Conlangery Podcast

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  

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.