Podcast – Conlangery Podcast

I interview Jessie Peterson of  @LangTimeStudio  about her Conlang Year project, as well as her other conlanging education and promotion projects. See Conlang Year here: https://www.quothalinguist.com/

I talked to  Artifexian about his work on Abheski and the new conlanging community on YouTube.

Today, I interview Agma Schwa about dog languages, cursed conlangs, and creativity. Make sure to check out this year’s Cursed Conlang Circus!

George talked to Paul Frommer, the creator of Na’vi, about his work creating languages for movies. Resources mentioned: Looking at Languages by Paul Frommer and Edward Finegan An Annotated Dictionary of Na’vi by Stefan G. Müller Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues A Guide to Barsoom by John Flint Roy Possible and Probable Languages by Frederick J. Newmeyer

George breaks down a paper that discusses ChatGPT’s supposed ability to create languages. It is not impressive. Citations Diamond, Justin. “Genlangs and Zipf’s Law.” ArXiv Computer Science, 2023. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.12191.pdf De Marzo, Giordano, Francesco Sylos Labini, and Luciano Pietronero. “Zipf’s Law for Cosmic Structures: How Large Are the Greatest Structures in the Universe?” Astronomy & Astrophysics 651 (July 2021): A114. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141081. Gabaix, X. “Zipf’s Law for Cities: An Explanation.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 3 (August 1, 1999): 739–67. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355399556133. Li, Wentian. “Analyses of Baby Name Popularity Distribution in U.S. for the Last 131 Years.” Complexity 18, no. 1 (September 2012): 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21409. Wang, Ding, Haibo Cheng, Ping Wang, Xinyi Huang, and Gaopeng Jian. “Zipf’s Law in Passwords.” IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 12, no. 11 (November 2017): 2776–91. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2721359. Links The Tweet that stared this: https://twitter.com/JPSoucy/status/1638747703332175872?s=20 Genlangs and Zipf’s law data https://github.com/Justin-Diamond/genlangs-and-zipfs Law brief article https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/

George interviews Marc Okrand on his work on Klingon and Atlantean and his experiences with both the Klingon speaker community and the greater conlanging community.

I’m announcing a new streaming series: Tongues and Runes. You can find the first stream scheduled here.

George talks to CD Covington about her upcoming book about linguistic worldbuilding, funding through Kickstarter. Links: The Kickstarter SFF Linguistics YouTube Channel The Tor Column A post about the Kickstarter

George interviews Biblaridion on conlanging, worldbuilding, and YouTube.

George has David and Jesse on to talk about Kopikon! Links: Kopikon  @LangTimeStudio  LangTime Engine Cecil Garvin earns honorary degree

Here’s the audio of my talk at LCC10. The video version can be seen here.

We have two conlang conferences coming up this year. LCC10 is this weekend, and in September, we’ll have Kopikon!

George talks about his experience streaming during Lexember. NOTE: This episode was written and recorded in the middle of the D&D OGL debacle. The way it was resolved changes some calculations slightly, but I’m still a bit perturbed by it. Original Script

Aidan Aannestad comes on the show to talk about information structure, which included discussions on topic and focus and how they can be realized in language. Links and Resources Aannestad, Aidan Alexander. “A Typology of Morphological Argument Focus Marking.” University of North Dakota, 2021. Büring, Daniel. “Towards a Typology of Focus Realization.” In Information Structure, edited by Malte Zimmermann and Caroline Féry, 1st ed., 177–205. Oxford University PressOxford, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199570959.003.0008. Wal, Jenneke van der. “Diagnosing Focus.” Studies in Language 40, no. 2 (July 1, 2016): 259–301. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.40.2.01van.

George will be streaming word creation for Lexember every Saturday of the month at 1 PM US Central Time! You can check it out here!

