Conlangery #32: Evidentials

George reveals a peeve, which leads to a bit of a tangent before we get to talking about the wonderful world of evidentials and all the stuff you can do with them.  Then we cover a very curious language by the name Talossan. Top of Show Greeting: Gówa Links and Resources: Evidentiality in Tibetan Evidence from Evidentials WALS: Coding of Evidentials Featured Conlang: Talossan Feedback: Email from Arnt Richard Johansen: Hi, folks. Great show, I’ve listened to every episode since #1 (except #13, which is so incredibly long, and I haven’t gotten around to #16 yet).I’m writing to bring to your attention a topic which I think is under-appreciated in our circles: prosody and intonation.I like David Peterson’s Dothraki a lot. Not because its grammar and lexicon is cleverly done (although it is), but because when he pronounces example sentences in the language, it sounds believable.It seems that most language creators just borrow all the intonation patterns from their native language, but Dothraki doesn’t sound like English – or any language I know. But I can tell that it isn’t random either, there is some kind of system to it. If I only knew what that system was!Tone and stress, which are categories that operate at the word level, are fairly well-described. But when it comes to making a system that applies to whole sentences or utterances, I have no clue. What is a conlanger supposed to do to figure out how questions should differ from statements, or how to emphasize morphs, words and phrases in different ways, or to mark sarcasm? When it comes to intonation, what may differ between languages, and what is truly universal?