Conlangery Podcast

We introduce you to a new host: Mike Lentine.  Then we cover the different ways you can get rid of adjectives or at least fuzz the distinctions between them and other word classes.  Also, we try to figure out what Lojban is all about. Top of Show Greeting: Esperanto (translation by William) Featured Conlang: Lojban Feedback: Email from Aidan: Just wanted to say that I finally tracked down these podcasts of yours, and I am thoroughly enjoying them! Really, I only heard about them fairly recently, as I happened to catch something on the conlang list where someone mentioned them. Lately, I’ve been crazy busy, and didn’t know about them. After a month or 3 or dithering, I finally remembered, and downloaded the lot. I’m only on ep. 7 (not bad for 1 work week), and I’m really glad you figured out your (George’s) volume issues. I’ll also say that it’s making my commute SO MUCH NICER! I swear, you’ve probably saved 83547 lives since I’m not all aggro. Just mellow and enjoying the ‘cast. So thank you! I’m excited to listen to all the rest over the next month or two, and I hope you guys keep up the great work for a good long time to come!

Bianca’s last show as a regular host goes into a rather ambitious topic: discourse particles.  Go listen to the show, because it’s too complicated a subject for me to summarize properly here.  We also feature a natlang going by two names. Top of Show Greeting: Amjati Links and Resources: Paper with a typology and some general info (Mostly uses German and English) Mando Malay Chinese discourse particles (skip to the qualitative analysis) Featured NATLANG: Nootka and Makah Feedback: Email: Hey guys, So first off let me start by saying we love your podcasts and posts. They provide a great resource to the conlanging community. Me and two other friends who met online through various conlanging forums or Tumblr have started a blog devoted to conlanging, but specifically trying to provide an easy to understand resource for newbie conlangers. We have about 30 or more posts already and one episode of our very own podcast that we are planning on running. We were wondering if you could give our blog/podcast either a mention, or a link on one of your next posts or in your next podcast so we can gain readers and get the word out there that we are a good resource for newbie and veterans alike. Our blog is currently being hosted through Tumblr, and there URL is http://deconstructedconstruction.tumblr.com We’re just a new blog trying to fill a niche in the conlanging community that we believe is left somewhat unfilled. We by no means want to compete with your podcasts, and in fact we have your blog/podcasts in our resources section as a great site to check out about conlanging. I’m sure there are plenty of your listeners that could also find our blog helpful. Thanks for any support you can give us! Jordan Creator/Editor, Deconstructing Conlanging

After a big announcement, we delve into the mysteries and wonders of creating dialects, reviewing natlang tendencies and talking about some techniques that can be used to mimic them, and then we talk about a quite interesting conlang as well. Top of Show Greeting: Palezi Urca Links and Resources: Wikipedia on Romance Languages Emesal (a Sumerian dialect/Kunstsprache) Uto-Aztecan sound correspondences Featured Conlang: Anawanda

George gets Bianca’s name wrong and no one notices.  We also have some digressions at the beginning and the end of the show, but somehow we end up talking a whole lot about noun incorporation, and the weird and wacky language known as Gevey. Top of Show Greeting: Vaida Mi Ha Links and Resources: Notes on Mithun (1984) Featured Conlang: Gevey Special Mentions: Carsten Becker’s interlinear gloss plugin for WordPress The Last Lingua Franca Feedback: Anthony Docimo (comment on #37) Could part of Novegradian be described as reconstructing? In the same way that a form of Hebrew was revived in the 20th Century, built upon the Torah and Talmud primarily; Novegradian was revived in teh conlang, built upon historical materials from/relating to medieval Novegradian. or is my mind seeing a paralel/connection that isn’t there?

Today we talk all about derivational morphology and what can be done with it.  We also spend some time talking about Proto-Deithas Top of Show Greeting: Sindarin (translation by Roman Rausch) Links and Resources: Gary Shannon’s notes on related words Lexical Semantics Agent nominalizations Nominalization in Thai Featured Conlang: Proto-Deithas

Aszev of the CBB joins us for a little talk about the many kinds of phonological processes: what they are, what you can do with them, why the order of processes in important.  We also review the awesomely well-developed Novegradian with its 500-page grammar and excellent dictionary. Top of Show Greeting: Talmit Links and Resources: Distinctive Features Types of Processes Featured Conlang: Novegradian Feedback: Email from Nathaniel Fischer: Dear Conlangery Podcast, I really enjoyed your episode on gender, and I thought I’d contribute my own interesting tidbit.In the Kiowa-Tanoan languages, there is a very unusual way of marking number that interacts with gender. The Kiowa-Tanoan languages typically have 4 genders and 3 numbers (singular, plural, and Dual). Every word “expected” number. If the number is “unexpected”, then the inverse number marker is applied. What is funny is that  what number is expected number varies from gender to gender. So in one gender, you might have the singular and the plural marked with the same affix, while in the next gender, you may have the plural and dual marked with the same affix. Look up inverse number marking for more details. -Nate

