Conlangery Podcast

George brings on two conlanger DMs, Joey Windsor and David J Peterson, to discuss how to incorporate conlanging into Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. Top of Show Greeting: Boral (by Jack Keynes) Links and Resources: The 5E d20 Standard Reference DocumentMatt Colville’s YouTube channelThe ChainMatt Colville speaking “Gith”D&D BeyondShadowrunA list of role-playing games Transcript PDFDownload Plain TextDownload {00:00:00} Greeting: Nos som Ideologofaction, l’astravocal lengaç costroit e lour y ci hom realisour partenent. /no ˈsɔm ˌideoˌlogofakˈʦjɔn | ˌlastʀavoˈkal lɛnˌgaʦ kosˈtʀɔjt e ˌluʀ i ʦi ˈɔm ˌʀealiˈzuʀ ˌpaʀteˈnɛnt/ “We are Conlangery, the podcast about built languages and their creators.” (Boral, Jack Keynes) {Music} George: Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. With me over in sunny California, we have David J. Peterson. David: Hi. I have a balloon with me. George: I don’t know how to respond to that. But up in Canada – David: It’s letting out air. George: Okay. Up in Canada, we’ve got Joey Windsor. Joey: Greetings from Calgary where kitty litter in the back of a car is for ice not pets. George: Ah, okay. So, I’m guessing it keeps the ice down without being as corrosive as salt would be, right? Joey: It gives you emergency traction on the road and confuses David wonderfully. George: Yes. Yes. Emergency traction. Joey: It’s also a service. George: Hm? Joey: It’s a service to the neighborhood. After you get your car going, you drive off and, pretty soon, there’s a lot of cat poop on the road. George: That might be unpleasant for some people. All right. We have these two gentlemen on here because a topic came up during Lexember actually, mostly because of Joey’s tweets because Joey was doing D&D conlangs. I was just thinking about, you know, there are people who use conlangs in D&D. I’ll get a couple of them on. I know that Joey does it and David does it. Both of you are actually DMs and use them in DMing right? Joey: Most recently, yeah. I also use them as a player once in a while. George: Yeah. I think we’ll talk a little bit about that too. I mean, it’s something that can be used on both sides of it, though there’s probably the question of if you’re doing it as a player, is it something that your DM allows you to construct for him. We’ll get into that. First, I’m just gonna say Conlangery is supported entirely by our patrons over at Patreon. If you would like to help the show get better, give me a little bit of money in my pocket, then you can over to patreon.com/conlangery and pledge a monthly amount. We have some rewards up there. I have some things in the works. Right now, the main thing that I’m looking at is I’m talking to someone who’s a transcriptionist and I’m gonna budget a certain amount for her to start transcribing the show. But if I could get more pledges, I could get through the backlog a lot quicker than I would be doing now. So, look out for that. Go pledge some money to us because, you know, right now I have to have a day job. I’m very bad at Patreon pitches. David: I’m convinced. George: All right. Let’s get started. Conlangs and D&D – this is a really nice place to apply conlangs if you’ve got a group that is into it because you’re – David: I’m gonna be on the “It doesn’t matter” fence. It doesn’t matter whether they’re into it or not. We’ll get to that in a moment. George: Oh, okay. Well, we’ll talk about that. But basically a big part of D&D is the world-building. Conlanging is part of world-building. It’s a great way to add some verisimilitude into the world. Why would you not want to apply your conlanging to things? I have not been able to find the time to actually play D&D, so I watch way too many videos and livestreams of it. {00:05:01} Matt Colville says, “Take the things you like and put them in your game.” Well, our listeners, you like conlangs. Put the conlangs in your game. Let’s talk a little bit about how that works. Now, let’s actually talk about, first, how much buy-in you need from – especially if you’re a DM trying to get this to players – how much buy-in do you need from the players? David, we’ll star with you since you had that thought. David: You don’t need any buy-in. Basically, the way that I look at it, when it comes to any element of world-building, aside from it being purely a matter of taste – so, for example, let’s just say that you came up with some sort of a language for one group and your player has decided, “You know what? I just don’t like pre-nasalized stops. Get ‘em out of here! I hate this language because of the pre-nasalized stops.” That’s one thing. But aside from using a created language at all, you don’t need buy-in. If it feels like you should, if your players are not working with it, it means that you haven’t implemented it well. So, that falls onto the DM. In other words, it’s not about whether your players are okay with it, it’s how they’re interacting with it and how that interaction has been scaffolded. The way I like to figure it is, basically, your players should be able to do whatever their characters are able to do effortlessly – effortlessly. However, if it should take their characters effort, then you should make it effortful unless that part of it isn’t fun, in which case you can just be shunted off. Then, what that means is like, when you think about, I guess, from a Macros perspective – especially for those who haven’t done D&D but who have conlanged – if you think about incorporating a conlang into the game, probably the first thing you think about is like, “Oh, your character is supposed to speak this language. I’m the DM and I don’t understand anything you say unless you say it out loud in this conlang which I provided for you that you must learn.” But that’s really not the way it should be implemented. Joey, you wanna kind of take it from there? Joey: Well, I’m gonna take the cue like, George, you already brought out Matt Colville as a DM. When he was starting the Chain of Acheron series, every once in a while, he would say something in Githyanki, I think it was. And I was like, “Oh, cool! I actually invented that language! Here, please use my grammar.” He ignored all my tweets. But for Matt Colville, it was just him going, “Aw, I think Gith would sound like this,” and adlibbing something off the fly. And all the players round the table were like, “Oh, yeah! That’s cool. That’s what they would sound like.” But you know – George: Yeah. He’s not a conlanger – definitely. Joey: No. I think he does appreciate the effort people put in. But exactly what David said – this is part of the world. If you walk by and you hear something, and if a conlanger is your DM, and if you walk past an alleyway and you hear some strange hissing that sounds like language but you’re not sure what it is, and the players go, “Oh, I roll a perception check. What does it actually sound like?” And you say, “Oh, it says,” I dunno, something like, [koɪtisalrulapʊl] {00:08:32} You’re gonna be like, “Cool. I can choose to engage with that, or I’ve just gotten a really cool piece of flavor.” In my experience, there is one linguist at my table quite frequently, but all of the other players are like, “Oh, I need to make a mental note of that, see if I can find someone who can translate it or tell me what the language is or” – even if they’re exploring a shipwreck, I’ll put the name of the ship in some conscript that I’ve come up with. And they inevitably write it down and go and try and find someone to translate it in case it’s meaningful for them. Buy-in is not a problem at all, from that perspective. George: I think what both of you are getting at is you need to build it into the game in a way that’s fun. Forcing players to speak in a conlang in order to play at all is not very fun because it’s difficult to go from 0 to 100 like that. But having little snippets of it for flavor and then the option of being able to translate something later or maybe having your character learn it or something, that sounds more like it’s something that can be fun for some players if they choose to engage with it, but they don’t have to have it rammed down their throats. {00:10:06} David: To give you an example, all of the – well, let’s just say if you’re going with a typical D&D setting like the ones that come out of the box, all of the various races are supposed to speak different languages. Some of them share languages. Some of them have negligibly different languages. They even have little write-ups for these things that are very poor in quality. But the idea though is that it works just like when you’re reading fiction. Even though, when you’re reading something like a Game of Thrones that’s written in English, the idea is that the characters are all supposed to be speaking a language called the “Common Tongue,” which is actually different from English. We’re just translating it because it’s too much to force your reader to learn an entire language in order to read a book. The same goes for D&D. In other words, all of your characters will end up speaking a language. It probably will be called the Common Tongue that most of the NPCs around you also speak. So, you don’t need a conlang for that. But there might also be other languages that are different from the one that everybody speaks. So, like in the first group that I played with, I think there was one dwarf, one human, one gnome, one elf, and then one turtle-person. It happened that the elves were gonna be doing things in this game. So, that elf character could understand when people were saying things in Elvish and could understand when it was written in Elvish. If he decided that he wanted to share everything with the group, then you just kinda bypass the conlang and did everything in English because he just got the information and relayed it, let’s say, almost immediately. However, since he is technically the only person that understands that language, it’s his choice. He might decide, “You know what? I feel like I don’t wanna translate everything that’s being said right now for the group,” in which case you can just say it directly to them. I usually do it via text message. But also, I mean, the group is there and just like – let’s say you were with a group of four friends in Spain and you were the only one that spoke Spanish, they could also take a shot at trying to understand what was said if they wanted to. They might not have any cognates in common, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t try to give it a shot. Joey: Yeah. There’d be body language and stuff. David: The same thing works especially with written language. If there’s something that could be written in a conlang that nobody understands, I would write it all out and give it to them with the understanding that none of them speak it. But if they wanted to try to puzzle it out, they could if they thought that was fun. If they didn’t, they could just hang onto it and see if they could find somebody to translate it. You know, you give them the chance – the same opportunity that you would have being in a country where you can’t read the script and don’t understand the language. You might not be able to even sound anything out, but you might recognize, “Wait a minute. I’ve seen three different police stations and they all have this sequence of glyphs, so that probably has something to do with police I’m gonna guess.” You know what I mean? Joey: I like using the written conlangs a lot in my game. One of the things – and I think this is a pet peeve of yours, George – is Draconic is a language and every dragon in every cosmology speaks Draconic. Draconic is not one of my languages. It’s one of the D&D cannon languages that has a few words and everything. I’ve used that and I’ve said, “Oh, you’re a good person. You speak this dialect that has to do with the metallic dragons. But this seems a little odd. Maybe this is chromatic dragon,” or something, just making two dialects. And I give them an intelligence check to try and figure it out. I set different difficulty classes. The player actually ended up rolling really well. So, she got that the sentence in Draconic meant, “Go to the mountain cave and fetch my fire sword.” But what she didn’t realize is that there’s three different possessives in Draconic. One is for inanimate objects. One is for friends and relatives. And one is for all other nouns. The “my” in this example happened to be “relative,” so it was actually his relative, a red dragon, who happened to be named “Firesword.” {00:15:03} Weren’t they surprised when they showed up at the cave and there was a red dragon there! George: Oh, okay! You guys both bring up, also, other points that I wanna go into. One thing – you guys both mentioned doing skill checks in order to figure out something that you don’t know. One of the things that I feel is kind of limiting about D&D that was done probably just understandably to make things simpler but me as language nerd doesn’t like totally is there’s no gradation to your understanding of language. It’s just either you speak this language, or you don’t. Unless you’re a barbarian or have certain backgrounds or something, if you speak it, you can read it. It’s this weird place – how do you guys handle it? Is it just different kinds of skill checks like perception, intuition, whatever – or insight, not intuition. David: I don’t think that’s relegated solely to D&D. I think that’s a part of many different types of fiction. I think it’s what a lot of people understand the world to be. For many people, either you speak a language, or you don’t. They’re like, “Can you speak this language?” and if you start to answer like, “Well, I’m pretty good with blah blah blah blah blah.” It’s like, “Okay. So, you don’t?” And it’s like, “Well, that’s not reality.” But that is reality for a lot of people in terms of how they believe language is supposed to work even though it probably isn’t true of their own competence of foreign languages. For example, anybody who’s taken a year of Spanish and says that they don’t speak Spanish, they didn’t pay much attention in high school, they’re gonna do better understanding something in Spanish than they will something in Mandarin or something in Vietnamese. It’s not something that, I think, activates for a lot of people. It’s not something they realize. So, it’s no wonder that when you build something up like D&D and you incorporate language into it – and in the language guides it’s gonna be like, “Here are your races. These races will speak these languages. If you want to speak extra of them, you can add this as a skill or a feature, and you speak more of these languages. You’ll speak all of these languages fluently and all of the other languages you will speak zero of.” Joey: And automatically be able to read and write too. David: Yes. That’s the other thing you brought up. Most of these people should probably not be able to read and write even if they speak the language. Joey: That was something back in second edition. Back in second edition D&D, you needed to take a skill in reading/writing competence. Then, when third edition came out, they just said, “If you speak the language, you also write it. We’re gonna assume everyone’s literate except for,” as George said, “barbarians who start the game with illiteracy as a feature of their class.” But that’s been lost, unfortunately, from the core rule books. George: I feel like that’s a thing – I feel like if I were going to run things, one thing that I would make would be a slightly different language system that would at least have two levels. You would have some languages you are proficient in and some that you are acquainted with, and you have to make a skill check or have certain penalties when you’re trying to use them. That is one thing that you would have to have players buy into and understand that this is a thing. Joey: I do that. George: You do? Joey: It says in the core books that, I think, goblins use the Dwarven script. If I have a character that speaks, reads, and writes Dwarven, I’ll at least give them a shot at muddling through some of the Goblin and going, “Okay. This word sounds familiar.” And you think that might be “north.” You don’t know what the sentence means, but you’re pretty sure you got “north” out of it, or something like that. David: It also gives you the opportunity to mess with false cognates. You essentially give somebody, I would say, a wisdom check where, if you pass the wisdom check, it makes you reflect and think, “Wait. Just because that word sounds very similar to a word I know, it doesn’t mean it means the same thing.” Whereas, if you fail, it’d be like, “Yep. That’s the word for ‘safety.’ Let’s go! We’re fine.” George: I think that Shadowrun has four levels for each language. But I think that’s too much granularity. It’s a little bit complicated. {00:20:01} David: It is interesting though. I wanna look this up. George: I did like that fifth edition – I know that third edition, which is the one that I have played before, had it so, like, your intelligence modifier determined how many languages you spoke. They got rid of that, I think, in fifth edition and moved it to background, which makes a whole lot more sense. Joey: Yes. Yes, it does. George: Yes. There are very, very smart people who only speak one language. Joey: I mean, they are assuming a bit of a melting pot. If you’re going to assume that every player or character can automatically read and write every language they speak, then they’re probably noble of some descent and they’ve probably been required to learn multiple languages. But I’m not sure that much thought actually went into it. George: I think it was just, like, the standard American tendency of thinking that if you speak more than one language that is because you’re smarter and your studied them in school, which is not how most people become multilingual in the world. But, anyway, going on from world building because one of the interesting things about it – and it’s true in most role playing systems, but you guys have both run D&D and I’m familiar with D&D, so we can talk about it from there – is there’s a lot of the world-building that’s kind of done for you and then you have to see about what you’re going to do. So, the most obvious one for that – and the one that if I’m building a D&D world, I would probably want to change – is the whole thing of one language per race. The exotic languages – like Draconic is fine. Maybe I can say that the Draconic that wizards and sorcerers automatically get is ancient Draconic to be like, “This is the magical language of the oldest dragons.” That’s cool. But why is it Dwarves speak Dwarvish and Elves speak Elvish and humans speak Common, which automatically we’re like, “Wait a minute. So, humans are in charge of everything?” Joey, you do a lot of conlanging actually for your world. Do you mess with those relationships much? Joey: Not as much as I want to, and I think that’s a matter of time. So, for example, I was talking about the Gith language earlier. I have a Proto-Gith language and two sister – well, two daughters – of Proto-Gith. That reflects the fact that there was a branch in the Githyanki and the Githzerai. I think one of them has voiced stops and the other one has – like, a voice/voiceless distinction – the other one has aspirated/unaspirated distinction. One of them has velars, the other one has uvulars, and a few other little changes like that – plus some lexical items to do fun things. I like messing with that dialectally. Or, if I have a player who speaks Elven and they go into the Underdark, I’m like “Well, Drow is definitely not the same as Elven, so you’re gonna get a couple of,” like David was saying, “false friends with the cognates. You can probably figure out a system of communication, very rudimentary, but it’s very much a different language. Or, if you end up on the other side of the continent, Common isn’t so Common because I think of it as “common to the local variety,” and if you’re not from that local place, you don’t speak that common language. That’s my stance on it at least. David: “Dwarvish” means “Common” in Dwarvish. Joey: Exactly. David: I would say that the reason that you probably have one race for one language in all of the D&D settings is because they’re all rather self-contained. It’s not only the case that it’s, say, the elves that speak Elvish, it’s also the case that the elves are all in one area. It’s like 99.9% of elves in the world reside in Elfland, and they speak Elvish, and they talk to each other only pretty much all the time except for the 0.1% that serve as the NPCs that you need to interact with that are miraculously wherever they need to be. {00:24:58} So, I’m not sure which one is more unrealistic. But in my case, the way I looked at it was, I kind of ignored whatever the races were, and I just said, “Let’s just stick with regions.” So, it’s like, “All right. In this region, this is the language that’s going to be spoken. If most of the people that are there are dwarves, then that’s fine.” The thing is, if you go to some other region and there happen to be dwarves there, if they are long removed from the first region, they might not even speak Dwarvish anymore if they came from there. They’re gonna speak whatever the local variety is. In that way, I try to make it stick so that it was languages per region. Of course, the big elephant in the room that we’re not mentioning here is that, in addition to the incredible investment of time required to create a campaign and maintain it and keep it running, there is also the investment of time that comes with creating languages, which is something conlangers are well familiar with. This is why, when I went to do my DM campaign, I didn’t create new languages. For the languages that I needed, I took languages that I already created that I thought worked well enough. Specifically, I also chose languages that I thought I might be using later on so that if I was fleshing them out, I would be killing two birds with one stone, so. Joey: I mean, guilty as charged. Before I got really, really into conlanging, I have slipped Klingon into a few of my D&D games just to give them some other worldly flavor. Like, “This is very obviously a different language.” But I try not to do that too often. George: Good for orcs or dwarves or something. I mean, if you were seriously conlanging for – like the stuff that you do, David – for movies and stuff, or for a book project or something, you wouldn’t want to do something like that. But for a D&D game where it’s all in fun and nobody really cares that much, that makes sense to me that you could use something that’s pre-existing that, maybe it wasn’t made for this setting, but it gives you the idea that these people are speaking another language that has meaning to it. David: I mean, Empire of the Petal Throne is the best way to go about it. In some ways, it’s a life-long project, and it also can be, I guess, disillusioning to put a lot of work into something like this and then have the campaign filter out after three or four meetings, which happens. George: That’s the other thing is how much time investment do you want to put into this particular campaign if it ends up not working out well, which, I mean, maybe you can use the same world for another campaign in the future or something like that. But it’s up to each person how much time and effort you want to do, in addition to DMing. Because if you’re doing the world-building, you’re probably going to be the DM. Joey: George. George: Hm? Joey: Just from Lexember this year, you’re familiar with my Tekhwosian conlang. I started that, I think, probably two years ago. I’ve got the character’s names who are gonna play in this game. I already know that the linguist character is going to be Dr. Thaddeus Charles Etterington because my player made that character name. I’ve been working on Tekhwosian now for two years. I’ve been working on the game for two years – people haven’t even played it! But I don’t care because I’m also a conlanger. So, I’m just in the process of creating this language. It lets me world-build. I’ve never gotten to use it or never got the campaign before, but I’m still having fun just conlanging anyway. David: Yeah. That’s cool. It’s just really hard managing adult schedules. Joey: Yeah. George: Can we talk a little bit about Tekhwosian? Because what you did for Lexember – reading through the stuff about Tekhwosian – there’s all these interesting things that, I think, you were building it into your world and also building it for the game in an interesting way. Because your source for all of the notes on each word that you’re giving – like the primary source that it goes back to – is a guy called “Kest the Provider,” who wanted to conquer the Tekhwosians, right? And he had a guy he was working with, Fmonikh, right? What is it? {00:30:09} Joey: [fmonɪx] {00:30:10} George: [fmonɪx]. Okay. You sort of made a little bit of mystery and a little bit of a puzzle in that he is not sensitive to all the distinctions in it, and so his material is very unreliable, in addition to just being an outsider, right? Can you talk a little bit about what your reasoning was there and how did you build that out? Joey: As a Dungeon Master, I’m setting this game kinda Indian Jones style. My characters will have access to firearms, which have been built into recent D&D settings like Waterdeep and things like that. They’re going to be university professors and, thanks to the dissertation by Dr. Charles Thaddeus Etterington, he has figured out that Tekhwosian was actually a pitch-accent language and Kest the Provider, a warlord that existed some 3000 years prior and completely devastated the Tekhwosian culture, wasn’t sensitive to pitch-accent distinctions in the language. He just thought there were homophones all over the place – or homonyms all over the place – when it wasn’t true. He also wasn’t sensitive to the distinction between an obstruent coda and then a glide-onset versus just a rounded obstruent, which is a phoneme in the language which also puts in a few more problems. The background of the game is, after this professor figures out it’s a pitch-accent language, all of these previous archeological expeditions that have gone to the mouth of the river looking for the Tekhwosian culture has failed, and he goes, “Well, this doesn’t have to mean ‘the mouth of the river.’ This is also a compound form that means ‘waterfall.’ If we go to the other end of the river, there’s a waterfall and nobody’s investigated that area yet.” The party assembles and they go away with this knowledge. I will make available my Tekhwosian grammar for anyone’s who’s actually interested. But when they come up with something, I’m gonna say, “You’re reminded of an excerpt from Kest’s journal where he calls this either this or this. You can translate it one of these two ways.” Then, it’s up to the player characters to decide, “Well, we really think this is probably the translation. Let’s assume it’s correct and act accordingly,” which means – at one point, they have to find either the heart of the king or the heart of the mountain, which would be a mine shaft – “king” and “mountain” being one of these minimal pairs. They can go down this ancient mine shaft, or they can go looking for wherever the king happens to be buried, as an example. The players don’t have to do a lot of conlang interpretation if they don’t want to, they’re just gonna be constantly presented with “This could mean this, or it could mean this. Take your best guess, and let’s see how it plays out.” David: Wow. That’s really cool. I like that. Joey: I hope it pans out. I’m looking forward to playing it one day. George: I definitely like that approach. I think that shows how rewarding it can be if you do try to do this. But, at the same time, it’s a lot of work to put into something that’s – so, David, you talked about you just break it out into regions and talk about it in regional ways. And then, Joey, you were talking about the Common here is not the Common there. Which I think is more the way I would want to run it would be – Joey: It’s kinda two ways of saying the same thing. George: Yeah. It is, really. Because D&D campaigns usually will start in a small, constrained area, right, especially if you’re taking seriously that this is a pseudo-medieval setting. People can’t really move that far around easily until they start getting magic and stuff. So, I can see that happening and, like, I can zoom in on this one area that’s gonna be the starting area and say, “Okay, what is the lingua franca here? What are the minority languages here? What other races live here? Do they have different languages?” And that can make sense. But I would not want to put it as strictly one language per race. {00:34:59} I’d probably want to have – at least humans would have several different language families. And then maybe because we wanna focus more on humans we can have some of the other races be slightly more monolithic. But still, maybe the elves have two languages, maybe the dwarves and the gnomes speak the same language – just depending on what the historical relationships between peoples are. David: In the case of my world, first it started off smaller than – I was looking at kind of a small area that I was working with and which was gonna expand. It really made sense to focus on region because basically you had a big elf kingdom that was self-contained and not widely spread. And then to the east of that was a Dwarven kingdom where, up north, that was where they started and then they kind of moved down south. So, there’s been a separation between the two areas. It’s the type of thing where you add a few centuries, they probably won’t be speaking the same language. But in this case, it was more recent. Then, after that, there’s a human kingdom. This is all in one landmass where all these people know about each other and are kind of talking to one another a little bit. But then, I needed to introduce a new set of humans that came from a distant place, kind of like an island mass that was far off to the east. Naturally, they spoke their own language. The thing that precipitated this was not the fact – I mean, what race they were; it didn’t matter – it was the fact that they were from an entirely different area that didn’t necessarily – I guess their place of origin wasn’t the same as the humans that started in this main continent area. There it was just – I dunno. The locale was just much more important. Naturally, most of the people they encountered in this main city did speak the language there, but they spoke it as a second language, which brought with it everything that that entails. It also allowed me to use that language as a second language for various purposes. In this case, it was tied to one of the major religions that was in the city – or in this kingdom – at the time. George: Great. That works. Joey: I was gonna say, one of the things we also haven’t touched on is, when we’re talking about races like elves – or in my case, Tieflings and other infernal beings – lifespan is gonna play a major role. For humans, we’re gonna change our language every generation or so – so every 25 to 50 years – and, after centuries, sure, you’re not speaking the same language. If you’re talking about the Infernal language where these demons have existed for eons, that language doesn’t change a lot. It might get new borrowings but, chances are, ancient Infernal is gonna be pretty close to modern Infernal or contemporary Infernal. George: Or not even going into exotic languages, but elves in D&D I think live, like, 700 years. Joey: Yeah. 500 to 700. George: So, in 700 years, great-great-great-grandpa is still alive for the elves, but for humans, that’s enough time for one language to be completely mutually unintelligible from its ancestor. So, you end up with weird – Joey: If an elf speaks the Common Tongue from 500 years ago, all of a sudden, another human shows up and it’s this weird, archaic Old English or something. George: Yeah. Although, there is a question of, how are you gonna mix up all the races together? If you ended up with an elven and human kingdom where there’s – let’s say the elves are the nobility mostly, and then you have humans and there’s intermarriage so there’s lots of half-elves, you’ve got people of wildly different longevities, what effect is that going to have on language change? Are there gonna be diverging dialects that one is super conservative and one is still innovative or are they gonna balance out somehow? Joey: I mean, it’s a good theoretical question. I would suggest you almost ended up with class or register differences. You get into the sociolinguistics there a little bit. David: How much longer do elves live than humans, usually? {00:40:01} Joey: To the power of 10, typically. David: Oh, my god. Joey: I mean, the books say humans can live into their 70s or 80s. But if you’re thinking medieval Europe, the average lifespan was like – you were lucky to reach 35 years old as a human, as a non-noble. Elves are 500 to 700. David: Oh, boy. So, you’re definitely gonna have more than one spouse unless you’re gonna be living a long, lonely time if there’s intermarriage there. Joey: Well, that was Lord of the Rings, right? Tolkien had to give Aragorn long life from being one of the dunedain rangers just so he could be with Arwen, I think. George: Yeah. Well, that was – yeah. That’s interesting. Well, Arwen also choose to become mortal too so that she would eventually die. Although, I’m not familiar enough with Tolkien to know the exact mechanics of that. Does she go to the same place that humans go when they die, or is does she fade like other elves do? I’m not sure. Anyway, that’s Tolkien. We’re talking D&D. They’re tangentially related. But I mean, any role playing system, any role playing setting, of course, you could have an element of language because there are sci-fi settings where you’re going off to different planets. Well, you go to the next planet, it’s almost certainly going to be a different language people speak there. Joey: So, when D&D comes out with the Spelljammer campaign setting again, they need to hire conlangers. David: You know, I think we’ve had this conversation privately, but it makes sense to have it on this podcast. It makes zero sense that there isn’t at least one full-time conlanger employed by Wizards of the Coast. Joey: I mean, my CV is on the website. David: It’s ridiculous. I mean, beyond that, it’s almost insulting that they have anything about language in there at all and they don’t hire somebody to do it. It’s such a no-brainer because, I mean, first of all, it’s such a cool thing that a lot of people would be really interested in. But it’s also something that not every DM has the aptitude for or the interest in actually building it up. And second, even if they want to, it takes a lot of time. It would be so nice if there were just some off-the-shelf languages for D&D that DMs could do the same thing they do with everything else in there – either take it off the shelf because they like it or don’t wanna bother. Or if they wanna do something different, they can do something different. It’s absolutely mindboggling, I mean, with how many races and languages everything is claimed to have. I mean, that’s an endless number of books that could be published, let alone what you might do if you wanted to get different dialects from the same proto-language. Or, I’m sorry, related languages from the same proto-language. There’s so much there. You could hire one person, and have it come out slowly over a long period of time or hire a bunch of different people and come out with a bang and publish, like, 10 books at once. Anyway. George: One project I’ve thought about, you know, we could get together and make these homebrew and sell {indistinguishable} {00:44:07} books too, but who has the time? One project that I was – David: Let’s just say that – you could, you could. You’d have to have everything in there that was special or unique to D&D be separate so that you didn’t step on somebody’s IP and get sued. Joey: The good thing about D&D is they have a Creative Commons license that puts almost everything in their content as public domain. You can use it. They just put a couple restrictions on where you can publish it. Then, there’s a few privative things. Like, you’re not allowed to do anything with the illithids, because that’s actually property of George R. R. Martin that D&D has licensed – or a few things like that. But, by and large, it’s fair game. {00:45:01} George: Wait a minute. George. R. R. Martin did the illithids? Joey: He also did the Gith, but they were a very different non-sentient race. I think it was ’87 or ’88 he published the book with them in it. It might have even been a short story or something. George: One project I’ve thought of making, which I have many more creative projects in my head than I have time to do, but going back to – like, even the game mechanics do some world-building for you. In D&D, magic is packeted into individual spells. A lot of those spells have verbal components. You also have, in the class descriptions, certain classes – certain spellcasting classes – get certain languages. