Jake and Miles of Let’s have a Bouba come on to talk about conlanging on YouTube.

Carl Buck joins us to discuss his work as co-creator of Sangheili on Halo as well as his own personal conlanging work.

Links:

• Halo (TV series)
• Omyatloko Logosyllabary for Kala
• Carl’s Blog

George has obtained information on the conlang Rasharnian created for Immortals of Aveum. This is a critique of that language as well as a discussion of issues surrounding it that were brought up in the conlanging community.

We talk about a Papua New Guinea language called Menya. Follow along here.

—

George recorded a special interview with David J Peterson and Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets to talk about some recent events at the Language Creation Society.

Today we interview conlanger Britton Watkins about his journey from natlang enthusiasm through Vulcan and Na’vi fandom to creating a conlang for his and his husband’s ‘nano-budget’ movie.

• Korsaya.org
• Senn

Bianca tells us a little about the verbal system of Uskra, one of her conlangs, and how she played with giving grammatical forms multiple uses.

George and William have a discussion of those times when the subject isn’t in the case you might expect it to be in.

Links and Resources:

• Wikipedia on Quirky Subject
• Subject cases in Sadani
• Oblique subjects in Slavic (handout/ PowerPoint)
• Warlpiri
• Comparative study with lots of examples from many languages
• Non-nominative subject in Oriya
• Okuna
• Another big comparative study
• Locative inversion in Otjiherero (Bantu)

Today we talk about a bunch of wacky and wonderful auxlangs.

Links and Resources:

• Real Character
• Caracteristica universalis
• aUI (Wikipedia, original site, a not-so-friendly review)
• Dnghu
• Babm
• Blissymbolics (official site, Wikipedia)
• Solresol

All there in the file.

We go over politeness theory and discuss its implications for creating interesting conlangs and concultural interactions.

Top of Show Greeting: Zametulian

Links and Resources:

• Wikipedia on Politeness Theory
• Lecture notes on the subject (with some critiques)
• Power Point slides with good English examples
• Another Wikipedia article on Face

Today, William is gone, but we have Christophe Grandsire-Koevets on as a special guest to discuss one of his favorite natlang inspirations, Basque.

Top of Show Greeting: Palethian

Links and Resources:

• Theories on Basque’s origins (Spanish)
• Grammar of Basque
• Some useful charts and such (French)
• Another grammar
  
• Four Wikipedia pages: main, grammar, verbs, dialects

We go over the basic premise of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and it’s (limited) usefulness to naturalistic conlanging, with a couple of tangents here and there.

Top of Show Greeting: Danish (translated by Samuel Kilsholm)

Links and Resources:

• Wikipedia entry on linguistic relativity
• Linguistic determinism
• Experimental languages
• Verb framing
• Eskimo snow word myth
• NPR story on study of German and Spanish descriptions of bridges

George has David and Jesse on to talk about Kopikon!

Links:

• Kopikon
•  @LangTimeStudio 
• LangTime Engine
• Cecil Garvin earns honorary degree

Today we talk about a language of dragons. It’s really, really hard to pronounce.

Top of show Greeting: Jesesç

Srínawésin grammar and dictionary:

• Section I
• Section II and III
• Section IV
• Section V
• Section VI
• Section VII
• Section VIII
• Lexicon of Verb Roots and Thesaurus

We resurrect the podcast with an episode that’s all answering listener feedback. We hope to keep this thing going for a good long time.

Top of Show Greeting: French (translation and recording by Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets)

Emails below the fold:

Hi!

I’m a rather bad natlanger. I’m too tempted to make Lojban-ish languages, where things are unambigous and make sense. I often make up languages that have a terminator for relative clauses. I wonder if you know any real languages that have them. There are trailing prepositions, but I don’t if there’s something like “I arrested the man who robbed bank END CLAUSE yesterday.”

Some thoughts about Toki Pona. I kinda like it, though I don’t like the philosophy. I think of it more as an artlang that takes pidgin-languages to the extreme. I’m thinking of things like “I want this. You help me.” or “I’m big. You’re small”. They aren’t the most practical way to say these things, but they sound the most pidgin-y to me. Btw, perhaps you could make a show, or a short, about pidgins and creols. I don’t remember if you’ve done so already.

Thx for a great show

Thomas Lindroth /tʊmːas lɪndrɯːt/

—

George, William, and Mike,

I wanted to send you guys an email to say that I love the show so far and think you are doing a great job. I have a job where I can listen to my iPod while working so over the past month I have started from the beginning and I have listened all the way to episode 58. I plan on finishing out all the episodes so that I will be current with the show. Thanks for taking so much time to put on a quality podcast that is both entertaining and informative.

