Conlangery Podcast

George and William come back to talk about telicity and lexical aspect. Listen to us talk about endpoints in events and puzzle over why achievement and accomplishment are supposed to mean different things. Links and Resources: Agbo, M. (2010). Verb classification and Aktionsart in Ìgbò. California Linguistic Notes, 35(1), 1–21.Aoki, N., & Nakatani, K. (2013). Process, Telicity, and Event Cancellability in Japanese : A Questionnaire Study. Journal of the English Linguistic Society of Japan, 30, 257–263.Kato, A. (2014). Event cancellation in Burmese. In 24th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Yangon Event (pp. 1–15).Khanina, E. (2006). In search of Lost Telicity: Evidence from Basque. In First Central European Student Conference in Linguistics (CESCL-1) (Vol. 1).Lares, E. (2014). Observations about the Aspectual Structure of VO Idioms. In LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (pp. 1–15).Levin, B. (2007). The Lexical Semantics of Verbs II : Aspectual Approaches to Lexical Semantic Representation. LSA, (3), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/416485Maier, E. H. (2004). Above or Below: Modeling a Telicity Restriction on Karuk Directional Applicatives. Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, 2, 317–330.Sahoo, K. (2012). Telicity vs. perfectivity: A case study of odia complex predicates. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 25(2012), 273–284.Santiago, P. J. (2003). Event Cancellation and Telicity in Tagalog. In Program for the 150th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan (pp. 388–399).

George reflects on completing his PhD, and talks to those conlangers who might be considering graduate study in linguistics. Script below the fold: Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley, and we’re back! We’re going to have a short episode today, just to catch y’all up on what I’ve been doing while I was gone and maybe to give me a chance to be a little reflective. As I write this, I have submitted the final version of my dissertation for deposit. Most likely, by the time you are hearing this, it has been put into the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. I’m not going to link to it, for reasons that will become clear, but if you have access to that database, you can look it up. If you don’t, I’ll happily email a copy. What I want to talk about today, is just a little reflection on getting my PhD in Linguistics and what that means. My main hope is to inform listeners who might be interested in going into graduate study for linguistics, since I know some portion of this audience will be. To put things right up front, I do not believe that a graduate degree in linguistics is necessary or sufficient to be a good conlanger. There are many good conlangers that don’t have advanced degrees in linguistics, and they do very well. An advanced degree in Linguistics, especially a PhD, is for someone who wants to make a career of it. My graduate study was a bit different from other conlangers who take this path. As far as I have seen, most conlangers who are in academia seem to gravitate toward documentation or historical linguistics. That makes sense, they’re fields that are very connected to conlanging, especially naturalistic conlanging, which benefits strongly from broad knowledge of other languages and historical development. My dissertation… is experimental phonetics. Specifically a second language production experiment. The kind of narrow phonetic analysis I was doing is not that connected to what I would do as a conlanger. As a conlanger you just don’t really need to be looking at spectrograms and pitch curves. Which works out just fine for me. I like conlanging, and working on the interacting parts of the grammar, and I also like acoustic phonetics and all the analysis that goes into it. I wouldn’t say that my academic work has no bearing on conlanging. Some listeners might recall a while back a short where I focused on how conlangers need not be all that picky about how they represent sounds in IPA, especially vowels. That comes directly from my experience and training in phonetics and phonology — the categories are usually fuzzy enough that you don’t usually have to bother with whether your /e/ needs a lowered diacritic. The contrasts are what matter. But I would say the bottom line is that I chose to study linguistics, and chose the particular specialization I took for its own sake. If you choose graduate study in linguistics, that’s where your head needs to be — you need to want to do LINGUISTICS research. I also want to emphasize another facet of being a PhD: It doesn’t mean I know everything. Many of you will be nodding your heads or even rolling your eyes, but I feel it’s important to say. Earning a PhD just means I was able to focus on a very narrow topic, study it, and learn something new about it on my own. It wasn’t a major breakthrough, and it’s not perfect. It’s just a little something I worked out that hasn’t quite been done yet. Yes, along the way I picked up a lot of general knowledge about linguistics, but linguistics is a big field with lots of nooks and crannies. I can put a “doctor” before my name, now, but understand I might still say things that are wrong, and there are massive gaps in my knowledge on a lot of things. As final advice, if you want to go to graduate school for linguistics because you want to make linguistics your career, I’d encourage you to try. It is a long, hard road, especially for a PhD, but it can be very fulfilling. If you are more interested in linguistics to help your conlanging hobby — graduate school is not necessarily the place for that. If you’re still in undergrad, you can consider picking up a linguistics minor or second major. Otherwise, so many in our community study languages and linguistics independently, and there are more resources than ever to do that. At most, a master’s in linguistics might be interesting for you and also give you some good career prospects that are not necessarily in academia. But if you do feel you want to do academic linguistics as a career — be it documentation fieldwork, historical reconstructions, experimental studies, what have you — and you have the means, graduate school can be rewarding. It’s also grueling and time consuming, so be prepared to work hard for small rewards, but if it truly is your passion, you can do it. As for Conlangery, we’re going to be returning to regular episodes as soon as possible. I just need to arrange things with a co-host or two and hopefully get a discussion episode up soon. In the meantime, if you want to support me and the show, hit up that Patreon to pledge or send a one-time gift to our Ko-fi. Anything you can pledge will be much appreciated.