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it’s sort of implied that spells have incantations in secret languages. I was thinking about someday doing the exotic languages – doing Draconic and Infernal and Celestial – and going through the spell lists of what’s in the D&D SRD and just making incantations for each of them. Arcane spells would be in Draconic and divine spells would be in Celestial or Infernal, whichever you wanna choose, and stuff like that. Anyway, that’s a thing that somebody could do. Joey: This is why I took Latin in undergrad because I wanted my characters to be able to speak Latin while they were casting spells. That quickly faded. One of the things I do is, if a bard casts Silence, wizards all of a sudden are almost done. If they have a verbal component to their spell and they’re under a Silence-thing, they’re done. If they happen to be underwater – you try speaking underwater. Unless they can cast the spell speaking Aquan, they’re screwed. I love that. David: This brings us back to our main point here, which is that the bard is the best and most overpowered class in all of D&D. There is no possible way that you can beat a bard. There’s just none. They’re too powerful. George: Here’s a question to you guys – because one of the idle thoughts that comes to me talking about spellcasters and silence – what would you do if you had a character who wanted to be a deaf spellcaster and tried to have you let him do his verbal components with a sign language? It’s like he has a disability because he can’t do any perception check that requires hearing, right, but an advantage in that he’s immune to Silence. David: Well, I mean, anything that’s in D&D, that’s just the way it starts, right? I mean, I don’t think anybody’s ever run a campaign where they do everything strictly by the book. If somebody wants to do that, I mean, it’s a simple swap, I think. Whatever is verbal is now done with sign. If their hands are tied, then they can’t spellcast. It’s the same thing as if they were Silenced or something. The only place where things would get tricky is how well articulated these signs need to be in order to actually effectively produce the spell. Because, of course, a lot of the times in D&D, characters are holding stuff in their hands. The question is, if the hand shape is super important, then the spell might not come off as well. But, of course, deaf signers are holding stuff all the time. In that case, they tend to get by. They’re holding a cup, they just use one finger and people, for the most part, get the idea. But who knows if, I guess – it’s kind of a weird thing to think of, but it’s like, if somebody who’s fluent in ASL watches somebody else in ASL who’s holding something in their hands and signing, they can fill in the blanks. Whatever entity needs to understand the sign in order for the spell to come off correctly, do they have the same plasticity that human beings have when it comes to understanding human language? I have no idea. Joey: I would need more time to think on that one, yeah. {00:50:00} George: It’s just a hypothetical, honestly. I don’t know if people have tried to do this. If you’ve tried to do this, let me know. f Joey: In the PHB, there are rules. A bard that is deaf and has to perform Fascinate or something has a 20% failure chance if they’re deaf, or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what it is. But there are actually rules in the Player’s Handbook about this – although not specifically for substituting in some sort of gestural ASL sign language in there. I don’t think that exists yet, but I love where the idea’s going for that one. George: I think you’d have to have someone who seriously wants to role-play the character this way and not be necessarily trying to do it just to be a munchkin somehow. Joey: I do presentations at our local version of Comic Con, which is the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, on making conlangs and putting conlangs into games and things like that. Inevitably the one question that always comes up is, “What about the first level spell Comprehend Languages?” You know, spells break everything. But I love it when my players go, “Okay. Our dungeon master is a linguist and a conlanger, inevitably this is gonna come up. I’m gonna prepare this spell.” They find something carved into a rock and they go, “Oh, I don’t recognize this language that is made with claws, but I’m gonna cast Comprehend Languages.” And I said, “Oh, okay. You touch the surface and you get it means, ‘place where were move discretely.’” Because Comprehend Languages allows you to get the literal meaning of something. The literal meaning of [hɾuwəpʌl] {00:51:58} in my Lizardine language is, “place where we move discretely.” All of my characters go, “Oh, shit. We’re in a bad place. We need to hide.” But that’s the Lizardine word for “borderland.” Just because they get the literal meaning as it would be translated into their version of Common doesn’t mean they actually understand what’s going on. I love screwing with players that try to get around my language things with magic. George: That’s an excellent point. “Rules as written,” as people like to say. You get the literal meaning of it and, sometimes, the literal meaning of it doesn’t tell you anything about what it means. I’ll point out, Comprehend Languages is one thing, at least that’s sort of a resource that people spend. But if you got a warlock, some of the warlocks can take a thing where they just can read any language anyway, all the time. Joey: Yeah. But it’s the same thing, I think – like, to get the literal meaning. George: Yeah. There’s a lot of things like that that you end up running into. I think that’s a great way to handle it because you can sort of make it so that someone who actually understands the language and learned it the right way, either as a native language or studying it as a second language – they are involved in the culture enough that they may get some of those references or that they might just automatically understand in context, “Oh, that means that this is the borderlands.” Whereas, somebody who magically understands the language will understand the language with no cultural context to it. So, they’ll tell you what these words mean but they’re not sure what all that means in this particular place and time. Joey: The other caveat I put on that is, if you read the spell description and if it’s written language, you actually have to be touching the surface. It’s like, “Place your hand on the surface somewhere that’s not easy to touch.” And if you want your wizard up there, they have to risk a 100-foot fall or something like that. A wizard’s not gonna survive that if they’re first level, so maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. David: Or maybe the surface is a trap too. Joey: Yep. I do that. All of a sudden there’s an exploding rune in there. I dunno. David, what’s your thoughts on magic getting around these language devices? David: The funny thing is, that has never come up. {00:55:00} I mean, they’ve had that ability and they’ve had times where it might’ve benefitted them to use it. Never once have they thought of it. Never once. Joey: They’re gonna listen to this episode of Conlangery and now it’s gonna start happening to you. David: It’s funny because – this has nothing to do with conlanging – but my experience as a DM is like I prepare for all of these possible eventualities of them doing this, this, this, this, this… And they spend two and a half hours arguing with an NPC over which one of these pastries is the best. Joey: Yeah. Players go left when the options were “up,” “down,” or “right.” I’ve actually run a game and the players, I don’t know why, but they said, “Hey, guys, let’s head north.” And I was like, “What? No. I gave you a map with an X on it, guys. No!” And they actually did the game completely backwards. It was a complete fluke that they ended up needing this really, really high challenge rating right off the bat, which gave them just enough power to literally do the game backwards. So, when they got to the very final thing, combat lasted, I dunno, three rounds, four rounds. And they’re like, “That was so easy. Why was that so easy, Joey?” “You guys literally did the entire game backwards. Those were the Challenge Rating 2s, and when you were Level 2, you took up the thing that was Level 7.” They do it. Players do it. George: Well, I mean, that’s why when they go for a left turn, you just, subtly behind the scenes, move your plot hooks around. Although, it’s harder when you’ve put a giant X on your map. Joey: Yeah. Except they forgot about having the map, when it was a physical prop that was actually in front of them with X on it. David: That happens. George: That would be a thing even with, you know, you’re doing conlanging/world-building stuff. What happens if you do all the world-building for a particular area that you expect your players are going to go to, and then suddenly, they go in some direction where you don’t know anything about it, you haven’t figured out what is even there? What do you guys do in that situation? David: Oh, brother. I mean, that basically happened because I had set things up so that my players would go south. I don’t know if you remember when I explained that there was this big Dwarven kingdom in the north, and then there was kind of a separate one in the south. I had set things up for them to go to that Dwarven kingdom in the south. Both my wife and I worked on this, by the way. She does a lot of my planning. She set up the whole city and everything. I created banners for 24 different Dwarven guilds. I had a whole set of things going there. And then, just through the natural course of events, they learned somewhat the lay of the land and where they could go. And they learned that there was this big city to the east, which was where I planned that they would go after the Dwarven kingdom. And they were like, “Let’s go there!” I’m like, “Oh. Okay. This is happening.” So, it’s like, “Okay. Just throw them” – as they head there, and I can’t dissuade them, I just throw them enough random encounters to get to the end of the night. Then, I can stop everything I’m doing and go plan all of this stuff which wasn’t ready yet. My god. George: You got to build a city in a week! Or how often do you game? David: Oh, well, we’re all adults so every 7 to 8 weeks. Joey: Oh, my god. I’m so lucky. George: You got a month or two to make a city. Joey: I mean, I play twice a week. David: Wow. Oh, nice. Joey: I am in enough games with enough different groups – so there’s one core group of us that play almost every Saturday. We’ll play all day every Saturday. So, if we get to a point like that, we just go, “Okay. Cool. That’s all I have planned. Can you start running your game for the next three hours because I’m out?” David: Well, that’s cool. That’s actually a really neat idea. Wow. Joey: We have a lot of simultaneous games going. My girlfriend picked up one of the Prefab adventures, and she was running that, basically to give me a break from DMing. {01:00:03} One of the other guys is running a game when he’s not too busy with school and finishing up his education degree. Then, I would like to think I’m pretty good at just going on the fly, whether it’s random encounters or – Here’s one thing, if you describe something in enough detail, your players will spend 2 hours puzzling over what it does before they even touch it. If you describe an intricate glyph and picture system on a doorknob, they won’t even look for traps, they will sit there trying to solve a puzzle when it’s an unlocked door. If you need to kill time, just describe something in intricate detail. David: That’s good. Oh, man. Joey: I mean, I have needed to pause the game for 45 minutes because I had to run out and pick something up, completely unrelated to D&D. I literally made this box, and when they got to the temple I said, “There’s a Warhammer stuck into the side of the mountain and this box is hanging off of it.” I had three switches on it. One side was labelled in Klingon. One side was labelled in Lizardine. One side was labelled in Gith. And one side was labelled in probably Dothraki actually. I said, “You have everything you need to get into this box,” and I left. It was a physical prop. I made it out of paper and whatnot. I came back 45 minutes later, and they said, “Well, we tried this, and the box didn’t open or anything.” I’m like, “You have everything you need to get into it.” Finally, one of them looked at me and they said, “The Warhammer, right?” I’m like, “Yeah. Just break the fucking thing open.” It wasn’t an actual puzzle, but it spelled them while I had to leave. David: Nicely done. George: That’s great, though, that you can put a challenge there that they’ll just talk about on their own for a long time and give you some breathing room. That’s something you can do with conlangs though, right? You can give them the text that’s on the door, and maybe it’s just totally just flavor. Probably you wanna make it somewhat relevant so that it’s somewhat useful information but just not necessary for them to advance. And then people puzzle over it and try to figure out what’s going on. Joey: My Lizardine language, I designed it around a coded orthography. I actually made – it’s about an 18” wooden shield with four rotating platforms on it so you can reorganize the orthography to code things. There’s probably about 40 sets of words that if you have the wrong setting on the code wheel, what should be “push” comes out as “pull” or “jump” will come out as “descend” or something like that. My players absolutely love that, probably because it had a physical prop. Two of them were trying to puzzle out this wheel, and another two of them were sitting with a copy of the grammar that they found on someone’s backpack or something like that. But, “Oh, if this means this and this is what I see in the wall, this must mean we need to go right to avoid the traps,” and if they had the settings wrong on the code wheel, they’d go the wrong way and get trapped. My players seem to love that because they didn’t have to be linguists to figure it out, but there was, “This is how you decipher. This is where you look to see what you have found it to mean.” They loved it. David: That’s true. Also, I mean, just the way that people try to encode things in the real world – I mean, certainly people that share a language will try to hide something from another one. You could always just bust out a cipher just because that’s what the character wanted to do. Then, you could bring in writing systems for that as well and just say, “You see this writing system here.” It’s like, “Do any of us know this language?” “No. No, you don’t.” Because it turns out it’s not a language at all. It’s just a cipher. It’s just a series of symbols. Joey: Comprehend Languages just doesn’t work on that. David: Yeah. And they’re like, “Why? It must be some magic spell.” And then they’re like, “Somebody’s enchanted this with something.” It’s like, “Yeah. Maybe that’s the reason.” George: Or it’s using the script that somebody knows but it’s just a cipher of Common or whatever. It’s not actually that language. So, they look at it and they’re like, “I have no idea what this means. It’s just gibberish.” Then, people have to figure it out. David: Especially if you have a campaign like Joey’s, they’re so used to having language around them. {01:05:05} That would be an amazing misdirect. Oh, wow. Joey: I mean, I’m really lucky my players around my table indulge my linguist ways and they accept it as this is something that would happen in a real world, and it’s one of Joey’s interests, so he’s obviously gonna incorporate it at some point. Hopefully, he’s not gonna be a complete dick about it and make it impossible. But my players indulge my linguistic tendencies. George: Well, I think it’s about time that we wrapped up the show. Do you guys have any final thoughts, just any takeaways that people should have from here – from this episode – about if you’re gonna use your conlangs, not just in D&D but in role playing in general, what is your advice to people? Joey: You can only do better than what’s already there for you. If you use it at all, if you embellish it at all, if you even just do fun voices with your characters and assume maybe different regional varieties or racial varieties – however you wanna go – have different accents, you’re already improving the role play experience for everyone at the table from what’s just on the page in the rule books. David: I’ll also throw this in. Even if you didn’t wanna go so far