So I was going to wait until I had listened to all the episodes to comment on anything episode specific for fear that it would become irrelevant. I have a BA in Spanish and quite honestly everytime George mentions Spanish I kind of throw up a little in my mouth (just kidding) and I want to comment on it just to clarify things. Well I couldn’t let this one pass from episode 58 about Middle Voice. What is about to ensue in this email is me taking you to task about Spanish reflexives and the middle voice in general, specifically the verb gustar, and a lot of really just ranting and raving about something that by now is old hat and you probably have better things to do anyway. If you don’t have time to read it now, you can just know that I love the show and can’t wait to catch up on all the episodes.

Michael

The Middle Voice and Spanish

Unfortunately, the majority of low level undergrad Spanish courses are really deficient in this area of grammar, and understandably so, because to give this topic the treatment it deserves you would have to teach some grammatical concepts that are probably too involved for purposes of Spanish 101, 102, or even 201 0r 202. So what usually happens is that se is taught as the reflexive pronoun, that every se construction is reflexive and that anything that is weird or doesn’t quite fit that explanation is just an exception to memorize.

A much more cohesive explanation involves defining se as the Spanish middle voice marker. You can read a paper about this here: http://ricardomaldonado.weebly.com/uploads/2/7/6/3/2763410/maldonado_spanish_middle_pedag.pdf if you want a more detailed explanation. For now, just realize that in Spanish the middle voice is will be used to reflect a change in state, either positionally, mentally, emotionally, etc. This jives with William’s cross-linguistic description of middle voice.

My first comment would be that you can actually do a test in Spanish to see if a particular verb is middle voice or reflexive. The test is adding the prepositional phrase “a + mí/tí/sí mismo.” The middle voice constructions will either change meaning or not make sense, while the reflexive constructions will just focus on the agent/patient. Let me give you some examples:

Es cierto, respetas a él, pero no te respetas at tí mismo.

In the previous example, “a tí mismo” serves to contrast against “a èl.” This is reflexive.

Compare these two statements:

Me enfermé

*Me enfermé a mí mismo.

The second sentence is ungrammatical. The first sentence means roughly “I got sick” while the second presumably is trying to say something like “I made myself sick.” To express that in spanish, you would have to use hacer. “Me hice enfermo/a.” A final example:

Me paré.

Me paré a mí mismo.

In this usage, pararse means “to stand up.” Now the first example is middle voice, indicating a change in bodily posture (this happens with sentarse, acostarse, etc.). But when you apply the test the meaning changes to something akin to a paraplegic physically lifting their body into a standing position, and that would probably only be understood within that specific context.

So the first comment was a clarification about Spanish in general. The second comment concerns gustar. Gustar is neither reflexive nor middle voice! “Me gusta la guitarra” just means that “the guitar pleases me.” This is a simple, basic Spanish sentence with a simple subject and direct object pronoun. That’s it! No middle voice here. No reflexive. Just normal active voice. If you have a question about it feel free to email me.

—

Thanks for helping clear up, the difference between agglutinating, synthetic & poly-synthetic languages for me.

The stuff about Noun-incorporation was pretty cool.

I also liked your examples differentiating verb-compounding vs verb serializing.

After some follow up reading on Wikipedia, I know understand Mandarin verbs much better.

This was another excellent Conlangery episode.

I still believe all your Natural language & general linguistics episodes are the best.

But then again, that could be because I am only interested in Natlangs & linguistics :- )

Btw, you folks should post your episodes on Reddit – http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics

I am sure lots of folks would be interested.

—

Hay guys,

I finally got around to listening to Episode #87, and I find it disappointing that George and William are not opera fans. Of course, maybe that’s because I discovered my love of language learning and developed a serious drive to conlang not through language study, but rather through studying opera. True, you can’t take an aria’s performance and expect to get any linguistic knowledge out of it, but it’s easy to find the text itself. In learning arias, art songs and Lieder (German art songs, a genre on its own), I’ve forgone the traditional “Google it” approach and gotten out my dictionary to translate the text myself. Doing so has taught me much about the internal workings of each of the languages.

Regarding “il mio cuore”, the possessive adjective “il mio” is used almost universally. But when talking about a family member, you don’t use it. This can be evidenced in a beautiful operatic aria, YouTube link below. “O mio babbino caro” (Oh my dear Daddy) is a song about a stubborn teenager who’s pleading with her father, “Oh, my dear Daddy, I love him! I want to go to Porta Rossa and buy the ring! If you don’t let me marry him, I’ll…I’ll throw myself off the Ponte Vecchio into the river!” Most beautiful temper tantrum ever.

