Next from Zompist Industries

Now that I’ve finished my client work, I’ve gone back to my Next Project.

The working title is The Conlanger’s Lexipedia.  Does that sound like something between a lexicon and an encyclopedia, for conlangers?  Because that’s exactly what it is!

The idea is, if you’ve read the LCK and ALC, you know how to create a grammar.  But you still have the lexicon to create.  And you can totally just generate a thousand roots using gen and give them meanings and call it a day, but I’m hoping to convince you that there’s a lot of pitfalls and you should buy a book, something between a lexicon and an encyclopedia for conlangers, to help out.

One reason is that there’s a lot of conworlding that’s buried in the lexicon.  Take a word like oxygen.  You can simply add a root for it, or look up the etymology and calque that (‘acid-maker’).  But really you ought to know some of the basics of chemistry, and know when a culture is likely to isolate oxygen as a gas, and what salient characteristics it has that might be used to name it.  So that sort of thing will be in the book.

Or, take color terms.  I’d briefly go over Kay & Berlin’s work on color, and talk about opponent-process color theory so you know why humans have the primary colors they do and you can design totally different color schemes for aliens.

I’m also trying to address the perennial question “What words do I really need?”  I’ve been assembling a corpus of fantasy/sf works and creating a frequency list– a list of roots rather than word forms.  The end result will be a list of 1500 or so words that are guaranteed useful in conworlding.

I’m not very far in, so this is all subject to change.

I still want to get some Almean novels out there, but the clamor for Zompist fiction hasn’t been deafening. But that’ll probably be next.

 

PCK v1.1

I updated the print version of the Planet Construction Kit to the revised text, edition 1.1.  (The Kindle version already has the revised text.)

The biggest changes are to divide up the over-long Culture chapter, fix the index, and add revised some pictures in the Illustration chapter.  I’ll create a PDF of the changes so readers of the old edition don’t miss out on anything.

 

Thanks!

A big smoochy thank you to everyone who’s bought one of my books. The total units sold for all books just went over 4000.  The largest fraction of that is linguistics, something that always amazes my parents who think the LCK is too hard.

I’m also grateful because with the new book, royalties have risen from “hobbyist” to “poverty” level.  But that’s pretty much OK.

Part of me still feels that real writers write novels… plus I feel that Almea only fully comes alive in stories.  But with APAF still under 100 sales, I don’t feel I can concentrate on that quite yet.  And I have an idea for another nonfiction book…

 

 

 

PCK available on Kindle

When the PCK came out, I didn’t create a Kindle verson, because, well, I dunno.  It seemed like a lot of work to convert all the illustrations.  But I just did that for ALC and it took just a day or two, so this really wasn’t a great excuse.

So!  As of right fricking now, you can read The Planet Construction Kit on Kindle, for a paltry $6.25.  If you do, note that the climate maps are here, in color… even though I divided the Earth map in three, I think maps don’t work so well on that little screen.

I took the opportunity to update the text.  Nothing really major, though I divided up the over-long Culture chapter, and redrew some of the instructional pics on drawing clothing.  I expect to update the print version in the next few weeks.

 

ALC is out!

I got the final proof copy of Advanced Language Construction on Wednesday, and it passed my extensive tests on whether my name was spelled correctly.

So, it’s available now in print and Kindle editions!  Go get some!  Also it’s my birthday, so if you were wondering what to get me, the answer is, royalties.  Treat yourself to a copy of ALC, you deserve it!

Actual book in its native habitat (my desk)

This is the most thoroughly vetted book I’ve done yet… the total number of pre-publication readers of the LCK (besides myself) was one; of this book, twelve.  Plus I’ve paid a lot more attention to typography, as it trips up some readers.  I changed the text font to Linux Libertine, which looks nice and more importantly supports all the very many Unicode characters I use.  (There may well be some embarrassing errors left, but I’m hoping they’ll be obscure, at least.)

I was kind of dreading the Kindle conversion, as every illustration has to be redone as a GIF, but before I could even finish whining about the process, it was done.  (In more detail: I created the illustrations in Adobe Illustrator, and that’s all that’s needed for the print version.  But Kindle wants JPG or GIF.  I think it used to accept only JPG, so this is an improvement.  Also, it can’t handle embedded fonts, so some bits that used Almean fonts also had to be converted to illustrations.)

As I write, the Kindle version is #7 in the Linguistics category.  Which doesn’t translate into a very high actual number, but it’s still cool.  I’m beating Lakoff & Johnson, man!  (Lakoff can console himself with being #4 as well.)  Also beating Particle Physics, which is presumably about how particles behave when smashed onto the ends of words at near-lightspeed.

I may have a slightly biased viewpoint, but I’m really happy with the book.  It ended up with a focus on morphosyntax, which was covered fairly breezily in the LCK.  It’s a pleasure to cover topics like morphosyntactic alignment, aspect, and polysynthesis in the detail they deserve.  Plus there’s new stuff that I think will interest experienced conlangers, such as predicate calculus, pidgins, ongoing sound change, and Sign.

I showed the proof copy to my parents, and I think it scared them.  But don’t let that stop you!  They think that about quantum mechanics too, and how hard is that?

BTW, in case it’s not obvious, the giant robot is making one of the signs from the book. Also, I think there’s kind of a clever pun in the lower left illo.