George gives a short talk about how phonology affects phonetic transcriptions and why the narrow “phonetic” transcription of your language does not have to be overly specific (especially with vowels!). We should have a regular episode again next month. ORIGINAL SCRIPT: There is a tendency in the conlanging community to hew toward more narrow, standardized definitions of terms than among linguists. There have been a few times when someone has criticized me on a use of a term that I defined in the text where they felt another term fit. This is most obvious in morphology, which is pretty notorious for having different traditions among different languages for naming different categories or morphs, but it extends to other places as well. I understand the impulse of conlangers to hew to standardized systems. Conlangers, by our nature, are describing our languages to an audience that is unfamiliar with it and wants to understand quickly. We want to standardize our description so that other people can quickly comprehend it and give feedback. That is somewhat the case in linguistics, but as a linguist you are not only talking to the broader linguistics community, but also to an audience of linguists who are particularly interested in a specific language, family, or areal group, and will be familiar with the peculiar traditions in describing that language. While I understand the interest in hewing to the standard, it’s important to know that there is some flexibility, and all sorts of descriptive terms are used differently among different languages. That’s important for reading linguistic research, but it’s also important for writing descriptions, because the labels you give things will be influenced by an analysis of the language at hand. I want to give an example through the lens of a part of linguistics I know fairly well: phonetic transcription. A note: yes, I do, in fact, mean phonetic transcription. It is obvious that the labels you use for phonemes in a phonemic transcription will be influenced by the structure of the language. It’s also pretty clear that those labels have a degree of arbitrariness, we choose which symbol is the phoneme based on an analysis of how it behaves and on standard conventions of the field. What is less obvious is that the symbols we use in phonetic transcriptions are informed this way as well. If we were to fully specify a phonetic transcription at the absolute, unaltered surface, we’d just print a wave form and spectrogram. But in linguistics we understand that as the pure sounds are translated into phonetic categories, there has already been a perceptual filter applied, so we never make it perfectly detailed. The most obvious example of this is in vowels. As I have said on the podcast before, vowels in real languages are never defined as points in the vowel space as the IPA chart would have you think. A vowel, perceptually, will fall into a range of values in a region of that space, determined relative to other vowels. Languages with fewer vowels will have a wider margin of error — As an Arabic speaker’s /i/-vowel may fall down to the region of English /ɪ/ or even /e/. In some cases, the distinctions may be important, but in many cases, we really don’t bother. Consider the English /u/-vowel. In many dialects of English. This vowel is fronted. For some speakers it is so far front that it is in the same region as the /i/ vowel. You would think that we would sometimes transcribe it as central [ʉ] or even as front [y] sometimes, but the fact is that even in relatively narrow transcriptions, you almost never see that. The reason for that is that the fronting of /u/ isn’t really phonological. There aren’t really phonological rules governing it, and it doesn’t have an affect on other sounds. It seems to just happen on the phonetic level without the higher level processing of phonology. So, unless we are specifically talking about this phenomenon, we don’t worry about it so much. We just transcribe it as [u]. Linguists can also disagree on a transcription, or transcribe differently depending on their perspective. For example, if I’m going by ear, I would phonetically transcribe the vowel in Mandarin Chinese zhong as a mid back vowel, [o] or maybe [ɔ]. San Duanmu instead transcribes it as [u], and I have also seen [ʊ]. Duanmu’s justification is that it is underlyingly /u/, and I won’t get into the reasoning there, I do agree with it. I don’t know if my lack of native intuition gets in the way there, but I would probably differ as I think that the lowering is a phonological rule we’d have to take into account. Now, vowels are notoriously fuzzy. Tonal systems are even moreso — I would not really want to give a confident transcription of a tone on any level without figuring out the tonal system first. But even consonants can have these. For instance, in English, [ʃ] is almost always rounded. If you are a native English speaker, just make a shushing sound and you’ll see it. But linguists never transcribe it with a rounding diacritic, because it is not affected by any rule and it doesn’t condition any rule. The theory is that the lip rounding enhances the distinction between [s] and [ʃ]. Finally, we can even disagree about a sequence of sounds. What is the rhyme in her. Is it [ɹ͈]? Or rhotacized schwa [ə˞ ]? Or is it a sequence of [əɹ]? It depends in part on how you think English works. I have seen many times a question something to the effect of what the difference is between a palatalized consonant and a sequence of a consonant plus [j]. And the fact is, the difference is mainly phonology — is that glide a property of the consonant or its own vowel. Now, the “glide” will often be phonetically shorter if we’re talking about palatalization, but that’s a side effect. How you transcribe it really depends a lot on the phonology. There are a couple of takeaways I want conlangers to come away with here. First, is that, when reading linguistic descriptions of languages, look for descriptions of the sounds if you want an accurate view of the phonology. The transcriptions will only go so far. Even if the linguists are using IPA (and not all do), their use of it will be informed by their theories and by traditions in transcribing that language. Also understand that just because something is in square brackets, doesn’t mean that represents precisely what comes out of a speaker’s mouth. It’s still filtered. Second, yes, use standard IPA values, but understand that IPA is just a tool, and an imperfect one. Don’t stress about finding exactly the right symbol with diacritics and whatnot. Transcribe what you need to transcribe, and write up a description of how things are pronounced. This basic principle follows for other parts of your grammar. Need to name your cases? Find labels that fit well enough, then give detailed descriptions of their usage. Syntax? You can try some high-level typological labels, but you need to also give example sentences and explain how they are working. In all these cases, the labels are just to give you a shorthand — the real work is in the description.

