R Srikant and his Conlang Lin

Lin! The creator of this Chinese sounding auxlang is R Srikant, another conlanger from India. According to his website, he was working at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in 2001. The website hasn't been updated for a decade so I don't know where he's now but even this little information is enough to dispel my earlier belief that Nikhil Sinha is the only conlanger in this country.

Lin was never designed to become an IAL. Instead, the creator defines his language as a "spatially compact lang" which means the language aims to convey thoughts by taking as less space as possible.

The 71 letter orthography of Lin is based on the Roman alphabet. There are no accented letters and no special letters in the sense of natural languages. 

The author of language has been able to design the orthography by giving different phonetic values to lower case and upper case letters. Also, the numbers from zero to nine and these eight signs - +, =, \, |, :, *, ^ and % - are treated as separate letters in Lin and thus have their own phonetic values. The creator didn't even spare the empty space between two letters; even it is pronounced in some cases. 

Lin looks more like a computer algorithm then a real 'language.' At first, I thought Lin is like Lojban but I proved to be wrong. There are some fundamental differences between the two languages and the most important, I think, is: Lojban is designed to be as precise as possible but because Lin's sole aim is to achieve brevity, ambiguity has crept into the language. 

A word in Lin has, on an average, at least half a dozen meanings. The correct meaning is inferred from the context. To cite an example, the word 'a' in Lin can mean anything of these: good, beautiful, deep, God, love, beginning and help grant. In some cases, a word possesses as many as ten different meanings.

A grammar of Lin can be found on this webpage on the website of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Now let's have a look at three sample sentences from the grammar and see how much less of a space they occupy:

_u f+1_ 

Whom do you fear?

px v u

A bird sees you.

i N px)f+u

I know the bird that fears you.

Wow! It is economical but I doubt if I'll ever be able to learn it. I couldn't find any literature, the vocabulary is still small and I believe an average learner would require more grammatical explanations than are currently available on the website mentioned above.

Nikhil Sinha, the Only(?) Indian Conlanger, and his Conlangs

I accidently found Esperanto a couple of years back. I was excited to know it's unlike any other language in the world. It was a 'constructed language'. (Some prefer to call it an 'auxlang'.) To find more about Esperanto, I occasionaly went to cyber cafes. During one of those visits, I came across another constructed language which, it seemed to me, incorporated the grammar of Esperanto in it. The only difference, I could figure out, was in the choice of roots. The European roots were swapped with more familiar Sanskrit and Hindi words. I didn't bother much about the language because I thought it was just a copy cat project and wasn't worth having a look. After that, I forgot the name of the language; the only thing that wasn't erased from my memory was the first name of the creator - Nikhil.

Today morning, for no particular reason, I decided to find out what happened of Nikhil and his project. At first it was difficult to find information about him and his conlangs because Nikhil is such a common name in India. But within a few minutes, I did manage to Google out his real name - Nikhil Sinha. He was 15 in 2003 so he must be 22 or 23 by now. I couldn't find more about him but more Googling did reveal that he is the "only" conlanger from India. 

Coming to his languages, he has created four artlangs: Nihilosk, Indika, Gokim and Cannic.

1. Nihilosk: According to this website, Nikhil's first creation was Nihilosc. "The first conlang is not akin to any spoken language. It is just made up." and the name of the language, Nihilosc, is a "corruption" of his name.

Here's what the language looks like:

Nihiloscon iso impiyoan raquaon greinoas. Etada Nihiloscon epruiboanus. Etadaan diseisenciaon Nikilon Sinhaon greinoas.

(Nihilosc is a simple language. I'm learning Nihilosc. My name is Nikhil Sinha.)

Unfortunately, I have no idea on how to pronounce it or how it works because the website that contained information about it was hosted on Yahoo Geocities which is no longer available.

2. Indika: This was perhaps the language I saw then. This language is based on Esperanto, English, Hindi and Sanskrit. I gather from the sample sentences I've found that the grammar borrows much from Esperanto and the role of the rest three is confined to lending words.

Indikao asas un asana linguao. Mi sikoagas Indikao. Mia namo asas Nikilo Sinhao.

(Indika is a simple language. I'm learning Indika. My name is Nikhil Sinha.)

Here, asas seems to have been borrowed from Ido and the verb ending -as, adjective ending -a, noun ending -o, the first person pronoun mi and first person possessive pronoun mia, clearly show how much Esperanto has affected the grammar of Indika.

The roots asan-, sikoaga- and nam- are from Hindi or Sanskrit and they mean 'easy', 'learn' and 'name' respectively.

You can find nine sentences, including the three mentioned above, in both languages here.

3. Gokim: The language was first spelled as Goquim. It's a very strange looking language. To make plural you have to add an -om and that's all I know about it! Below are the same three sample sentences in Gokim:

Goquimu kuin Omeina na. Duitina goquimen dilde nalla. Oste dilde Nikhil Sinha na.

(Gokim is a simple language. I'm learning Gokim. My name is Nikhil Sinha.)

Fortunately, there is still some information left on how the language works on this page. 

4. Cannic: This is the best documented, if you are a linguist, of all of Nikhil's languages currently available on the internet. I believe there is sufficient material on this website for an expert but for me, who is only casually interested in languages, it's far from being something I could learn the language from.

Again, the same sentences in Cannic:

Kánika astis á simplán lánguéźa. Áma larning Kánika. Ámos náma astis Nikil Sinhá non.

(Cannic is a simple language. I'm learning Cannic. My name is Nikhil Sinha.)

To me, it's both heart-warming and disappointing at the same time to learn about these projects.  'Heart-warming' because they show Europeans aren't the only ones who are making conlangs, 'disappointing' because these non-European projects aren't easily visible.