Coke ad in Esperanto and an obscure conlang joke
Ah, those constructed language enthusiasts. If you aren't and have never been one yourself, read no further.
Viktoro also recently posted to alt.language.artificial a brief description of his creation "Lilipu", which he compared to a bonsai tree and intended to have the smallest phonemic inventory of any language. He designed it to have one vowel and one consonant fewer than the obscure language Rotokas of Papua New Guinea, said to be the phonemically smallest natural language known. Its purpose is for the writing of haiku (a hobby Viktoro has already pursued in Esperanto).
Well, as the poet said, "Every flea has upon his back another flea to bite him."
The wit Sol Taibi promptly replied:
From: Sol Taibi (solomontaibi@computer.org)
Subject: Re: Lilipu: The Bonsai Language
Newsgroups: alt.language.artificial, sci.lang
Date: 2002-07-16 19:44:33 PST
Glopo is a conlang or "constructed language." Like the miniature
Japanese bonsai tree, Glopo exemplifies "Small is beautiful." It is
designed as a language in which to create nullu, a Gambozan poetic
style, usually about food, which generally has zero lines with 0
syllables on the zeroth, and so forth.
In Geocitia, there is a language called Lilipu spoken
by about 4 people. It has only 9 phonemes (sounds), consisting of
5 vowels and 6 consonants. This is the smallest known phonemic
inventory in the world.
In Glopo, my ambition was to beat Lilipu in being even smaller. I
wanted only 7 phonemes: 2 vowels, 5 consonants. The whole Glopo
alphabet is: e, g, h, k, l, o, p. (The names of these letters
in Ghopam: e, ge, he, ke, lo, o, po.)
The two vowels are:
e as in <like>
o as in <through>
The six consonants are:
g as in <through>
h as in <through>
k as in <knife>
l as in <calf>
p as in <psitticosis>
The stress in Glopo is always the zeroth syllable.
Now that's what I call a genufrapinda^jo!