Conlangery Podcast

William comes back on the show to tell us all about the category of Associated Motion. Links and Resources: Wikipedia – Andative and Venitivede la Fuente, J. A. A., & Jacques, G. (2017) Associated motion in Manchu in typological perspective. Language and Linguistics. 語言暨語言學, 19(4), 501–524. https://doi.org/10.1075/LALI.00018.ALOJacques, G., Lahaussois, A., & Zhang, S. (2018) Associated motion in Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan. In The 12th conference of the Association of Linguistic Typology: workship on” Associated Motion.Ross, D. (2017) A Cross-Linguistic Survey of Associated Motion and Directionals. Data Handout. Presented at the international workshop on Associated Motion at the 12th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT 12), Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.Ross, D. (2015) Locating Associated Motion: an underdescribed morphological category. Rice Linguistics Society’s 6th Biennial Conference.Jacques, G. (2021) A grammar of Japhug. Language Science Press.Belkadi, A. (2015) Associated motion with deictic directionals: A comparative overview. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 17, 49-76.Guillaume, A. and Koch, H. Introduction: Associated Motion as a grammatical category in linguistic typology. Guillaume, A. and Koch H. Associated motion, De Gruyter Mouton 978-3-11-069200-6. 10.1515/9783110692099-001. halshs-02917416v2Guillaume, A. (2009) Cavineña “associated motion” suffixes: their meanings and discourse function. In Transalpine Typology Meeting, Bern.Genetti, C., Hildebrandt, K., Sims, N. A., & Fawcett, A. Z. (2020). Direction and associated motion in Tibeto-Burman. Linguistic Typology, 1Lovestrand, J., & Ross, D. (2020). Serial verb constructions and motion semantics. In Proceedings from the ALT17 workshop on associated motion, Empirical Approaches to Language Typology. de Gruyter Mouton.

George takes some time with Kenan Kigunda to talk about his conlang Zevy and how writing gets standardized. Top of show greeting: Fysh A Links and resources: Kenan’s LCC talkZevy wordbookZevy grammar notes Transcript coming soon!

George interviews Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo and Lingthusiasm about her work on Aramteskan for the Shadowscent book series as well as her other work with authors. Top of Show Greeting: Swedish (Umeå dialect, translated by Ruben Drott) Links and Resources: Shadowscent: The Darkest BloomSuperlinguoLingthusiasm Transcript coming soon

George gives a little info about his current conlanging project, a set of naming languages for a story. Original Script (below the fold) Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I thought it was time for another personal conlanging update. I’ve been doing something interesting regarding historical development that I thought I might share with y’all. Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. I know that there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but if you like Conlangery, and you’re able to throw a buck at us, patreon.com/conlangery is where you can do that. Some listeners may be aware that I have been writing a story recently and wanted to create a diverse set of names for the characters in it. This story takes place in a fairly diverse academic environment. Because of that, I’m aiming not just to generate names of characters from a variety of languages, but I also want to generate names that people will cite in the story. To do that, I want to have a number of different languages with enough history to reach back in time a bit and cite some really old texts as well. Although I only need naming languages at this stage, I wanted to keep things open to expand these languages in the future. I also really want to establish language families that I can branch off of when I need to. This is really some of the underwater part of the iceberg here, as I’m doing a whole lot of work just to make these names, but I’m hoping that the relationships will be apparent in the story, and I’ll have my framework for future work laid out. I’ve talked about the family that I provisionally called “Ankong” before. Ankong has ended up with two closely related sister languages that are developed to where I can make words and names. I used it for my Lexember language, which for some reason I did entirely on TikTok. I probably will decide on actual names for the languages and the family sometime soon.  Now, I am working on a second family, which is under the working name “Ingar”. Ingar so far has had more branching, with a fork in the tree right at the start, and a later fork down one branch as I’ve developed it out. This language family was sort of aimed at producing the language for the more “European-esque” or “Anglo-like” culture, but it turned out very not that in phonology. I have done one vowel chain shift similar to the Great Vowel Shift, and I might actually do another one after I’ve worked out what to do with the monstrous diphthong inventory in that branch. Here is the way that I’m handling these families so far. Each language is developed in five stages, with each stage representing five hundred to a thousand years worth of historical change. This should get me language families with three to five thousand years of time depth, which is quite a lot, but I’d rather have a framework going back further than I need, than to go expanding families down the line and find out I need to reconstruct backwards. I used to wonder how many sound changes I should give for a particular period of time, but frankly, I’ve found the best answer is just whatever I feel like. Languages don’t change at a regular rate, and there are tons of factors that could affect the speed of change, and it’s not like sound changes are actually that easy to count, especially if you end up having to break some changes up into stages because of the limits of a sound change applier. Each stage is represented as a Phonix file. I discussed Phonix back in short number twenty six, so you can go there for details, but suffice it to say that it’s my preferred sound change applier because it can handle arbitrary features, syllable structure, and stress, though stress assignment I had to build some stuff to do. At the root of each language is a phonology I generated from gleb, which I build a contrastive hierarchy for, similar to the ones that Joey Windsor presented at two LCCs, just to set up the features. From that, I generate three thousand roots in Lexifer, William Annis’s word generator, then I start working on sound changes. When I work on the sound changes, I have some ideas about where I want to end up, but not anything super firm. I wanted the Ankong languages I was working on to be analytic and tonal, and I wanted some Ingar languages to have some sort of European-ish features. Beyond that, I go with what the features and the sounds suggest. As I go, things get restructured, phonemes come and go. Features come and go. When I feel that I have enough sound changes for one stage, or when I identify a place where I might want to make a fork in the tree, I run Phonix to apply changes in a new text file, then move on to the next stage. I haven’t bothered to figure out exactly when and where these stages happened, or precisely where each language is spoken. If and when I decide to do loanwords, I’ll have to figure out some sort of timeline. People might recall that I had started a map for my world, but I haven’t really been able to continue that work for a while. I honestly feel a little bit lost trying to figure out the geography, and I might instead just abstract it out to some kind of diagram to get my head around it. I have no idea if I’m going to use that map anymore. One thing that has occured to me is that once I do have the roots for the “Ingar” languages, there’s more work to be done there. For a full language, there’s always more to do, and I don’t think I could easily say one kind of language is easier or harder to create. For a naming language, though, I think that typology really affects how hard the job is. The two Ankong sisters I have are analytic, so once I have basic roots, there’s cultural work on naming conventions and maybe some basic assumptions about syntax, but otherwise, I don’t feel I need much. I’ve figured out how compounding works. Maybe I will do some reduplication and a couple affixes and that’s really it. But for this “Ingar” family, I want to have some synthetic and fusional morphology. That means that, even with just a naming language, I need to think more. I need to do more thinking about derivational strategies. I need to decide if nouns will have cases, and if so, what is the citation form. I probably need to do more grammaticalization work and general morphological changes. It just seems to be a whole other series of decisions I’ll need to make just to be able to have names. In any case, I think that I’m very close to finalizing the sound changes I need for the languages that main characters’ names will come from. After that, I will probably throw up a few more languages — offshoots of these families or one-off isolates — in order to fill things out and get everything in order. I’m shooting for two or three families and a handful of isolates for variety. Then I need to actually have a timeline and some history, some kind of work on the actual geography. Oh, and I need to make all the names! I’m going to see how this grows from here. At some point I need to sit down and start writing again.

George wants to talk to writers, filmmakers, and creatives about how conlangs can benefit worldbuilding, and how you can go about getting one made. Links: Language Creation Society Resources PageLCS Jobs Board Original Script In this episode, I want to talk to authors, directors, and other creatives who are creating fictional worlds and cultures where a conlang might be really helpful for their work. I am going to talk to you about how creating a conlang or hiring a conlanger to create a conlang can help you add depth to your world and characters. I’ll also talk a little bit about the other things that have been done to represent languages and where they do and do not work. Before we get there, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. If you go to patreon.com/conlangery, you can get early episodes and even get access to my scripts for these shorts as I am writing them. I know that not everyone can pitch in, but I really appreciate anyone who does. Alright, so let me start by stating the case for what purpose a conlang serves in a story. Many stories in speculative fiction involve fictional people, aliens, spirits, or other beings that are capable of language. Often these people or creatures have rich worldbuilding in their fictional culture and histories. Having them speak a real language that connects to the culture is very valuable to the work because it adds another layer to that worldbuilding. A well constructed conlang will enhance the culture and give you ways to introduce information about how these people think and what their history is, and the names and dialogue generated adds something that will make your people feel real. Conlanging is in part a research and worldbuilding exercise, and in part its own separate artform. In film, you likely have a team working on costumes who spend hours researching period appropriate attire or cultures similar to the ones on screen, though they also are ultimately creating something of their own design. The same would be true of conlangers. We will research languages to learn what fits into your story, and use what we know to develop a unique work of art that ties into the rest of the worldbuilding. Before I discuss more about the business of adding a conlang to your work, let’s talk briefly about what the alternatives to using a conlang are, because there are a few. First of all, there’s straight gibberish. Artistically, this is the worst option outside of a parody. Weiss and Benioff considered using just gibberish for Dothraki, but decided to hire a conlanger instead, because gibberish simply wasn’t cutting it. Doing this would be disrespectful to your readers or viewers, because if you do not have a system to your language and meaning assigned to the words, people will figure it out. If done poorly enough, even casual listening will tell you that these are English speaking actors making it up on the spot. Something similar could be said of sound effect languages, like Shriiwook in Star Wars. That’s essentially gibberish dressed up with sound design. Some voice modulation can be a fun gimmick, but without meaningful words behind it, it remains just a gimmick. Similarly, altered speech in your target audience’s language, like the manipulated English or Japanese in Animal Crossing, is just a gimmick. It may be useful for comedy or where you don’t really want a fully realized culture and language, but it’s definitely not a replacement for a conlang. An alternative that a lot of people bring up is simply using real world languages to represent languages in your world. Some people even suggest that this might “help” minority languages by “raising awareness”. Here is why I think that idea generally does not work out. When the Star Wars sequels were starting, there was a Tumblr post going around saying something along the lines of “Let Poe speak Spanish.” The idea in the post was that since Oscar Isaac is Hispanic (born in Guatemala), it would be somehow cool for him to use Spanish to represent an in-universe native language. I never responded to that post, but every time I saw it, it went through my head that the reason that it would never happen shows the reason that what Star Wars does do with real-world languages is problematic. You see, the audience will recognize Spanish. Particularly the core American audience will be very familiar with it. Many will be able to speak it and understand it. And so, the audience will be smacked right out of the movie wondering why this dude in a galaxy far, far away is speaking Spanish. Spanish is one of the first languages that will get subtitles and dubs, and what the heck are you going to do when the Spanish-speaking audience is not hearing a different language when English speakers are? When Star Wars does use a real-world language, they find one that is obscure to the audience specifically because they don’t want you to recognize it. They have a human-sized bug man speaking bastardized Quechua because the core audience probably never heard of it, or if they did in passing wouldn’t recognize it. They had a weird big-eared, fish-faced guy speak a mix of Haya and Kikuyu because the audience wouldn’t recognize it. This isn’t really helping “awareness” of the language, or giving the speakers of these languages anything but maybe a chance to laugh at mangled dialogue. Instead, it’s taking their language and passing it off as the language of weird aliens, which is not a great way to treat the humans who speak these languages. There are some people who will counter that we use English to represent one language all the time with no one complaining, and we do. But the function of English, or more broadly, of characters speaking the same language as the audience, is to help the audience understand the story and to indicate which characters we are meant to identify with more. The culture that speaks English is usually the culture that the protagonist comes from. Now, not every movie even does that. The Passion of the Christ is entirely in ancient languages that no one speaks natively, and it worked. People went out and paid money to see a movie that everyone would need subtitles to understand. I have not seen anyone try to make an all-conlang movie, aside from some Esperanto films, but that could be an interesting experiment for you. I’d say there is one exception where using a real world language works, and it is when the actual real world culture has a connection to your fictional creatures. The Australian series Cleverman features creatures called Hairies, which come from the mythology of several Aboriginal groups, that resemble humans except for their thicker body hair, harder fingernails, and greater strength. The Hairies in the series speak the Australian language Kumbainggar, which is also the language of the Aboriginal group featured in the series — the Gumbayngirr. It helps that Aboriginal people are making that series. Note that I’m talking about an actual connection to a real world ethnic group, not something “inspired” by a real culture but in a secondary world. I think there is an argument to be had as to whether “coded” cultures can be given the language of the culture they are coded as. I’m not going to wade too far into that, I will say that, to me, using real-world languages in a fantasy world gets odd as the cultures involved diverge from their inspirations. At some point the coincidence gets to be very noticeable. So what do you get from a conlang? If you construct a language or hire someone to construct it for you, the first and most important thing you are going to get is a language that fits into your world. The language will say something about the people who speak it, their culture and history and life. When my erstwhile and maybe occasionally future co-host William Annis created Usandu for the game Grey Goo, he created a numeral system that suited creatures with four hands with three fingers each. He also created a second source language for vocabulary in order to reflect a history of cultural mixing. The Elvish language family of J.R.R Tolkien are perhaps among the best known conlangs out there, and in the branches of that family you can trace the genealogies of the Elves themselves. A conlang that is built for your world will be informed by your world and serve as a reflection of it. A conlang will also enhance your storytelling by giving you tools to signal to the reader. Building consistent languages for fictional cultures can be another way of informing readers or viewers about your characters. For instance, your conlangs can be used to generate names for characters that will be consistent across a culture. Once readers become familiar with the patterns of that language, the name will be a signal you can use to indicate where a character comes from. If you make several closely related languages, that can be used to signal that certain characters come from related, but still different cultures. Generating names like this is valuable enough that we often talk about creating “naming languages” that won’t generate full sentences, but can be used for names or isolated words. Beyond just names, though, a conlang will be a source for those “untranslated” words for cultural concepts that matter to the story. A full conlang can be used to present some dialog to make readers feel like they are in another place. In a movie or TV show, where subtitles are an option, you might get away with a whole lot of conlang dialog, giving an indication that these people speak something different to each other, or that some characters shouldn’t be able to understand what’s being said. Finally, it’s really good for audience engagement. Any property that has a conlang and gains any level of popularity will gain a small but highly engaged fanbase that’s interested in the language itself. By themselves, they probably won’t generate a whole lot of sales, but their energy can feed other fans as they become experts in the language and start offering to translate things. There is an entire fan-run Klingon school and organization, called the Klingon Language Institute, which certifies Klingon speakers and has produced Klingon translations of the Bible and Hamlet, and they aren’t just making things up for themselves — they frequently talk to creator Marc Okrand for advice. Frankly, it can just be fun to see fans of a work engage with a language like this, even if it’s just a small slice of the audience. If you’re very brave, you might build some of the engagement into the work. Some of the dialogue in Land of the Lost was geared toward teaching kids watching the show a little bit of Victoria Fromkin’s Pakuni language. It can also end up as part of side products, such as Living Language Dothraki, written by David Peterson, who created Dothraki for the HBO series Game of Thrones. The real benefits really are artistic though. A real meaningful language gives depth to your cultures and your characters in a way that other worldbuilding decisions can’t. A language can signal history, values, and relationships with other cultures in any number of ways. It will also push you to deepen your worldbuilding. In order to make a good conlang, you really need to ask yourself a lot of questions about the world? Who is in charge? Who was in charge 500 years ago? How do your speakers view other cultures? What other cultures have your speakers come into contact with? You may find that the language feeds into the worldbuilding, demanding backstories for things you might not have thought needed that context. My last episode gives an example of that, as I invented a whole history for a type of dance in order to develop an etymology for it. Having the language also will allow you to develop cultural objects that simply wouldn’t have the same impact if they were created in English.  A full conlang can create music and poetry, or sections of in-world text. Margaret Randsdell-Green and Eric Barker are inventing entire musical traditions for Maragaret’s world, which would not be possible without her work creating languages for the cultures there. So here comes the big question: Once you’ve decided you need a conlang, how are you going to get one? There are two simple options here, you can create a language yourself, or you can hire someone. Creating a language for yourself can be very rewarding, just like any creative project, but do be warned that there’s a significant learning curve, and it takes a lot of time to get a decent language finished, especially as you’re learning how. There are a lot of resources out there that can help, including introductory books like The Art of Language Invention and The Language Construction Kit and communities of friendly conlangers on reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc. I’ll link to some of those in the show notes. If however, you would like to focus on other aspects of your writing and worldbuilding and outsource the conlanging portion to someone else, I would suggest going through the Language Creation Society’s Jobs Board. They will help you to write a job posting and set a fair price for the work that you want done. The way the market is now, I can promise you, you’ll get some applications very quickly. If you’re hiring a conlanger, I want to talk a little bit about fair pricing. Conlanging is an artform that takes a lot of time, and just as you would want to pay a cover artist or an illustrator or a map-maker for their time and skill, a conlanger you hire really should be fairly compensated. This is going to be beneficial on both ends. For the conlanger, it’s of course a better deal, but for you, you are more likely to get a satisfactory product. Just as in any other field, if you are paying a low salary, the people you attract are likely to have less experience and be less motivated. The LCS Jobs board lists some minimum prices, but I would caution you to treat those as rock bottom, and start significantly higher when offering a job. Rolling up a conlang can take months, and rolling up a good conlang requires time, skill, and motivation. If you have good resources, such as from a movie or TV budget, I might suggest double or triple those amounts to ensure a good product. That way, you will be sure to attract more experienced and skilled candidates and ensure higher quality. Authors I can understand having a bit less cash, but given the time it takes to develop a novel, you can probably allow a lot more time to get things done. Most conlangers do it as a hobby, and doing it professionally is usually just an occasional side gig, so having flexibility to finish at their own pace will be valuable. You can also carefully consider how much dialogue you’re going to want in your work — since you can get away with a translation convention a lot more easily in a book than in a film or TV format. Ultimatley, the thing I will leave you with is, if you are creating a new culture, whether that culture is for fictional humans or aliens or monsters or what have you — for any beings that can use language — whether it be oral or signed, too — I want you to consider using a conlang, especially for soemthing that’s in a secondary world or something that is foreign to our world. It will help your story, it will help your worldbuilding, and it will be a valuable tool in your storytelling. Thank you and happy conlanging!