Today, Logan Kearsley joins us to talk about whistled registers, and to let us know about his whistle synthesizer that can help you make one. Links and Resources: Logan’s whistle synthesizer Meyer, J. 2008. Typology and Acoustic Strategies of Whistled Languages: Phonetic Comparison and Perceptual Cues of Whistled Vowels. Journal of the International Phonetic Association , 38 ,1, pp. 69 – 94, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100308003277 Rialland, A., 2005. Phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages. Phonology, 22(2), pp.237-271. Meyer, J., 2007. Whistled Turkish: statistical analysis of vowel distribution and consonant modulations. In XVI International Conference of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 284-288).

George discusses word substitutions people use to avoid Internet censorship, and how that could be applied in worldbuilding. Original Script One of the interesting things you find in internet spaces is the presence of content filtering and the attempts to get around them. On the one hand, the people who have control of a given space have impressive control over the language that is allowed to be used on their platforms. Yet, on the other hand, many of their tools are fairly easy to circumvent, especially if there aren’t expensive human reviewers involved. The result of this is a really interesting environment for a weird kind of taboo avoidance. People avoid certain words not because of any genuine belief that it’s wrong to say them, but because there are people in power who have an effective means to ban those words, and a lot of their replacement strategies have a clear eye to keeping the meaning clear while avoiding the automated filters. This could be really interesting to think about for conlangers working in modern or science fiction settings, where the same kinds of filtering tools might be present, though I have a thought how it could even extend into less technological fantasy settings. Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. You can become a member at patreon.com/conlangery. You can get early access to episodes and even see the scripts for these short before they are recorded. Go to patreon.com/conlangery to pledge your monthly amount. This topic came to me as I was musing about the kinds of taboo avoidance I see on TikTok. I’ve been on TikTok for about a year now, and in that time, I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon of word replacement to avoid censorship. TikTok is known to do a lot of algorithmic enforcement of their community guidelines, and a combination of creators getting videos downgraded or removed along with maybe some technological superstition has led a lot of people to put together some interesting strategies to avoid potential censorship. One very ubiquitous term you’ll hear or see is unalive. It seems that TikTok doesn’t like terms referring to death, so a lot of creators have used unalive as a substitute for die, kill, and even suicide. Note that this collapses the semantics quite a bit, though context will usually pick up that load. You can talk about someone who unalived, someone who unalived someone else, or someone who unalived themself. The meaning remains very clear, with an intuitive derivation. I’ve often mused about how I never see tabooing of terms relating to violence, and this still isn’t quite that, but it does include violence-related terminology. It is interesting that TikTok apparently censors words related to death enough for this euphemism to catch on. In a lot of other avoidance strategies, it’s often more about how words are spelled in captions, which are easier for the app to censor than spoken words. Sex is replaced with seggs, people put random spaces into words in their captions, or follow 1337 conventions of replacing letters with similar-looking numbers or symbols, like 1 for i or the euro sign for e. One user seems to get by with mostly adding diacritic marks to vowels in banned words. Like unalive, it’s aimed at preserving the meaning while avoiding word filters. I even see people use “clock app” or the clock emoji in place of TikTok, presumably in case the site suppresses it’s own name to suppress criticism.  