CORRECTION: A commenter below graciously corrected me on a point I (George) raised in the show.  When I talk about desiderative languages, please replace that word with dechticaetiative.  Look to the comments below for a relevant link.  I apologize for misidentifying the phenomenon I was talking about. We talk a lot about morphosyntactic alignment, outlining the basic types, talking a little about various complications, and even bringing up a linguist who thinks it’s not all that important, anyway.  Also, we feature a natlang for the second time: Ngarla, a language of Australia, with some morphosyntactic oddness (that’s typical for Australia, but still odd).  Also, stick around after the end music to hear George’s informal review of China Miéville’s Embassytown. Top of Show Greeting: Jameld Links and Resources: Wikipedia article Handout on ergativity The Blue Bird of Ergativity Featured NATLANG: Ngarla Feedback: Email from Bryn LaFollette: Hey guys,I came across your podcast a few of weeks ago on iTunes serendipitously and just wanted to let you know that I’ve been heartily enjoying it! I had been meaning to write in just to voice my appreciation, but then ep #33: Supersegmentals just happened to hit upon what happened to be the very subject matter of my Master’s Thesis; namely, derivation of phonemic tone inventories in natural languages, with field work on Mandarin. And while working with my collected data that I had specifically observed the tendency for low tone (i.e. tone 3) in Mandarin to be realized by many speakers, especially in continuous speech, as creaky voice! And, just as Bianca mentioned, the hell that wrought in trying to get usable frequency data from spectrograms of the recordings I had made with my native consultants! Anyhow, it gave me a good laugh.My main area of research used to be Phonology (though with a heavy dash of phonetics) and Syntax (very close to the very fuzzy border with morphology). I had gotten as far as completing a Linguistics Master’s degree from University of California, Santa Cruz when I took a “short break” from linguistics, graduate school and academics in general about ten years ago, but in the mean time sort of accidentally ended up a professional programmer. Your podcast has gotten me digging up my old attempts at constructed languages, as well as re-interested me in my old linguistics work, and, incidentally, LaTeX. From what I’ve seen since looking at the examples you’ve featured, my humble artlangs wouldn’t really qualify as much more than sketches, honestly. Plus, being designed for the use of non-linguists they were necessarily simplified and restrained from what I might have otherwise done. Although the content is unchanged from their last being worked on in ’98 (before grad school took up pretty much all my time), I think they’re laying about somewhere on the interwebz still in some form or other. Well over due for a revision, me thinks.Now that I’ve said ‘hi’, I may make some comments on older episodes as I get around to listening to them. So, here’s fair warning, I guess. As far as feedback, there were two main thoughts I’ve been having: 1. Aside from the foray into supersegmentals, it seems like phonology hasn’t figured very strongly in the podcast. The episode on sound systems and romanization was really mostly just romanization, and left me wondering if it might not be something worth covering. Especially, the wonderfully diverse contrasting features in the worlds languages. Likewise, concepts like sonority scale and what sorts of crazy phonemes some languages in the world deem to function as a syllable nucleus, not just syllabic /r/ or /l/, but like /t/, for example. The sound of a language as spoken by a fluent speaker is a major part of the appeal to me, and I feel like maybe more appreciation of the sound of less familiar languages might be a nice source of inspiration to others. For example, as I’ve heard you guys mention that Pacific Northwest languages are popular right. Although I don’t share the philosophy of the website, or the substance or message of the recordings, this is still a great series of recordings of speakers reading texts in Nootka (http://globalrecordings.net/en/program/C06150). There are many others of quite a variety of American Indian languages on the same site, as well. 2. Historical linguistics and language change are of strong interest to me, and I think the level of work in including elements of historical linguistics techniques in conlanging may not necessarily need to be as involved as it sounds like is often portrayed in the podcast. For example, I was thinking how in ep #27 on irregularity how one of the easiest ways to add irregularity is basically to get a suppletion pattern in a verb or noun paradigm by simply coming up with two separate lexical items, sussing out the full pattern for each, and then create the irregular one for the language by simply picking and choosing between the two. This is a nice quick way of getting, for example, a pattern like that of English verb ‘to go’ (go~gone~went). Another useful idea is to put some historical style structure in your lexicon by establishing specific strata (like Norman-French vs Anglo-Saxon vs Latin in English, or Yamato vs Sino-Japanese in Japanese). Having a subset of vocabulary that was borrowed at some point from another language, and so doesn’t “fit” quite the same with the rest is an easy and quick way to add some naturalistic detail. The thing is, Historical Linguistics, when you’re doing it formally, is for the most part working backwards toward some common ancestor by cross linguistic comparison, or internal reconstruction. Sure you can work forwards through time from a pre-defined proto-language to your daughter language. But, that’s just one method of using that toolset with others that can be applied on a much less overarching scale. This is getting too long, so I’ll just leave off there. Cheers, Bryn — Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam.