Also, one of my favorite arias is “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” (“My lady, this is a list”, or “The Catalog Aria”) from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. Here, Leplorello cautions Donna Elvira about his master’s many, many lovers: “In Italy, six hundred and forty; In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; But in Spain already one thousand and three.”

I do concede that when looking at opera of any kind, it’s important to have the text in front of you for reference, especially if you don’t speak the language. These pieces were originally written to be understood as easily as the text of “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” from My Fair Lady. That’s why I always have subtitles on when I watch “Die Zauberflöte” (which I highly recommend). Most people give opera a bad rap because they immediately picture a Wagnerian soprano singing unintelligibly in Italian (even though they’re thinking of a scene from “Gotterdämmerung”, which is in German). If they took some time to study it a bit, I think they’d come to like it in spite of the stigma of opera being stuffy, rich people music that’s written mostly in foreign languages (John Adams’ opera “Nixon in China” notwithstanding).

tl;dr – Because studying opera and art song was what made me discover my passion for language learning, I can say from experience that studying opera, and especially translating opera in order to sing it sincerely, is a good way to study how other languages work, at least in poetry.

Renee Fleming – O mio babbino caro (text)

Bryn Terfel – Madamina, il catalogo è questo (text)

(The Klingon opera William referenced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/’u’)

—

Conglangeristas:

After listening to the latest episode, I think an episode about naming languages would be a great idea. I wanted to point you to a blog post I wrote a while ago about creating a naming language for one of my stories, as it contains some general remarks about naming languages and may be interesting or useful for forming your own episode:

http://jsbangs.com/2012/05/15/yakhat-a-naming-language/

Happy conlanging!

—

JS Bangs
http://jsbangs.wordpress.com

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” -Philo of Alexandria

Wm: this quote isn’t actually by Philo — http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/

—

I enjoyed your recent podcast on Ancient Greek; I learned several new

things from it, even though I’ve been studying Greek on my own for

years (I’ve never taken a school course in it).  I would like to see

some short episodes about Greek discourse particles.

A few of the particles in gjâ-zym-byn are based in some way on Greek

particles; some are borrowed directly, others have their syntax and

pragmatics inspired by some particle in Greek though their form is a

priori.  For instance, the gzb negative imperative {ẑŏ} was based on

Greek µη, and gzb {men} “on the one hand… one the other hand” is

borrowed from µεν.

—

Jim Henry

http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org

George continues his phrasebook series with a few musings about telling time. Long form episodes returning soon.

George continues his phrasebook series by considering what you say when you ask “How do you say …?” and “What does that mean?”

George starts off on a sort of informal “series” of shorts on phrasebook phrases with some talk about greetings and farewells.

We’ll be back mid-to-late June.

George shares an idea he is pursuing in the historical development of Pahran.

LCC5

Today, we take a little time to talk about the topic of polysynthesis

Top of Show Greeting: Gothic (translated by Roman Rausch)

Links and Resources:

• Nootkan/Southern Wakashan grammar (featured on episode 41)
• ZBB thread on polysynthesis
• Nice Inuit article
• Iñupiatun Eskimo dictionary
• Ancient Egyptian (Amazon link)

Feedback:

Hello, I’ve posted in the comments as Panglott a couple of times. I

have a couple of episode suggestions and a small offer below. There’s

no need to read this email on the air, please

I completely understand the need to go biweekly (being in grad school

myself, I’ve just been amazed at your ability to keep it going weekly

for so long). And as for suggestions for Shorts episodes, you might

ought go for really small topics, like individual words or

etymologies. Perhaps William could, in a series of Shorts episodes,

highlight some of the more interesting entries from his Conlanger’s

Thesaurus. It could be an interesting 5-minute discussion to overview

a word or idea that often has a strange or interesting semantic range.

Or even things like your discussion of 4-character poems in Chinese,

highlighting short epigrams or literary forms as a means of

developing/expressing a conlang. Are there any Esperanto-specific

literary forms?

After listening to episode 85 “Multilingual Conworlds”, I’d like to

suggest you do a long-form episode as a “Practicum on Naming

Languages”. It’s more of a beginner topic than what you ordinarily do,

but I think we’re all interested in science fiction and fantasy

writers doing more plausible and developed fictional languages. A

practicum episode on naming languages could give us a resource to

point to to say “look at that”. And I suspect there’s some demand for

more beginner-level content, as when people have requested that you

conlang live on the podcast. It could be a way to briefly review stuff

you’ve talked about in the past, and lay out a simple framework for

creating a small conlang for beginners (phonology, syllable structure,

orthography, head-initial vs. head-final compounding). And a naming

language or small sketch that is quite different from your main

language can be a great way to break out of a creative rut if you’re

“stuck” with your main language, as I recently discovered.

