beginning work on LATL

so, when i was a wee little child, i discovered language. like, most wee little children discover language, but some wee little children get given the lord of the rings when they're ten or something and get into the narrative and the characters, sure. but those appendices.... there's .. a language here? called quenya? and it's written in this script? called tengwar? and there's a related language, sindarin? and this tolkien guy just made all this up?

so, i did the precocious kid thing and said to myself "if this dead british weirdo (who's like really into the concept of royalty) can make a whole new language, then surely i can too"

i did not, in fact, make a language. i made a relex of the language i already spoke (my own peculiar idiolect of u.s. english,) but we all gotta start somewhere

for a long time the internet to me was mostly the brown university conlang listserv. here i learned about different phonology, what the heck morphosyntactic alignment is, diachronicity and how different languages can be related. i got exposed to awkwords and sca2 (tools for generating words and modeling changes to those words.) but i never interacted with ppl much. i was a kid and the ppl in there really knew their stuff, and i never much felt comfy with the idea of being just in public on the internet like that

anyway i got better at making languages and learning about how language works, and it's just been a (sometimes more consistent, at times less) hobby of mine for most of my life

flash forward to a few years ago, i'm working on a language that has turned into the passion project that i've spend the majority of my conlanging on and i'm getting frustrated with my tools. other conlangers have made some really cool tools that i've used forever, but i wanted to change my workflow. i wanted to do more complex, phonological-feature-aware, sound change rules; i wanted diachroinc tooling for morhposyntactic bits of my languages; i wanted a tighter feedback loop between defining some changes, or lexical items, or whathave you, and seeing the results; i wanted to see how a derivational pattern at one stage in a parent form of a language branches out or collapses into different derivational patterns in a child language

all was not well in my conlanging

i would need to do some programming

the thing is, i had just learned javascript. i had built a few little toy web apps, and i was not ready to execute on a vision for a multi-purpose conlanging tool that was beginning to take shape in my head

i tried anyway

and i made a bad first draft of a sound change tool

there's an e-bnf grammar in that project somewhere! the hubris i had then, to think i could make a little javascript-backed language tool with all of the bells and whistles i needed! with the knowledge that i had then! (or more accurately, didn't have)

but now...

i'm still not ready

but at least, today i'm forgoing bells and whistles for execution models. core abstractions. experience using a (programming) language-oriented programming language maybe. there's a lot to think about

so, i'm going to try reviving this project. or, more accurately, reimagining this project. from the little sound change tool that was merely an unusably buggy iteration on tools that other conlangers had executed better, to a more robust environment for conlanging. one which gives language nerds the power to solve all of their language nerding problems in one runtime, with an extensible and reflective interface. and which is written in such a way, with the appropriate abstractions, that lanuage nerdy hackers can hack their own tools on top of it

and i'm going to be doing a hecking hacking retreat about it. i'll spend some full-time programming days making a goofy little thing for goofy little language nerds surrounded by goofy programming nerds doing whatever rad things they happen to be getting up to when i happen to be there

like many of the communities i am a part of, i am a quiet part of the conlanging community. so, we'll see how this goes. maybe it is only ever something of interest to me and the conlangers i interact with in meatspace. maybe it only teaches me some things about designing and building a tool of the type that i'm designing and building. hoooopefully it is helpful in a way to other conlangers such that it evolves beyond what i could do on my own (cause i ain't no whiz kid 10x programmer)

but that's all me getting ahead of myself (as is often my wont.) first! to pack for the trip!

i'm just gonna fly right through these. there's going to be a lot to read up on, to explore, to think and talk through, to build toy versions of before it gets time for larger prototyping and building a workable tool. so, here's the very start of the thinking-in-public. each of these little thoughts is going to get at least it's own writeup (if not several) and i'll update with additional sections and links to the writeups as i go. a note: it would be impossible for me (and probably most ppl) to create the full vision in the time i'll be working on it fulltime

i don't know dude, naming things is hard. it's a working name, it works good as an extension. my-conlang.latlanyone?

i also just like syllabic laterals? they sound neat to me. the official initialism is linguistic analytic transformation language, but it also double entendres to lower anterior temporal lobe, so that's just kind of fun.

and the l means there can be lambda iconography-this is crucial for a new computer project. [ˈλæ.ɾɫ̩] as a typographic image is so perfectly specific to the kinds of things i dream about.

maybe it'll have a different name some day, idk