George uses some research into the etymology of coronavirus to launch into a way to build a story around the etymology of a word. Links and Resources: Coronavirus on WikipediaAlmeida JD, Berry DM, Cunningham CH, Hamre D, Hofstad MS, Mallucci L, McIntosh K, Tyrrell DA (November 1968). “Virology: Coronaviruses”. Nature. 220 (5168): 650. Bibcode:1968Natur.220..650.. doi:10.1038/220650b0Tyrrell DA, Fielder M (2002). Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common Cold. Oxford University Press. p. 96. ISBN978-0-19-263285-2. Original Script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages, and the people who create them, I’m George Corley. I’m doing a short today where I’ll discuss etymology, where words come from.    Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. I know that there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but if you like Conlangery, and you’re able to throw a buck at us, patreon.com/conlangery is where you can do that. In the last episode of Conlangery, I repeated a commonly stated etymology of coronavirus, stating that it was named for its “crown-like spikes”. Recently, while working on some English teaching videos with my wife, I found out that that etymology may be a folk etymology, or at least an incomplete story. Now, I usually don’t make a whole short trying to debunk something I said on the show, but as I worked out the issue, I thought I could use it to talk a little bit about how to do etymology in a conlang. I got here when I was checking the Wikipedia article for coronavirus just to get some public-domain images for the video. I noticed their etymology didn’t match the one that I had heard on the news and repeated on the show. It instead said that coronaviruses resemble a “solar corona”. The same etymology is listed on Wiktionary. It was interesting to me that this etymology seems to be knowable enough to be on the dang Wikipedia page, but somehow news organizations are saying something else For this solar corona etymology, Wikipedia cites a 1968 note in Nature about coronaviruses citing the original team that coined the term: [T]here is also a characteristic “fringe” of projections 200 Å [ångströms] long, which are rounded or petal shaped … This appearance, recalling the solar corona, is shared by mouse hepatitis virus and several viruses recently recovered from man… I also found among the sources a 2002 book co-written by David Tyrrell, one of the authors cited in the Nature source. That described the naming of the virus this way: We looked more closely at the appearance of the new viruses and noticed that they had a kind of halo surrounding them. Recourse to a dictionary produced the Latin equivalent, corona, and so the name coronavirus was born. Those sources seem pretty authoritative, since they both trace to members of the team that coined the term. I’m not uncovering anything new, here, either. This origin was known, it’s just that a lot of news sources seem to have repeated a different story. The projections that are discussed here are the spike proteins, which on an electron micrograph do form a ring-like structure around the virus. I’m not sure which story is better or if perhaps a combination of different metaphors all collided in corona, but it does seem like “crown-like spikes” was at best a game of telephone with one of the possible inspirations. Now, this is a show about conlanging, and I’ve often said it’s not as important whether something is true as that it’s useful for your art. In this case, getting closer to the true story tells us something about how we should incorporate the story of a word into its etymology. The key thing to notice here is exactly what the scientists who named the virus were looking at and what they knew about it. On the news, we often see color 3D renderings of a coronavirus. Those are illustrations made to show the virus structure and colorized to highlight important parts of the virus. When the virus was named in the 1960s, those scientists were looking at electron micrographs, images taken with an electron microscope. There was no color, and the images are two-dimensional. I’d suggest looking at the micrograph on the Wikipedia article for “Coronavirus” for a reference. This goes back to something that we talked about on the disease naming episode: That you need to know where and when your speakers encountered a concept and what they understood about it. Let’s break down what we know about the story of coronavirus: This virus was encountered and named in a time when electron microscope technology was available.The scientists were inclined to name the virus based on visual features on the electron micrograph (as opposed to diseases it caused, etc.)The naming was a semi-formal process, with known namers. Depending on which of the stories you think is the best one, you can highlight a couple of more facts: If you take the “solar corona” explanation, that indicates a certain understanding of astronomy, even though it wasn’t their field.If you take the “halo” explanation, we’re seeing the convention of using Latin for scientific terminology and also an influence from religion. These seem to be plausible for 1960s British scientists, given my understanding, but what do you know about your conworld? What technology do they have available? What things do they know about disease, nature, or the world? Hearing this etymology and all of the history involved inspired me to come up with an exercise to work out etymologies for words like this, where you want to tell a story about it. Ultimately, what I came up with might be a classic or a cliche, asking who, what, when, where, why, and how. To be more specific, these are the questions I would ask: Who is coining the word?What does the word refer to?When did speakers become aware of this concept?Where does the concept come from?Why is this concept important to have a word for?How do these people usually coin words like this? Let’s go over each of those a little more: Who is coining the word? In most cases, this is just going to be some anonymous speakers somewhere. That’s the answer for most natlang words, after all, but it’s useful to ask a bit about them. Could they be people in a particular region? A particular social class? A particular profession? In the example of “coronavirus”, the word was coined by scientists, which puts in mind a particular mindset and set of interests in coining the word that our other questions can address. What does the word refer to? This may seem obvious, but actually think about this for a bit. When coming up with words, I often actually do a little research on the actual object I’m naming. Part of what I’m looking for when I do that is information that speakers of my language would use when naming it. What does it look like? What can it be used for? Is there any technical knowledge of it your speakers could use in naming it? Getting in the heads of your speakers is important, here. You need to take a good look at the thing you are naming, then you can figure out what they see in it. When did speakers become aware of this concept? Did the speakers know about this concept thousands of years ago, or is it something they just recently encountered? This is crucial information, as it doesn’t just go to the age of the word, but also what technology or scientific knowledge would have been available, the cultural outlook, and what languages they would have been in contact with. Keep in mind that an old concept might be given a new word. If so, you’ll have to also think about when that new word came about and what influenced that. Where does the concept come from? Is it something from within the culture or imported from another one? Is this something that’s around and commonly known about, or something that’s rare and foreign? This interacts with the who question in interesting ways, as where the concept comes from might inform who is likely to first coin the word. Also consider where in the more metaphorical sense: part of the answer to this for coronavirus is that it came from an electron micrograph, because that’s the only way that scientists were able to see it. Why is this concept important to have a word for?  This is a tricky thing, and could lead you into some odd directions, but I think it’s fruitful. This is absolutely one where you need to be in your speakers’ heads. You need to know why they are naming these things. I’m reminded of Zeke Fordsmender’s work on date farming terms for his language — every word that he made had an underlying reason for being, because they were things Zeke found to be important in his research on date farming. Using our example of coronavirus — why did we need a word for this concept? Coronaviruses are a class of viruses that are related to each other and cause diseases in humans and animals. There are a lot of reasons that they needed a name, but one that is clearly at play is that modern biology is just always seeking to classify, and when we see some viruses with similar features, we are of course going to look for a relationship. This feeds into a practical benefit that we know where to look if we find a new virus with the same features, as we should all understand now. How do these people usually coin words like this? If this is something that’s ancient and likely to be an old root, it’s probably not something to worry about, but otherwise: Are your conpeople into borrowing? Do they have extensive compounding strategies? Do they prefer derivational affixes? What kind of metaphors would they use? This has to be informed by all of your other questions. It’s not just about coining words in general, but this particular word.Is this particular word going to be prestigious or vulgar? Is it a technical term? An artistic one? Or is it just an ordinary word coined on the street? Would your speakers borrow a word for a foreign concept, or insist on making their own native derivation? To work through this, I thought that I would set about doing the etymology work for a word in a sketch I have recently worked up. I have created the basics of a language family for a story I’m writing. Right now I just have a couple of naming languages, under the working family name “Ankong” (which is absolutely going to have to change). In the story — which may end up as a novel or a novella — I feature a cultural art that I have dubbed firedancing, where performers use a combination of magic and athletic skill to dance around in flames being manipulated with the wind. It’s common enough to be seen in street performances, though it may have had more prestige in the past. The magic used is not available to absolutely everyone, but is common enough that it’s just seen as a normal part of the world. Let’s go through the questions and see how they can help us. Who is coining the word? This isn’t a word where there’s going to be one definitive coiner. I don’t know who invented firedancing, and I don’t think I will be answering that question. The word probably came from early firedancers themselves, so it would probably relate to how they promoted their performances to the public. What does the word refer to? As I described above, firedancing combines magic with an athletic dance to create a complete performance. To be more specific, the magic in this world allows people to manipulate heat and the motion of fluids. Traditional firedancing uses a bit of heat manipulation to start the fire in a dramatic fashion, and then manipulates the air around the fire in order to fan the flames or blow them into a variety of shapes. Both the fire and the dancing performers combine to create an idea of danger and excitement. When did speakers become aware of this concept? Firedancing is fairly old. This is important, as magic is systematically studied in this world, but the current theory behind it is relatively recent and wasn’t created in “Ankong”. This, combined with being coined by performers promoting their work to a general audience means the name probably won’t reference the schools of magic I’m calling “energetics” and “fluidics”. If any magical theory were to be invoked, it would be an older one. It was also known in a time when magic was less available than it is at the time of the story. Where does the concept come from? Although other cultures have similar practices, firedancing is old enough that Ankong people assume that they invented it. At this point, I don’t have any ideas of it coming from another culture. If it did, it’s sufficiently integrated into the culture that any foreign origin is forgotten. This is effectively a native art form. Why is this concept important to have a word for? Firedancing is popular entertainment. As I stated previously, it may have been more prestigious in the past, but in any case, the name should be something clear enough for people to know what they’re going to see and also should be enticing. This name was made for marketing. How do these people usually coin words like this? Ankong takes a lot of inspiration from Chinese (for some meta-story reasons), so compounding is the go-to strategy for word creation, and native terms are generally preferred, especially for something I’m assuming is a local art form. So after answering our questions, we have some clarity on how we should proceed. We need a word that performers would use to describe dancing with flames with magical aid. It’s expected to be recognizable and clear enough to the public that it will put butts in seats, so to speak, but it also could be a bit poetic to gain some prestige. It should be a native compound word, and it can be relatively old. Thinking about this, I see a number of options. My original English name fire dancing still works, but I want to adjust it. I considered something like fire jumping or fire leaping could work, if I imagine the dance to involve a lot of leaps (as it probably would) or just to borrow the jump – dance polysemy of Chinese. Poetic translations kind of depend on the nature of the dance and how it is performed and perceived. What role does the fire take? Is it a dance partner, an actor in a story, an obstacle, a backdrop? Here is where my conlanging is feeding back into my worldbuilding. I need a little bit of backstory to set up how this kind of performance came about, so here it goes: Animal taming used to be a popular form of entertainment for the elites of Ankong, sometimes making it into public performances for city residents. The exotic animals used for this were expensive and were typically owned by the imperial family or some higher ranking nobles and officials, so this was limited. Fire dancing evolved alongside this, and often imitated the moves of animal tamers, giving an impression that their fire was a wild animal to control. A major historical fact about the world is that magic was at one time restricted much more to rich scholars who had time to study and hone their skills. Relatively recently, alongside the invention of printing, a method was developed of codifying spells into units that are easier to learn. This was invented outside of Ankong, but quickly spread there as a useful technology. It still takes practice and study to learn a spell, and spell books are somewhat expensive, but spells are much more common throughout society today than in the past. The democratization of spells meant that firedancing became a cheaper alternative to beast taming performances that could more easily be taken out to the countryside. This, of course, also contributed to a reduction in prestige, even as animal taming became less popular itself. So, with that story, the word I came up with is tʰũ˥p pʰwuu. Tʰũ˥p means “train or tame an animal”, and pʰwuu means “flame” or “fire”. So, it’s “fire taming”. Something to note here is that I actually left plenty of ambiguity in my answers to my questions. I didn’t name a single inventor. I don’t really know the ultimate origins of firedancing, or perhaps I should say fire taming. That’s okay. You only need as much detail as you feel is necessary to make the history real. Perhaps there are several individuals the name is attributed to, or maybe nobody cares. Either way, I have a word with a story behind it, rather than just a simple origin. I don’t know if this backstory will ever be a part of my story. It’s a bit incidental to it, given the role fire dancing plays in the narrative. Asking the questions did help me to focus and get the etymology and the story behind it right. I don’t believe this method is the end-all be-all, and I don’t expect people to use it with every word, but consider it something to try when you’re stuck on a word or as a technique to practice to get better at interesting etymologies. I’d love to hear from listeners about techniques they have for producing interesting etymologies as well. For now, I hope that this has been helpful for someone out there looking to do some etymology. Thank you for listening, and happy conlanging.