What do you do when you want to make a language without case marking?  Or with very little case marking?  That is what we attempt to explore in this episode.  If you would like to take up George’s “homework” challenge, make up a sketch of a language and send an example of some sort of narrative that demonstrates how you handle various semantic roles, with varying animacy, etc.  Here is an example story you can use (though you are fully free to make up one yourself). There was once a man who beat his donkey every day.  One day, a second man, who was a neighbor, came to the donkey-beater and asked, “Why do you beat your donkey?”  The donkey-beater said, “Beating is all the donkey knows, I must beat him until he learns how to behave.” The donkey-beater then went into his home and discovered his dinner wasn’t ready, so he beat his wife.  His neighbor heard the screams of the donkey-beater’s wife and came to the door.  “You should not beat your wife so much,” said the neighbor.   “I beat her until she learns to have dinner ready on time.” Some time later, the neighbor saw the donkey-beater beating his son in a field.  This time, he did not say anything, but seized the donkey beater and began to beat him with a heavy cudgel.  When the donkey-beater asked why his neighbor was beating him, his neighbor replied, “I will beat you until you learn not to beat others.” Again, you don’t have to use my story, it’s just an example. Anyway, on with the shownotes … Top of Show Greeting: Maxédri Links and Resources: Maori goodness Featured Conlang: Txtana

Alternate Title: Genders, Classes, and Agreement, oh my! We talk today all about gender.  Or noun class.  Or both.  Really, they are the same thing, at least we think so.  Anyway, after a vivid and lively discussion on what can be done with the wonderful world of arbitrarily classifying nouns we review Taruven Top of Show Greeting: Knæknæk Links and Resources: — Zompist on gender (More in the book.) — WALS pages Number of Genders Sex-Based Gender Gender-assignment — Interesting gender systems Yanyuwa (Australian) Anindilyakwa (Australian) Ganda (Bantu) Featured Conlang: Taruven (newer link here — the grammar we used is very old) Feedback: We won something! (Link may die.  Let me know if it does.)

We get right to it talking about suprasegmentals: mainly stress, phonation, tone, and nasalization.  After a long and fascinating (if incomplete) discussion, we finally get around to talking to DJP’s Kamakawi. Top of Show Greeting: Kinál Links and Resources: Phonation Types Mark Liberman has doubts about stress-timed vs syllable-timed Nambikwara (lots of suprasegmental distinctions) Featured Conlang: Kamakawi Feedback: Comment thread on #30 Some comments we mention specifically: CMunk: A short introduction to danish numbers. In danish “halv fem” (half five) is 4:30. Oh yeah, now Bianca found swedish  There’s also a special word for ‘one and a half’ in danish. It’s “halvanden” (half-second), and it has rarely used counterparts: “halvtredje” (half-third = 2.5) “halvfjerde” (half-fourth = 3.5). And this brings me to the vigesimal part of the numbersystem. The names of the tens 50-90 are derived from the number of scores. For example 60 is “tresindstyve” which breaks down to “three-times-twenty”, though this is a rather conservative way of saying it; it is normally* shortened to “tres”. Now, 50 is “halvtreds(indstyve)” (half-third-times-twenty = 2.5 * 20 = 50). 70 is “halvfjerds(indstyve)” (half-fourth-times-twenty = 3.5 * 20 = 70). 80 is “firs(indstyve)” (four-times-twenty = 4*20 = 80). 90 is “halvfems(indstyve)” (half-fifth-times-twenty = 4.5 * 20 = 90). *”normally” means always, except in ordinal numbers where you’d have to say “tresindstyvende”. And these are used a bit more than the english equivalents because we have flipped tens and ones (as in German). {A relevant illustration} Kraamlep: Hi guys, some random thoughts apropos this episode: Is it possible that Chinese’s writing system was a sufficiently strong influence to prevent numbers like 12 and 13 from being subjected to the forces of historical linguistics? I mean, would the fact that 12 was written [ten][two] be enough to stop the spoken form drifting away? Half five: that’s just us Brits lazily omitting “past”  As Bianca pointed out, Swedish would have it meaning “halfway to five”, and Norwegian, Danish, Dutch and German are the same. Similarly, Jameld has “fëfjel” (five-half), which is also used to mean “four and a half”. William mentions not needing to use a plural marker after a numeral in Hungarian. Finnish also does that; IIRC it does funky things with the partitive and the verb stays in the singular. Which is fun. Russian is glorious: it uses the genitive singular with 2, 3, 4 and numerals ending in those digits, and the genitive plural for 5–9. So you get one book, two/three/four of book, five/six of books… , 21 book, 22 of book, 25 of books and so on. Truly inspirational