as making languages or using your own languages, even building in a naming language for the various races of your game will, I think, add a nice level to it. First, when players hear a name, they’ll be able to recognize it and start to say, “Oh, that’s probably that name.” But you can also even have fun with it and just remember that, all right, these people aren’t supposed to speak this language. What would happen in the real world? So, like – what was that name? Okay. Well, the only name I can think of right now in Arabic – you could probably get by pretty easily – but the last name I was thinking about was [qadɾi] (Qadri) {01:07:28}. I’m sorry. That should be a trill, shouldn’t it? [qadri] It’s got a Q in the beginning. So, as a DM, you can just say, “What’s your name?” “My name is [qadri].” Then, they try to repeat it, and they try to repeat it as best they can because they don’t speak the language, right, so they’re still just giving it their best shot. I did that with – my dwarves had this language. In fact, they spoke the language that the orcs did in Bright. But there was a character. They were engaging with this character who’s going through – she was the leader of the caravan. So, they say, “What’s your name?” The character says, [χoʊd͡za] {01:08:11} They said, “What?” “[χoʊd͡za].” And they’re like, “Could you slow down?” “[χoʊd͡za].” So, they’re sitting there trying to repeat it because, later on, they needed to tell somebody else who it was. They had to try to repeat it. The thing was, that was a real situation, right, because they didn’t speak that language so, no, you don’t get to write it down, you just gotta do your best to sound it out and hope you can get somebody else to understand it. You can always have fun like that even with just a naming language. Joey: I like that. George: That’s a great suggestion actually. I know I said we should be wrapping up, but I wanna talk about that because one of the biggest things that DMs wanna have is a list of names for NPCs just to – you can whip up a naming language pretty easily and generate some names and have that as your list. Now, they’re all within the culture and all consistent in terms of phonology and everything, and you’re like – and that’s added a lot more to your world than the default list of names in the book, which are all over the place and weird. David: And you’ll run out. This way, you can just generate more. Joey: And if you don’t feel like doing it, you can go to the LCS’s jobs board – plug, plug. {01:10:00} George: Tell Wizards of the Coast to do that. Joey: I think David and I have both tweeted them telling them that a few times now. David: You know what we should do though for all the new dot-commers – I’m sorry. Not “dot-commers” anymore. That was the 90s. For all the tech people in San Jose and San Francisco who are now running D&D games on their own because it’s hip, “Hey! It’ll only cost you a few thousand dollars to hire a conlanger to create some languages for your campaign. Why not?” Joey: I mean, it’s a lot cheaper than that for just naming languages, but. David: Oh, come on. We’re talking San Francisco/San Jose here. This is tip money for them, all right? Joey: Perfect! I could use some tip money. George: Well, that’s a great idea. Seriously, the audience for this show is not those rich tech people, but the audience for the show – yeah, you could definitely make up some naming languages at least for a list of names and then you can make those naming languages related in interesting ways still without having to build out full conlangs and such. Even that will get you good world-building. If you wanna go further and invest the time and build full-conlangs for your D&D worlds, that’s great. You basically are doing the same conlanging that you would do for anything else just it’s for a game instead of for a novel. We wanna encourage people to try this out. Do it to the level that you are willing to invest in your games and such. Yeah. I think that’s a great takeaway. Before we overstay our welcome too much – David, thanks for being on. David: Mm-hmm! George: Joey, thank you for sharing your experience. Joey: [xitanθsə] {01:12:16} Which is Tiefling for “Hell yeah!” George: Oh, yes. That was the other one you had is Tiefling with lots of insults and profane words. Anyway, the rest of ya’ll, thanks for listening and happy conlanging! {Music} George: Thank you for listening to Conlangery. You can find our archives and show notes at conlangery.com. Conlangery is supported by our patrons over at Patreon. A special thank you to Ezekiel Fordsmender, Graham Hill, and Margaret Ransdell-Green, as well as all of our other patrons for their support. Conlangery is under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-commercial – Share-Alike license. You may use Conlangery in any noncommercial work as long as credit is provided, and you use the same license on that work. Conlangery’s website was designed by Bianca Richards, and our theme music is by Null Device. {Music} {01:13:50}

George talks a little bit about how choosing a theme for Lexember can be helpful for your conlanging. Original script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I went on social media recently to ask what people wanted covered before Lexember and got some great suggestions. The one that I’m going to cover today is creating your words based on a theme. Many lexember entrants do themes throughout the month or follow lists of prompt words from places like ConWorkShop, and I think it’s an interesting way to get your juices flowing. I’m going to talk about this mostly as it relates to a naturalistic artlang, since that’s what I have experience with, but I think these sorts of themes and prompts can help with any sort of conlang. Before we get to that, Conlangery is supported by our Patrons over at Patreon. Thanks to our patrons, I’ve been able to move the site over to its own hosting, which has given me more control and will hopefully take some stress off of the LCS’s hosting plan. You’ll also see that little padlock icon on the site now, which will make you slightly more secure when commenting and using the site and also prevent browsers from yelling at people visiting. By the way, if you pledge $10 or more per month, you can see the scripts for these shorts as they are written. On another note, the Language Creation Society has just announced its President’s Scholarship. They’re accepting applications from people who are affiliated with educational institutions who either want to do research on conlangs, or who want to teach a conlanging class. I’ll have the link in the show notes for anyone interested in applying. There are two $500 scholarships available, and the deadline for this coming year’s applications is January 15th 2020. If you’re a naturalisitic conlanger, everything about your language can be an opportunity for worldbuilding, of course, but the lexicon is where I find the deepest worldbuilding potential. Most grammar and phonology is culturally agnostic — it can be influenced by things like politeness culture and literary customs, but just about any grammatical feature can be dropped into whatever culture you wish. That’s not so true for words. The lexicon is deeply related to how your people view the world. It’s how they divide up and name the parts of the world, and that has fantastic cultural implications. That said, being too heavy handed on the cultural aspects could backfire. What you want to have is an idea of some cultural values and ideas that will guide what words you create and how they are framed, as well as a variety of real world and conworld knowledge to guide you. Keeping culture in mind and even building it alongside your words can help you when working with prompts or themes to make richer and more interesting choices of words. In 2015, I did a cluster of words related to childbearing, influenced by the birth of my first child on December 17th. This wasn’t the entirety of my Lexember that year, and I did a few words outside of Lexember, but I did have an extended period where I was looking at birth related terms specifically. In doing so, I had to consider what medical knowledge the Istatimik would have, what cultural associations they would have with birth, and the who and how of delivering babies in their culture. One place where this led to a particular choice was in the derivation of qenrii, meaning “placenta”. This derives from qen, meaning “moon”, and rii, meaning “meat” or “flesh”. I didn’t come up with this from any natlang inspiration, rather I looked at pictures of placentas and saw that they can be seen to look round and quite unsurprisingly meaty — in a less than appetizing way, but the cultural question brought in the “moon”. I decided that the Istatimik would associate themes of birth, femininity, and reproduction with the moon, considering menstrual cycles to be following the lunar cycle. What words you choose to make can also come through culture building. My children were delivered by doctors, but I imagined that in Istati culture, as in many cultures now and in the past, childbirth would be more commonly be attended by midwives. But then the question becomes who are the midwives? I imagined that most of them would be older women, perhaps too old to give birth themselves but having experienced it. I had a root puuk that I used in the terms for “grandmother” and “clan matriarch”, so it seemed perfect to use this for another term referring to old women. I also decided the term should be an older compound, owing to the long-standing cultural status of midwives — which meant that it, unlike some newer compounds, had been altered by vowel harmony. For the other element, I chose maaṭe “catch” — usually used for something slow-moving — for the act of “catching” the baby as it falls from the birth canal, and thus came the term maaṭepook. Sometimes you may have ideas for the worldbuilding that aren’t so salient from the form of the word or the dictionary entry. When I created the word nitiq “lanugo” (the fine hairs that cover a newborn’s body) there was not that much depth to the etymology in terms of cultural meanings. Nitiq is also the word for down feathers, as I felt that that was a good metaphor to draw from, but that was about it. However, in my mind, I considered how this would be related to Istatikii elemental beliefs. The Istatimik exist in a fantasy world and among them are some of the best alchemists in that world. At that time, I had them following an elemental system somewhat taken from the Wuxing, or five Daoist elements. So I felt that they might look for signs in childbirth of affinity to a particular element. Hair is associated with wood, so an excess of nitiq would be associated with strong affinity for wood. Feces is associated with earth, and so things like passing meconium before birth (and surviving — it’s a suffocation risk) might be a sign of a connection with earth. Children born in an intact fluid sac would be strong in water, clearly. None of those associations made its way overtly into the language. I could have put them in, but not all of your cultural associations and practices have to be explicit in the formation of words. Perhaps this would have an effect on how alchemists talk about these phenomena, but I didn’t really feel it even needed to be in dictionary entries. In this case, it was more that thinking about these concepts while creating the language helped me to solidify what they would mean outside of the immediate word formation. In other words, a theme through a cultural lens absolutely can help you with etymology and polysemy, but it helps just as much with selecting words to create and with broader cultural context. When I went to the community asking for their experiences and pointers for working with a theme, I got a number of interesting responses. Dylan Moonfire is one of the first people I noticed doing a themed Lexember, and he happened to respond when I was asking for examples. Here is what he said: When I did measurements two years ago, I basically started with what I thought the culture would have as base units (like a fist for volume) and then used what I had developed in the culture to figure out the derived units from there to refine them into “modern” usage. With last year, it was geography. So, I focused on the physical area around them. It was a desert culture so there were a lot of words for different types of rock, sand, gravel, winds, etc. However the rivers and forests had relatively fewer because they were used less. This year, I’m switching to a fantasy nomadic language set in steppes/forests/plains, but the magic is in the land, so the focus is going to be on the concept of land ownership/claims/fallow along with continual travels. Built up around the culture’s concept of “tapping” land. I really like this idea of the physical environment being something to consider in your conlanging. It’s very grounding to imagine where your cultures are and then understanding from that what words they would need and how they would view the things around them. You don’t need a map for this, you just need to have the basics of what biome they’re in and perhaps what local natural landmarks exist, like a large mountain or a major river. Beyond just the words for the concrete environment, that will also give you an idea of what metaphors they might use and a little bit about what might become culturally important to them. I also specifically reached out to Zeke Fordsmender, who did a theme a couple years ago about date farming. He gave me a long email detailing how he went about his research and word formation process, which I will include in the show notes under the script for those interested. I’ve extracted a few relevant parts here. Karyol, the language of the date-palm-growers, is spoken in a country called Twāo by a people called the Twāogowe. But going into Lexember 2017, I didn’t know much about them besides their name. The Twāogowe are actually the ‘bad guys’ in my conworld—they’re imperialists, and the premise of the project has always been (though it still remains unrealized) to produce creoles in each of Twāo’s occupied colonies with Karyol as the superstrate language and local languages as the ad- and substrate languages. I had been very impressed by conlanger and writer Dylan Moonfire’s 2015 Lexember work; that year he’d come up with 31 different words for units of measure in his conworld, and it struck me that a Lexember theme could be used almost like a writer’s prompt, the sort that a fiction writer might use to invigorate a stagnant idea. Rather than producing vocabulary for concepts I already had in place, I wanted to explore ‘what-ifs’ by letting new ideas develop from the previous days’ work. The idea to explore date-cultivation specifically I arrived at rather arbitrarily. Other ideas I had were perfume- or glass-manufacture (I ultimately used glass as my 2018 Lexember theme) or river-faring and boatbuilding. But I had in the back of my mind the famously vast Somali vocabulary for camel-husbandry, which I’d seen produced by linguistically savvy people as a response to the linguistically unsavvy trotting out the ‘Inuit 40 words for snow’, and I felt that the rural economy was the most fertile place to begin exploring. I nailed down only two bits of canon before I started making my words: 1.)    That Twāo was a desert nation, and that their colonial ambitions were the result of their own country being deforested; and 2.)    