Conlangery Podcast

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.

Today, we all talk about the wonderful nuclear-fricitiveness of Ogami, a real life natural language in the Ryukyuan family.  It’s got lots of little bits to inspire you in your conlangs.  Enjoy! Top of Show Greeting: Mandarin Chinese (translation help and recording by Starrie Li (李昕)) Featured NATLANG: Ogami

Kickstarter I mentioned at the top of the show. Today, we finally get to talk about why David hates morphemes, among other things. Top of Show Greeting: Tslure Thujekatsoth Links and Resources: David’s LCC1 talk about Morphemes More explanation from David And more and more I don’t know why David put all his own stuff in the shownotes, but this one is a funny bit Zhyler vowel harmony (also from David, but we mention this specifically) UPDATE: The Endangered Alphabets Kickstarter I mentioned at the top of the show and linked above has reached its goal.  I like to think some of you helped push it over the edge, and if so, thanks.  If you haven’t checked it out, yet, you can still donate until the 15th.

This week we talk about one of the older languages in the conlang community, Arthaey’s Asha’ille.  And no, that spelling has nothing at all to do with the language’s phonology.  You’ll learn a bit about that in the episode. Top of Show Greeting: Ostunese Featured Conlang: Asha’ille

We are super excited to reveal that our third host for (we hope) the duration of William’s absence will be none other than David J. Peterson!  Take a listen as we talk through the challenges of making an agglutinative language that isn’t depressingly boring. Top of Show Greeting: Kihā́mmic Feedback: Email from (another) Michael: Hey guys, I’ve been having a bear of a time getting going with LaTeX. For some reason, I can’t get my hands on the Windows binaries that the LaTeX project website links to, and I can’t stand Lyx. The LaTeX wikibook recommends using an online editor at ScribTeX.com, but that site isn’t taking new users anymore (besides that, it’s a freemium business model that gets you only 5 projects unless you pony up the dough). When I tried to register, it pointed me at ShareLaTeX.com, which I’m going to try out. From what I can tell so far, it’s easy to write out the code, and you just click a button and it gives you a PDF right away. I’ll keep you guys posted; this might be a great resource for conlangers!

Bianca joins us as we tackle a fun and wacky conlang with some serious phonological processes. Top of Show Greeting: Neo-Simikaka Featured Conlang: Alũbetah Feedback: Email: Hi guys, Greetings from Melbourne, Australia. Loving the podcast, keep up the good work.  Only discovered it a few weeks ago, but have worked my way back through most of your back catalogue. I had a question which you might have covered in your episode on loan words, but not sure.  I am a high school language teacher (German/French/Chinese) and when I was talking with one class about loan words between languages we got off on a tangent about redundancies. For example, near our school is a waterway called “Mordialloc Creek”.  In the indigenous Australian language (Boon Wurrung) that was spoken in this area before European settlement, the word “Yallock” means creek.  So the English name is essentially “Mordi Creek Creek”. “Sahara” is also an anglicised version of the Arabic word for desert, so “Sahara Desert” is essentially “Desert Desert”.  Mekong River is also something along the lines of “Khong River River”, roughly (technically the full name in Thai is Mae Nam Khong, which makes more sense as “Khong River”). I know it happens in numerous other contexts. Our question was whether there is an actual word for this phenomenon?  Or is it just called linguistic redundancy? Thanks, Aaron

Today we have a very enlightening discussion about conceptual metaphors and how thinking about them can help you avoid a relex as well as have loads of fun in usage and translation.  Also, this will be William’s last episode for a while Top of Show Greeting: Arahau Links and Resources: List of English conceptual metaphors (in categories) Metaphors in Iraqi Arabic John Quijada on cognitive linguistics (video) Metaphors in Hmong Organ/body part metaphors in Thai/Japanese/English Metaphors in Basque Mandarin Chinese metaphors for the Internet Metaphors in Modern Greek Dog metaphors in English Culinary metaphors in Persian