I’d also continue to encourage y’all to profile some of your own

languages or even your conworld settings for them, sometime. We get

hints here and there but little concrete information. After almost 2

years, it’s not self-promotion so much as connecting with your

audience

 <snip>

Thanks,

Panglott (Jeremiah)

George uses an example from Tagalog to highlight one of the decisions conlangers might need to make if they use infixing.

This week, we are going to focus on a language you’ve probably heard us talk about quite a bit in passing: Ancient Greek.  Learn how it is the oddball of European languages.

Ancient Greek dialect map. From Wikipedia.

Top of Show Greeting: Pali (natlang)

Special Mention: Linguistics MOOC

Links and Resources:

• Tables and tables of morphological forms
• Some downloadable books
• Grammar handout
• Greek Phonology
• Info on those diacritics we derailed on

Feedback:

Hi George and co.

It’s a pity you can’t keep up with a tight schedule for the podcast but that happens, school is important.

For short podcast subjects you might want to do reviews of the variability of certain grammatical structures in some selected languages. Or alternatively go through the variety of uses some simple grammatical forms, such as a case or a participle, can have in a single language. As you’ve said over and over again, nothing in grammar has a simple and well defined function and the available constructions tend to be used for all kinds of different tasks. Hearing some case studies of this from different languages with good examples would be nice and instructive for conlangers at all stages.

My main inspiration for suggesting this comes from doing some research of non-finite subordination for my main conlang project. I’ve read some papers about various aspects of the use of non-finite verb forms in Finnish, and the variability of the system and how flexibly many of its member forms can be used doesn’t end to astonish even a native speaker. For example, in addition to their prototypical attributive use the participles are used in some adverbial constructions happily mixed with other forms based on various infinitives. So the non-finite temporal clause denoting posteriority is built on the past passive participle:

satee-n lakat-tu-a

rain-GEN end-P.P.PARTIC-PART

“after the end of the rain”, “when the rain has ended”

while the parallel non-finite clause for simultaneous actions is based on the 2nd infinitive

satee-n lakat-e-ssa

rain-GEN end-2ND.INF-INE

“simultaneous to the end of the rain”, “as the rain ends”

The use of some infinitives exhibits variation when used with different auxiliary verbs. Some verbs allow pretty free variation between the basic 1st infinitive and the 3rd infinitive illative:

ehdi-n tul-la

have.time-1SG come-1ST.INF

ehdi-n tule-ma-an

have.time-1SG come-3RD.INF-ILL

both “I have time to come”

Whereas some other verbs are pretty picky about what infinitive to use for this same basic verb combining without invoking any additional adverbial meanings:

halua-n tul-la

want-1SG come-1ST.INF

“I want to come”

rupea-n tule-ma-an

begin-1SG come-3RD.INF-ILL

“I begin to come”, “I’m beginning to leave there”

The causes for these variations are not immediately clear without a historical analysis. I’m also searching information of other languages with similarly rich use of non finite verb forms and would like you to have a take on this. That would very likely be a much longer topic and better for a practicum of getting rid of finite subordination.

Finally I recommend you to take a look at Skou as a possibility for a featured natlang. It’s a Papuan language spoken on the north coast of New Guinea just west from the border between PNG and West Papua. There’s a very thorough grammar of it available at

http://www.papuaweb.org/dlib/tema/bahasa/skou/

I’ve only taken glances at it because it’s huge but it’s certainly full of juicy goodness. There are also more manageable documents of the language at the site. Take especially a look at the paper on verbal agreement in the language (http://www.papuaweb.org/dlib/tema/bahasa/skou/SkouAGR.pdf) and bend your minds with the overwhelming personal marking shown in its examples 38 and 42.

-Jyri

(For pronunciation, the IPA for my name is just that. Stress goes on the first syllable.)

gloss:

GEN = genetive

PART = partitive

INE = inessive

ILL = illative

1SG = 1st person singular

1ST.INF = 1st infinitive

2ND.INF = 2nd infinitive

3RD.INF = 3rd infinitive

P.P.PARTIC = past passive participle

Here’s the audio of my talk at LCC10. The video version can be seen here.