That the Twāo heartland was along the banks of what we call the Nile, but that they hadn’t lived there particularly long—less than 1000 years. This was important to some work I’d already done on a Sprachbund I wanted Karyol to be a part of—I wanted Karyol to be invasive but also well-established where it was spoken. Zeke goes on to describe how he decided that the Twao had been oasis hoppers in the Sahara who later settled along the Nile, his world being an alternate history. There is a lot of worldbuilding detail in his email that I will let y’all read below, including how something alarming about his source material led to new inspiration, but long story short, the Twao chose date palms as a source of food, wood, and valuable trade goods that grows both on the oases that they came from and along the river where they settled down. From there, some research and careful thought brought him a great wealth of words that related to breeds of date palms, the type and quality of fruit, and so many other things involved. He also discussed the cultural associations he made when he dealt with the polysemy of his words bgōe [ˈbɰɔ: e] refers to “1.) a distinguished and respected man (and specifically a man, and not a woman)  or to 2.) a male date palm tree,” specifically because the properties of a male date palm in cultivation can be associated with a distinguished man — the idea being that because farmers keep only a few male date palms in order to fertilize the female trees, they would develop special relationships with them, with rituals to ensure fertility in the fields and a general respect for a venerable old tree that produces good stock. Recently I have been reading Theories of Lexical Semantics by Dirk Geeraerts. It’s a broad historical review of lexical semantic theory starting back in the 19th century. Geeraerts early on highlights two strains of lexical semantic theory that are relevant here, which go by the names semasiology and onomasiology. Semasiology focuses on the meaning of single words, particularly in terms of polysemy and semantic change. It’s what you do when you are describing the different senses of a word, or categorize the ways individual words change meaning, such as generalization, specialization, and other kinds of meaning shifts. Onomasiology, however, sees the lexicon as a connected system. The name onomasiology contains the term onoma, deriving from the Greek for name. Per Geeraerts, this comes from the fact that an onomasiological point of view often discusses how we are finding names for and categorizing things in the world. Put another way, as semasiological view would consider the mechanism by which computer shifted from “a person who computes as a profession” to “an electronic device designed to perform computations” as a fact about that word, and might say it’s some sort of lateral change along functional lines. An onomasiological view would point out that we invented this new electronic device for doing computations and we needed a word for it, and computer was a logical choice to fill the gap, especially as the profession computer was rapidly becoming obsolete. Both of these views are important, and I think conlangers should have both in mind when building words. Having a semasiological point of view is useful when you are in the weeds of where this one word comes from and what secondary senses it has. Onomasiology is useful when determining what words you need in the first place, how the meanings of those words relate to the meanings of other words, and how your system generally is defining the world around your speakers. That said, I think that using a theme for your lexember words is a particularly good way to encourage more onomasiological thinking in the process. You can find interesting ways of looking at lexicons onomasiologically when looking at smaller thematic subsets of a lexicon, such as kinship terms or color terms. Sure, the word uncle has a meaning all of its own, but it’s also part of a network of related terms that all define relationships between each other and with the ego, and it’s a system laden with cultural meaning. I can say that Chinese can translate uncle as 伯伯, 叔叔, 舅舅, 姨夫，or 姑夫, but until I explain the broader system, it doesn’t mean much. Even listing out the meanings — 伯伯 is your father’s older brother, 舅舅 is your mother’s brother, 姑夫 is the husband of your father’s older sister, etc — doesn’t fully explain the system, though it will start to get you there. The thing to understand, ultimately, is that Chinese distinguishes these terms based on birth order and whether relatives are part of your paternal line, distinctions that Chinese makes because they are historically culturally important for understanding who is considered part of your family and who has power within the family. This is where picking a theme helps with onomasiological thinking — or thinking of the lexicon as a system that defines the world. It might be easy to take a list of words and make your conlang equivalents to them, but if you are picking a theme to riff off of, now you have to start deciding what words you are going to work with. The theme becomes the domain that you are coining words in, and as you build your words, you can build the web of references between them.  Choose domesticated animals and you have to decide what animals your conpeople raise, what the animals are used for, and what features will be salient. Will they have detailed distinctions of horses based on sex, age, and function as English does, or will they end up with similarly detailed vocabulary for camels (like Somali) or reindeer (like Saami). Pick architecture and now you have the opportunity to research historical building technologies. Do your people have concrete? Arches? Adobe? Steel reinforcement? How does their environment shape their architecture? Are there frequent earthquakes or floods? Is it a warm, cold, or temperate climate? Do they have cultural considerations about which direction buildings face, or buildings that follow a specific plan that requires specialized vocabulary, like the cathedrals of Europe with their naves and apses? All of this feeds into the two questions you need to ask: What things are in the speakers’ world, and how do they understand those things? With the right approach and the right theme, you can turn a conlanging exercise into a rich worldbuilding exercise. I had considered ending this episode with my own list of themes that I would present for Lexember conlangers would follow, but I think ultimately each conlang is unique, and you may know better what semantic categories you need to develop better than me. So if you’ve got a theme or several, or if you’re following one of the lists, I hope this has been helpful for y’all to figure out where to go from there. As always, I will be watching Lexember posts on Twitter and Tumblr and trying to highlight some favorites. I hope that I’ll also be able to participate. Thank you all for listening, and happy conlanging! Zeke’s Email George, Karyol, the language of the date-palm-growers, is spoken in a country called Twāo by a people called the Twāogowe. But going into Lexember 2017, I didn’t know much about them besides their name. The Twāogowe are actually the ‘bad guys’ in my conworld—they’re imperialists, and the premise of the project has always been (though it still remains unrealized) to produce creoles in each of Twāo’s occupied colonies with Karyol as the superstrate language and local languages as the ad- and substrate languages. I actually discovered your podcast rather accidentally in the summer of 2014 when I was doing some googling about concreoles, and found you’d just released Episode 101 ‘Pidgins and Creoles’. Sometime in 2014, though, my conlanging and my world-building became uneven activities—I had devoted a lot of time to the culture of the occupied peoples, which I explored in part in Lexembers 2015 and 2016, but even as the Karyol grammar was expanding, I had very little written about who its speakers were. It got to the point where I was having trouble developing a mature and internally-consistent lexicon. For example, I knew that Karyol verbs would pay more attention to lexical aspect than to—for example—manner, so that ‘to cut into’ (karta) and ‘to sever’ (cyiha) would be separate words, but not ‘to cut with a knife’ (ritumu karta/cyiha) and ‘to saw’ (reacwa karta/cyiha). But I didn’t know how their level of technology would require them to make distinctions like ‘to amputate’, ‘to engrave’, ‘to mine’, etc etc.  In fact, my actual impetus for determining where in time Twāo would be was that I had developed a complex lexicon for discussing flint-knapping, which I had completely fallen in love with, and I was pulling my hair out trying to determine if these words had a home in Karyol or not. I knew the Twāogowe weren’t a Neolithic people, but I just didn’t know how removed from the Neolithic they were. Did they have more in common with the ancient Egyptians or with the British Empire? Could the flint-knapping words exist in Karyol, maintained by semantic drift and metaphor, or had these words fallen by the wayside centuries or millennia before? I had been very impressed by conlanger and writer Dylan Moonfire’s 2015 Lexember work; that year he’d come up with 31 different words for units of measure in his conworld, and it struck me that a Lexember theme could be used almost like a writer’s prompt, the sort that a fiction writer might use to invigorate a stagnant idea. Rather than producing vocabulary for concepts I already had in place, I wanted to explore ‘what-ifs’ by letting new ideas develop from the previous days’ work. The idea to explore date-cultivation specifically I arrived at rather arbitrarily. Other ideas I had were perfume- or glass-manufacture (I ultimately used glass as my 2018 Lexember theme) or river-faring and boatbuilding. But I had in the back of my mind the famously vast Somali vocabulary for camel-husbandry, which I’d seen produced by linguistically savvy people as a response to the linguistically unsavvy trotting out the ‘Inuit 40 words for snow’, and I felt that the rural economy was the most fertile place to begin exploring. I nailed down only two bits of canon before I started making my words: 1.)    That Twāo was a desert nation, and that their colonial ambitions were the result of their own country being deforested; and 2.)    That the Twāo heartland was along the banks of what we call the Nile, but that they hadn’t lived there particularly long—less than 1000 years. This was important to some work I’d already done on a Sprachbund I wanted Karyol to be a part of—I wanted Karyol to be invasive but also well-established where it was spoken. Based on just those two notions, I decided that the Twāogowe had previously been nomadic oasis-hoppers, and that I needed to find a commonality between living along the side of an oasis and living along the side of a major river to develop my idea of what their economy would look like. I felt they couldn’t be pastoralists: their version of the Sahara is wetter than ours, but still too dry to build a booming economy on herding goats back and forth. But palm trees grow well both in Sahara oases and along the Nile. The processed trees can be used as building supplies, textiles, basket-fibers. The sap can be fermented, and cultures who do this in our world attach a lot of importance to palm wine. The dates themselves can be both a staple food to those who grow them but also a luxury to those who don’t, and I could easily see how trading them could be prosperous. And, I learned, there were dozens if not hundreds of different cultivars and several different but closely related species, some of which produced lumber suitable for building, others which did not; some which produced fruit similar to but different from dates, i.e., the douma palm. There was a mature science of propagating the plants through cutting and grafting; and an even older superstitious pseudoscience concerned with which plants would be most suitable to graft. Controlled fertilization required intimate human intervention, and this was dangerous work: not only because the height of the tree but because the flowers are protected by thick spines, long and sharp and sturdy enough to puncture a truck tire; one-footed date-palm farmers are far from a rarity. There was absolutely enough material to explore Twāogowe technology and to make it interesting and fun; I also didn’t know anything about horticulture, and I thought of it as an opportunity to explore a facet of the world I’d never really given pause to consider before. Ultimately, I didn’t place Twāo in time as specifically as I did in Lexember 2018 when I explored their manufacturing technologies, but I really felt I developed a good sense of who these people are. My favorite aspect of conlanging is developing a polysemous lex, and my technique doesn’t change much from project to project. I have a broad collection of dictionaries, and I’ll select a couple as inspiration for a particular language. Karyol uses Mous, Qorro, and Kießling’s Iraqw-English Dictionary, Leslau’s Concise Amharic Dictionary, Newman’s A Hausa-English Dictionary, Gamta’s Comprehensive Oromo-English Dictionary, and Dent and Nyembezi’s superb Scholar’s Zulu Dictionary. In the case of the one-way dictionaries, I’ll also use Wiktionary or an online dictionary to search English-to-target-language. When developing a polysemous sense, I’ll look up an English word’s different senses in one of the target languages; in the case of Karyol, I usually start with Zulu. I’ll then look up all the different senses listed under the English in the Zulu-to-English side. I’ll then take those senses and look them up in the other dictionaries; I usually do two or three passes. When I have a dense collection of senses, I’ll identify what I want to be the primary metaphor, and then eliminate the senses that I can’t tie back to this metaphor. My primary source material for information on date cultivation were two articles written by Paul Popenoe around the time of World War I, Date Growing in the Old World and New and The Propagation of the Datepalm: Materials for a Lexicographical Study in Arabic. The papers are actually fantastic: the former explains in exacting detail traditional agricultural methods from North Africa to farmers growing dates in the American Southwest, and the latter is an exploration, to some extent linguistically sound, to some extent folk-etymological, of the Arabic vocabulary of date-cultivation. Paul Popenoe, however, was not a fantastic person. He was not only a horticulturalist but also a eugenicist and a proponent of the compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled. It’s really chilling to think of him considering people in the same way he might have considered a plant that needed pruning. I didn’t discover this about him, though, until after I had already prepared most of Lexember; at that point, not only had I read and reread these articles myself, I’d also recommended them to another conlanger working with plant words for Lexember. It was sick and awful feeling when I finally decided to look him up on Wikipedia. The shock I registered when I read about his beliefs about genetic ‘betterment’ I wrote into the project, as I’ll discuss below. I also referenced Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture (1952) which I used to figure out how a desert orchard without the benefit of electricity might function and to decide how to handle words for ‘pollen’ and such. I also managed to track down a working date farm in the southwest US that had extensively photographed their greenhouses and orchards and posted these photos online, which gave me a good idea of what these things looked like, both the plants themselves as well as grafting techniques and other horticultural strategies that I was familiar with before. Finally, some of the more abstract notions I developed came from a recent reading of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough; I hadn’t read the book expressly for Lexember, only out of my own interest in comparative religion and mythology, but the text was fresh on my mind and absolutely directed a couple of my lexes in less concrete directions. Insofar as the lexes themselves go, I feel there are a few in particular that make the Twāogowe stand out among real-world peoples who cultivate dates. Lexember 4th was bgōe [ˈbɰɔ: e], a word that refers to either 1.) a distinguished and respected man (and specifically a man, and not a woman)  or to 2.) a male date palm tree. If memory serves, I recall reading that one male date tree can fertilize up to 400 female trees, and as such date orchards are primarily filled with female trees (łoagyol, the same word used for a mare or female camel) with only a couple of male trees sequestered from the females to prevent unplanned fertilization. Dates take several years to mature, and I reasoned that these male trees would need to have established pedigrees, like stud dogs or stallions; you wouldn’t want to spend years growing a tree that turned out to be a dud. Farmers, I imagined, would probably have a deep emotional connection to their most fecund bgōe. But I remembered reading in The Golden Bough that agricultural peoples tend to have ambivalent relationships with their crop-spirits, for they can provide, but they can also refuse to allow a field to be fruitful. For these reasons I pictured Twāogowe legwēto (‘date horticulturalist’, Lexember 25th) to revere their bgōe as the living embodiment of date-spirits, celebrating them with wine and cake, both because of their emotional attachment to an abundantly-producing tree, but also to appease the tree and to keep it producing. Lexember 12th was nea [ˈnɛ æ], 1.) the small, seedless, deformed fruit of unfertilized female date flowers; 2.) a blind monster from Twāo myth who eats teeth and who’s associated with the dangers of unorthodox thinking. Nea-the-monster’s association with the unconventional stems from common-sense-thinking about date fertilization; by grafting a new female tree from a healthy mother-tree and by fertilizing it with the pollen of a bgōe with certain known characteristics, one is able consistently to produce healthy dates. By letting the trees fertilize naturally, the unconventional approach, a significant portion of one’s yield is bound to be the inedible seedless deformed nea-fruit. Nea-the-monster’s association with teeth stems from my own observation that, with a good bit of imagination, the unfertilized date flowers look like strings of teeth. Further, I imagined that any nea-fruit that was inadvertently produced would be used to make a kind of moonshine, and that people who drank too much of such liquor would be associated themselves with a variety of health problems, including blindness (as we ourselves talk about blind shiners) and tooth decay. Finally, Lexember29th was ubua, the word in which I registered my disgust and the kind of man Popenoe was. ubua is 1.) A datepalm grown from a seed (as opposed to one produced by grafting); 2.) a dateplam one in unable to identify, either because he’s an unskilled gardener or because he’s too far away to inspect it; 3.) a foreign laborer. You’ll remember that the Karyol-speakers are the bad guys in this conworld, imperialists who see their colonial subjects as a means to an end. I felt their thinking might very well stray occasionally into territory as dark as Popenoe’s. Sense (3.) is a metaphorical extension of the previous two senses—a foreign laborer is one who is wild, ‘grown from a seed’, someone whose work ethic and his personal character can’t be known; and like a wild-grown datepalm, which will almost undoubtedly produce inferior fruit, a foreign laborer might be useful in the short term but has no long term value (just as datepalm lumber, except for the douma palm, is suitable for building fencing and scaffolding but isn’t strong enough to build lasting structures). ~ Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write all this down. I took notes while I was working on the words two years ago, but most of this was just pulled from memory—and it’s great to get it down before it disappears. Hope it’s something you can use, too. Best, Zeke

George talks a little about little tidbits of his daughter’s linguistic development, and talks about how listening to child language might help conlangers find inspiration.

