Conlangery #55: Practicum — Getting Rid of Tense

We give you a podcast today about how you can do without tense, and what other things in the language can be used to fill in the gaps.  Also, we have special guest Jeffrey Jones on to talk about his conlang. Top of Show: Sheewan Links and Resources: Vietnamese tense/aspect marking Telicity (Wikipedia) Featured Conlang: K’tlê Feedback: Email from JS: Conlangery hosts: I’m writing to say how much I enjoy your podcast. I only became aware of its existence a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been doing what I always do when I discover a new podcast that I like: listening to the archives from the beginning. Just today I happened to listen to episode 23, in which I discovered, to my shock and delight, that my OWN conlang Yivrian had been featured. I thought you guys said a lot of complimentary things about it, and your criticisms were completely valid. In particular, I agree with Bianca that the verbal system is a little bit overstuffed, and with William that the modal prefixes are annoyingly regular. Both of these things are the result of a disease that afflicts people who work on the same language for a very long time: different parts of the language are designed at different times, often with different philosophies and different goals. In this case, the modal prefixes date from a period when total regularity was a design goal, while the verbal complex dates from the ALL OF THE MORPHEMES stage that followed shortly thereafter. It’s a good thing I had never heard of evidentiality or animacy hierarchies at the time I initially designed the verbs, or I would doubtlessly have found a way to include those as well. Your podcast has also inspired me to consider other neglected aspects of my languages. In particular, I’ve been mulling over the ways that Yivrian expresses formality, and reconsidering the entire concept of adjectives. You discussed my ancient essay “An Artlanger’s Rant” when you covered my conlang, and it’s very interesting to see how that post has aged ten years on. If you ever were interested as having me on as a guest, I’d be happy to discuss it (or anything else conlang-related) with you. — JS Bangs [email protected] http://jsbangs.wordpress.com “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” -Philo of Alexandria