George and Joey Windsor use the various names of COVID-19 as a jumping off point to talk about naming diseases. Note that this episode was recorded in May, and quite a lot has changed in the intervening time. Top of Show Greeting: Chátsu Special mentions (from top of show note): A list of BLM charities, When We Stay In, Corley English (YouTube, Bilibili, website) LInks and Resources: World Health Organization Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases/r/linguistics discussion on Asian language terms for COVID-19Wikipedia on Viruses

George shares some ambitious plans for a new world with lots of naming languages. Map of the migrations in this conworld. Darker color is the urheimat, ligher is my first stage migration. The story is planned to take place near the triangular sea in the southeast quadrant. Natural color map of my conworld as it stands now, to give a clearer idea of the environments involved. Links: Ankong FamilyIngar FamilyX FamilyLexiferPhonixSongs of the Eons Script: Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I’m doing a short this month, as being at home for me actually means I have less time, mainly due to small children. In what time I have, I’ve been able to do a little bit of conlanging, and I wanted to share a little bit about my plans there. Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. I know that there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but if you like Conlangery, and you’re able to throw a buck at us, patreon.com/conlangery is where you can do that. Recently, I have been working on writing what now looks to be a novella. It’s set at a fantastical university with the equivalent of graduate students preparing for their final test by inventing new spells. One thing I want to do with this world is to create a number of naming languages. The primary characters come from two different cultures, and one of them has ancestry from another one. Currently all of the characters have placeholder names, some of which are fantasy names made up on the spot, like Hregan, Chan, and Siira, which may or may not survive, and some of which are just variables like Masters A, B, C, D, and E. Those will not survive. My aim is to create enough naming languages with enough history that I can expand them into full languages later without losing continuity. As such, I’m doing a lot more historical work than you would necessarily need with a naming language. I want these languages to have evolved and branched off into families to generate a ton of different names I can work with, and I want an idea of what cultures were in contact when, so that I can later figure out loan words and influences. Right now I have a number of proto-languages started. I started off generating a bunch of phonologies in gleb. Then, I selected a few that I liked and came up with a few initial sound changes just to give them a little bit of allophony. From there, my plan is to evolve each language in stages, going around 1,000 years at a time until I have 3-5 millenia covered. It’s a bit ambitious, but I want the option to have large, deep language families where I want them. As far as tools I’m using here, in addition to gleb, I’m also using William’s lexifer to generate words and JS Bangs’ Phonix to apply sound changes. I did a short about Phonix some time ago, and I believe lexifer has been mentioned on the show. They’re both command-line tools that work from a text-based definition file. I also inform my sound changes with Contrastive Hierarchies, like those that Joey Windsor discusses in his LCC talks. I do things a bit differently from him in that I use a different feature set, based on work by Avery and Idsardi, which combines with the Contrastive Hierarchy to leave me with really seriously underspecified segments. I may do a future episode on these features. They’re interesting to use, but not necessarily for everyone, and there are some tricky bits and some things they don’t do perfectly. For one thing, you need to be okay with the fact that one segment ends up with no features at all. I’m going to link to the Google Docs where I’m working on these languages so people can look at what I’ve done so far. The first one, labeled the “Ankong” family has a three-way laryngeal distinction (plain, voiced, and aspirated). I plan on having tonogenesis develop in the branch of this family that I will be using, and I can already see the avenues for that. I like the prospect of the three-way distinction, as I can easily lose voicing to tonogenesis, and I also have an easy way to get final glottal stops. Although I don’t generally like cultural coding, because of some personal aspects of the story, this culture will probably be inspired somewhat by Chinese culture. We’ll see how it goes, as I do need to think in terms of where they will be on the map and what that environment will do to the culture. The second family, the “Ingar” family, is a really interesting situation. I’ve got a big, unwieldy vowel system, with nasalization and too many central vowels. I plan on doing a lot of work with the vowels, partly to tame those central vowels (I find it difficult to distinguish /ɜ/ and /ɘ/, anyway, and would prefer just a schwa). Then I’ll see if I can artfully get rid of nasal vowels. You can see the first step in my central vowel taming in the initial sound changes, where I’m assimilating them to front and back. This culture will be somewhat more European inspired, again for personal reasons, with the same caveats. I have a third family named “X” for now. I’m not sure what to do with it at the moment. It’s an interesting system, with an oddly minimal, very symmetrical consonant system, paired with a seven vowel triangle. I definitely want to play around with it, just to see where I can take it. In any case, I will be having many more families in this world. Right now, I am working on a map of this world in order to get a better picture of where languages are and how they end up interacting over time. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with maps, and I’ve started to realize that they can be very important to worldbuilding. I previously abandoned one novel that I had started writing without a map, and I think part of me abandoning that world comes from not having a clear sense of where things are. My current story takes place entirely in one location — a university located in one city — so I can at least write the narrative without a map, but I realize it would really help to know where my characters come from and where they are heading after the story, and it will be especially helpful as I develop my languages to know which languages interact at which stages. This led me to look for ways to generate maps that would do some of the work on climates and realistic continents and whatnot for me, and I landed on a game in development called Songs of the Eons. It spits out very richly detailed maps that use all sorts of models to give you plate tectonics and climates and everything. It’s going to be a strategy game with richly modeled politics as well, but that’s not really what I am interested in. It will take some effort to transform this map into something that can be used in a book, since it’s built on a hex grid on a globe (with a couple pentagons somewhere), but I find the world generation really useful. So I have generated some worlds with Songs of the Eons and picked one, and now I am going to work on the language expansions. At present, I have picked out the urheimats for ten different language families seeded around the world. I’m going to work out the stages of their migrations over time in order to get a handle on where family splits are and what languages will come into contact. I’m probably going to be seeking feedback about my migrations and such, as I’m getting a bit out of my depth there. It’s interesting the amount of random generation I’m doing right now. I feel that it’s a useful way to get my juices flowing, as I have a lot of difficulty visualizing a map and putting it down from scratch. So that’s where I’m at with the project. It’s quite ambitious, I will say, but I do hope to get some feedback from friends and the community on this. I am still continuing to write the novella, now on the second draft, but there will always be some details that have to be worked out later as I work out where things are and what happened when. Are your conlangs set in a fictional world? How did you develop that world? Did you work it out by hand, or do some procedural generation? I’d love to hear if others have had similar experiences. Happy conlanging!

George brings on David J Peterson and Jesse Sams to talk about their new livestreaming adventure, LangTime Studio. Top of Show Greeting: Nekāchti Transcript Conlangery146.pdfDownload Conlangery146.txtDownload {00:00:00} {Greeting} {Music} George: Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. In plague-ridden California we’ve got David J. Peterson. David: {Clears throat several times} We have who? George: What? David: I mean, you weren’t even going to say the “illustrious,” the “respectable,” uh, the “fragrant”? George: It’s probably not actually a good joke to be using because that’s everywhere. Oh, down in Texas, someone who is going to start doing classes online if it doesn’t crash on her is Jessie Sams. Jessie: Hello. George: Sorry. We had some discussion of things that are happening in terms of mitigation of a disease beforehand. Thankfully, that’s not the thing that we’re gonna be talking about. Jessie: Yes, no. Please no diseases. David: No, sir. We’re just talking about tanking Heroics. That’s it. Jessie: That means nothing to me. George: It means something to me but it’s not actually what we’re talking about. David, please, this is my show. David: By all means. George: We are here to talk about ya’ll’s show. The two of you have started a streaming conlanging show called “LangTime Studio.” That is gonna be our topic for today. Before we get to that, first of all, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons over at Patreon. You just go to patreon.com/conlangery and pledge your monthly amount. I love that we are getting enough that I can do a few things. One of the things that I’ve been able to do because of the Patreon is that I have transcripts of every episode now. If you want the back episodes transcribed faster, I need more pledges. That’s just a thing. I could also get some better equipment and do more shows – all kinds of things. Patreon.com/conlangery if you wanna support the show. Now, moving on. We’re here to talk about ya’ll’s show. Who wants to give me the rundown of what’s the basic concept for LangTime Studio for our listeners? Jessie: Go for it, David. David: Okay. Way back when – well, last year I started hiring other conlangers to work with me on various shows. Jessie happened to be the very first one that I hired. I hired her to work on a show called “Motherland: Fort Salem,” a show which is actually debuting on the Freeform network in four days on March 18th. I don’t know when this is gonna come out. It might be after the premier. It might be before. If it’s before, go watch it since I know you’re not doing anything else. Nobody’s doing anything else right now. Jessie: If it’s after, it’ll be on Hulu. Just saying. David: Ooo! Really? Is that serious? Jessie: That’s what all the advertisements say, “Freeform” and then “Hulu” on the other side. I’m just saying. I’m counting on that. David: That means I can watch it! Jessie: Yes. George: You can watch the show that you worked on, huh? David: I don’t have a cable subscription. I’ve got a digital antenna, but it doesn’t go that high. Jessie: It doesn’t go as far. David: I guess I can go to my parent’s house. That’s the only place that we’re visiting while we’re self-quarantining because, I mean, somebody needs to watch our child and it’s not gonna be us. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right. Okay. Anyway, Jessie was the first person I worked with. I also worked with Christian Tallman {sp} on “Shadow and Bone” and Carl Buck on a project that is yet to be revealed. {00:06:10} That’s gonna be a good one too. Anyway, going way back, I have a YouTube channel. I know I often forget about it, but I do. One of the things that I started doing was I started recording myself doing work on languages, recording the various things I do, which was a lot of fun, but I can’t stream it live because it’s all covered by an NDA. As an experiment, I did a joint one of these with Jessie when we were working on “Motherland.” I did one, and the recording failed. It recorded video but it didn’t record any audio. It was very embarrassing. Jessie: Which must be fun to re-watch. David: Oh, gosh. Well, no. That video’s gone. I mean, is it? Jessie: I’m sure it is. David: I think I just deleted it. That one – gosh – that one was a load of fun. It really is too bad that the audio didn’t record on that one. I figured out the problem, so we did it again and it recorded audio in the second one. That was a lot of fun. That one will go up on my YouTube channel eventually when that episode of “Motherland” airs. Anyway, I had such a great time both working with Jessie to create a language and recording stuff with Jessie that I thought it would be a really cool thing if we just did it more. All we needed to do was come up with a way to create a language that wasn’t covered by an NDA. I have a personal project that I’m working on where I want to create a bunch of languages. I asked Jessie if she wanted to help me out with it. That was how LangTime Studio was born. Jessie: Indeed. I will tell you, when he asked me, I was like, “Heck yeah! Let’s do this!” It was very exciting. David: Yay! Which was gratifying because she could’ve said no, and my little heart would’ve been broken into a million pieces. Jessie: I can’t do that to the rabbits. David: Oh, that’s right. The language we’re creating, by the way, is a language for rabbits, kind of anthropomorphized rabbits – conveniently anthropomorphized rabbits. I’m not dealing with how would rabbit physiology work with phonemes and stuff like that. That’s not for this project. George: That was right up front too on the – I have tuned into all of your streams. The last one I only tuned into part of it because – you know. David: Well, sure. It’s two hours. George: Yeah. Right up front I remembered you were like, “We’re just assuming that they magically have the same vocal apparatus as humans just because I don’t want to deal with it.” That’s always a perfectly valid choice if you’re making fantasy languages for fantasy creatures you just get to determine that. Having tried to account for non-human physiology before, it's just painful and you don’t really wanna do it if you don’t have to. Jessie: I feel like there’s more story there, George. George: Well, I mean, it’s fun. It’s fun but, at the same time, it’s like, “How far do you wanna go?” Some of my first few languages were for aliens. I was trying to think about it and I think most of the time I was thinking just in terms of what sounds they wouldn’t have. I had, of course, a species that had beaks instead of mouths, so they wouldn’t have any labials. I had a species where the nasal apparatus was actually creating echolocation clicks, so I assumed that that would be dedicated to that and they wouldn’t have nasal sounds available. The creatures that have the beaks are the Xala. I also did give them something that humans can’t pronounce in that they have a syrinx, which allows them to produce two pitches at once. I had a little bit of a tonal system. Those are old language that, I dunno, if I were to return to them today, I would probably scrap them and totally rewrite them because those are some of my first attempts. Anyway, back to what ya’ll are doing. You have this rabbit language, and you’ve done like three sessions, and I think you’re still sorting through sound changes, right? {00:11:12} Jessie: Yes. But I feel like at the end of the third episode, we are now in a place where we’ll potentially move off sound changes within the next episode or three. Is that accurate? David: Yeah. Honestly though, if you think about it, creating a whole language – I mean, we’ve put six hours into this language and we’re gonna be done with the phonology after six hours? I mean, it’s pretty quick. Jessie: That is insane. It does help to have the crowdsourced commenting because you make decisions faster when other people are voting. David: I suppose there is a lot of time in conlanging that is lost to pondering, wondering, tinkering, and then also procrastinating – “procrastilanging,” if you were. In other words, you know that a decision is coming, you know it’s gonna be important to make that decision, and you don’t wanna actually sit down and have to do it. Plus, there might be some work involved or some research and so you just kinda put it off. I know that there’s a lot of conlanging time lost there. You can’t really do that on air because it leads to dead air. Jessie: That’d be real exciting to watch as we both strike a thinker pose – “Hmm.” David: There was something that really got me stuck this last session. It was trying to make the Pete Bleackley sound changes work. I really wanted them to work. Jessie: But wait, now, we did reserve – or “preserve” I think I should say – part of it because we did change some of the [ə]s and [æ]s {00:12:00}. We got part of it. It was just all of it was difficult. George: So, the Pete Bleackley sound changes? What are you meaning, exactly, there? David: Right. I was having trouble with deciding how to resolve hiatus in this language. We put it to a vote amongst our patrons on Patreon, but even with those options that were available, I didn’t know what to do with the sequences of schwa followed by [a] and vice versa. I left it kind of blank and I said, “We’ll figure out what to do with that later.” Then, on Twitter, Pete Bleackley had a look at it and he gave me a really brilliant sound change where, whether it was schwa or /a/ – whatever it was – when they come next to each other, it turns into a long /a/. Then, a later sound change turns short /a/ into ash and long /a/ into regular /a/. I was so brilliant and took care of things so well that I didn’t consider the further ramifications beforehand. Instead, I tried to implement it and then I saw that, with all the other things that were going on, it just wasn’t going to work or wasn’t gonna work out exactly the way I want it to or changing that would – if you wanted to keep the spirit of it – would force you to change some other things. Ultimately, we had to abandon it. I still feel that rather acutely. Jessie: I feel like, though, it could be implemented into future languages. We do have more languages on the way, eventually. David: This is true. Tons. George: Here’s a question. How much of this language are you going to create before you move onto others? Are you going to be getting into building the lexicon up and everything before you move onto other ones or what is the situation there? David: I mean, I don’t think we know. We didn’t really plan this. Jessie: It’s unscripted, so we’re not sure. David: Here’s the thing. I’ve had this happen a couple of times in my life where it was like I’d come up with an idea for something, and I think it’s gonna be really cool, and I ask for advice, and people say, “Oh, you should do this, this, this, and this. Once you do all those things, you should be up and running in 7 to 8 months.” And I’m like, “Ugh.” And I was like, “Should I go through all this rigamarole and launch something that’s really good eight months from now, risking the fact that I might just lose steam and drop it?” which happens a lot. {00:15:01} “Or do I just go now with what I know already works and just see if it works?” I went with Option B there. Luckily, Jessie was onboard. I mean, if Jessie were a different type of person, she might’ve said something