Margaret Ransdell-Green and Eric Barker come on to talk about the music they created for Margaret’s concultures in the world of Aeniith, which they performed at LCC8. Top of Show Greeting: Muipidan Transcript PDFDownload 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 me in Hawaii, we have Margaret Ransdell-Green. Margaret:                   Hello. George:                       Also, Eric Barker. Eric:                            Nice to be here. George:                       Yes. All right. So, if you have listened to – what is it – Conlangery 140, I think, where we covered the 8th Language Creation Conference, we talked quite a bit about Margaret and Eric composing music in Margaret’s conlangs. That’s the subject for today is their use of conlang music and how that figures into Margaret’s world-building – whatever sort of comes up in the conversation surrounding that. That is our topic for today.                                     Before we get there, if you would like to support the show, you can visit our Patreon at patreon.com/conlangery. Any amount is welcome. I would love to have more people pledging. If you pledge $5.00 a month or more, you get episodes early. If you pledge $10.00 a month or more, then you can see the scripts for shorts that I’m working on. I think there’s one up there that I have just basic notes on right now. If you pledge $20.00 a month, you can get your name in the end credits of the show.                                     Full disclosure – Margaret is a patron, I believe, right? Margaret:                   Yep. That’s right. I’ve been a patron for quite a while, I think. George:                       Just to be clear, that is not a way to get you on the show, but it is a nice thing to do for us. Okay. Let’s get started here. Margaret, I just want to start with you because these are your conlangs and your world. You had had a talk at the previous Language Creation Conference about world-building in your languages – with your conlangs – and then you were on a world-building panel at this one and you did a performance with Eric doing music in your conlangs. I wanted to sort of – let’s just start with what got you into the idea of composing music in your conlangs? Margaret:                   Well, I’ve always been really interested in music. I studied music for a long time as a teenager. I actually started that by studying opera for four years back when I lived in Alaska. I had always been really interested in music – singing in particular – but also composing and listening to all types of music that I could get my hands on.                                     I think over time, a lot of my different hobbies and interests kind of coalesced and came together and I thought, “Well, why can’t I create something that is musically creative as well as creative in terms of the conlang itself and use that to then flesh out these constructed cultures that correspond to the different constructed languages?”                                     That was how I got into doing this particular thing. It actually started a really long time ago. One of the songs, “Bve Pfa R̂í,” is really, really old. I actually wrote when I was about 13 years old the melody for that. It’s been a very long process of a lot of my interests coming together pretty organically, I would say.                                     {Excerpt Bve Pfa R̂í} Bve Pfa R̂í bve pfa ʂi tree blue yearns ‘yearning green’ Goxe ɡoxe stir.PRES ‘stirring’ Bily bi-ly seed-push ‘seeds springing forth’ Bili bil-i underground-wet ‘damp soil’ Naqa rí naqa ʂi gentle yearn ‘gentle yearning’ Na genk na genk INF sleep ‘to sleep’ Re kanad re ˈkanad out.of forest ‘out of the forest’ Be be smile ‘a smile’ {End excerpt} George:                       Eric, how did you get involved with this? Eric:                            Well, I, too, have been involved in music most of my life. At a very young age I was composing and playing piano. {00:05:00}                 When I met Margaret and we started doing various things, that was early on one of the things that we did. We performed a lot of covers and originals together for a while, but not very long into that, she brought forward a few of her conlang songs, and I wrote backing music for it and arrangement for it. That’s where that began. George:                       That’s interesting. One thing that I heard is that for some of the cultures you used invented scales or at least different scales than we tend to use in western music. Eric:                            That’s right. If I’m gonna have a wholistic view into culture, you have to, to some degree, as best as you can, separate yourself from traditional western European music, which is what my basis is in. I’ve studied quite a bit of world music styles in college. I have a degree in music.                                     But composing, I end up being fairly solidly rooted in European culture, being American myself. A lot of that was exercising breaking away from that as best as I can. I’m still figuring that out and working as we go. Just as, I think, a parallel for Margaret is early conlangs that a lot of conlangers do are more rooted in languages they know, and as they start becoming more advanced is breaking out into non-traditional styles. That’s what I’m attempting to do here. George:                       Yeah. Margaret, did the choice of musical styles – rhythms, scales, those things – was that influenced by the particular language that you were composing for? Margaret:                   I think I would say it’s more influenced by the culture that’s associated with the language. I wanted to make things that made sense to me and that aligned properly with my ideas of what those cultures are rather than the language themselves.                                     Of course, it would be a lot more difficult for me to write certain styles using languages that have certain phonemes just because of the nature of the vocal style I use and the ease of singing different types of sounds, as far as the human mouth is concerned. For the most part what I used was inspiration from the cultures, histories, different kinds of cultural practices that were already existing in the constructed cultures.                                     Then, I kind of worked from there, and worked with Eric from there, to see what type of music or song, or what type of piece, would be appropriate for the type of people who would be speaking a language as well as performing the music. Eric:                            Right. I’ll kind of piggyback that, if you don’t mind, is the songs that we’ve done have been created through various ways and means. Some of them began with thinking about the instruments that they would develop, especially culturally, as what their society is based on.                                     For instance, one society is very imperialistic, militaristic, and so I wanted to create instruments that would be used for battlefield, for marches, and drum stuff. So, I had them based around brass. Then, considering the limitations and pros and cons of various brass instruments – then kinda breaking that down into the music theories of that culture. There’s been some of that along the way, too, is instruments get developed by the musical culture, and then culture is influenced by the technology of the musical instruments – and back and forth. George:                       Could you give an example of how you determined what instruments – I understand that you used a synthesizer to simulate instruments that don’t exist, but can you give me an example of how you came up with an instrument that people would create? Eric:                            Okay. Well, for instance, I’ll add to the one that I was talking about. The Tosi culture is a very imperialistic, colonial, militant authoritarian culture that’s very, very structured and would have a lot of use for battlefield drum roll/drum core kinds of things. {00:10:10}                 So, I wanted instruments that would project. They also had very advanced metallurgy. Taking these into account, it made sense for them to have brass instruments. It’s actually probably some of the instruments that are closest to European cultures because of those aspects.                                     Curiously – and I’m not gonna get in deeply into the technical aspects of brass instruments – but there are some notes that would be more distant and would require either more metallurgy or higher technology or would be arrived at later in the process of an instrument’s development. I purposefully downplayed those notes and then created scales off of those, with those limitations in mind. That would be the primary sounds that their music would be based off of. Not that they can’t access now those other sounds, but that those kinds of notes would be the primary notes.                                     So, I based their music theory around that. Is that a good example of what you’re talking about? I can go into more detail, but it might get a little more technical than you want. George:                       Oh, no. That’s fine. I mean, it’s not a music podcast so {crosstalk – inaudible} {00:11:37} I might be able to understand some of it, but it wouldn’t necessarily be good for all the listeners.                                     But that is interesting. It looks like you were doing research on the acoustics of the instruments that could be possibly made and then working out scales and things naturally from there. That’s an interesting thought there.  Let’s – Eric:                            Just to sum up, is I’ve kind of observed Margaret’s process in her coming up with conlangs, and I feel very much a newcomer to this, in world-building. She’s far more advanced in that sense of world-building than I am. So, I took a lot of cues on how she came up with and evolved cultural aspects and tried to apply that to my music theory background. George:                       Right. In a way this is becoming a collaborative conworld. Eric:                            Yes, absolutely. George:                       Back to you, Margaret, because I wanna get into the language aspects. You have released – or at least to some people – a couple of recordings. Excuse me, “Bve Pfa R̂í” and “Ŵatakap Bí Xaẃét.” And you have more songs than that.                                     I wanted to talk about, what was your process for writing the songs and arranging the songs? I guess, working with Eric on the instrumental parts – what was your process for writing them? Margaret:                   For writing them, for example, “Bve Pfa R̂í,” it started as just a simple vocal melody line. I wrote it in an older version of one of the conlangs that I have called “Rílin,” so it’s actually written in Old Rílin, which is the predecessor to the modern, current language.                                     I wrote several verses. It was kind of inspired by nature, in fact. I was in Georgia at the time – in southern Georgia – and I was looking at all the lush flora that was around me. And I wrote this song about these growing green things and forests. That was how that song got started.                                     But when we arranged it, it first was arranged with piano. When we modified it to include some of the native types of instruments, as Eric has mentioned, we thought about what kinds of materials they would use to build instruments and in what way they would arrange the song and some ways that were not necessarily identical to the typical western arrangements of verse plus chorus and things like that. {00:14:56}                 {Except piano Bve Pfa R̂í}                                     Actually, when I wrote Bve Pfa R̂í, it was written specifically in a type of Rílin poetry that I developed before that. Sometimes, when I write songs in Rílin in particular, they will follow a style of poetry. This is something that you can actually see with other Rílin songs is that they’re not always necessarily ABAB pattern. There’s definitely a distinct, I guess, pattern to Rílin poetry itself. You can see that in some of the songs that I’ve written that way.                                     There’s other songs that we have, not from that culture. For example, the Tosi song, it’s a military march because their culture puts a lot of focus on the importance of the military. We wanted something that would be very practical for an army on the move. We wanted something that would not be overly complicated so that all kinds of enlisted soldiers, for example, would be able to sing it without difficulty. We didn’t want something that was super elaborate or had a really wide range or anything like that. We wanted something that would really reflect the practical nature of a march.                                     Really, what its purpose was was getting everybody marching together and keeping everybody going over long distances. Like Eric said, a lot of the instrument design was also created with that in mind of what materials would be available to these cultures and what they really needed the music for and what their purposes were. George:                       That’s very interesting because I think about – I don’t think I’ve had this song in your stuff yet – yeah. If you get it before this episode posts, let me know, and I can try to add a snippet of that. I can sort of think about that because I was in marching band in high school. I’ve listened to enough marches to know they’re gonna be simple melodies, 2/4 or cut time, usually, because you got two feet, and it’s gonna be something –                                     {Excerpt Zhumzhum Zūr}                                     A: Zhumzhum zūr o ˈʒum-ʒum zuːr o creep.redup death and ‘Death is creeping’ Dez jo nar dez dʒo nar sand with fire ‘The sand on fire’ Mizu chi malimet tēngi ˈmizu tʃi maˈlimet ˈteːŋ-i empress GEN numerous soldier-PL ‘The Empress’ many soldiers’ A: Tapi mas na i o rīy ˈtapi mas na i o riːj IMP open earth OBJ and sky ‘Open the land and sky’ Tapi fedu rix hi jida i ˈtapi ˈfedu rix hi ˈdʒida i IMP bring pierce ADJ fate OBJ ‘Deliver a severe fate’ B: Vil o tāv o, vil o taːv o trial DAT weak and ‘A trial for the weak’ Vil o lu vil o lu trial DAT strong ‘A trial for the strong’ B: Vil o han, vil o han trial DAT all ‘A trial for all’ Vil o mizu. vil o ˈmizu trial DAT empress ‘A trial for the Empress’ A: Namu zal ge, ˈnamu zal ge 1PL.FEM sing FUT ‘We will sing’ Namu han ˈnamu han 1PL.FEM all ‘We all’ Namu shof ret ber van chi mag ˈnamu ʃof ret ber van tʃi mag 1PL.FEM walk across wide world GEN mountain ‘We walk across the mountains of the wide world’ A: Kal xot hi ga ghisu i kal xot hi ga ˈɣis-u i take.up sting ADJ hot arrow-PL OBJ ‘Take up the stinging hot arrows’ Kal xot hi mā namu pa chi zau kal xot hi maː ˈnamu pa tʃi za-u take.up sting ADJ mother 1PL.FEM GEN sword-PL ‘Take up the stinging swords’ of our mothers’                                     {End excerpt}                                     So, that makes sense. Whereas, your other ones are more different forms that wouldn’t be – like the Ŵatakap Bí Xaẃét sounds more like a dancing song. Eric:                            That’s exactly right. The lyrics will reflect that, I guess. Margaret can go into that. But, yeah. George:                       Yeah, and Bve Pfa R̂í is – hm? Margaret:                   Oh, no, yeah, I was just gonna confirm. Yeah. That was designed as a dance. Part of it is a sort of a story and then part of it is actually instructions to dance moves that don’t actually exist, but they could. George:                       Okay! Eric:                            We should mention that one was kinda written specifically with the conference in mind. This is a little aside, is we knew that we were gonna be leading off the conference and we thought, “What better way than a group dance/sing-along to open the conference?” So, we created, also, some ways in which, culturally, it would be a participatory thing because we wanted to have a participatory thing for the conference.                                     It kind of doubled as such. Before we actually performed it, we taught people how to say the group chorus – to sing the group chorus – along with us. {00:20:00}                 Then, we had these handclaps that were signals for everyone else to join in. We spent, like, 30 seconds teaching that, and then we went ahead, and everybody got into it, and figured that culturally it would be used for a similar kind of occasion. It worked out that way. George:                       Let’s actually – I’m gonna put in a little snippet of the Ŵatakap Bí Xaẃét in here just about now.                                     {Excerpt Ŵatakap Bí Xaẃét} ŵatakap bí xaẃét aés ˈɸatakap bi ˈxaβet ˈaes ‘The cold winds are blowing’ ŵatakap bí xaẃét nŭsa ˈɸatakap bi ˈxaβet ˈnɯsa ‘The warm winds are blowing’ ŵatakap bí xaẃét ŵansé ˈɸatakap bi ˈxaβet ˈɸanse ‘The easterly winds are blowing.’ byŕótalíniky byʐotaliˈnɪky ‘Let’s all dance’ mu síséŝó mu siˈseʃo ‘Again in a circle’ ŵatakap bí xaẃét lŭnsé ˈɸatakap bi ˈxaβet ˈlɯnse ‘The westerly winds are blowing.’ ŵatakap bí xaẃét kiré ˈɸatakap bi ˈxaβet ˈkɪɾe ‘The southern winds are blowing.’ ŵatakap bí xaẃét móta ˈɸatakap bi ˈxaβet ˈmota ‘The northern winds are blowing.’ byŕótalíniky byʐotaliˈnɪky ‘Let’s all dance’ mu síséŝó mu siˈseʃo ‘Again in a circle’ {Repeat three times} tríeky a nímbaky tríeky a nímbaky ˈtɾiɛky a ˈnimbaky ‘shimmy and jump’ byŕótalíniky byʐotaliˈnɪky ‘Let’s all dance’ mu síséŝó mu siˈseʃo ‘Again in a circle’ {Repeat three times} feluíaky a zaíky feluíaky a zaíky fɛˈluiaky a ˈzaiky ‘Spin and go’ {End excerpt}                                     Listening to that, the thing that struck me, Margaret, is you know that it’s good conlanging and good writing music in a conlang when it’s kind of difficult to translate it directly. Because you have English translations here on the lyrics sheet that you sent out to people, but the way that it’s sung – the ŵatakap bí xaẃét – that part is a chorus line, and then you have different words – “aés,” “nŭsa,” “ŵansé,” that’s a single person.                                     From the way I can analyze it, it looks like when you’re translating that in English, those words are the unique word that would be – like, “The cold winds are blowing,” “aés” is “cold,” right? But when you’re translating it into English, it doesn’t work anymore. Margaret:                   It doesn’t work anymore because you would not have – the word order is all wrong because Rílin is a verb-initial language. You have VERB SUBJECT and then the adjective following it. You can’t really have a differing word in the adjective at the end of the phrase in English because it wouldn’t be at the end of the phrase.                                     This is one song that it would be really hard to make work in English as a song and not just totally change everything. There’s some songs that are a little less difficult to do that with, but this one is one of the ones that just really was written in Rílin to be sung in Rílin and it doesn’t work in any other language that I’m aware of. George:                       I just wanted to point that out because that happens with real world languages. We often rearrange elements when we’re translating because it doesn’t work the other way. Margaret:                   Right. It’s kind of awkward to say, “Blowing are the winds, cold,” in English. It’s really weird. I wouldn’t say that. George:                       That’s just, to me, a good thing. You mentioned these growing out of poetry traditions that you had already developed, which is an interesting thing because songs are basically a form of poetry. That makes a certain kind of sense.                                     You have these different songs. And I’m presuming you have different songs for different occasions. That’s a dance song. You have a military march from a different culture. You’ve got [bve pfa ɹi] – [bve pfa ʒi] – [bve pfa ʂi] {00:24:21} – right. Eric:                            Just kind of a tone poem. George:                       Yes. That’s a good word for it. It just seems mournful and slow and calming sort of music. Was that a thing that was reflecting the cultural moment you were representing with each song or was it just you wanted a variety of different songs that fit the culture? Margaret:                   We basically wanted to go to a few different cultures in what we did at the conference. {00:24:59}                 I’d already written Bve Pfa R̂í and I had already written the words and the melody for Emé Feréae, which is a Gotevian tune that we did.                                     {Excerpt Emé Feréae} Emé feréae ˈɛme fɛr-ˈe-aɛ across forest-ABL-PL ‘Across the forests’ Té naeglian dlaer te ˈnaɛglia-n dlaɛr inside sea-ABL deep ‘Within the deep sea’ Kou m’halomae priné ˈm-(h)al-om-aɛ ˈpri-ne on DEF.ART-mountain-GEN-PL top-ABL ‘Upon the mountains’ great peaks’ Rifbaren laer moiova larel: ribar-ɛn laɛr moˈj-ova ˈlarɛl world-ACC great can-1SG traverse ‘I could traverse the wide world’ Myna teino lar nirké. ˈmyna ˈtei-no lar ˈnirke truth 2SG-ABL is only ‘Truth is only with you.’ M’ikfa wendolin m-ikfa wend-olin DEF.ART-sword wield-P.PART ‘The sword that is wielded’ Ma don eltelin ma don ˈɛltɛ-lin DEF.ART arrow shoot-P.PART ‘The arrow that’s shot’ Venir venkone sluanae vɛˈnir vɛŋˈko-ne ˈslwan-aɛ blood vein-ABL flow-PRES.PART ‘Blood that runs in our veins’ {End excerpt}                                     But Zhumzhum Zūr O, which is the march – the Tosi march – as well as Ŵatakap Bí Xaẃét, the Rílin dance song, were much more recent. We actually created those farther down the line once we knew that we were gonna be performing songs for this occasion. We wanted to have a good range of cultural representation, I guess, from Aeniith, which is the constructed world setting.                                     We wanted to have, like, okay, well, don’t wanna just do all Rílin songs, or whatever, because that would just be boring. There’s, like, a million cultures in this world, so I have to get some variety going. Yeah. I did wanna make a variety of songs – a different variety of feelings to each song, not just the same type of things. I didn’t want it to be, like, four military marches. That would be boring.                                     I did wanna have a different, I guess, ambiance for each one – a different sort of feeling – to represent the cultures and represent the different types of music that they would create. Eric:                            Let paint interesting aside here, in addendum to this, is that before the conference, about a month or so – a couple months – before the conference, Margaret and I were on a research trip of hers in Papua New Guinea, near Australia. We had large amounts of time where we were just held up in a room in between her doing her research sessions. We got very inspired, and we were looking forward toward the conference, so we spent most of our extra time developing these and writing new songs and getting into everything.                                     There was this burst of creative energy during that trip. The things that we did specifically to flesh out our existing material for the conference was all done there. George:                       That’s very interesting. It’s interesting that there’s this collaboration going on between the two of you with Margaret already having the languages and the cultures developed and you providing some of the information on the music and more music history and music theory stuff involved.                                     Eric, what was it like developing melodies – I know, Margaret, I’m sure that you had – you said you had some melodies sorted out and they changed as you collaborated. Well, maybe, to both of you, what was it like to be developing these songs from a constructed language? Eric, my question to you is, working from a language that you probably didn’t understand so much? Eric:                            Well, in many cases, especially the songs that I kind of spearheaded a little more, we’d come up with some of the music and melodies and arrangement even, sometimes, first and then the lyrics would be developed after that on top of the melody, just as a lot of music is – a lot of even modern pop music and various kinds of songs.                                     I wasn’t concerned so much on the conlang aspect while I was writing the music itself. That was kind of Margaret – to try to parse my complicated musical phrases into conlang lyrics. I think it worked out very well in that regard. Those two particular songs are Ŵatakap and the Tosi march. {00:30:00}                 A lot of the melodies were – the second part of your question – a lot of the melodies just kinda came from playing around. As I said, I often would come up with the music theory via the instruments first. And I have a very curious instrument, synthesizer instrument, called a “ROLI Seaboard,” which I like to describe as a fretless piano, which gets me away from a little bit more traditional keyboard style compositional techniques.                                     I would sit and play around with things. Sometimes, parts of melodies would come to me, and then I would play around with those using the existing instruments that I was synthesizing until things would develop. Then, at the very end, lyrics would be written on top of that. George:                       I have to look up this ROLI Seaboard. Eric:                            I can send you a link. George:                       Okay. So, looking at it – so it’s a keyboard but the white and black keys are not white and black. Eric:                            No, it’s all black. And it’s one – well, partially because I was travelling and it’s really hard to travel with a keyboard with all its moving parts. It was very convenient is it’s all one part. It’s actually a silicon gel surface. It’s actually very squishy. It’s surprisingly squishy when you play it. It’s very easily transportable but also, once you play note on it, you can do vibrato on it, slide down to other notes. It actually worked out beautifully when dealing with the slide brass of the Tosi cultural stuff. All of their stuff revolves around trombone-type of slide brass.                                     I really, really wanted to work with that. The pitches were all very relative and slippery and there’d be a lot of semi-tone – or quarter-tone – interplay. That was perfect for mocking up and synthesizing that type of – George:                       Yeah. If you have a slide brass instrument – for our listeners, I’ll just try to clarify. Slide brass uses – you mentioned a trombone. I think that’s what you’re talking about is something that has a slider for the pitch. For that, you would need – you could not do that on a traditional keyboard because it’s just gonna ding one note every time you hit a key. That makes sense.                                     {Excerpt Zhumzhum Zūr}                                     B:                                     Vil o han, vil o han trial DAT all ‘A trial for all’ Vil o mizu. vil o ˈmizu trial DAT empress ‘A trial for the Empress’ A: Zhumzhum zūr o ˈʒum-ʒum zuːr o creep.redup death and ‘Death is creeping’ Dez jo nar dez dʒo nar sand with fire ‘The sand on fire’ {End excerpt}                                     Moving backwards, then. I’ll redirect to Margaret. Was it a challenge to have these melodies that some of them were in unfamiliar scales and such and then try to fit your language onto those melodies in a satisfying way? Margaret:                   At times it was, but I don’t think the different scales was much of a challenge to me. The melodies came to me pretty easily when they were written. The issue of fitting the language – the lyrics – that took more time.                                     I can tell you that the main factor that determined how long it took was how well I speak or understand that particular conlang of mine or not. For example, I’m really good at Rílin. I know Rílin really well. I can just start writing in Rílin, and that’s largely because I’ve written a lot of poetry in it. It made me learn the language. It made me learn the language really well, that I knew all the words and the grammar and everything, and I could just think of something.                                     Whereas, some of the other languages I haven’t worked with in a long time and I had forgotten some of the words that I had made for it. It took a while to go back and be like, “Okay. Well, I dunno if that’s gonna work,” or, “What’s a different word for this?” “This has too many syllables, but I can’t remember the alternate word.” Things like that. I would have to just go and look things up and try to re-remember things that I had written maybe 15 years ago.                                     I think that that was actually just the biggest defining factor of why some things took longer and some things were really quick. I think the music factor – the different scales and stuff – was not a challenge for me at all. It came pretty naturally, I think. George:                       Okay. That’s interesting. {00:35:00}                 I guess the scales would not necessarily be a big thing because the melody is the melody. Maybe rhythms could have some effect, but that – just the familiarity with your own language. I’m sure a lot of conlangers know well the idea of, “I created this language, but I cannot speak it in any way fluently.” That makes a lot of sense, going through the dictionary – Eric:                            I do remember there was – we were really going outside the box – and we will definitely record and have at least something for you for the Tosi march because that would be really – I’m blanking on the name, Margaret. That was kind of decided – Margaret:                   Oh, the Tosi march is called “Zhumzhum Zūr O,” which means “Death is Creeping.” Eric:                            Oh, that’s right – Zhumzhum Zūr O. Yeah. The name came very, very late, and all of the files and everything that I was working with just say, “Tosi March.”                                     I do remember that one very specifically and why it would be good to get a recording of that is that it uses a very different scale system. There was a few notes that we had to kind of work over. It’s like, “Oh, they don’t have that note. You can’t do that.”                                     {Excerpt Zhumzhum Zūr} Mizu chi malimet tēngi ˈmizu tʃi maˈlimet ˈteːŋ-i empress GEN numerous soldier-PL ‘The Empress’ many soldiers’ A: Tapi mas na i o rīy ˈtapi mas na i o riːj IMP open earth OBJ and sky ‘Open the land and sky’ Tapi fedu rix hi jida i ˈtapi ˈfedu rix hi ˈdʒida i IMP bring pierce ADJ fate OBJ ‘Deliver a severe fate’ B: Vil o tāv o, vil o taːv o trial DAT weak and ‘A trial for the weak’ Vil o lu vil o lu trial DAT strong ‘A trial for the strong’ B: Vil o han, vil o han trial DAT all ‘A trial for all’ Vil o mizu. vil o ˈmizu trial DAT empress ‘A trial for the Empress’ Bridge: Namu won za i ˈnamu won za i 1PL.FEM grab sword OBJ ‘We take up swords’ Es di karush i chungezh es di ˈka-ruʃ i ˈtʃuŋ-eʒ and lead GRP.PL-battalion OBJ great-mighty ‘And lead the mighty battalions’ Vitu vedi ge ˈvitu ˈvedi ge 3PL.FEM rise FUT ‘They will rise’ Es vitu pōv shof jo pred mur es ˈvitu poːv ʃof dʒo pred mur and 3PL.FEM try walk with hard earth ‘And they will try to walk the solid earth.’ Namu won ghisu i ˈnamu won ˈɣis-u i 1PL.FEM grab arrow-PL OBJ ‘We take up arrows’ {End excerpt} Margaret:                   {Indistinguishable} {00:37:17} There was one note that I would actually want to – like, I knew the melody already, in theory, but when I would go to sing it, my brain is so wired differently that I would wanna sing a note that actually wasn’t in their scale at all. I dunno, I think it was like – they don’t have a D or something, I think it is. Eric:                            Yeah. I forget – they don’t have a D. Margaret:                   Yeah. It’s like A, B, C, E, F#, G – is how it goes, I believe? Eric:                            Yes. That’s absolutely correct. Margaret:                   I would wanna sing a D, and he was like, “You’re singing a D,” and I’d be like, “Oh, yep. Sorry. That doesn’t exist here. You can’t sing something that doesn’t exist.” Eric:                            That’s right. You actually had to create some of the vocal melodies for that. Margaret:                   I created, like, I think, all of it for Zhumzhum Zūr O. At parts, I was really struggling because you wrote this really great instrumental piece – background – and I was like, “I love this, but I don’t wanna ruin it with words,” or something. I felt like I didn’t wanna sing over it; I just didn’t wanna mess with it.                                     But, actually, what I came up with ended up being amazing in – I say that with no ego because it was hard for me to do. I was really surprised by how well it turned out, in my opinion. Eric:                            There was a lot of work involved in that. That’s right! Yeah. I created – yeah. I should describe a little bit of the process for that. I spent quite a lot of time, probably more time than almost anything else, on that song and the music underpinning. Also, I created a notation system – not that I was reading from it – but I wrote it out in their notation system and then trying to figure out how to also – unlike a small tone poem or a folk melody is be able to perform an entire band, an entire marching band.                                     I did use some backing tracks. I finally just went ahead and started using some pre-recorded backing tracks that I had made and kind of looped sections of it. George:                       You almost have to. Eric:                            Yeah. I don’t usually like backing tracks. I like to do either live looping or things like that, but it just ended up being much more necessary in this case. Margaret:                   My looping program kept crashing, and we were worried that it was gonna crash when we were on stage. And we were like, “Okay. We have to do something that’s not that risky.” Eric:                            Exactly. “Let’s keep it simple.” But then, I had a second mini Seaboard specifically there for the drum part. {00:40:02}                 And I would get the drum part going, and then it would loop out, which was actually backing tracks. Anyway, back to the original point, I’m getting off topic here. So, I created all the instrumental sections. My thought was the melody would kind of float over top of that.                                     