William is leaving (temporarily), but don’t worry, we have one more episode before he goes.  Also, we talk with Eric about his lovely language Tayéin Top of Show Greeting: Frixàð Featured Conlang: Tayéin Feedback: Email from Sai: George, William, & Mike – Howdy. Alex & I were just listening to your podcast #62 while on a road trip, and you mentioned a couple things we’d like to respond to. 1. You mentioned that you don’t know any conlangs that have logophor; our gripping language does. (http://000024.org/conlang/gripping.html) Gripping is built specifically as a two-person tactile language, communicated entirely through finger presses made between two speakers who are holding hands (with opposite hands’ palms facing). Because Gripping intrinsically has two extrinsincally asymmetric speakers, there are likewise two well defined pronouns rather than the usual first/second person – one for the speaker whose thumb is underneath, and one for the speaker whose thumb is on top (which we call ‘sub’ and ‘dom’ respectively). These two pronouns are part of a range of five terms (which we call a ‘thumbscale’); they are produced by one speaker’s thumb tapping the other speaker’s thumb at any of five locations, from wrist to thumbtip. Thumbscales are extremely frequent in Gripping, and mostly made to take advantage of the natural feature of the mode. The other three pronouns in the scale are a neutral third person pronoun, one for the last bound referent of dom’s, and one for the last bound referent of sub’s; the last two function somewhat like a deixis system, for things that are closer to one speaker or another, either spatially or metaphorically (eg ownership). For subordinate clauses, we use logophor. Within the clause, ‘dom’ and ‘sub’ refer to the (first mentioned) speaker and their audience respectively (as if they were the ones speaking), and the dom’s 3rd / sub’s 3rd pronouns refer to the dom and sub of the matrix clause; the neutral 3rd pronoun is unchanged (becoming the only general purpose third person pronoun). Gripping is of course an engineered language, in which our objective was to optimize for the medium, rather than any concern for naturality. Neither of us know of any naturalistic artlangs that use logophor. 2. You suggested making a new conlang on the show, mentioning my conlang presentations as an example. Of course I think this is a great idea. As you probably know, I’m actually not an artlanger at all; my own conlanging interests are pretty strictly in engelanging, mainly in how the boundaries of language can be stretched or how languages could be made to better exploit an underused medium. The reason I do artlanging for my presentations is because I think it’s actually a much better and more approachable teaching exercise. You get to cover the whole gamut of linguistics, you have to consider (and therefore know) what the normal range is and what works well together aesthetically, etc. It’s also a lot easier to do quickly, since the options are usually relatively clear, and the considerations are more ones of aesthetics and consistency. With an engelang (at least for me), I find that my major difficulties are in just understanding what the possible space of solutions is, how to drastically reframe a familiar linguistic feature to better suit a new situation, etc. It’s of course a process I quite enjoy, but doing it quickly and out loud is rather hard. I’d be quite interested to see how actual artlangers, like yourselves, would take on the problem of making a new collaborative artlang live on air. I’ve always felt a little awkward doing it for my presentations, since for me it’s kinda like composing poetry in a language whose grammar I’ve read but which I don’t really have any practice at speaking – something I can do when needed, but doesn’t come naturally. I’d love to see native speakers at work, as it were. For that matter, if anyone feels like trying their own hand at giving such presentations at conferences, I’m happy to help, and all my materials are CC by–nc-sa, so feel free to copy my slides; just share them yourself and give me credit. 3. If you’re interested, we’re both curious as to what you have to say about UNLWS (see http://saizai.com/nlws & http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3&torch=04&ringlish=N&tlit=n&torchlish=y&reverse=n). Not sure how it’d do with an audio-only medium, though. I enjoy the show, and hope you keep up the good work. As for your length, from my own experience I’d suggest you actually try to keep the length a little bit shorter; your last few podcasts are pretty reasonable. Don’t cut good content, but if you find that you’re starting to ramble or repeat yourself, that’s a good place to cut. Tighter presentation tends to be more interesting and easier for people to listen to (since everyone has limited time); of course it’s a balance with requiring more time to edit, and a somewhat less chatty feel. Just as a comparison, I generally do interviews with a rough outline in hand of what I want to cover, and I do them for whatever length of time feels natural; typically this means about 1.5h of interview, about half of which can get cut without really leaving anything substantive out. Fiat lingua, Sai

Today we tackle a very interesting typology topic: head-marking and dependant-marking.  Turns out that whether your language leans one way or another affects (or depends on) a wide variety of grammatical features.  Be sure to check the links below for additional info. Top of Show Greeting: Toki Pona (translated by Vadim Fomin) Links and Resources: Great paper on the subject WALS: Locus of Marking in the Clause WALS: Locus of Marking: Whole Language Typology Feedback: Email from Caleb: Hey guys, Great work with the podcast, informative and funny. I got a few questions I wish to bother you with. I was wondering if perhaps you could tell me why in iTunes I am only able to view/download only the most recent episodes? Also Is there any chance of Mark Rosenfelder getting on the podcast? And, Finally, Do you happen to know of a good resource for learning the majority of the IPA sounds ( pronunciation that is)? I have looked for quite a while and have no been able to find much. Perhaps you could direct me to something like videos or audio possibly? Thank you for your time. (Some resources we came up with for you: Flash IPA chart, IPA for English)  

Today, we cover one of the weird and wonderful languages of Papua New Guinea.  It turns out to be surprisingly not so weird, but there’s still quite a few things in it to inspire conlangers.  Do check out the crazy verbs though — that bit is quite nuts. Top of Show Greeting: Pøplish Featured NATLANG: Kuot