like, “Oh, yeah. That sounds great. Let’s create a roadmap and let’s create an outline for how we’re going to approach this and come up with a week-by-week schedule. Then, in a year and a half, we’ll be ready to go.” But luckily for me – Jessie: If you hear my snort laughing over here, it’s because I think from first mention to first episode there was a month. I was just like, “Let’s do this!” I wasn’t even thinking technology or any of the additional concerns that go into doing livestreaming. David was actually the planner in this partnership because he’s like, “We need to practice and actually make sure we can record each other.” Thank goodness we did because our test livestream we found out there was no audio for 10 minutes. David: That was embarrassing. Jessie: It was great. George: I mean, that’s the beauty of the new era of online content creation because you can just jump on and do that. When I started Conlangery, which is now years ago – I’ve been doing this for a very long time. David: Very. In fact, hold onto your thought. It amazes me how many of these episodes you’ve done. I mean, 100 would be a ridiculous amount. Aren’t you over 200 now? Approaching 200? Where are you at? George: I believe that this one is gonna be 146. I’d have to take a look here. Jessie: That’s amazing. George: Let me look at my website. Jessie: It’s one a month, right? So, we’re talking – is it one a month? George: Well, at the very beginning it was weekly. Then, it moved to every two weeks. And then now it’s – but, yeah. This one – the last one was 145, so this one is gonna be 146. David: Unbelievable. George: This is also, yeah, one more time, we are transcribing those back episodes, and there are a lot of them. Right now you’re getting one back episode a month with a current episode. So, patreon.com/conlangery. I could pay my transcriptionist more to do more stuff. Anyway, this is not about me. I was just saying that, when I started Conlangery, I went on the ZBB back when I was on the ZBB and people were there. I don’t know. Is that still going? I’m not sure. I went onto the ZBB and I’m like, “I wanna start a conlang podcast. Who’s gonna be a host?” I got two people who showed up for the first episode. One of them was not on any more episodes. We were off to the races. Audio quality was horrible for the first seven episodes, but we were off to the races. Now, that was in 2011, I think. Now, nine years later, we’re still going. Hopefully, you guys will get to that long. I actually am very encouraged to see not just LangTime Studio but there’s a bunch of conlanger channels popping up on YouTube now because that is the thing that I wanted to happen when I started Conlangery. It didn’t really happen early on. There was one podcast that came after us early on and then just stopped abruptly after one episode, I think. But now, finally, we’ve got LangTime Studio. We’ve got some – there’s a world building channel, Artifexian, that does some conlanging stuff. Then, there’s a few, like Conlang Critic and Biblaridion, I haven’t really looked at these too much. I’ve watched one episode of one of them because I have no time. But it’s encouraging that I see people trying this stuff. Hopefully, LangTime Studio will inspire more people to do stuff. {00:21:08} David: I hope so. Jessie: Definitely. David: By the way, since we’re talking about Conlangery, there was this thing where when podcasts came out, they were huge, and then they all but died. Then, they came back. I believe that Conlangery came out at the very end of the first boom. You survived the general podcast crash. I don’t know if you remember this, but nobody was listening to podcasts for a while after a time where everybody was listening to podcasts. Then, they came roaring back. So, that might’ve had something to do with it. But, my goodness, you just plowed right through that. George: My secret, David, is I never expected to earn any money. I don’t really care about getting sponsors or anything. Now, I have a Patreon and I would like to get more money, but it was never a goal. I was always going to do this anyway. I made it – and I went to monthly; I’ve gone on hiatus a couple times – but I’ve always made an effort to just do it just for the joy of it. That’s how I survived. Jessie: That’s beautiful. David: I think that was the idea that at least I had with this whole LangTime Studio was I didn’t really care necessarily about people watching because I needed more followers or anything or for us to make money, I just thought it would be really cool to work with Jessie again, and I was desperately looking for some kind of excuse to do so. That was this. Jessie: That is so sweet. David: I mean, it’s true though. George: To be clear though, you guys do also have a Patreon and patrons can vote on certain things, right? Jessie: Yes. David: Yeah. It’s there. What is it? What’s the Patreon? Jessie: Patreon/langtimestudio, right? David: Oh, right. Of course. Yeah. Jessie: Pareon.com. David: We have a small but loyal following, and they’ve been voting, so that’s been good. We take those votes seriously. Their stuff makes it into the language whether I like it or not. Jessie: And then you kill it. George: Let’s talk a little bit about that. This is collaborative between the two of you, but you also have other people – I think what I’ve seen you do is you’ll do some things are patron votes and some things are audience votes, which is sort of a common thing. Then, where was I going through? So, you’re collaborating between the two of you and then you’re collaborating with the audience, and the audience is throwing out suggestions. I think I threw out a few things once in a while. How is that like? Because I know that right now you have some things that you would like to keep in the language, but you’re not totally sure if one of these votes is gonna kill – there was a word. I don’t know. Is this what you’re hoping to be the name, where it’s the word [əŋalə]? Jessie: That was actually – and I don’t think David cared about the word because he’s trying to kill all the central vowels including schwa. It was in our first session and it was one of our very first sound change rules. It was just thrown out there as one of the – “Hey, look! This could be a word.” Some of the commenters had latched onto it and said, “Hey, maybe this could be the name of the language.” I don’t know why, it just has a great ring, and I was like, “This is great! [əŋalə] {00:24:08}.” I was really desperately holding onto that word, and David killed it in the last episode. The central vowels are gone. David: Well, at the same time though, you really liked ash, remember? Jessie: I do. Yes. I do have a weird affinity for the ash vowel sound. David: I mean, you had to be thinking of “anala” in the back of your head at all times. I remembered it. I was like, “Oh, I know what’s gonna happen to this.” Jessie: And I believe now it is [ˈeŋalə] {00:24:46} – [eˈŋælə]. David: Yeah. I did that because otherwise it was going to wind up being [ɪŋælə] {00:24:55}, which that’s terrible. Even I admit that’s terrible. {00:26:11} Jessie: It just didn’t work for me. David: I found a way to at least get [eŋælə] {00:25:07} in there. It’s all right. Jessie: So, it’ll be preserved. We haven’t really set whether that’s going to actually mean anything in the language or even be the name of the language. It was just this great sound. I don’t know if it’s because it’s so similar to – I think the only way that this language could say my sister’s name that I was like, “This is wonderful,” because her full name is “Angela.” I don’t know if that’s what made it so important to me. Something about it, I was like, “We have to keep this word.” David: I thought maybe you were thinking it was [ɛŋæləgɪs] {00:25:47} to another word. Jessie: [ɛŋæləgɪs]? {Laughs} George: Yeah. You can’t do “Angela,” can you? You’d have to have – Jessie: We don’t have that affricate. George: [ant͡selə] {00:26:06} or something like that. David: Well, here’s the thing. One of the last things that we need to do once we resolve our vote, which honestly I really felt sad for one of our commenters who lost the last vote because they really liked voiceless sounds in between vowels and we just weren’t gonna have it. So, I just relied on the old geminate trick to get them back. Now, we’re figuring out how that’s gonna work. I think it’s gonna more forward. At least one version of it is, anyway. Once we do that, one of the last things we have to do is – I mean, Jessie, you said you wanted a palatal series. We haven’t addressed that yet. That’s gonna have to happen next episode. We’re gonna need to discuss if we’re gonna do that and then how we’re gonna do that. We’ve got a whole series of vowels that have palatal glides before them, so we’ve got options. Jessie: I just feel like the rabbits are very palatal. I don’t know why. David: We’ll see. We’ll throw some test words out there, and if they feel rabbit-y or not – Jessie: This is the beauty of creating languages, right, where it’s like things just feel right and you have no idea why. We keep saying, “Oh, rabbits wouldn’t do that.” What rabbit would do any of these sounds? None. David: Our rabbits. Jessie: Our rabbits will, yes. David: I really feel like somehow, miraculously, everybody who’s chimed in and said something like that, I found myself agreeing with all of them. I think we’ve really homed in on the sense for what these rabbits are supposed to be and that brings joy to my heart. It makes my job easier because eventually I’m gonna have to fill out the stories for these rabbits. I mean, I’ve got some, but I need to fill them out. But that’s far after the language is done. George: Let’s ask about that because for the phonology, especially since you’re just assuming that they’re magically humanoid vocal tract, then you don’t really have to think so much about culture and backstory and stuff like that. As you move into, a little bit in grammar but mostly when you get into lexicon stuff, you’re gonna have to be considering that – how much world building have you done for this? I understand it’s for a job. David: It’s this board game idea I have that I think can work very well. Honestly, not having languages has been an impediment because I don’t even wanna give them placeholder names. I want them to at least fit the phonological pattern and there isn’t one. Well, now there is one. Well, we’re getting there. Anyway, it’s been kind of a roadblock, so I really wanted to get these languages off the ground. Essentially, these forest-dwelling rabbits are – they’re in the forest and they believe that nature is tops. They’re really big fans of it. Anybody that would harm nature is the enemy. The idea behind this world is – probably it is post-apocalyptic. What we know for sure is that there’re no human beings anymore. They’re simply not in the picture. But there are a number of animals that perhaps were hopping around here on earth, be they rabbits. What happened is there is some sort of substance which caused those animals that came into contact with it to develop human-like characteristics completely by magic. I don’t care about the science of this at all. {00:31:13} The rabbits are one group, right, and they are one group amongst several other groups including cats, dogs, mice, and probably possums though it might be somebody else. I dunno. I have to decide when I get there. Anyway – George: I’m sorry. You have to have possums. You can’t just drop possums and say, “Oh, it might be somebody else.” It’s gotta be possums, man. David: Wow. Okay. Shoot. Now, I’ve got that to contend with. Jessie: What about raccoons, armadillos? David: Raccoons were coming later. George: I’m from Appalachia, man. I need to have possums in there. David: The only thing that gave me “pause-m” about the possums – Jessie: “Pause” – hm. David: That was terrible. I really apologize for that. But it was I thought that this group, it might be good to have diggers in there, you know, guys that dig holes. Jessie: Are you thinking moles or prairie dog kind of diggers? David: Yeah. Are they separate types of diggers? Do moles and prairie dogs dig differently? Jesse: Oh, yes. They’re different. David: They do? Jessie: They’re totally different animals. George: Well, I mean, rabbits burrow too. Jessie: That’s true. David: They do to an extent, but specifically I wanted these to be – I thought it would make things easier if they were folks that dug in the ground quite a bit. On the other hand, possums are nocturnal, so that could also help. I do like possums. I think they’re darling. My wife was just telling me today – Erin was talking about how she saw the biggest possum she ever saw at her work. She thought at first it was a cat and then came closer and realized it was a possum. I think she was expecting me to react in horror like, “Ugh! Oh, my goodness! A possum that big?” And I was like, “Oh, that sounds delightful. What a good day.” Jessie: Okay. You’ve never seen a possum hiss at you. They can be terrifying. David: Well, maybe you shouldn’t have mouthed off at that possum like that. Jessie: Because – okay. George, you mentioned Appalachia. You’re from the Appalachia area originally? David: He’s from West Virginia. Jessie: West Virginia? David: Yeah. George: I’m from West Virginia. Jessie: Okay. I’m from the Ozark region of Missouri, and I gotta say I never found possums cute because they’re mean. David: Well, see, that’s what Erin has said about raccoons. Jessie: That’s true. But at least raccoons look like cute little bandits. I don’t know why I find raccoons cuter. But they are very mean. David: They’re adorable. Possums are adorable. George: I mean, none of these animals are mean unless you corner them. We’ve had a possum come up on my mom’s porch and it runs away when you go to it. How did you encounter the possum? Were you going into the garage or something? Because that’s probably when it would be aggressive. Jessie: It was on our front porch. George: Anyway. David: It just showed up. It was probably looking for donations for its possum family and you just slammed the door in its face. Jessie: It was eating our dog’s food. David: It didn’t know anything about your dogs. What it knew was that somebody had set food out for it, and you’re trying to shoo it. My goodness! Poor guy. George: I mean, we can talk – I dunno. Possums are great. Raccoons would be great too. David: I’ll try to – sorry. George: We used to live in a place in University housing that had animals everywhere. Flocks of turkeys would go by and there’s raccoons and squirrels everywhere. It’s like once, at night, I was going out to the mailbox, and there was a raccoon in my way. I’m like, “Okay. Hey, Bud. Just get out of my way,” and he left. He rose up to his full height on hind legs, which is surprisingly tall for a raccoon there, but he did get out of my way after just a little gentle prodding. Jessie: Gentle prodding? We have to have so many more languages, David. Not just five. We gotta add. We gotta have the possum and raccoons and squirrels. I mean, there are so many. David: Oh, yeah. The initial set was gonna be five. But the idea is there would be expansions, of course. Jessie: Expansion pack – love it! George: Right. Now, we’re planning your expansion packs, David. You pick your initial five but, at some point, you gotta add possums. {00:36:10} David: Anyways, the idea was that – yeah, this was kind of the back story for the rabbits. The idea with these initial group of five is that the whole reason that there is conflict is that this substance, which engendered in them the ability for speech and also to build stuff and hold stuff in their little paws, that substance has come back. Now, each of the five groups has a very different idea about what should be done about that. The rabbits, of course, think that nobody should touch it. Nobody has any right to it at all because it’s a part of mother nature and also trying to extract it could hurt it. It also so happens that the substance is arising on their lands in the forest, so they have something to defend. That’s the basic set up. Jessie: I like, though, how you threw in the “of course.” The rabbits, “of course,” feel that no one should touch it. We really have a strong kinship. What cracks me up is I was not introduced to the rabbits until the very first episode. David told me very brief sketches of “Hey, there’s gonna be talking animals, but they’re gonna have all the human phonology abilities.” That was pretty much all I knew was that there was a game and there were animals who talk. I wasn’t even introduced to the rabbits until our very first episode as we were livestreaming and, already, there is just such an affinity for them. I love it. It’s so good. George: I mean, there’s such an interesting thought there. Once we get that little bit of world building, like, first of all, the name of that substance, I feel like, has to be a rabbit word, right? David: Well, here’s the thing. Everybody’s gonna have their own word for it, of course, right? Then, the question is what’s the social hierarchy of the animals. In other words, who is the prestige class? I’m gonna tell you this, the cats think they are the prestige class. Jessie: Obviously. David: Incidentally, my original idea for this was to take five of my old languages and re-tool them to make them better. I had a language picked out for each one. But I decided against this for a couple of reasons. 1.) I felt like Njaama, which was the language I was gonna re-do for the mice, I just felt like it didn’t fit them. 2.) Kamakawi was gonna be the language for the rabbits, and I realized to two things. 