Colm Doyle comes on to talk about his Nymeran language, created for the comic series Glow, as well as some of the process and challenges of making a conlang and script for comics. Top of Show Greeting: Vaq’ǫ̀ʔ Nąśą /vàqʼõ̀ʔ nã̀ʃã́/ Glow issue 2 Kickstarter

Joey Windsor and Christophe Grandsire-Koevets join George to discuss what tools we can get from more advanced linguistics theoretical frameworks. What tools do they provide the conlanger, and where do you have to be careful about applying them. Top of Show Greeting: Gidurguyt [ɡɪ-ərdɡuː-jɪt] LCC Presentations: Doug Ball’s Talk Unfortunately, the video of Joey’s talk is incomprehensible. I also cannot find video for William’s talk. Please forgive the inconvenience. Academic Sources and Textbooks: Mihalic̆ek, V., & Wilson, C. (2011). Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics. Ohio State University Press. Dresher, B. E. (2009). The contrastive hierarchy in phonology (Vol. 121). Cambridge University Press. O’Grady, W., & Archibald, J. (2015). Contemporary linguistic analysis: An introduction. Pearson Canada. Kager, R. (1999). Optimality theory. Cambridge University Press. Gussenhoven, C., & Jacobs, H. (2013). Understanding phonology. Routledge. Trask, R. L. (2004). A dictionary of phonetics and phonology. Routledge.

