCullough is a friendly force on your side going "Yeah, I know this is new to you. Here's how it works. Don't forget you can always check the glossary!" (And how could I not fall in love with a writer whose glossary includes X-rated cusswords right next to a toga pattern right next to the best explanations of Roman government I've ever read?) All history lessons should be this riveting. My love for this book can best be expressed by my desire to immediately read the next volume - all 818 pages of it.

There was a sudden reflexive stir and murmur among the crowd of senators; the senior consul, Marcus Minucius Rufus, was about to offer his white bull to the Great God, only it wasn't behaving itself, must have had the presence of mind to avoid its last manger of drugged fodder. Not a good year, everyone was saying it already. Poor omens during the night watch of the consuls, a miserable day, and now the first of the two victims was snorting and plunging, had half a dozen sacerdotal underlings hanging on to his horn and ears - silly fools, they should have put a ring through his nose as a precaution. Stripped to the waist like the other attendants, the acolyte carrying the stunning hammer didn't wait for the raising of the head toward the sky, followed by the dipping of the head toward the earth; it could always be argued successfully that the beast had lifted and lowered its head dozens of times during its fight to survive. He stepped in and swung his iron weapon up and down so quickly its shape was a blur. The dull crack of the blow was followed immediately by another, the noise of the bull's knees hitting the stone paving as it came down, all sixteen hundred pounds of it. Then the half-naked axeman brought his double-bladed instrument down into the neck and the blood was pouring everywhere, some of its caught in the sacrificial cups, most of it a streaming sticky river coursing off to nowhere, melting and thinning amid the rain-soaked ground.

"Washington Square" by Henry James

Thumbs up for Washington Square by Henry James. Literature.

I remember reading, a long time ago, about a young woman who was enjoying Henry James, until someone asked her "But don't you find James very difficult?": after which she realized Henry James was difficult. Having that story in mind when I began, I was pleased to discover that James is difficult in a very specific way - to wit, his laughably long paragraphs. The first paragraph of Washington Square is two and a half pages long, and I noted one that ran to three pages (this in a trade paperback having quite small type). Frightened? You shouldn't be, for they are such tidy, controlled paragraphs, you won't feel lost. In fact, I quite like James's style. He paints his characters with immaculate precision and arranges them in a tableau of classic drama - unattractive girl, unsuitable suitor, domineering father, ludicrous aunt - that makes me think he was a big Austen fan. This is a realistic novel, not a romance, so don't take that comparison too far, but I would nevertheless recommend this to an Austen aficionado who has a little more depth than to demand a happy ending every time.

Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for little secrets and mysteries - a very innocent passion, for her secrets had hitherto always been as unpractical as addled eggs. She was not absolutely veracious; but this defect was of no great consequence, for she had never had anything to conceal. She would have liked to have a lover, and to correspond with him under an assumed name in letters left at a shop; I am bound to say that her imagination never carried the intimacy farther than this. Mrs. Penniman had never had a lover, but her brother, who was very shrewd, understood her turn of mind. "When Catherine is about seventeen," he said to himself, "Lavinia will try and persuade her that some young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will ever be in love with Catherine. But Lavinia will take it up, and talk to her about it; perhaps, even, if her taste for clandestine operations doesn't prevail with her, she will talk to me about it. Catherine won't see it, and won't believe it, fortunately for her peace of mind; poor Catherine isn't romantic."

"Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice" by Judy Schachner

Thumbs up for Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice by Judy Schachner. Children's.

I've always found the illustrations in the Skippyjon Jones books adorable, and have meant to read one for a while. Well...it was way weirder than I'd expected. I'm not even going to try to summarize: let's just say I'm glad I don't have to explain this to a four-year-old. Or maybe it makes complete sense to four-year-olds, and I'm too old to get it. Anyway, it's cute.

Knock, knock. Who goes there?
Verde Martians everywhere!
Slurping sloppy ice-green cones,
Speeding in the spicy zones.
Mossy Martians on the move,
What do they think they have to prove?
We did not come here for a fight.
We want to build, we will not bite!