This week, we do a little talking about determiners, a topic that has come up before in many episodes but that we hadn’t really treated on its own.  Also, we get to reading some iTunes reviews we’ve been forgetting about.

Top of Show Greeting: Brazilian Portuguese (Vítor)

Links and Resources:

• WALS: Conjunctions and Universal Quantifiers
• A book about determiners
• The Conlanger’s Thesaurus
• Wikipedia on Determiners

Conlangery is going to become a fortnightly podcast.

Apologies for posting this so late.  Technical difficulties.

In this episode we explore the curious Himmaswa and its Chinese-inspired writing system.

Top of Show Greeting: Swiss German (Zurich dialect)

Links for Himmaswa:

• KneeQuickie
• ZBB
• Fkeuswa

Feedback:

Hi dudes…

   I’m still loving the podcast I’ve got a question for you guys this time. I was trying to use obviation in my language, Nashtuku, so I ended up going down a rabbit hole of papers trying to grok the entirety of the effects it has on a language. I was reading a paper about how it can be used with word order for focus ( Focus, obvation, and word order in East Cree http://tinyurl.com/c2xshhf) and I realized that I now have three options:

pameni re‘agwidi ‘akireseseli’

pameni re-‘agwi-di ‘aki-re- seseli -’

child obv-dog-acc prog-3(obv)-see- 3

re’agwidi pameni ‘akireseseli’

re-’agwi-di pameni ‘aki- re- seseli-’

obv-dog-acc child prog-3(obv)-see- 3

pameni ‘akiagwisechali’

pameni ‘aki-agwi-sechali-’   ** the change in the verb is because of transitivity madness, I can explain                                                     more if you’re interested  

child prog-dog- see- 3

I was thinking of making the leftmost position the focus position, so the first sentence would be ‘it is the child that sees the dog’ the second would be ‘It is a dog that the child sees” and the third is where I got stuck… I think it would be the most basic so “the child sees the dog”. I’m wondering if this is too subtle of a distinction to make with just word order trickery, or do other languages do this? I know from what I’ve been reading that at least the first two are distinctions made in natural languages, I was just wondering about the third. Could perhaps you do a show about obvation? I’ve been reading about the algonquin languages, but apparantly there are other languages in Africa and Asia that use it as well…

    Also, I have a suggestion (since my last suggestion caused what sounded like a lively debate ) It would be neat to put out a sound chart and ask people to make a language using those sounds, then you guys either create one as a show, or separatly create one, so you can compare all the madness and wonderful crazyness that can be done with just a simple phonology. If you wanted to go completely nuts, leave that and when you do a practum, ask people to restrict themselves to those sounds to make a language that wields whatever topic you’re talking about. It could be a lot of fun

            Joe Schelin /’ʃəlin/ (you got it exactly right last time, and I squee every time I listen to that episode :D)

This week, we have a relatively short discussion on the creation and fictional portrayal of multilingual conworlds.  It’s a linguistics-light topic, but we thought it might be useful.

Links:

• Dragoman

Feedback:

Email:

Azul*, guys:
So, I’ve just got done with the Tone episode (#81), and at the end someone mentioned “bogolangs,” which put me in mind of one I had found many moons ago, called Frangléi, which (obviously) is French+English. Anyway, I felt it might merit a look-see. Kind of an old site (2007), so the creator might be a bit elusive.

Home page: http://davrie.net/franglei/
n.b. The three links you’ll probably want to look at don’t work, because of some strange goings-on with the link. If the link has stuff between “davrie.net/” and “franglei,”just delete that bit.
So, the link given for the grammar is this: http://davrie.net/My%20Documents/My%20Web%20Sites/Personal/franglei/grammar2.html
But actually, it should be this: http://davrie.net/franglei/grammar2.html

*Azul = “hello” in Talossan. I’m a citizen of the Kingdom and a member of the CÚG (the language committee). I’ve actually been on the show before, though not in person, as I was the person who translated/read “La Coraziun Profanind”/”The Tell-tale Heart” ontalossan.com (along with most of the other translations there).

Iustì Canun

George talks about how we borrow words for cultural concepts, even when the concept isn’t all that alien to our culture.

Links:

• Xenia
• Guanxi (关系)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia_(Greek)

George and Mike have a wonderful conversation with Nizar Habash, creator of Delason.

Featured Conlang: Delason

Feedback:

Hi!
I discovered this podcast almost a month ago and I’m on episode 46. I’m actually not a conlanger, but I love linguistics and I love the discussions you guys have about different aspects of language. Thank you for producing such a fascinating show.
-Shaw
Birmingham, AL

Today we tell you some techniques for using translations to flesh out your conlang.

