• Episodes
  • Listen
  • Transcripts
  • Tranquillusionist
  • Events
  • Lexicon
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Merch
Menu

The Allusionist

Street Address
City, State, Zip
Phone Number
A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

Your Custom Text Here

The Allusionist

  • Episodes
  • Listen
  • Transcripts
  • Tranquillusionist
  • Events
  • Lexicon
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Merch

Allusionist 59: One To Another

June 30, 2017 The Allusionist

Translation, A Love Story:

Translator listens to The Allusionist. Translator hears about the podcast The Memory Palace. Translator listens to The Memory Palace. Translator immediately becomes smitten with The Memory Palace. Translator translates The Memory Palace from English to Brazilian Portuguese, and turns it into a book - O Palácio da Memória - which will be published in Brazil two weeks hence.

But, like any love story, it's not quite that simple.

Read more
In episodes Tags Memory Pallusionist, The Memory Palace, Nate DiMeo, Caetano Galindo
3 Comments

Allusionist 25: Toki Pona

November 18, 2015 The Allusionist

There's a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, five vowels, nine consonants, and apparently you can become fluent in it with around 30 hours' study. It was invented by linguist Sonja Lang in 2001,

iTUNES • RSS • MP3

There’s a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, five vowels, nine consonants, and apparently you can become fluent in it with around 30 hours’ study. It was invented by linguist Sonja Lang in 2001, and it’s called Toki Pona.

And Nate DiMeo, from the Memory Palace, decided we should learn it together.

FURTHER READING:

  • tokipona.org is your first stop for Toki Pona information, such as Sonja Lang's book and the Facebook group.

  • This is the article that first piqued Nate's and my interest in Toki Pona. I also enjoyed reading about this two-day Toki Pona learning binge.

  • A Finnish psychiatrist experimented with getting his patients to record their thoughts in Toki Pona every day.

  • Hey, linguistic size queens: here's a piece comparing number of words in different languages, and here are some stats for you.

  • I need to read In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent, who appeared in this early episode of 99% Invisible about Esperanto.

  • There are a lot more invented languages; here are a few mentioned in this episode: Kēlen, Ithkuil, Blissymbols, Lojban, Klingon, Elvish, Na'vi...

  • Here's the transcript of this episode.

RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
kobold

CREDITS:

  • Nate DiMeo makes the beautiful podcast The Memory Palace thememorypalace.us.

  • This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Eleanor McDowall.

  • Martin Austwick provided all the music apart from the instrumental version of Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger'.

  • Communicate with me minimalistically at facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/helenzaltzman.

- HZ

In episodes Tags Memory Pallusionist, The Memory Palace, Nate DiMeo, words, language, linguistics, minimalism, Sonja Lang, constructed languages, inventions, invented languages, Esperanto, Kelen, philosophy, metaphor, grammar, phonemes, morphology, universal language, history, computation, computers, programming, programming languages, Klingon, Elvish, JRR Tolkien, Na'vi, Blissymbols, Lojban, Ithkuil, humor, humour, numbers, counting, simplicity, colours, subjectivity, communication, comprehension, understanding, negatives, negativity, sarcasm, irony, new languages, Squarespace, Oxford Games, conceptual
8 Comments
Allusionist Patreon
Featured
feed bullshit
Allusionist 208: Ffff
Allusionist 208: Ffff
WhatsApp Image 2025-04-27 at 23.06.37.jpeg
several bits of news! (nothing bad)
queer playlist
Allusionist 207: Randomly Selected Words from the Dictionary
Allusionist 207: Randomly Selected Words from the Dictionary
Allusionist 206. Bonus 2024
Allusionist 206. Bonus 2024
A Christmas Carollusionist
A Christmas Carollusionist
Allusionist 205. Lexicat, part 2: now with added Dog
Allusionist 205. Lexicat, part 2: now with added Dog
Festivelusionists
Allusionist 204. Lexicat, part 1
Allusionist 204. Lexicat, part 1
Allusionist 203. Flyting
Allusionist 203. Flyting
Allusionist 202: Singlish Singlish
Allusionist 202: Singlish Singlish
Allusionist 201: Singlish
Allusionist 201: Singlish
Tranquillusionist: Ex-Constellations
Tranquillusionist: Ex-Constellations
Allusionist 200: 200th episode celebratory quiz!
Allusionist 200: 200th episode celebratory quiz!
Creative Commons Licence
The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.