I did encounter one avoidance strategy that didn’t really aim to keep meaning clear. For a while, I saw people replacing sex work with accounting and sex worker with accountant in order to talk about sex worker rights issues. Sometimes, they would call out the taboo avoidance with star emojis, but not always. And as always, this may be said out loud or may only be replaced in the captions. This strategy seems to also be related to a more complex tactic of telling allegorical stories — basically satire aimed at talking about something that’s likely to get removed or deemphasized by the platform. As I alluded before, there are differences in how people implement all of these strategies, with some people saying the replacement out loud, while others only replace it in the captions. This, of course, can cause an accessibility issue when the captions don’t match the speech, but there seem to be cases where the app actually will not transcribe a particular word, indicating that it’s banned from captions. Another place I have encountered some interesting word avoidance in the face of technology is on the Chinese Internet. It’s been a while since I read much about Chinese netizen language, so some of this is definitely out of date, but it’s still interesting. You may know that China exercises a significant amount of censorship on online speech. This is a system that they’ve built up over the years, but it includes a mix of blocking select foreign sites, keyword filtering of social media, and human reviews of online content. The avoidance strategies I’ve seen mostly revolve around using homophones or near-homophones, which works very well in Mandarin Chinese, since you can find homophonous characters pretty easily. A lot of what I saw around when I was paying attention to these things were actually more mocking replacements. Around the aughts, one of the slogans of the Chinese government was 和谐社会, meaning “harmonious society”. People mocking the slogan online replaced the characters of 和谐 “harmonious”, with a homophone (河蟹) meaning “river crab”. This escalated to incorporate a second slogan, 三个代表, “the three represents”, transformed into 带三个表, “wearing three watches”. This, of course, led to photoshopped images of a river crab wearing three watches, which was popular for a while. But there is more straightforward, non-political taboo replacement. This is not episode 13, so I will let you go look up the grass mud horse and the french-croatian squid to figure out the “obscene” phrases they are replacing. There are a lot of things that you can do with these sorts of replacement games. Obviously, this is something worth thinking about if you have some sort of science fiction or modern day world where these kinds of forces are likely to be present on different Internet-like platforms. You can be thinking in terms of your writing system and what can be replaced with what. An idea that came to me was how this could apply in a fantasy setting. For instance, in the book Tigana, an enchantment is placed over the titular princedom on the Peninsula of the Palm by a foreign conqueror. People not from Tigana cannot hear or retain its name or many of the cultural products from the princedom, instead referring to it as Lower Corte. In the story, children of people from Tigana found each other through songs or other cultural knowledge they learned from their parents. However, what if you took that basic premise, but applied some of that TikTok euphemism logic to it. Could they twist the name into something similar that outsiders could hear and retain? If it’s a transparent name, maybe they could use synonyms — perhaps the country is named the equivalent of Rose Kingdom, and various flowers end up substituted, or a description like Thorn-stemmed Kingdom. This all depends on how you decide the enchantment works, of course, and that’s all up to what limits you decide to put on it. Of course, you can also take some inspiration from the mocking nature of some of the Chinese examples above, and come up with some fun, punny ways people refer to the ruling class or the official government. Who is making fun of the government? Why? What are the things they hit on in their satire? In any case, exploring ways that people obfuscate words in an online context or some similar censorship situation can really help you tie language into politics and culture in your world. What things are censored? Why are they censored? What motivates people to talk about them anyway? How effective is the censorship? There’s a wealth of issues to explore this way. Happy Conlanging!