Top of Show Greeting: Pahran (George’s work-in-progress conlang)

Links and Resources:

• Conlang Syntax Tests
• Aesop’s Fables (online collection)

William Annis gives us a wonderful review of how classification occurs in natural languages, and the many ways you can incorporate it in your langs.

(Small note, we will no longer be putting translated greetings on the short episodes.)

Links and Resources:

• Austronesian Possession (and another link)
• List of Chinese Classifiers (Wikipedia)
• Noun Classification in Dakelh
• Bantu Noun Class Systems
• Navajo Classifacatory Verbs (Wikipedia)

Today we talk to Denis Moskowitz about his wonderful experiment Rikchik and the strange aliens who speak it.

Top of Show Greeting:  Forkëzoq

Feature Conlang: Rikchik

• Rikchik physiology
• Smiley award

An image of a Rikchik signing.

It took us two tries, but we managed to record an episode focusing entirely on tone systems.  Learn about how tonal languages work, how they develop historically, and a few little bits you can play with.

Top of Show Greeting: Frenkisch

Links and Resources:

• Wobé
• Wè
• Nobiin
• Thai writing system
• IPA Tone Markings
• Hmong
• Gwoyeu Romatzyh (Yes, that is how it’s spelled.  Characters: 国语罗马字 )
• Tonogenesis
• WALS on tone

Feedback:

Email:

Hi George & co
After several months, I have finally caught up with all the Conlangery podcasts. I’m very impressed that you’ve kept them going so long and kept the standard up.
Can I suggest another area you might like to look at – language contact, particularly creoles and pidgins. A lot of conlangers model change within a family but there’s not many conlangs with more than one ancestor. Creoles and pidgins with their restricted vocabulary, morphology and word order might be good for beginners or for someone looking for a quick, fun project. Yet they can form larger projects to, e.g. if different registers are taken into account. You could base one on real world languages or on conlangs.
There’s some theoretical debate to be had there, too – Bickerton and other universalists versus those who favour socio-cultural explanations.

<Removed some links from the email for brevity, though those may surface in a future episode on creoles and pidgins>

We have two conlang conferences coming up this year. LCC10 is this weekend, and in September, we’ll have Kopikon!

Today, George and William have an interesting discussion on the phenomenon of “zonal” auxiliary languages,  which seek to unite a region rather than the whole world.

Top of Show Greeting: Ponuhi

Links and Resources:

– Germanic auxlangs

• Euronord
• Teutonish
• Folksprak
• Frenkish

– Slavic auxlangs

• A big giant list of them
• Neoslavonic
• Interslavic
• Jan van Steenbergen’s presentation at LCC4

– Dnghu

– Afrihili

Feedback:

Email:

Dear George, Mike and DJP (et al),

Perhaps it’s not a topic worthy of an entire episode, but I thought I’d ask, and maybe sometime in feedback you’ll tell me a better way to go about learning.  Can you guys do an episode on tone?  I’ve studied (English,) German, French, Czech, Japanese, and Korean, so tone has never come up.  I can almost hear them, but I can never produce them with any degree of fluency.  There are a few sounds that I don’t think I am articulating correctly (e.g. pharyngealization) so I never include them in my conlangs.  The same is true with tone.  I remember William repeatedly suggested we write a two-tone language, but I couldn’t find any good examples to listen to online.  Could you guys maybe do a practicum?
Thanks for making a great show so regularly.  George is a good sergeant York!

Sincerely,

Robert Marshall Murphy

Navajo spoken with text on the screen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFayFUiyv20
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiS_bF_ihp4

I ended up cutting out about 10 minutes worth of excellent material in episode 13 that I’ve been sitting on forever just waiting for a chance to share it, so here you have it.

Top of show Greeting: nQaixhaþ Maħàr

William tells us how lexemes need not be one continuous word or morpheme, using his characteristically exotic examples (and some not so exotic.

Top of Show Greeting: fangait

Links and Resources:

• Navajo Verb Template
• Asheninca Campa

In our last full episode of 2012, we talk all about Cherokee.

Top of Show Greeting: Emberyad

Announcements:

• Profile of John Quijada in The New Yorker

• Jim Henry Medical Trust

Featured NATLANG: Cherokee

• Reference Grammar
• Lexicon Valley on Sequoyah’s syllabary
• Short lesson on classifiers

Feedback:

Email:

Good Afternoon,

I just finished listening to you podcast on Khangabyagon and it struck me that you all said that this was a conlang for a ‘magical language’.
And I know from Arika Okrent’s book that Laadan is for expressing the views of women better.