1.) I didn’t want to update Kamakawi even though I don’t feel like it’s up to my standards anymore. It really holds a special place in my life and so I don’t wanna touch it. It’d rather just not work on it anymore than try to re-tool it. 2.) It was a language for a people that lived on an island – a very small island somewhere in the South Pacific. Tons of vocabulary for ocean stuff and fishes and everything like that. Rabbits are nowhere near the ocean. If they ever saw it, they probably wouldn’t like it. So, that just seemed like a poor idea. Jessie: They would have very different words for it. You bring up something very interesting that I think – I feel like all conlangers will understand that feeling of you could repurpose an older language but, even though you recognize there’re things that could be improved, it’s very special. Languages are very special to you when you create them. David: It’s different with some of them. My plan was – and I’m still planning to do this – my plan was to refurbish Zhyler for the cats. I’m still happy to do that, and I’m actually pretty excited about doing that because, for some reason, the connection I have to that language is different. Whereas, with Kamakawi, I almost recoiled in horror at the idea. I just assumed it would work and I realized it wouldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. George: Isn’t Zhyler the one with the absolutely absurd vowel harmony? David: Yeah. That was when I was taking theories that I would learn in linguistics very seriously before I realized that, often, those theories are garbage. The thing is, they’re descriptive theories. They’re descriptive theories. {00:41:10} They’re good enough if they explain whatever they seen before them. It doesn’t matter if they over-generate because it doesn’t matter. It over-generates but the data isn’t there so who cares. As long as it generates the stuff that’s there, it’s fine. Of course, that doesn’t work for a conlanger because otherwise you end up producing a language like Zhyler 1. George: I do wanna say, linguists do actually care if theories over-generate, but I guess it’s not necessarily as – it’s not the same kind of concern. It’s more a concern about the validity of the theory is rather than this is going to cause a problem with what you are doing, right? That’s a thing that you always have to be careful of. I remember going to a conference. And Optimality Theory is really known for over-generating a lot. Somebody tried to do a universal OT set up for stress systems and just run through all the possible orderings. They just came up with – the computer spit out just really absurd stuff like the stress pattern is different depending on whether you have even or odd number of syllables. Things like that. These are things that conlangers have to be careful of. David: Yeah. {Inaudible} {00:41:40} Jessie: I feel like – oh, go on. David: No. Yours sounded better. Go. Jessie: Oh, it just made me think of the conlang bot that just spews out really random ideas and some of them are really horrible for what you could incorporate into a conlang. I feel like everything that was being generated needs to go into that Twitter feed. David: Regarding Zhyler 2, I will say that one of the things that makes it fun is that Zhyler 1 is really bad just from the very start at every single level. I mean, it’s interesting and it was a fun idea but, since it’s so bad at every single level, there’s really nothing that can be rescued. So, when I approached Zhyler 2, the question was, “How can I do this right while retaining the spirit?” – still something that’s strongly head-final, still something that has maybe a larger number of cases than one would expect from the average language but not everything is cases, and something that has interesting vowel harmony system but is not an absolutely fundamentally broken vowel harmony system. That makes it fun. George: I look forward to seeing you wrangle it into some kind of shape that does not have a vowel harmony system that no one could ever acquire. That’s gonna be an interesting challenge. Jessie: Have you ever called it “Zhyler Squared” by any chance? David: I have not. Jessie: Because then we could have “cubed,” you know? We could just build. David: Okay. I hear that, but I also hear what you really said. What you really just said was is it possible to build a language out of dance because, of course – Jessie: That is totally what I mean. David: Because, I mean, “Zhyler Squared,” square dancing, dance. I think that, yeah, if you could have a group dance that the entire purpose was to convey a message through the dance, I think it could be done. Jessie: And now I’m wondering what “do-si-do” really means. George: This is gonna be your language for bees. Jessie: Yes! Oh, my gosh. We have to have bees now. They’ll be squared. We can leave Zhyler 2 alone, but we need to have a “squared” language. David: Oh, “bee squared” – be there, bee squared. Jessie: Oh, my god. That’s so perfect. David: LangTime Studio Season 14 – be there, bee squared. Look out for it. Jessie: We finally get to the bees. David: That’ll be in 2068. Jessie: It’ll be great. George: I mean, it’s an interesting thing to see people doing this live. I really like the idea that this is you guys just doing conlanging in the same way that people are now doing DnD streams, although those are slightly more popular. {00:46:21} But people who do videos on all kinds of different hobbies, it’s just you –I was talking to William and he was like, “I don’t need anyone to teach me how to do conlanging,” and I understand that perspective. But, at the same time, it’s really interesting to me to see how someone else does it. I would do some things the same way that you do, and I would so some things differently, but it’s interesting to see what your process is. I think all conlangers who want to spend the time watching you guys would be interested – can get something from looking at this is how David and Jessie work on a language together. I think it’s interesting. David: If I could throw out my own pitch – Jessie: Please do. David: Okay. Here it is. It’s interesting to see it done in video form. It’s also interesting to have a conlanger reflect on their own process for a language that they’ve created whether it was their 1st or their 50th. If you or any other conlanger listening thinks that that’s something they might enjoy doing, that is what Fiat Lingua is there for. We would love – absolutely love – essays from conlangers reflecting on their own process, reflecting on the creation of their own languages. I think that is something that will be incredibly valuable to future conlangers whether they’re beginning conlangers or not. It’s just interesting to see somebody doing the same thing, having the same love for it, and approaching it in a slightly different way. Please, please, write this stuff up and send it to me. I beg you. That was my pitch. Jessie: I love it. I also – kind of building on that – I also think there’s always a point in every conlang I make where I feel like, not that I’m stuck, but I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. Where do I go from here?” Having that inspiration to just see what other people have done – especially, like David had said, hearing them talk about it or reading something that they’ve written about that back process – it is so inspiring. I think everybody can benefit from that. George: I makes me want to jump into creating a new language or something like that, which I might end up doing soon in the future. I’ve halfway written a novel and I’m like, “I need this language and this language, definitely, for this.” And I’m gonna need to go back and do a ton of world-building and figuring out these languages and at least get naming languages up because I’ve got placeholder names. I know David – so that’s one difference is I was writing a story with placeholder names just to get what I would need in the first place. Then, you’re like, “No. I have to have a language first so I can have names for these things.” David: I mean, for me it works, like when I was writing writing, because then I would literally just drop in XXX, YYY, ZZZ, and so on because then you can search for them easily. But this is different. All the stuff that I’m writing, it’s on a bunch of different documents and I have a Google Drive folder. I’m literally, it’s just like, “Kingdom A, Kingdom B, Kingdom C, Kingdom D, Kingdom E.” It’s just like – ugh. It’s like, as I’m writing this stuff it’s constantly referring to the other stuff and it’s not in a single document. It’s impossible to search. It’s just like – ugh! Forget it. I need the languages, gosh darn it. I need something there. I needed something, you know? So, we’re getting stuff. It’s good. Jessie: Slowly but surely. David: [eŋælə] {00:49:33}, which is soon, via sound-changes, going to become – Jessie: No, no, because that is so beautiful. We need [eŋælə] to stay. George: I have to ask a question because you don’t say anything explicitly about this. You are doing this historically, as is proper when you’re doing naturalistic conlanging. {00:51:09} Do you have a timeframe in mind between the proto-rabbit language and the modern rabbit language? Or are you just gonna give as many sound changes as you want to and then see what pops out? David: Well, you know, of course, different languages will have a different number of sound changes occur over a different period of time. I never worry too much about that. In this case though, what I’m imagining is that there’s certainly nobody alive that was the original – from the original crop – but it’s not as far in the future as human beings. I mean, I don’t think we can even conceive of how close this would be to the dawn of human beings in terms of analogy. Let’s say that this generation is maybe somewhere around generation 10, and that’s it. It’s really close to the beginning. For that reason, this stuff can be evolved less, but it could also be evolved more if we just happen to want it that way. Jessie: I guess I never even – how long is a generation for our rabbits? I had never asked that. David: Of course, I was thinking in human generations so, immediately, I screwed that up. Son of a gun. Okay. Hold on. Jessie: You’re welcome. David: How long do rabbits live? I think they probably live about 20 years. Jessie: They repopulate quickly. David: Yeah. They do. George: I have a feeling that all of your animals, after they are uplifted by this strange substance, will be living longer than their source species anyway, right? Jessie: Yeah. That’s a good point. David: If for only that they can communicate now and could better protect themselves against random things. I’m sorry. I just googled this. I don’t know if you heard my little gasp, but it was a gasp of sadness. Rabbits live one to two years in the wild. Jessie: Oh. So, our generations will be much longer. 10 generations – 20 years later. David: Pet rabbits are like 8 to 12 years but, I mean, you have to think the reason they’re not living that long in the wild is because of predators and just accidental, you know, like cars and stuff. Oh, gosh. It’s so sad. Jessie: Oh, the horrors. David: Yeah. These are gonna be longer-lived rabbits – longer-[lɑɪvd], longer-[lɪvd], longer-[lɑɪvd] {00:53:09}? I dunno. They’re gonna live longer, yes. Thank you, George. They’re going to live longer because you are an expert and you said that they will, so. George: Well, I mean – you know. Jessie: That’s George’s Law. David: “George’s Law.” Thanks to George’s Law. George: I mean, listen. You gotta have some kind of longer life-expectancy than one year in order for them to build a civilization and everything. I guess you’re welcome. I’m glad that I could contribute while I’m having you on just to promote your show. {Laughter} David: Ah, “George’s Law,” {inaudible} {00:54:00} Jessie: I like it. George: Where can people go to watch LangTime Studio? I know that you’ve not necessarily had a stable time, but what’s usually gonna be the time when they can tune into the stream? Jessie: Usually it’s gonna be Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. Pacific. That would be 5:00 p.m. east coast. That will be our normal time. We only had to change that for one week so far. From here on out I think we’re pretty good for a while at that timeframe. Usually, it’s a two-hour livestream process when we do it. David: To get to our YouTube channel, because it has some weird URL, just go to langtimestudio.com and it will redirect you automatically. We’re also on Twitter at @LangTimeStudio, on Instagram at @LangTimeStudio. We’re on Tumblr, which is – are we langtime.tumblr.com or langtimestudio.tumblr.com? {00:56:16} Jessie: I believe it’s “langtimestudio.” David: Yeah. That makes a lot more sense. Then, Patreon – patreon.com/langtimestudio. Anyway, we did all the social media networks and we’ll see which ones stick. It’s kinda sad. I had more than 40,000 followers on Tumblr, but I started this one on Tumblr and it’s not getting as much traction. But – you know. You can see old episodes, of course, on our channel at YouTube. I also post all of the old episodes on our Tumblr as well. I’ll keep doing that just because, eh, it’s not that much effort for our 30 Tumblr followers. Jessie: Hey. I think that’s more than I would otherwise have. I did verify. It is “langtimestudio” for the Tumblr. David: Perfect. I’m sorry. 13 followers. 13. Jessie: Okay. So, not as many as 30 but maybe, after this, we’ll get 30. Go follow us. George: Just go hit up the YouTube channel and go see LangTime Studio! It’s fun, especially if you can get in the chat and get into the conversation because that’s where everybody’s just throwing out ideas and talking about linguistics and that’s great. This episode, if I get it out right, we’re recording this on the 14th, this will come out on April 6th. So, you guys said you were close to wrapping up phonology. Hopefully, by that time you’ll be onto to morphosyntax, huh? Jessie: Maybe. We’ll see. David: I’d say so. Our next one is gonna be the 19th, correct? Jessie: Yeah. David: Then, the 26th and then April 2nd – so if this airs April 6th, our next one will be April 9th. Yeah. We might be almost to the beginning of the very start of morphosyntax. Jessie: Depends on how long that palatals take – the palatals. David: Oh, my. Palatals – Episode 1 through 19. George: Palatalization is fun. There’s so many things you can do with it. You guys need to have – here’s something that you guys need to have happen. I don’t know if it will ever naturally happen, but you need to have some weird merger where two phonemes end up having the same allophone in a weird way that can’t be analyzed. That’s one of my favorite things to see. David: Like both X and N going to F? George: I mean. David: In some environment? Jessie: I would like to see that happen. George: Is that a real thing that ever happened? David: No. I’ll tell you one thing that has happened. Velars have gone to post-alveolars. Wait. No, no, no, no. Velars have gone to interdentals. That was it. So, [ɣə] {00:58:42} becoming [θə]. If it can do that, then it can go to labiodentals. So, [xə] can go to [θə] can to [fə] – that’s fine. Then, for N, I mean that’s more of a challenge, isn’t it? Jessie: I mean, I would say so. David: Goodness gracious. It’s gonna have to be N – Jessie: Changing place and manner. David: Coming next to some sort of – oh, I mean, this is how you’d have to do it, right? N coming before B, there’s an assimilation that happens, so it’s MB. Then, there’s some sort of – Jessie: I feel like it has to be a P because then it’s at least voiceless. David: No, no. no. Check this out. Okay? So, then MB per mutation just becomes M. That happens a whole lot. Then, what happens is that this thing becomes voiceless in word-final position because we dropped final vowels – so [amf], [am], [an] {00:59:46}. Then, that thing just gets interpreted as F. There you go. George: I think I was thinking – I think I did not convey exactly what I meant and was thinking of something much, much tamer and more reasonable than what you just came up with. {Laughter} {01:01:14} Jessie: Nonetheless, that will show up in a language I’m sure. David: Good lord. Now, I’m just thinking about how they could possibly work. How can she pull that off? Nobody can pull that off. Oh, my god. Anyway, what were you thinking? George: Oh, I was literally just thinking – it came to mind because you were talking about palatalization where like in – I think too much about Mandarin, but anyway. In Mandarin, both velars and the dentals got palatalized to these, what do you call them, blade palatals or something? They’re totally tame changes, it’s not anything weird, but no one actually knows how to work out what’s the phoneme or anything because, historically, these two things merged in this one environment for palatalization but that means that the information about what they originally were is lost. I like those kinds of things – much tamer than what you were suggesting of N and [x] merging to F. Although, I think it’s possible. Jessie: Anything is possible. David: Honestly, everything just becomes H eventually anyway. Everything becomes H. Then, it disappears when everybody dies. Jessie: Wow. George: You did have an introduction to H in your geminate thing that you were working on, right? I think you were – David: Yeah, I did. George: It was an S coda going to – I remember because I saw it and I immediately thought, “Oh, Caribbean Spanish.” Anyway, I think Puerto Rican Spanish has similar things going on. Anyway, LangTime Studio – go check it out! If you’re into livestreaming and you wanna watch these two work out a language for rabbits and hopefully, in the future, a language for cats and a language for possums – gotta do possums at some point. I don’t care. At some point, you gotta do possums. Anyway. Guys, just go and watch it and participate in the chat and everything. It’s a fun time just kinda hanging out and seeing how other people do the conlanging thing. Thank you, David, for coming on and Jessie, too. Uh, oh. Jessie: Yes. Oh, I just heard a noise. George: David is offline suddenly. Jessie: Oh, no! But you’re welcome. I’m glad to have been here. I sure as heck hope this all is recorded well. George: Okay. All right. In any case, thank everybody for listening and happy conlanging! {Music} George: Thank you for listening to Conlangery. You can find our archives and show notes at conlangery.com and follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter by searching for “Conlangery.” Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons at Patreon. To become a patron, go to patreon.com/conlangery and pledge your monthly amount. As little as a dollar will help us out. A special thanks to Ezekiel Fordsmender, Margaret Ransdell-Green, Graham Hill, and all of those who have chosen to support us. Conlangery is under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-commercial – Share-Alike license. You may use Conlangery episodes for any non-commercial work as long as credit is provided to us and you release your work under the same license. Conlangery’s website is created by Bianca Richards, our theme music is by Null Device, and transcriptions of our episodes have been provided by Sarah Dopierala. Kasaral. {Music} {01:06:16}