So, I’m handing her this pretty much composed piece. It had a lot of room for stuff in it, but it’s a very set thing, and saying, “Here, Honey. Go ahead. Take it.” And she’s like {indistinguishable} {00:40:35} “And I have these notes to work with?” It was an amusing process. But she did an amazing job. George:                       Right. That’s the thing is speaking the language and also singing – performing – the thing is an interesting thing.                                     {Excerpt Zhumzhum Zūr} Tapi fedu rix hi jida i ˈtapi ˈfedu rix hi ˈdʒida i IMP bring pierce ADJ fate OBJ ‘Deliver a severe fate’ JIDA fate JIDA fate JIDA fate JIDA fate {End excerpt}                                     Before we go any further, I know that you have to leave very soon, Eric, and – Eric:                            I’ve got 15 – 20 minutes left probably. George:                       Okay. Well, there’s another thing about this is that you’ll have to leave your computer open to this for a few minutes to get it uploaded. Eric:                            Ooo. And I need my computer with me. Okay. George:                       Yeah. I’m thinking that we might want to wrap up pretty soon in order to get you out. But, yeah, that’s the trouble with this program and having a hard out. So, I guess – well, is there a place that I could share your music or anything? Eric:                            When is this going to air? George:                       Since I already have one for September – it’s actually coming out early – this will be out on October 7th. Eric:                            Then let’s go ahead and I will send you that. If you can plug that in here – well, at this point, edit that in. We’ll definitely have a bunch of things recorded and also a place that we can put more stuff because we have yet to add this to our website. But we will. I promise! Margaret:                   If anybody’s interested in being updated about Aeniith music or conlang music in any way, I have a mailing list. You can email me if you want to and I’ll put you on the mailing list. That’s something that is a temporary workaround that I’ve been doing with people for Aeniith-based music projects that we’re doing. Eric:                            Our apologies – ever since the conference, we’ve been travelling for various other things and I just haven’t had the opportunity to put it online yet. We will put that up there because there’s a number of visuals, there’s a lot of creative renderings of instruments as well as the notation system and some discussion about the music theory. And that was given at the conference. I just need to reformat it for the web. George:                       Well, I will link to whatever of that is available when we post, but I do believe I’m gonna have to stop it here so that we have time to upload our audio. Hopefully, people have inspiration. Just take a look into – if you’re a music person, definitely look into what you can do with music and your conlangs. Let me know what you do with music and your conlangs because that’s an interesting – another aspect of the world-building and culture when you are doing the naturalistic artlang route.                                     Any last thoughts from either of you? Eric:                            Well, I was just gonna wrap up by echoing what you just said and saying one of the wonderful things about music and conlangs is it’s a doorway into a lot of aspects of the culture. Once you open that up and realize you’re creating an artistic framework that also uses lyrics and a conlang, you’re opening up all these different cultural aspects that you may not have considered before. It’s a good way of actually developing from there. I think we’ve created a number of cultural aspects while composing these that probably weren’t there before and added to the conworld. {00:45:05} Margaret:                   It’s also a very good way of coming up with terminology that surrounds music and harmonics and different kinds of names for notes and scales and things like that – and terms for instruments and what they’re based on and what they’re used for and things like that. I think that it can actually enrich your conlanging as well as vice-versa. George:                       Well, thank you, Margaret and Eric, for being on the show! This was a great conversation. I wish I could talk to you guys more about this, but I want to make sure that you can make your practice, Eric.                                     Get on that mailing list. I will have whatever links are available. Go out there and make some music for your conlangs and have some fun with it. I’m gonna say, “Happy Conlanging!”                                     {Excerpt Bve Pfa R̂í}                                     Pilu ní ˈpɪlu ni center.of.flower clear ‘clear center of a flower’ Uka ˈuka companion ‘a companion’ Be ŕíky zöet bɛ ˈʐi-ky ˈzø-ɛt NEG expel-IMP trust-ABS ‘don’t expel trust’ Despyxa dɛˈspyxa tissue.paper ‘paper of tissue’ Moías ˈmɔias tapestry ‘a tapestry’ Kaíkr̂ŭ ŝala ˈkaikʂɯ ˈʃa-la warmth.from.light petal-INSTR ‘warm light through the petals’ {End excerpt}                                     {Music} Thank you for listening to Conlangery. You can find our archives and show notes at conlangery.com. Conlangery is supported by listeners. Thank you to Margaret Ransdell-Green, Graham Hill {sp}, Ezekiel Forsbender {sp}, and all our patrons who support us at patreon.com/conlangery. Conlangery is released under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-commercial – Share-Alike license. You are free to use or adapt our work for any noncommercial purpose as long as you credit Conlangery Podcast and release any derivative works under the same license. Webspace for Conlangery is provided by the Language Creation Society. Our site was designed by Bianca Richards, and our theme music is by Null Device. {Music} {00:48:13}

We bring Mike McCubbins on to talk about his new Kickstarter project, Anasazi, a comic which uses simple constructed written languages to tell a story in a visual medium. You can find the Kickstarter here! Top of Show Greeting: Salbécyk / Salbekian

George brings on Christophe and Joey to talk about their experience at the Eighth Language Creation Conference. We also have clips from interviews Joey made at the conference. Top of Show Greeting: Bizhida Links: 8th Language Creation ConferenceLivestream: Day 1, Day 2

George and William invite Prof. William Croft to talk about his theoretical approach to word classes and constructions. Forget a language without adjectives, let’s talk about how your property concepts are predicated! Top of Show Greeting: AvriccilnDownload Links and Resources: Croft, William. in preparation. Morphosyntax: constructions of the world’s languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1, Chapter 2 Croft, William. 2013. “Radical Construction Grammar.” The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. Graeme Trousdale and Thomas Hoffmann, 211-32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, William. 2007a. “Beyond Aristotle and gradience: a reply to Aarts.” Studies in Language 31.409-30. Croft, William. 2007b. “The origins of grammar in the verbalization of experience.” Cognitive Linguistics 18.339-82.Croft, William. 2005. “Word classes, parts of speech and syntactic argumentation” [Commentary on Evans and Osada, “Mundari: the myth of a language without word classes”]. Linguistic Typology 9.431-41. Stassen, L. 2003. Intransitive predication. Oxford University Press.

George spends some time talking about his recent revisions of his Istatikii grammar, with a focus on organizing writing to serve the needs of the language and the readers. You will find the two drafts of the Istatikii consonant processes below. istatikii-phonproc-draft1Download istatikii-phonproc-draft2Download Script below the fold, see the history here. Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I’m making a short for this month, due to some scheduling issues for our planned episode. Before we get on with the show, I have a couple of announcements: First, we are supported entirely by our patrons over on Patreon. Part of my recent revisions mean that if you’ve pledged at $10 an above, you may already know just about what I’m going to say today, because you’ve had access to my script as I’ve been writing it for about a week prior to recording. I appreciate patrons who contribute at every level, as it helps me ensure I can keep the podcast going. Second, the Eighth Language Creation Conference will be held on the 22nd and 23rd of June at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom. If you’re going there, I’m trying to arrange for someone to run around with a recording device interviewing people for me, so look out for that. For those who won’t be there, the Language Creation Society will be streaming it live. I’ll link to some more information in the shownotes. Now, onto our topic for today: After finishing my dissertation, I took a little time to look at my grammar for Istatikii. My goal is to finish it up enough that I can present a proper “published” version before moving on to another conlang project. Life has been a bit hectic, so progress has been slow and halting, but I did manage to start some revisions, and I wanted to talk about something that came up in those revisions. My first task is to go chapter by chapter and revise what I have written. I followed a pretty classic format for a reference grammar breaking up topics into phonology, morphosyntax, etc. So, the first chapter I have set about revising is the phonology chapter. I had broken that down into sections on consonants and vowels, with each of those having sections on the phonological processes that affect them. On my reread, I noticed that the organization of the phonological processes wasn’t really working for me. The problem was mainly in the consonants, as they had a long list of changes, where vowels simply have the vowel harmony system, which is complex but contained. My consonant phonological processes were organized into three categories: assimilation, deletion, and “other”, with that “other” section containing only the final devoicing rule. This was a logical idea when I was first writing, but on a second reading it didn’t really work for me. I noticed that organizing by type of process did not aid the natural connections between processes. For instance, stop gemination and nasal deletion interact in Istatikii, because the nasals participate in gemination, and thus stop gemination can bleed nasal deletion by turning a nasal coda into an oral stop. But in the old version, those two rules were far apart, and there was just a minor reference back to stop gemination. Someone reading through might miss the connection or have to jump back and reread. There was a lot of this going on in the rules — someone would have to jump around the list to refresh their memory or see a rule that hadn’t been mentioned yet. Non-linear reading is of course going to happen in a grammar, and you do want to be sure you cross-reference between chapters and sections, but small sections should be readable linearly as well. Seeing this problem I looked at my rules and all their feeding and bleeding relationships and reorganized them in a more reader friendly manner. For Istatikii, that meant an organization based on natural classes — the stops and nasals interacted as above, and liquids had their own interaction between a deletion and gemination rule, so I made stops and nasals one section, and liquids another section. There is a third section entirely devoted to glottal deletion rules, as the glottal stop and /h/ have deletion rules that interact with both nasal deletion and liquid deletion. In that case, the idea is to present it last so that the reader is able to relate these rules to rules they already know. Is this organization the best possible for Istatikii? I’m not sure. Will it be the go to for every language? I think on that the details are going to really depend on your language. Everyone will have rules interacting in different ways, and every conlang is unique. I think any conlanger who wants to present their conlang to others should do a readthrough of their documentation from the perspective of someone new to their language. Have someone else take a look if you can, as well. I’m thinking about how I should present things in other sections of the grammar as well. For instance, Istatikii devotes a huge section of morphosyntax entirely to prepositions, giving a great deal of time to the two classes of inflecting prepositions.. In fact, the Class I prepositions section basically goes through each preposition and lists out its uses with examples. At the time, I felt that was the best way to present it, and it is similar to how I handled Aeruyo’s moods, which also have lots of noodly uses that need listing, but I have been reconsidering it recently. The main issue I have is that the information I have on those prepositions is going to be replicated in a much condensed but still similar form in the dictionary. Redundancy is not necessarily an enemy — it can be useful to present the same information in different ways in your documentation, because readers won’t necessarily read linearly and they won’t necessarily get things the first time. However, I have been considering recently that I could pare down the prepositions just to their inflectional paradigms and the basic syntax of the prepositional phrase, and then use the examples I have in a section that covers syntactic constructions more generally. This would help me to build the syntax section, which I’m a bit stuck on how to start, and to think more about constructions aside from how prepositions are used in them. That, of course, is a different problem I’ll be thinking about in the weeks to come. Circling back to the phonology example, your rules might not interact in the same ways as my rules, and the details of my organization may not work for you, but the basic principle here is: If you write a grammar for public consumption, take a step back and reread it from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about the language. Because that’s who it’s for — we are conlangers, there is no greater expert in our language than ourselves. Go back in and restructure things in a way that teaches about your language and builds upon knowledge already presented. In truth, this is just a general tip for writing, but it certainly applies for us conlangers as much as for everyone else. I’m going to attach two different versions of the consonant processes in my Istatikii reference grammar — one in the old format with my editing notes included, and a second with the new reorganization so people can compare. It’s by no means a finished product, I still need to go through and get the text right on the individual rules. Take a look at it. If you have your own suggestions, let me know. I’d also love to hear from conlangers on how they reorganized or revised their own grammars. I put out a question about this topic on social media and the answers I got were more about the larger scale organization of the grammar, such as what chapters you would include, or technological issues such as preference for PDF vs HTML grammars. Those are things I might cover in the future, but I really do want to ask — have you ever looked at one section, or a subsection, even — and reorganized things to make it an easier read? What did you change? How did it turn out for you? And as always, Happy Conlanging!

Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets joins us to talk to us about Ainu, a minority language of northern Japan. Top of Show Greeting: Bwángxùd by alr2569 (Translation Notes) Links and Resources: Japan’s new policy on the Ainu is misleadingA Topical Dictionary of Conversational AinuBugaeva, A. (2004). Grammar and folklore texts of the Chitose dialect of Ainu: (Idiolect of Ito Oda). ELPR Publication Series (Vol. A-045). Suita: Osaka Gakuin University. (Texts, Preface, Index)Refsing, Kirsten. (1986) The Ainu language: the morphology and syntax of the Shizunai dialect. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.Corso, E. D. (2016). Morphological alignment in Saru Ainu : A direct-inverse analysis. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 18, 3–28.Bugaeva, A. (2017). Polysynthesis in Ainu. In M. Fortescue, M. Mithun, & N. Evans (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jessie Sams comes on the show to talk to us about how she uses conlanging in the classroom. We discuss how these courses can be designed, what fields of linguistics they address well, and the results she saw from the course. Jessie also requested the following message be added to the notes: I would also like to thank David J. Peterson, who has visited with my conlang students the last three times I’ve offered the course. His visits have been incredibly beneficial for both my students and me. Students don’t often have the chance to speak with the author of their textbook, so it’s an amazing experience. Top of show Greeting: Nál [nɑːl] by Carl Avlund Links and Resources: Jessie’s course syllabus Linguistics Olympiad sample problems Merrifield, W. R. (1987). Laboratory manual for morphology and syntax. Intl Academic Bookstore. (Google Books)Condis, M. (2016). Building Languages, Building Worlds: An Interview with Jessica Sams. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 4(1), 150–161. Sanders, N. (2016). Constructed languages in the classroom. Language, 92(3), e192–e204. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0055 Pearson, M. (2017). Using Language Invention to Teach Typology and Cross-Linguistic Universals. Fiat Lingua, (April), 0–11.