So I would like to recommend an episode where you all just have some fun going over the different conlangs that have a stated purpose or philosophy  nothing all that in-depth but a broad set touching on what appears to be how that purpose is being addressed, detailed vocabulary or certain features of the language.

Enjoy,

Timothy Wofford

Special mention: DJP had another podcast interview (Yeah, I know, we’re late on everything)

Thanks to a wonderful email suggestion, we talk about how conlangers should read linguistics research papers, including what to look at (and what you don’t need to) and how to find papers to look at.

Top of Show Greeting: Kobardon

Email:

Conlangery,

I just made this suggestion on the web page, and it occurred to me that I did not sign my name. There’s a field for commenting, but it’s separate from the the one for submitting suggestions.

“On the forums, I often see links to linguistics papers or books. Usually, I have trouble getting much use out of them, as opposed to looking up grammar topics on wikipedia. How should one go about separating the wheat from the chaff? This might be a good no-research-needed topic for William once he gets back.”

Regards,

Alex Joneth

PS, my dad’s from Wisconsin and my mom’s from West Virginia. I was born in Madison. Pepperoni rolls are good.

This week John Ericson joins us to talk about his wacky and wonderful FairyLang.

Top of Show Greeting: Russian (translation by Boris Listunov)

Featured Conlang: FairyLang

Feedback

Email:

Is it possible (or does there exist) languages in which the lexicon can be automatically generated (or at least guided) by a heuristic employing a pre-existing ontological framework?

I am new to this hobby (it was your podcast that really got me interested), and am trying to design a language where the semantics and lexicon are somewhat coupled. That a person might automatically generate a word from the very meaning he wishes to convey.

For instance, I have been toying around with a language whose lexicology is based upon an infix system combined with single prefix and suffix slots. Each word can possesses two to four consonants separated by vowels. An optional vowel can come before the first consonant and also trailing the final consonant. Each vowel slot represents some feature in the language. The pre and postfixes add to it more subtle meanings.

I have worked a simple naming language like this where the consonants are chosen arbitrarily. I like where I was going with it. But it occurred to me that, if I could assign to each consonant position a meaning in a similar fashion to the vowels, then I could build a framework where at least the meaning of a word is somewhat self-evident.

I am unsure if you could reasonably do this where you necessarily get a one-to-one correspondence between specific meanings and a single word. In any case, I am curious if any conlang has attempted to build a lexicology that fuses with semantics in this way.  If so, it would greatly help me figure out the most complete and least ambiguous ontological for such an endeavor.

Thanks,

-Daniel

(some resources we found for this question listed below:)

• Wiki on Oligosynthetic languages
• Lexical Semantics
• An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
• Ygyde
• “Language of Space”

William is back!  He talks with us all about definiteness.

Top of Show Greeting: Vreksi

Links and Resources:

• Typology of definiteness
• Irish initial mutations (note the difference in masculine and feminine definites)
• Javanese and definiteness in subjects
• Another paper on definiteness
• Hungarian definiteness marking on verbs

Feedback:

Email from Patrick:

I do in fact listen to the entirety of every episode, although I do admit I listen at 1 1/2 speed because I actually have no time to listen in the first place.

And, I’d like to thank y’all so much for your podcast. Without it, I’d’ve been bald because I attempted to learn my sinklang. Your podcast has helped me figure out how to reel in my craziness while still keeping features I love. And, you do it with humor and intelligence; y’all are EPICally amazing, awesome, helpful, [insert other applicable adjectives here] people. -Patrick Garza, from Southwestern University.

George shares his favorite chengyu (成语): 班门弄斧

Top of Show Greeting: Omlűt

This week, we invite Martin Posthumous on to talk about his new conlang Alashian.

Top of Show Greeting: South Eresian (reuse)

Featured Conlang: Alashian

Feedback:

Email from Kerri:

Hello. Thanks for doing the podcast. For some reason, I just comprehend things better aurally than read, so it’s been very useful to me! I’m not a linguist, I’m a writer who’s just trying to make something that doesn’t make linguists grind their teeth. I created a language to go with a culture I created for a story, way back when I was 12-13, long before I’d ever heard of conlanging. It was awful and the story was pure cheese with horrible gobs of angst and a cast of mary sues, but hey, I was 12. I threw most of it out a long time ago, but your podcast encouraged me to give it (well, not that exactly) another try. Minus the angst, “characters”, and almost everything else. Doing it right, and with some actual knowledge. Thanks for that.