George brings on Ezekiel Fordsmender and Margaret Randsdell-Green to talk about techniques for creating polysemous lexical entries. Top of Show Greeting: Chicken Links and Resources: CLICS3Wiktionary (esp. Arabic, Latvian, Scottish Gaelic words) STEDTLakoff, G. (2008) Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. University of Chicago press.Heine, B., Bernd, H., & Kuteva, T. (2002) World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press.Dent G.R. & C.L.S. Nyembezi (1969) Scholar’s Zulu dictionary. Pietermaritzburg, Shuter and Shooter. Gamta, T. (2004) Comprehensive Oromo-English Dictionary. New York : Karrayyuu Pub Bates, D., Hess, T., & Hilbert, V. (1994) Lushootseed dictionary. University of Washington Press. Annis, William S. (2014) “A Conlanger’s Thesaurus.” Fiat Lingua, <http://fiatlingua.org> Transcript PDF transcriptDownload Plain TextDownload {00:00:00} {Greeting} {Music} George: Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley with – Zeke, where are you? Ezekiel: I’m in Philadelphia. George: Okay. Over in Philly we have Ezekiel Fordsmender. Ezekiel: Hi, how are you guys doing? George: Over in Hawaii, we have Margaret Ransdell-Green. Margaret: Hello. George: Both of these people are on for the reason that they are both really good with polysemy. Margaret, you did a talk at last year’s LCC about it, right? I just recently managed to watch that. For some reason I had not watched it before. But that was interesting. Also, if you look at Zeke’s Lexember entries, those are a very good example of how to do very rich dictionary entries with lots of senses. Ezekiel: You can find Margaret’s talk on the Language Creation Society YouTube Channel. My Lexember stuff – I keep all of that on Twitter actually, so my handle is @Fordsmender. That’s F-O-R-D-S-M-E-N-D-E-R. Margaret: Yeah. My Lexember and everything is – I’ve done various things like that at different times. That’s all on Twitter for me as well. My handle is @MintakaGlow – M-I-N-T-A-K-A. Some of my stuff is there – some of which is heavy with polysemy and some of it is not. All my lexicon stuff I tend to put up there. George: Well, I mean, we’ll talk about that in a minute about how much polysemy do you want to include in a language with {inaudible} {00:02:50}. First of all, before we get into the subject, I have to handle the money stuff. Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons. Go to patreon.com/conlangery to show your support. We’ve got some rewards there. A couple things about that. Thanks to our patrons and me working out the numbers, something that we’ve just recently been able to do is start doing transcripts of all episodes. What I have – based on the budget I’ve made for it – is I have somebody doing transcriptions of all new discussion episodes. Then, every month she’s also going to do a past episode. That will take years to get through the back catalogue, but it is a way to get started on it. Here’s where the Patreon comes in. That takes money. If I can get more money in the Patreon, then I can do something like, “Oh, I can get those transcripts done faster” or the back catalogue. Other things can be equipment. Just recently, because of the money I had in my account from the Patreon, I got some acoustic foam for my recording booth here. My daughter helped me set it up – “helped,” in quotes. She’s 4. Hopefully, I will sound a little bit less like I am recording in the middle of a bathroom because the storage room – yeah. It needed a little bit of improvement of the acoustics. {Cut in with less reverb} And as you can hear right there, I had not gotten it totally figured out as to how to use the foam and how to actually get a good sound. {end cut in} {00:05:02} Right now, I have a reasonably good solution, so hopefully episodes from here on out will sound good. With more money, I could get a better microphone, all kinds of better recording equipment. That’s other things. Ezekiel: Well, that’s fantastic news about the transcripts. Margaret: Yeah. That’s good. George: This is just what I’m telling you guys is the more I can get through the Patreon, the more interesting things I could do for the show. I could do more shows. I can get the transcripts done faster. I could get better equipment to make the experience better for you, the listener. Patreon.com/conlangery. There’s several different tiers up there. Now, full disclosure, my two guests today both happen to be pledging the highest tier. I do have to note that is not a way that you can get your way on the show, it’s just that they also happen to be very good conlangers that I wanted to talk to. Again, patreon.com – hm? Ezekiel: I’m thrilled to be the subject of a full disclosure. I imagined myself to be something of a rebel when I was a teenager, and if you went back in time and told 18-year-old Zeke that he would someday be the subject of a full disclosure on a conlanging podcast, he would just be very tickled. Margaret: {Inaudible} {00:06:40} George: Anyway, let’s go – so patreon.com/conlangery. Go there. Show your support. Now, let’s get into the topic which is polysemy. What is polysemy? It is specifically when one word has multiple meanings, usually multiple related meanings. Ezekiel: To that I think we could add when one word has multiple, usually related, meanings and then they develop from each other through metaphorical extension, for example. It would be separate from homophony in which, through the process of sound change, two different words come to sound the same but have different semantics. George: Right. That’s a crucial distinction when you’re talking about this because we do, in a naturalistic conlang, want both of these things to happen. You want both polysemy and homophony to happen. Now, there are times, also, when homophones can – give me a second. I’m gonna be right back. Ezekiel: Sounds good. George: All right. I’m back. I have my book here that I am looking at. Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s reel back again. Let’s start out – because I want to get the foundation firm. Let’s think, what’s a concrete example of polysemy? Something like? Ezekiel: “Run,” for example. So, “The river runs north,” versus, “I ran a six-minute mile.” I think that’s a pretty clear example. George: Right. The connection there is they’re both sort of involving motion. I think the older meaning is like “running a six-minute mile.” It’s “running” as in the action of running with your legs. It’s a particular gait. Then, “a river running” is an extension of that metaphorically to just indicate fast motion. Ezekiel: Yeah, along a path. George: Yeah. If you look at a dictionary, “run” has tons and tons of different meanings, but that’s a clear illustration. Whereas, a homophone is something like “led.” So, “led” can be the past tense of “lead,” or it can be the element “lead.” That is just coincidental that those happen to sound the same. That’s homophony. {00:10:01} To some extent, you are going to end up with both of these in a naturalistic conlang because that’s just how it ends up. Let’s start off with talking about strategies for building polysemous words, and how do each of your approach that? Margaret, maybe we’ll start with you. Margaret: The way that I start to build a polysemous word tends to have two directions. This curls back a little bit to something that I mentioned in my presentation at the LCC where I talked about how conlanging can influence conculture as well as the other way around. We normally think of culture influencing language. If you are more interested in conlanging, maybe, you may find that over time a lot of your lexicon my influence decisions that you make about any corresponding culture. That’s something that I do a lot just because I find it easy and I find it sort of a natural, fluid way to go. A lot of times I’ll come up with a primary word and then think about semantically adjacent concepts to that particular word. Some examples I have is sort of semantic shifts either in subtle or maybe not-so-subtle directions. A recent word that I had created was one in the Rílin language, which was “tsemé” which means – literally, it’s “to make into a rock or stone.” The literal meaning associated with that is “to carve something into stone,” but also “to harden something,” or “calcify,” essentially. There’s the literal meanings of the very physical transformation of carving something into stone or making something hard like stone, but then it also has metaphorical extensions like, “to solidify.” You can solidify your plans, or you can solidify your ideology, or anything like that. Then, another extension beyond that was “to complete” or “to fill.” It’s like a dot-dot picture where you start off with a primary, usually concrete, meaning and then branch out from there. Sometimes, you have to take things like culture into consideration. But sometimes it’s just more cognitive, conceptual stuff. That’s one of the techniques that I use. Then, the reverse of that is to use parts of the conculture that I already know about, that I’ve already decided on, and integrate those into a polysemous word. There’s another word in Rílin, which is “ŕíka” [ˈʐika] {00:13:11}, which means, “seasoned,” or “spiced.” It originally meant with a particular spice that was an important spice, and then it became generalized to just mean “seasoned” as a food, generally. There was another extended meaning of something that is altered, something that’s been altered from its natural state. From there you get the even farther meanings of “unusual,” or “strange,” or even “unnatural.” My thought was that, “Well, maybe this is because native Rílin foods are not necessarily heavily spiced with this particular substance and it is a mark of something that is foreign in some way.” Those are two basic techniques I use to creatively expand on a word’s meaning and make it a little bit semantically richer. George: That’s really interesting the way that you do that. There was one, I believe, where you had a word for maritime things. This is in your presentation. And because the sea goddess was, I think, associated with peace, is it? Margaret: Yeah. George: Then, it got extended into following her religion and also being peaceful or tranquil and that led to interesting associations. What that made me think of is real-world word histories that are similar in certain ways. This is breaking away from polysemy and thinking more about etymology, which is related. {00:15:03} Like, you could use the same techniques for both. But the word “cynic” – let me double check this, what “cynic” – Wiktionary – right. It’s derived from an Ancient Greek word meaning, “doglike,” right? Margaret: Right. Yeah. George: That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in English. Like, why did this thing that means ‘dog’” – but if you follow the chain of events of this, 1.) the philosopher was called a “dog” – this one Ancient Greek philosopher was called a “dog” as an epithet, or pejoratively, because of his behavior. Then, his line of philosophy became called “cynicism,” which “cynic” can still mean a follower of that in particular, but because of aspects of that philosophy it also means a totally different thing – someone who’s seeing all the negatives in society and is apathetic about it. That chain of events where each word has a story is a very interesting thing. Zeke, I’m gonna move to you for a second. What kind of techniques do you do? Because I look at your dictionary entries and you have 10 or 20 meanings sometimes in a word. I’m just like, “Where did this start? And how is it going?” Ezekiel: I have to take a lot of notes, so I don’t forget where I am while I’m working on it. It was very interesting to hear Margaret’s LCC presentation because she talked about her bi-directional approach from conculture into conlang and from conlang into conculture. Before I heard that, I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. It’s always interesting when you hear somebody else discussing something similar to what you’re doing and you have this context outside of yourself to think about your own work. I am definitely a conlang into conworld person. All of my work on the culture behind my projects exists within my projects and all the conworlding happens within the lexicon, essentially. So, I don’t know the people as well as some other conlangers or some other conworlders would because I’m just discovering them as I go along. My process is fairly hands-on. I like to create my words by hand. I don’t really use a word-generator like Awkwords, for example. I do stuff on notebook paper. It helps me remember vocabulary too. Once I have a word, I try to live with it and try to imagine how I would use it if I were a native speaker of this language and how it might begin to shift and change over time. As an example, a couple of years ago I was thinking about – so my primary project is an a priori language called Karyoł. Karyoł, I felt, was becoming very relex-y. So, I decided to blow up the vocabulary and just take all of these words that I felt were too close to English and to cut them apart and look at the individual senses. I started doing this with words for breaking and cutting. I realized that you can take senses for breaking and cutting and you can, essentially, put them in two different categories. There’s manner-based verbs and result-based verbs. A manner-based verb of cutting or breaking would be like, “cut with a knife” or “chop with an ax.” Whereas, a result-based verb would be like, “cut into little pieces” or “tear apart.” Karyoł itself is really fastidious about tracking transitivity. I imagine that this would probably exist in the semantics of the language too. So, I kind of shunted all of the manner verbs – all the verbs whose semantics were concerned with how an object was cut or broken. {00:20:05} I put those aside and I started focusing on the result ones. I came up with these two different verbs. Both mean “snap.” They’re both not concerned with how an object is snapped – if I step on it or if I break it over my knee or if I crack it between my teeth. They differ in the resulting pieces. So, “āre,” for example, means “to break with frayed edges,” and “huhba” [huˈpaː] {00:20:37}, is “to break with clean edges.” Once you have these two words, then – I’m in my apartment, I’m in my kitchen, and I’m thinking, “If I’m cooking, which one of these words would I use?” If you’re tearing apart, say, an orange or you’re breaking apart meat with your hands, you have an instance of breaking something with frayed edges. Once you’re there, you can begin to think about maybe this verb could also be used for whittling wood. From there, something a little bit less concrete like needling someone or wearing someone down, leaving them with frayed edges. The same thing happens with your verb “to snap with clean edges.” I remember, I was in the kitchen and I was breaking off this little square of chocolate from a bar and thinking about how the two resulting pieces were intact and how that would probably be important to the semantics of the word huhba. So, from “to break with clean edges,” that word evolved into a verb that means “to separate two people having an argument.” It’s also the word for “to give birth” as, afterwards, both parties are intact. These words, they don’t evolve from within conculture. They honestly could exist in any language. But they do exist in Karyoł because of some peculiarities of Karyoł syntax. George: Okay. That was very interesting. That whole thing, to me, was a very interesting – I am just now realizing that you guys both have a bunch of notes in my doc that I had not seen before now. That’s a very interesting point there is that one thing that you’re doing there that I really like – well, I covered this on a short earlier – is you think about the lexicon as a whole system in the first place where you are thinking about these breaking and cutting verbs, which I believe we’ve cited a paper about that earlier. I might be able to find that. You built in the system of how those are put together and distinguished in the language. Then, that led to further sub-senses of some of those. That’s a very interesting thing to keep in mind is you start with something that’s working with your language system and then moving out from that. Let’s actually move into this. I’m very glad that you guys have done some work here. But let’s actually say – let’s back up here and say – okay. We have some notes here about why do polysemy? I mentioned up at the top, natural languages have polysemy. It’s realistic to have them. Let’s keep on moving through here. Realism and hyperrealism – what’s hyperreal about that? Ezekiel: Sure. Hyperrealism is, I would say, the ideal aesthetic that I’m trying to accomplish in my own projects, which is very difficult to do as one person working on a conlang. Hyperrealism, I would say, involves complex loanword strategies, borrowings and re-borrowings, doublets, complex polysemy and homophony, in-depth historical language work. {00:24:56} Realism, I would say, is the best approximation you can achieve in a realistic amount of time. In order to avoid having to come up with two dozen sketchlangs to borrow words into to build up your vocabulary, you can focus on your native vocabulary and accomplish an amount of realism by using polysemy, for example, and introducing some homophony. Beyond that, I’d say it’s a necessary part of artlanging because it does keep you from relexing your own language. I do think they’re probably about as many reasons to participate in this hobby as there are people doing it, but I think that we all agree that one of the tremendous benefits of conlanging and learning about language is it really opens your eyes to the beauty of your own native language. And one of the ways you can really involve yourself in that is by consciously not relexing it and being very aware of how meanings in your own language have developed over time. I do know that there is a contingent within the conlanging community – and I know this personally because I used to be one of these guys – who feel that syntax is where the real work is done in that there’s something second-rate to people who fiddle around with their vocabularies. But I think that if you’re interested in doing grammaticalization, you’re already working with polysemy. I have this note here, “I love the English word ‘to get,’” because it’s such a simple, commonplace word. It’s not as agentless as “receive” is but it doesn’t have the gusto that “attain” or “acquire” do. It’s generic. It’s somewhere in between. “Get” has developed one of my favorite grammaticalization tendencies. Its past tense has become a verb of possession. So, we can say, “I got some money on me,” meaning, “I have some money on me.” I think that’s a really beautiful metaphor. “I have already received it. I have it.” From there, in contemporary English, it’s beginning to replace “have” in auxiliary constructions which I think is really pretty cool and it speaks to this universal tendency for verbs of possession to be used in these constructions. It’s also used in that passive construction. “He got punched,” for example. It’s interesting, too, the “He got punched” construction, there’s something a little bit different about that than “He was punched.” There’s just some very subtle semantics there. We should talk later on about synonyms and how synonyms are kind of a fallacy and how they don’t really exist, maybe, or maybe they do. When two words begin to approach each other, it seems that the human mind really wants to keep them as separate as possible. Margaret: I was just thinking about that the other day. Ezekiel: Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t tell you what the difference between “He got punched” and “He was punched” is. But there is a difference there. Maybe when he got punched, he was looking for it in some way. George: I think that “got” passives, not always but sometimes, do actually involve some sort of intentionality on the patient, which is a weird thing because the whole thing about passives is they’re promoting the patient, right? But “got” passives are promoting the patient even more, like the patient is already an instrumental now. Just getting back from that, talking about “get,” do not overlook polysemy in your – first of all, in your constructions, which we have talked about that when we talked about constructed grammar, when we talked about constructions specifically and how they can be polysemous themselves. {00:30:04} But also, your small words, if you are making a dictionary that is thorough to the degree of real dictionaries, they will have page-long entries with lots of different senses. I read a book a while ago, Word by Word by Kory Stamper, and she has a whole chapter about how she got the word “take” to review. I believe it was “take.” It was a small, simple word, and she thought it’d be easy. But she started reading the senses and realized that this was going to take a very long time because there’re a ton of different senses that she had to verify. It was at a time when she was still using index cards to handle things. She had here entire desk – she started out with just sorting out nouns and verbs, and then it ended up with her entire desk, on the floor, like spreading out of her cubicle were stacks of index cards covering all of the senses of “take,” trying to verify and see if she needed to split or merge senses. Those little words get complicated, like “get.” But “get” is particularly hard to pin down. Non-native speakers have a lot of trouble with what “get” means. Translators have trouble translating it into other languages because it’s like, “I have to know exactly what the whole sentence means before I know what verb to use there.” Actually, throwing it Margaret. Do you talk about the cultural terms, which are usually larger content words, but do you do the same level of polysemy on small words like that? Margaret: Yeah. A lot of the basic common verbs, or what you would call “small words,” I think have some of the highest potential for polysemy because, because of their frequency and flexibility, they take on many different shades of meaning and many different usages. Because of that, I think that it’s a really great place to go with polysemy. A lot of my I guess what you would call “common verbs” in some of my languages do have many primary senses and it’s hard to really tease apart which is the primary meaning for a lot of these. It’s one of the things that when I was thinking about polysemy, it also made me think about the lexicography that I’ve done for real-world languages and the challenge behind how to design a dictionary, and how to include senses of individual words, and how to decide which comes first in the ordering – which is considered a primary sense or a secondary