 

Proof that proofing exists

The proof copy of Advanced Language Construction arrived today!  When I was doing the LCK two years ago, it took about two weeks to get it; this one arrived in six days.  Amazon is getting frighteningly efficient.

What’s next?  I’ve started proofing the proof, which will take a couple days.  Then I make corrections.  Two more readers are perusing the same text, so I’ll have a few more corrections to make.  Then, another proof copy, hopefully the final one.  So I expect the book will be available in mid-August.

It reads pretty smoothly, thanks to the platoon of readers who’ve gone over it.  (Embarrassingly, I still find errors.  But one reason for the proof is that errors stand out much more in print, especially things like font mismatches.)

One thing I learned from the LCK is that many readers are acutely conscious of typography, so I’ve paid much more attention to that this time around.  ALC will be hyphenated, with single spaces after periods, which helps eliminate uneven text and annoying little bits of white space.

LCK’s body text was Century Schooltext, with Gentium for oddball characters.  This isn’t the best combination, but fortunately there are now better ones.  I like Linux Libertine for all citations and glosses.  As an experiment, I printed one chapter with the body text in Libertine too.  Sigh: I haven’t entirely decided.  It looks fine, and I really like having everything in one font.  But Century Schoolbook is a little larger (at the same point size, 11) and friendlier.  On the other hand, Libertine handily won the little poll I ran at the ZBB.  I wonder if I can set it to 11.5 points…

 

Book news

When we last visited this topic, I was sending out a draft of Advanced Language Construction for review.  As comments came back, I’d made corrections or add clarifications.  The only fairly big revision came when my friend Daniel suggested talking about “prestige”.  I decided I wanted to include what Labov said about the leaders of sound change, and that turned out to require finding out what he said about the leaders of sound change.  And you really can’t skim Labov.  So that took awhile.

If you think of books only as a readers, they’re products– a solid slab of text that seemingly emerged whole from the mind of its author, like Athena.  For the writer, it’s not solid at all; it starts out gaseous and only slowly solidifies.  It’s at about the consistency of Play-Dough right now.  I occasionally reshape a bit or plop on a bit more clay.

The good news is that the people who’ve read it seem to like it.  That’s more than can be said of the first draft of APAF!

I just sent a revised draft to a few more people.  So the idea is, I get some more comments, revise, and then order a physical proof copy.  I find that a lot of things (especially formatting) are only evident on paper.  So start saving your lawnmowing money, the book is coming soon!

If you prefer Kindle format, that’ll be a bit longer, as all the illustrations have to be converted into fuzzy, half-readable JPGs.

 

Ask Zompist: Teach Yourself Verdurian?

Have you considered putting out something on Verdurian on print-on-demand— some sort of more advanced Teach Yourself Verdurian or the like, or a more in-depth dictionary/grammar?

—Dhokarena56

I have, in fact, though I’ve thought more about (say) an edition of all the ancient Eastern languages (Caďinor, Cuêzi, Axunašin, Obenzayet).

So it’ll happen eventually.  The main holdup is that I don’t think sales would be phenomenal, while the book production would take as long as any other project, so it’s not terribly high priority.

 

LCK2: Scripsi

Edit: I’ve gotten a  lot of responses– thank you!  I am rushing through one more read-through so I can get it out to people, hopefully tomorrow night.

Not long ago I felt I’d written about all I had to say in the LCK2 (Advanced Language Construction), but I had only 250 pages, and I was aiming for 280.  Well, problem solved!  The section on modality added about 10 pages, and I just finished a short chapter on logic and loglangs.

Can you buy it?  Er, not yet!  I still need to spell-check it, index it, order a proof copy, draw the cover, and all that.  But you can read it, maybe!

I need a handful of readers, whose chief characteristic is a willingness to read a whole PDF and make some comments, and not take too long either.  (Although I have some weeks available, the earlier I get feedback the better, especially anything that requires research.)

Different ability levels are welcome; though I’d love to have readers who can find inaccuracies, I’m most interested in knowing what’s confusing or what’s missing.  You don’t have to have read the LCK, but if you’ve read nothing at all linguistic it’ll probably too hard.

So if that sounds like you, contact me (markrose at zompist dot com).

 

Why I love Philly and Boston

Amazon provides authors with some fun sales reporting tools, such as this one— a chart of US print sales by region:

(I redid the text portions to make it sprawl a bit less.)

Go, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit!  If I ever do a book tour, I know where to go!

Sadly, the chart doesn’t show foreign lands, which make up about a third of my print sales over this period, nor Kindle, which are about 30% of my total sales.  I wish I could get more than 2 months of data at once, too.

If you’re curious, total LCK sales are now over 2100, and PCK sales above 550.  Those are fantastic numbers for basically no publicity, and I’m very grateful.  It’s also why I’m prioritizing writing another linguistics book over getting more novels out there.  (APAF sales have inched up to 55.  On the plus side, the people who’ve read it seem to like it!  Go buy a copy and you’ll see!)

I’m on page 134 of LCK2, by the way.  My desk consists of a pile of linguistics books right now, and I need to get more to get up to speed on some of the more obscure subjects.

I keep trying to convince my clever but lazy friends to publish with Yonagu.  I may have a bite on the line!  More on that later.