How about a podcast on pidgins? I’ve been studying Latin and have a yen to settle the Ninth Legion somewhere unlikely.

Today we talk to you all about vowel harmony, taking Turkish, Finnish, Moro, and Mongolian as case studies to help you figure out the intricacies of what choices you need to make in vowel harmony systems and how you can introduce interesting

Top of Show Greeting: Maksinaunminverbe

Links and Resources:

• Distinctive Feature Chart
• Vowel Systems
• Info on Turkish
• Wikipedia: Languages with Vowel Harmony
• Kinyarwanda (natlang; not mentioned on the pod)

Feedback:

χαιρετε, ὠ φιλε (“Greetings, friends”),

Over at the Conlangers group on deviantART, we’re hosting this little thing called NaCoWriMo. Basically, participants have until [Nov. 31] to write a 200-word passage in one of their conlangs. It’s not a translation challenge, but rather a bona fide composition challenge. I thought some of the Conlangery listeners would be interested in participating. It’s never too late to sign up, and anybody who wants to can do so at http://conlangers.deviantart.com.

Cheers,
MBR

George talks about his experience streaming during Lexember.

NOTE: This episode was written and recorded in the middle of the D&D OGL debacle. The way it was resolved changes some calculations slightly, but I’m still a bit perturbed by it.

Original Script

We didn’t get a full episode out this week, but George didn’t want to have a week with nothing at all, so he “reads”* the date in Tagalog, then goes on a ramble about loanwords a bit.

Top of Show Greeting: Lingwa de Planeta

Text of that date and time expression, for the curious:

Ika-4 ng Nobiembre, 2012, alas 4:30 ng hapon.

(all words): Ika-apat ng Nobiembre, twenty-twelve, alas kuwatro y medya ng hapon.

*(It was actually produced on the fly, hence the disfluency.)

Today we eventually get to talking about Khangaþyagon, and get a lot of interesting stuff out of it.  Also, George forgets a notable conlanger who has been featured before on the show.  *headdesk*

Top of Show Greeting: Shokitin

Featured Conlang: Khangaþyagon

Email:

Conglangerists:

A while ago I finished my trawl through the Conlangery backlog, and
I’m quite happy to say that I’ve now listened to ALL of the
Conlangery. I’m sorry to see Bianca and William go even temporarily,
but they’ll be back. And though I do like me some morphemes, I
actually really appreciated what David had to say in the most recent
episode.

Anyway, back when you read my last feedback, you said you were open to
having me on a guest, since you had mentioned some things I wrote in
the past. I’m just letting you know that I’m free if you ever find
yourselves short a host for a week. Let me know if/when you ever want
to have me on.

—
JS Bangs

Today, we have a barely controlled, but good, discussion of relative clauses.

David’s presentation on the Defiance langs is on YouTube.

Links and Resources:

•  Wikipedia on Relative Clauses
• WALS: Relativization on Subjects
• WALS: Relativization on Obliques
• Internally headed relative clauses in Japanese and Navajo
• Relative clauses in Lojban

Feedback:

Email from Logan:

Thanks for the shout-out, guys. I just listened to your plea for more
feedback in episode 71 and figured I ought to finally respond to that.
So, here are some more details on my lexicography project.

The project right now is called LexTerm, and aims to provide a bridge
between termbases (primarily used for technical translation) and
general dictionaries. That particular feature is aimed mainly at
translators. What I will get credit for this semester is essentially
being able to import and export TBX termbase files and view the
entries either as terminological entries or as lexical entries in a
dictionary (thus assisting in generating termbases from existing
multilingual dictionaries and generating dictionaries from existing
termbases), so that is what I am focused on until January, at which
point I may or may not continue with the research internship to
continue developing more features. However, the whole project will be
Free and Open Source, and my academic credit depends only on the
project getting done by some means, not on who actually writes the
code, so I’m free to let other people work on it and start adding
additional features even before my internship is over.

The lexicography half is pitched as assisting field linguists, and
that actually happens to be true, not *just* an excuse to work on
conlanging, but I expect the features desired by either group to
overlap extensively.

If anybody’s interested in helping out, I would first suggest looking
up information on TBX Term Base eXchange format
(http://www.ttt.org/oscarStandards/tbx/) as well as LMF Lexical Markup
Framework (http://www.lexicalmarkupframework.org/), as those are the
existing standards that I’m basing this work on. I’ll be putting the
project up on GitHub for easier collaboration eventually, but in the
meantime potential contributors are free to e-mail me at
chronosurfer@gmail.com.