sense and so on. I think that sometimes when you’re creating those collections or clusters of senses, it’s really easy to realize that there are actually sub-branches of senses. There may be a primary, secondary, and tertiary sense, and then off of each of those, it starts to have a branching structure or bifurcated structure, in some cases. George: That’s a really good note. One thing that you can do in terms of – I say, “small words,” just as a catch-all. It’s not really a technical term. One thing that can get really polysemous is functional words. There, I think a really good thing to do is to actually just translate stuff and, as you are finding that you need some sort of a functional relationship here, try to use stuff that you already have. Margaret: Yeah. Exactly. George: With Istatikii, I have a small list of prepositions. I have two different classes of inflecting prepositions and then non-inflecting. When I was doing this text test, I was running into things where I kinda wanna use a preposition here. {00:35:02} I want to use on of the ones I already have. Which one will work? I had an issue of I was trying to make a derivative construction like, “We have lived here for so long time,” and I didn’t wanna use anything new, so I just make up new stuff. I just like, “Okay. I have this preposition, mahok. It is generally for the source of something and also for inalienable possession. Maybe I could throw that in as also meaning ‘during’?” And that seemed to work for me. So, I ended up with that. I think I used another, different pseudo-genitive preposition to mean like – apok, I think, can be used for “at a specific moment in time.” I’m not sure. I’d have to go back and actually look it up again. So, that’s a part of what real languages do and a part of what you can do is, as you – try to start out with the functional words and whatever cases, whatever TAM marking, you want. Then, as you come up with situations where you need something, try to see if your existing material can be applied to that in an interesting way. Margaret: That’s definitely a really good point. Also, what I’ve found myself doing – just looking at my own lexicon while you were talking about a word for “for X period of time” – the word in Rílin that I use for “for” and “during” and “while” is all the same word because I just didn’t wanna make extra material that I didn’t need. Ezekiel: Margaret, may I ask you? I’m the only one out of the three of us who’s not trained as a linguist, so I’ve got a pen out. I’m taking notes on this here. When you are working with a nat lang professionally, and you are drafting a lexicon, what is the best practice for determining which sense goes first? Is it the oldest sense or is it the most common sense that you list first? Margaret: It really depends on a lot of factors – a lot of real-world factors – that actually aren’t so relevant for conlanging since you are potentially the user of your dictionary. A lot of what we consider in lexicography, at least from what I do with work on endangered and indigenous languages, is to consider who’s gonna be using the dictionary and what will probably be the most useful. What I do in terms of conlangs, because there’s no reference that I need – I don’t have to be like, “Well, I gotta look at a corpus,” because there isn’t one besides what I determine. I usually try to do what is the primary sense and what is the most common use for this word in my mind. If I were to just say, “What does this word mean?” what would somebody respond with? That may or may not be chronologically the first meaning because a lot of my words, actually, their primary meaning – their primary contemporary meaning – is not the one that it started out with. There’s a word that originally meant a food that was roasted termites, and it changed to mean – it sort of semantically broadened to mean – any small finger food that you could eat, like nuts or anything. It wouldn’t matter specifically what it was. It was more just how you ate it. Now, I would definitely say that in Rílin, that word, it’s primary sense now is basically “finger food,” and its primary sense is no longer its chronologically original sense because they don’t really do termites as much anymore as a food source. George: I think a way to break this down for listeners – I’m not in lexicography. I was a phonetician, so I don’t really do this. But I think a way to break this down for our listeners is, are you writing the Oxford English Dictionary or are you writing Merriam-Webster’s? {00:40:07} The reason I give those examples is the Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary. They list them in chronological order based on the earliest citation. That’s how you lay out an etymological or historical dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s is an everyday reference dictionary for people who are writing or looking up a word that they read. That is the way that you described, Margaret, is they’re trying to identify the most common sense and put it first. It’s gonna depend. And I feel that for conlangers, probably you’re writing Merriam-Webster’s or even more like you’re writing – really what you’re writing is a bilingual dictionary, honestly. You have to think about it also in terms of when you, yourself, are looking up words, what do you want to have in your mind first as what the translation of that word is because that’s gonna be the core meaning and, also, I think that’s actually a sort of sub-nugget of this is like, since you guys both do all this work to work out different senses, how much are you thinking about the amount of detail you add to each sense? Because if it’s mainly a reference for yourself – but both of you guys do present yourself publicly. I’m always thinking about if I’m writing an entry as like, “Am I just writing the gloss of this or am I writing enough information that I know how to use this word correctly and not end up using it as a relex of whatever English gloss I’ve listed?” Ezekiel: Again, I try to present as much detail as I possibly can to keep everything fresh in my mind so that I can remember the process that led me – actually, I’ve got an example right here. This is from this year’s Lexember, and this is a fairly {audio cuts out} {00:42:40} of a word with a fairly long trail of senses behind it. The word is “pööndsjuo” and it means, primarily, “to play,” but it has 19 senses. The first is – and I’ll try to keep this from sounding like I’m reading from the phonebook, but I’ll just read what I have here. Sense 1 is “to play, to recreate, to pass one’s time amusing oneself for no other purpose than for entertainment, to hang out, to have a good time.” 2.) “To play as children do, to run around and make believe.” 3.) “To play a sport or a game.” 4.) “To play a keyboard, stringed, or percussion instrument.” 5.) “To toy with, to trifle with, to be frivolous with, to be flippant with someone or something in an otherwise serious situation.” 6.) “To fiddle with, to fidget, not to know what to do with one’s hands.” 7.) “To amuse oneself or others, to humor, or to indulge.” 8.) “To adjust or to adapt to.” 9.) “To be nimble, to be clever with one’s hands.” 10.) “To compromise, to negotiate.” 11.) “To be acceptable, to be okay, to be an option.” 12.) “To frustrate, to vex, or to thwart.” 13.) “To blast or blight” – of the weather, or disease of plants, for example. 14.) “To outwit, to outsmart, to outfox, to beat by correctly anticipating one’s opponent’s next moves.” 15.) “To tease, to poke fun at.” 16.) “To provoke or to annoy.” 17.) “To scold, reprove, or rebuke.” I like this one. 18.) “To grill, to sweat information out of someone.” And 19.) “To draw milk from a cow or a reindeer.” So, the semantics develop as follows. The earliest sense is “to press.” Now, this an a posteriori language that I’m working with. It developed from Proto-Germanic root and that’s [pɹənganə] {00:44:57}, which meant “to press.” {00:45:00} Your earliest senses here are going to be “to adjust,” “to press into corners,” or “to adapt to,” but also “to grill,” or “to scold” – those are gonna be your earlier senses. Then, “press,” developed into a sense to “to set in order” or “to arrange.” From “set into order,” it developed into a sense “to be crafty.” So, at that point, the sense is about amusement but also “to frustrate,” “to vex,” “to tease,” “to poke fun at” or “annoy” – that’s when those develop. From “to be crafty” – “to be mischievous. That’s when the senses of “play” begin to develop. Then, finally, from “to play as a game” – “to play as an instrument. That’s the final sense there. Margaret: Wow. Yeah. That’s really interesting, especially taking into consideration that it is a posteriori and so you had to work within historical context. It’s interesting to see the etymology of the word “play” in English and the different meanings that its forebears have had throughout the different proto-languages and in Old English and stuff. It’s really interesting to compare how you’ve made that semantic pathway and to kind of look at it in context of the semantic pathway that “play” in English has gotten over the years and over its predecessor’s years. Ezekiel: It’s interesting. Words for breaking and cutting, those are fairly easy to work out because they have fairly concrete semantics. But words for recreation, those are a little bit more difficult. I find that it’s a little bit trickier to do those convincingly. Margaret: Yeah. Because sometimes there’s one thing they get – Ezekiel: Without calquing. Margaret: Yeah. Without calquing. Exactly. Sometimes, there’s one aspect of a more complex action like that that gets emphasized. Like, I looked here because in Old English it says that in “plegan” it was also used to mean, “move rapidly,” or “to occupy or busy oneself,” “to exercise, frolic, make sport of or mock.” It’s interesting how this idea of moving rapidly has coalesced with playing or performing music. George: That is an interesting thing to come at. So, where your word starts can end up indicating what happens to it later. Do you guys also think about – and this is partly do have to do with polysemy but also have to do with language development – do you think about cases where one word has pushed another out of its semantics in a certain way? Ezekiel: Yeah. Actually, the word that I just brought up, “pööndsjuo,” has done that up to a point. Let’s talk maybe about synonym avoidance right here. I’ve got a good quote here from the linguist Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy. I’ve got one of his books in front of me. That’s The Evolution of Morphology. He’s discussing synonym avoidance, and he does that throughout the book. I’m on Page 62 right now. He says, “As regards ‘rancid’ and ‘addled,’ the fact that they are regularly collocated with butter and eggs, respectively, shows that they are not interchangeable. The phrases ‘rancid eggs’ and ‘addled water’ are ill-formed. One can imagine a variety of English that has just one word applicable to food with the meaning, ‘gone bad through having been kept too long.’ However, actual English is unnecessarily complicated, one might say. It has a variety of words meaning ‘gone bad’ – ‘rancid,’ ‘addled,’ ‘sour,’ ‘rotten,’ ‘stale.’ But each is limited in the foods that it can be applied to.” So, bearing that in mind, I’ve done that a little bit with “pööndsjuo.” If – I think it’s Sense 3 or 4. Let’s see – George: I just wanna say that example seems like it has aged because “rancid butter” is fine for me. The words – Ezekiel: “Rancid butter” is the correct one. “Rancid eggs” is the one he says is ill-formed. {00:50:00} Margaret: I always would apply “rancid” to anything with oil in it. Even oil-based is “rancid,” but I wouldn’t say anything else – anything that’s not explicitly oil-based, I would never use “rancid,” personally. Ezekiel: Neither would I. He’s also writing from New Zealand, so his intuitions might be {audio cuts out} {00:50:20} our own. In the case of the word I just quoted, Number 4 – since Number 4 is “to play a keyboard, stringed, or percussion instrument,” not a brass instrument, that’s because there’s an older word, which is veisuo [vɛɪzuo] {00:50:38}, which means “to play an instrument.” It’s polysemous with the word, “to sing,” “to make an instrument sing.” That has been retained only for wind instruments, but it’s been displaced by this other word, “pööndsjuo,“ for string, keyboard, and percussion instruments. George: Yes. Okay. I wish I could find my Isatikii dictionary because I have something similar in that I have “to play a stringed or percussion instrument,” I believe, is tinsüdaa, which is like, “to hit music.” It’s an incorporated word. It’s “to strike music.” Playing a woodwind instrument, I believe, is actually related to the word for “to sing.” So, I had a similar thing where I broke up playing instruments in that way. Again, I wish I could find my old dictionary, but it is actually lost, and I will have to reconstruct it if I continue working on Istatikii. Anyway – Ezekiel: That’s very naturalistic. Tocharian, which was a part of my inspiration for this “pööndsjuo,” does the same thing. It’s “strike music,” “sing music,” depending upon the instrument. There’s one more thing I should’ve mentioned when we were talking about small words, actually, that’s just occurred to me and that’s, in addition to small words, bound morphemes can be polysemous too. If you think about inflection – inflection can be either a case of homophony through paradigmatic leveling. Two dissimilar forms that have different etymologies come to look the same. It can also be a matter of one inflectional affix coming to overtake the function of another and, in that sense, developing polysemy. If you’re doing some nonwestern-centric languages, if you’re working with polysynthesis, for example, bound lexical affixes can often be polysemous. I have an example from the Lushootseed language. I love this one. I think this is a beautiful little collection of senses. They have this word alus [əlus] {00:53:36}, which means, “eye,” as in the organ of sight, or “color,” or “bright.” It's a bound morpheme. Where are my examples? You can use it in the sense of “the color of the leaves,” or “the bright of the sky,” or “to have sore eyes,” that’s the third example. And I’ll spare you my trying to pronounce Lushootseed because there’re very few vowels and I dunno exactly how to do it. So, I think that’s something interesting and that might not necessarily occur to somebody who is first setting out to play with things in their lexicon that the affixes themselves will also have further meanings. It’s important to think about those things. In R. M. W. Dixon’s The Australian Languages, he has a nice little diagram of the etymological relationships between different noun inflection morphemes in the Australian languages, which is really interesting to see that the ergative affix will develop from locative or the instrumental and will often be identical in form to these other affixes still. {00:55:13} George: That’s very interesting. Another thing I want to bring up is sometimes words can end up dragging other things with them. This is from – I’m slowly making my way through this – Theories of Lexical Semantics by, I believe the name is, Dirk Geeraerts. This is a really interesting book for conlangers. It’s a theory book definitely, but it goes through the history of lexical semantics. I’m only a little bit through, but one thing that pops up is, he has an example from French of – now let me just get this. There’s “chat,” meaning “cat,” and “chas” meaning “glue with a base of starch.” If I’m mispronouncing those, I will hear it from Christophe. They’re spelled differently. One ends with a T and one end with an S, but they’re close to homophones. Because of this, there’s a word, maroufle, which means like “a big Tom cat,” but then acquired the meaning of “starch” because of this association. That’s actually just homophony in terms of “cat” and the “glue.” That homophony conditioned that word to take on a secondary meaning because of the relationship of these other two words. Margaret: Wow! That’s amazing. I feel like – Ezekiel: Yeah. That makes we wanna go out and do that now. Margaret: I feel like there’s some example of that in English of that that I came across once, but I don’t remember what it would’ve been. That’s so interesting. George: That’s kind of rare. I mean, you’ll find a lot of examples in here of all kinds of things because he’s trying to use the examples that people gave in their own theories. This is what I was going to bring up in the beginning is don’t just make your homophones or let them occur by chance and not think a little bit about that because homophones do have an effect on how the rest of the language system develops. There’s that where that’s probably a rare thing for a homophone to drag a semantically related word into a new sense. Something that happens a lot is stuff like homophone-avoidance. An example that he has is, in Gascon, the Latin “gallus” and “gatos” merged to – I’m not sure, is this [gat] {00:58:48} or [xat] {00:58:49}? I think Gascon has [xat]. But anyway, they merged to one form in certain dialects. In those areas where that merger occurred, other things were brought in to mean “chicken” because “gallus” means “rooster.” Other things got brought in to mean “rooster” because “rooster” and “cat” being homophones is kind of detrimental, especially in a farming society. So, “gallus” and “gatos” merging was not good, so they brought in words meaning “pheasant,” and there’s one that means “curate” that got pinched to mean “rooster.” Ezekiel: “Curate”? George: I don’t know. But the point is there was this merger and people didn’t want to use the same word for both of them, so that left a void that led other words into that space. {01:00:02} That could be a source of polysemy or it could be just a source of etymological changes. Ezekiel: This is adjacent to what we’re talking about, but what you’ve just mentioned really makes me think of avoidance registers in Australian languages. In these avoidance registers – so there’re certain taboo family members and you’re not allowed to use certain vocabulary around them, and so you have to use another word. There are ritually prescribed words that you use. The origins of these words are really interesting. Sometimes, they’re borrowed from neighboring languages. Sometimes, it seems that they’re invented, that they are conwords, that they are like nonsense words. Sometimes, they’re alterations through affixation, etc., of other vocabulary words. In societies where there are such avoidance registers and there are taboo words, sometimes the vocabulary will consciously shift. For example, there’s an important person whose name is a commonly used enough word, and this person dies, it’s not unheard of in certain societies for people to avoid that word and have to substitute it with another one. George: That is another thing. But I mean, again, the lexicon is a system. Those words have to come from somewhere so either they’re going to shed their own meaning and leave a void, or they’re going to become polysemous and start referring to the other thing. You shouldn’t be afraid of overlapping senses either because in real languages, the meaning of a word is not really what’s in the dictionary. The meaning in people’s heads is like they develop a prototype and things that are surrounding that prototype that are similar enough end up being called that word. The boundaries of words are fuzzy. Let’s think – oh, think about a knife and a sword, right? What exactly is the distinction between a knife and a sword? It’s like there are swords that have single blades so it’s not that, even though knives usually only have a single edge. There’re single-edged swords too. Length? Well, a machete is about as some very short swords. Margaret: If it’s not necessarily length, is it