George discusses last year’s Lexember and some of the things that came out of that. Also, help us correct our transcripts on the Conlang Sources Wiki. What we reblogged on Tumblr. The Conlangery Twitter account. (Sorry, twitter search is bad, so I can’t  conveniently direct you just to Lexember retweets.)

Conlangery Statement on Patreon Fee Changes (audio and transcript) We use Patreon to get a little money to pay some of the site fees and such for Conlangery. Our Patreon has grown some since it started, and I’m grateful to all our Patrons. However, I need to inform you that the way you pay through Patreon has changed. Patreon has added a thirty-five cent fee on all transactions, which is paid by the patron. Previously, all fees would just be deducted from the pledges, meaning that I’d get less money, but patrons would pay exactly what they signed up for. Now, they are shifting some cost over to patrons. Thirty-five cents is not a lot, but we have several patrons who pledge only one dollar, and several more pledging five dollars. I really value these small donations. A one dollar option lets more people participate and helps me build a broader base of support. But if someone is only wanting to pledge a dollar, and then they have to spend an extra thirty five cents, that could be enough to discourage them, and I don’t like that. So, it’s safe to say, I don’t like this change Patreon made. It was done without my input and I have no way to change it. Right now I’m exploring other funding options. I will let people know about those when I make them available. The Patreon will stay open for now, but I do understand if anyone gets this message and decides to cancel, especially people who had small dollar donations. I would like to ask our listeners what you think. How do you feel about the fee change? Would you prefer a different system? Would you be more or less interested in donating to the podcast if we did things differently? I’m open to suggestions.

Today, Matt Pearson joins George and William to talk about non-finite “adverbial” verb forms called converbs. Top of Show Greeting: Old Niveni Links and Resources: Imperative Converb in Archi (conference abstract) Expressing adverbial relations in clause linkage with converbs: definitional and typological considerations (workshop slides) Ylikoski, J. (2003). Defining non-finites. Action nominals, converbs and infmitives. Journal of Linguistics, 16(2003), 185–237. Ahland, M. (2015). The Functions of Non-Final Verbs and Their Aspectual Categories in Northern Mao (Omotic) Narrative. Beyond Aspect: The Expression of Discourse Functions in African Languages, 109(81), 1–40. Creissels, D. (2010). Specialized converbs and adverbial subordination in Axaxdərə Akhvakh. In I. Bril (Ed.), Clause Linking and Clause Hierarchy: Syntax and pragmatics (pp. 104–142). John Benjamins. Asfawwesen, D. (2016). The inceptive construction and associated topics in Amharic and related languages. (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University). Vandewalle, J. (2016). On Uzbek Converb Constructions Expressing Motion Events/Devinim Anlatan Özbekçe Ulaçli Yapilar Üzerine. Bilig, 78, 117. Coupe, A. R. (2017). On the diachronic origins of converbs in Tibeto-Burman and beyond. Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia: New Horizons for Tibeto-Burman Studies in honor of David Bradley, 211. Forker, D. (2013). Microtypology and the Tsezic languages: A case study of syntactic properties of converbal clauses. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 26(i), 21–40. Amha, A., & Dimmendaal, G. J. (2006). Converbs in an African perspective. Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs. 167, 393.

Jake and Kaye come on to talk about how language can interact with identity, across ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class identities. Top of Show Greeting: Faikari. /ˈvɐ͡ɪ.kʰɒ.ˌʁi/ Links and Resources: Plural you Key and Peele skits 1, 2 Stigmatization of speech associated with women “Sounding gay” Journal of Gender and Language Mondorf, B. (2002) Gender differences in English syntax. Journal of English Linguistics, 30(2), 158-180 Holland, D. C. (2001) Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2011) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge Oakley, A. (2016) Disturbing Hegemonic Discourse: Nonbinary Gender and Sexual Orientation Labeling on Tumblr. Social Media + Society, 2(3), 205630511666421. Renninger, B. J. (2015) “Where I can be myself … where I can speak my mind” : Networked counterpublics in a polymedia environment. New Media & Society, 17(9), 1513–1529.

This week, George discusses Phonix, a sound change applier that will help you with your historical conlanging.