purpose, perhaps? Or is it breadth? Maybe “knife” is a broader category than “sword,” and “sword” is a, usually, big knife that you use to probably hurt people with. George: Yeah. Well, swords are always specialized weapons. Margaret: You don’t really use swords for normal cutting – usually. George: Some knives are just tools, some are actually specialized weapons, but that’s where the fuzziness comes in. Another thing is, I think about this in the supermarket now because I go to buy animal crackers and I’m like, “Is our animal crackers a cookie or a cracker?” Margaret: That’s a problem. Well, the knife thing reminds me of something I did in Karkin, which is one of my other languages. I have a word for it that’s usually translated “knife,” but it always “knife” in the context of “knife” being a weapon because its etymology is related to the word for “blood.” Essentially, it could be something like “a bleeder” – something that makes someone bleed. You can’t use it to mean, “Oh, hand me that knife. I’m gonna cut the bread,” because if you did, it would be really sinister. So, I was thinking about the purposes of the different tools rather than their shape or form, exactly. I was like, “I’m gonna make words based on intention and purpose of a tool rather than how they just look or are.” That was one of the results of that. Then, the word for a knife as a tool, as a non-violent tool, is something else. You never have to worry about that. But English, you don’t know, right? {01:05:01} George: Looking at different languages will help you out with this too because I just thought of this because the knife and sword thing just popped out. In Chinese, the distinction is mainly just double-edged versus single-edged. “Jiàn 剑” is specifically a double-edged sword – a straight, doubled-edged sword. And “dāo 刀” can mean a knife or it can mean a single-edged sword. There’s even compounds of “dāo.” “Jiǎndāo” means “scissors.” It’s like – I forget what “jiǎn” is – but they’re like a specific type of “knife,” quote-unquote, but the individual blades are single-edged. Margaret: That’s interesting. It’s similar for the word for “scissors” in Rílin being “twin knife.” That’s basically connected so. George: That’s sort of another thing. Where you’re putting boundaries between words can end up affecting where they end up in other places with the polysemy. We had started talking about polysemy, but we’re kind of talking about lexicon building in general. Ezekiel: Well, it is all related. You do have to draw from other sources because there’s no book that you can buy on how to build a polysemous lexicon. You have to feel it out for yourself as you go along. Margaret: A lot of things can help you with that. There’s a lot of different resources that are not about that specifically but all work toward this general goal of – like these books on semantics and the book you mentioned earlier – or I guess you mention it in the notes of the – what is it? Women, Fire and Other Dangerous things? Ezekiel: Yeah. Margaret: That’s a good one. Ezekiel: Would you like to talk about inspiration, and how to get started doing this, and how to train yourself in this? Would this be a good time for that? George: Yeah. You have a list here – Zeke, I guess you put it – is bilingual dictionaries – that’s great – Wiktionary – Wiktionary’s always part of my process; I might go over that in a minute – William’s paper – so “A Conlanger’s Thesaurus” – and “World lexicon of grammaticalization.” I would add to that CLICS3. Ezekiel: Yes. I use CLICS3 in a very specific way in my process. I use CLICS3 essentially to double check the work that I’ve already done. I wanna make sure that if I’ve come up with a constellation of senses, that they’re not too specific to one existent nat language family. I don’t wanna create something that feels like it’s from South East Asia necessarily. I don’t wanna create something that feels like it’s from Sub-Saharan Africa. I want my polysemies to be cross-linguistically sound, idiosyncratic in their own way, but I want them to feel like they belong to the other vocabulary in the language and not to some other part of the world. And CLICS3 is great for that because CLICS3 is very general. You’re not gonna get some in-depth reading and food for thought from CLICS3. CLICS3 will point you in different directions – let you know if something you’re thinking about is done by nat langs or not, but it’s not like Wiktionary, for example, where it’ll give you fairly idiosyncratic lists of meanings. George: I do things differently from you. I will go into that in a minute. But first thing I want to say is I get what you are talking about there with not wanting to be too specific because – this is totally unrelated to the lexicon – but when I was working with Istatikii and I was wanting to do a direct inverse agreement system, I did not really settle on actually doing that until I found a paper that was comparing the Algonquian languages, which I’d already heard of, and – I’m not sure how to pronounce it – “rGyarung” or something. {01:10:02} It’s a Sino-Tibetan subfamily. Because of that, since I had it attested in multiple language families and I could look at how it worked in different language families, then I was able to make my own system that hopefully is more unique and not ripping off Ojibway. But back to the tools – Margaret, do you use any particular tools or resources when you’re trying to work on polysemy or lexicon building? Margaret: No. It hadn’t really occurred to me to use any particular sources, but I kinda just got inspired and would remember things that I had read about different languages or in my own daily work with languages and whatever I’m doing – not just conlanging but linguistics and whatever. I would do some things and think like, “Oh, that’s a really good point” or “Man, yeah. I guess” – I would have a word in a language and feel like it was too relex-y, and I would start to play with it creatively and be like, “Okay. Let’s see where this can go.” But now that you guys mention it, it’s a really good idea to check up on some of these resources for new ideas and to kind of just check yourself and make sure you’re not relexing somebody else’s semantic web or whatever because that’s something that I try to avoid in conlanging – in a priori conlanging especially – I don’t wanna copy anything from anybody, really. It supposed to be a synthesis of what I know as a person. That’s a really good point that you make. These resources are actually really good ideas. So, I haven’t really used anything in particular myself. I kinda just go for it. But these – yeah. I’ll probably start to do a little more in-depth, directed research now that you’ve mentioned these sources because they look like really good ideas. George: Well, I do wanna say, you actually do fieldwork, so you have access and inspiration that a lot of conlangers don’t necessarily have. Margaret: That’s true. I think that a lot of my inspiration just comes from all sorts of sources all over the place. I don’t even know exactly what they are. George: That’s totally understandable. My process – when I was doing Lexember, actually, I was doing this – is – and there I was doing etymology, but etymology and polysemy are basically cousins. So, it’s not that far away. I would look at CLICS3 first, actually, because for me CLICS3 was a place to get inspiration and say, “Okay. I want this word” – I was doing etymology, so I wanna see what this word could possibly come from. Knowing what links there are in the CLICS3 are good. CLICS3 doesn’t have everything. It’s just very high-frequency concepts. Sometimes, it just doesn’t show me anything. Other times, it shows me a map and I’m not satisfied. Another thing that I used for inspiration was STEDT, which is the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary. That’s specific to one language family, but it still is pretty good just to get a sense of realistic changes. You kinda have to wade through it because a whole lot of the time, you’ll look up a word and everybody just derived it from something that meant that word way back in some higher branch in the Sino-Tibetan family. I don’t know if that’s an artifact of the reconstruction or an actual fact that a lot of words just didn’t change. That’s another part of that. Then, I would go to Wiktionary and – I don’t know if this is what you do, Zeke – but my thing with Wiktionary is I’ll go there, I’ll read the English etymology, maybe I’ll click back through to Proto-Indo-European, and I will go down and find the sense of the word in the translations that I want and click through to the different languages. It’s very spotty. Highly studied languages you get more information than less-studied languages. {01:14:56} But I often will get languages from several different families that have different ranges of polysemy and different etymologies for these words that are satisfying for me to try to brainstorm ideas. And Wiktionary has everything. Ezekiel: It does. Wiktionary is very hit or miss. There are a couple of translations of English Wiktionary collections that I think are far better than others. The Arabic one is pretty good. Latvian is very good. I use Latvian a lot for Hemackle, which is my Germanic a posteriori project, because it’s spoken in the extreme north of Europe. Latvian is very good. Scottish Gaelic is very good. The Wiktionary is very good. George: When you look at Chinese or anything that uses Chinese script, you have to be careful how you read it because sometimes it has both the character etymology and the spoken etymology – the actual language etymology. Sometimes, it’s like one or the other and it’s not always 100% clear which one you’re referring to, so you have to be a little careful. But still, that’s like double information when you get both of those. It’s really cool. Ezekiel: Absolutely. George: But you’re right, it’s spotty. You’ll get one language that has a lot of information and one that doesn’t. But it’s a lot easier than trying to – I think I have a seven-language multilingual dictionary, but I never use that because it’s a paper dictionary and I just don’t want to page through everything. Ezekiel: I have my Karyoł library sitting here next to me. There are five bilingual dictionaries that I’ve used for inspiration with Karyoł. I can really recommend some of them if somebody wants to add a little bit of Sub-Saharan African feel to one of their conlang projects. Dent & Nyembezi’s Scholar’s Zulu Dictionary is incredibly good. So is the Comprehensive Oromo-English Dictionary by Tilahun Gamta. These I actually got – well, I can say this. If anybody is in the New York City area, I really heartily recommend East Village Books. It’s this tiny little place. It’s on St. Mark’s Place. It’s a tiny little basement shop. It’s the size of my living room. It’s not a very nice place. They have unfinished hardwood floors. But it’s just so charming and old New York, and they have a linguistics section. The Strand doesn’t even have a linguistics section, but this tiny little basement shop has a linguistics section. You can buy some pretty interesting esoterica in there for under $10.00. It’s all used. My copy of the Scholar’s Zulu Dictionary, I got for $6.50. I looked it up on Amazon today. On Amazon Marketplace it’s going for like $25.00. My copy of Tilahun Gamta’s dictionary – $13.00. It’s like $600.00 on Amazon right now. It’s a rare book. If you’re looking for bilingual dictionaries – used bookstores, that’s the way to go. Absolutely. Margaret: Nice! That’s really great to hear. George: Okay. Now, I just am seeing that we are getting very long on time, so I think it’s time to start wrapping things up. But, yeah, Zeke, if you can list all those resources in the doc, I can put them in the show notes. Ezekiel: Absolutely. I’m gonna update it now. Margaret: That would be great. George: Here’s what I want to be a takeaway of – I think there’s two angles that you want to be looking from that are coming out of this. One is the lexicon as a system, which is going to help you define where words need to be and where things can end up expanding out. The other is the story of individual words. We haven’t touched on everything. {01:20:00} There’s much more to this than even that. Words can be influenced by foreign words that are coming in and causing the semantics of a native word to change to conform to it. There are all kinds of things that can happen. A change in environment, or the speakers can be a big thing we haven’t touched on. But the main thing is each individual word has a story and then the whole lexicon fits together as a system. If you can balance those two things and think creatively about where your words can go, then you can do good examples of polysemy. Margaret: I think to kind of wrap up what you had said earlier, I think that it’s important to remember that none of your lexemes exist in a void. Even though you can make an individual lexeme – an individual word – and say, “Okay. That’s that word. On to the next,” as we’ve seen, they can influence each other. They’re all in there together. In the minds of the speaker, they’re not just a serious of single words, but there’s this whole web of connections. Sometimes, when you pull one string, it can affect something else. I think that using stuff like etymology, polysemy, lexicography – all this stuff can be really interrelated because the lexemes themselves are really interrelated just by their nature. Ezekiel: I was thinking, on a parting note, I think insofar as the nuts and bolts, the craft, of actually putting these things together is concerned, a word of caution – you can go too far. You wanna practice naturalism in this, and so you wanna keep your collection of senses to be fairly tight. As an example, in preparing for this talk I was flipping through my copy of Women, Fire, and Dangerous things. There’s a discussion on Dyirbal noun class in there, which has a lot of overlap with polysemy because it’s about prototypes and metaphorical extension and stuff like that. I was thinking about there’s – in the Dyirbal system of grammatical gender, cigarettes are assigned to one gender. I was trying to come up with as many different possible reasons why this could be. I thought, “Okay. So, it’s possible that” – it’s because if you open up a bag of flour, often dust will come out. Cigarettes give off smoke. And I imagined if that is the primary sense and that if it’s dust or smoke, and if Dyirbal were a conlang, where could you develop it from there? I immediately thought of fog. It’s very foggy here, especially in the mornings this time of year. I would feel that a constellation of meaning surrounding flour, fog, and smoke – I feel like that would be a good polysemy. But my mind continued to go along this path and, if I pushed it any farther, I think I’d be going too far. For an example, after “fog,” I thought, “What does fog do?” It impairs visibility when you’re on the road, for example. Perhaps, an extension from fog would be “blindness.” “Deafness” relates to “blindness” because they’re both privation of senses. They’re both in the same domain of experience. So, it would be possible from “blindness” to develop into “deafness.” That all makes sense. It makes sense on paper. But I don’t feel like you would ever find that in a nat lang underneath one – George: Yeah. I think that’s where your free-associating and developing out this word story ends up butting up against the lexicon as a system and what is the lexicon doing. Your extent to blindness, that’s starting to get weird but not that bad. But then extending from “blindness” to “deafness” – I can see that happening on its own, but it’s really a bit of a stretch for it to still have the meaning of “fog,” and “smoke,” and “flour,” and then extend to “blindness” and to “deafness.” {01:25:02} Because people are gonna want to have those distinct. And also all the rest of the constellation of meanings seem to be more “blindness” being on the outside because all of these things can impair vision, right? Margaret: I think it’s okay to make, sometimes, these big leaps, but I think that to make several big leaps in one lexeme is pushing it a little bit occasionally – not that you couldn’t do it if you liked it. I mean, if you like that, obviously go for it. But in terms of natural language, I mean, I think it starts to just – my suspension of disbelief is just destroyed briefly by that. I think some of that – if you were to take those types of leaps and separate them into two different parts of the lexicon and show me at separate times, I would be fine with it, but sometimes – yeah. George: I think for most purposes of conlangers, whether it is a naturalistic conlang, even things like an auxlang or an engelang, unless you’re just like, “This is a personal language. I’m gonna do whatever I want,” there’s a sense of people have to speak this language. At some point, you’re making so many logical leaps that either you got to lose some of the earlier senses and make it like a chain semantic shift or you’re gonna have to stop spreading it out. That’s a nice little word of warning at the end here, after we’ve got people excited about making big, long dictionary entries. So, have fun. Go on out there. Do some reading and some work and figure out – maybe go through your existing dictionary entries and say, “Can this have a couple more senses?” That’s one thing I’ve done before and it’s very interesting to work on. Or as you’re making words, think about where can this word go. Hopefully, we’ve given people some ideas. Ezekiel: And I would say a final final final final thought is that if you’re somebody, especially for younger conlangers, if you’re trying to get your friends engaged in what you’re doing and they’re not particularly interested – I remember making languages myself in high school and my friends being excited for me that I was excited about this but unenthusiastic themselves – your vocabulary is a great way to get people involved in what you’re doing. At the Philadelphia Conlang Salon, one of the guys who we would meet there with, Jon Martin, said, “After all, people publish all these popular linguistics books about kooky words in the world’s languages, but we will be hard pressed to find on a shelf in a bookstore a popular language book about some kooky syntactic structure.” If you wanna talk to your friends about what you’re doing, vocabulary is a great way to get them hooked too. Margaret: Yeah. I definitely agree on that. People love to hear about strange meanings of words that they don’t know. George: That’s great. Share it with your friends too. All right. Thank you, Margaret and Zeke, for being on the show! Margaret: Thank you for having me. Zeke: Thank you. George: Hope you guys have a nice night. To our listeners, I’m hoping that you guys have some new inspiration for your conlangs and for polysemy and lexicon building in general. With all of that said, I’m gonna say, Happy Conlanging! {Music} George: Thank you for listening to Conlangery. You can find our archives and show notes at conlangery.com. Follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter by searching for “Conlangery.” Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons at Patreon. To become a patron, go to patreon.com/conlangery and pledge your monthly amount. As little as a dollar will help us out. A special thanks to Ezekiel Fordsmender, Margaret Ransdell-Green, Graham Hill, and all of those who have chosen to support us. Conlangery is under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-commercial – Share-Alike license. You may use Conlangery episodes or any noncommercial work as long as credit is provided to us, and you release your work under the same license. Conlangery’s website is created by Bianca Richards, our theme music is by Null Device, and transcriptions of our episodes have been provided by Sarah Dopierala. Kasaral. {Music} {01:30:53}