George talks about some interesting terms he encountered in his most recent job, and how you can pay attention to language around you at work for inspiration. Original Script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. Today, I want to continue my occasional “listen like a conlanger” series talking about how you can think like a conlanger at work. Language is everywhere at the workplace, and by having language on your mind as you work, you may be able to improve your craft and distract yourself from the drudgery of capitalism. Conlangery is entirely funded by our patrons on Patreon. To make a monthly contribution, go to patreon.com/conlangery. Patrons get access to early episodes and get to see these shorts scripts as I am working on them. I’m also considering what other kinds of perks I can add, so if you have suggestions, let me know. Some of you may know that I was working at Google as a transcriptionist for the past two years. Now that that contract has ended, I want to talk a little bit about my experience there. I know that many people bemoan corporate language, but the way people around you talk at your job can be an interesting thing to think about. There can be a lot of jargon floating around with unusual and interesting origins, and it can reveal something about the subculture that exists within the company. I’d like to start by talking about a few of the metaphors I encountered at Google. Many of these are likely common at other tech companies and throughout the business world, but I find them interesting. First, there are metaphors that seem to be related to the technology business. It’s common for people to ask for a high-level summary of some system or process. High-level here means a surface-level or abstract and simplified explanation. As far as I can tell, this seems to be related to terminology for programming languages. A high-level programming language is designed to be easier for a human programmer by giving abstracted options that are closer to how we understand the program, taking care of the technical aspects under the hood. Python is a good example of a high-level language. Conversely, a low-level programming language, like Assembly, is much closer to the detailed instructions, down to managing the computer’s memory within the code. So it makes sense that these would end up getting extended to things like an explanation. Ultimately, high-level and low-level are related to the cognitive metaphor of DEPTH IS DETAIL, which you see in phrases like in depth and deep dive. It’s interesting to me, as these terms seem to conflict with other English height metaphors that relate to hierarchy. It’s entirely plausible that a high-level meeting will have two very different meanings: either a meeting of people who are in high positions in their company, organization, or government, or a meeting where topics are covered in a broad and general way. I expect that both apply simultaneously a lot of the time, since powerful people don’t have time for details, but they could clash. Another technology metaphor I heard was bandwidth. Most of us are familiar with the computer networking sense of bandwidth, where it refers to the capacity of a connection to carry data. Apparently this has caught on in the business world to mean someone’s ability to complete tasks. In an environment where people are expected to be juggling multiple tasks at once, this metaphor is useful. We might criticize that environment for the stress that it causes, of course, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another podcast. In both of these, I can think of a couple of things to ask about your conlang. First is what kind of technology is common in your world? Many languages have farming metaphors, because until very recently, most people were farmers to some degree. There are also car metaphors, and now, information technology metaphors are becoming common. Second, what kind of things do your speakers work with all the time? This is especially good if you want to mention specific subcultures within certain professions. Alchemists might make chemical metaphors. Astronomers might take to star metaphors. Another term related to the business is Dogfood, which refers to internal testing where employees are opted into features that are still under development. I see competing origins for this online leading to different companies, but the phrase “Eating your own dogfood” seems to be involved, in a sense of using your own products, which may have originated with actual dogfood companies. Google’s internal material indicated the term was used because it’s a dog-friendly company — employees are encouraged to bring their dogs to work — but I’m pretty sure that this didn’t start with them. Nevertheless, there’s actually an interesting extension here, as an even earlier development testing stage is called Fishfood, which is a more limited pool of opted-in employees. What interests me here is the complexity. A common saying catches on in the business world, then inspires a technical term with possible reinforcement from the company’s culture, then another extension is added on by slapping a different animal metaphor on. That kind of chain reaction is hard to think of in a conlang, especially if you’re going word by word, but can happen fairly often in natural languages. I really wish I could give examples of internal codenames, but I’m really uncertain about whether I can mention those. Most of the ones that I know are for internal data products or backend data systems, and I don’t think they’re publicly known. I will just say that there are a variety of names: some are pop culture references, some are generic and descriptive, and some of them, I’m not sure what the name came from. And of course, there was a plethora of technical terminology. As a transcriptionist, it wasn’t really my job to understand that beyond what was necessary to put the right word in. Occasionally there were interesting little things that can pop up. For instance, the database query language spelled as SQL (for Structured Query Language) was usually pronounced as “sequel”, which is apparently the most common everywhere, though there were those who pronounced the letters S Q L out, especially non-native speakers. If you think about it, it’s clear how dependent that kind of situation is on particulars of our culture. It requires a highly literate culture with an alphabetic script using initialisms. How would this sort of thing work differently under an abjad? Or an abugida? I don’t have one overarching lesson here, except to say that this is another case of using the world around you as inspiration. Think about terminology you come across at work, what its origins are, and how it connects to work culture. How might different professional or work environments in your conworld contribute to the terminology there? For instance, I still need to come up with some technical terminology for magic and magical universities in my current conworlding project, and I’m going to have to think about these things before I come up with finalized terms. I know that different cultures will view these things differently, but I’m going to have to sort out where those differences are.

This episode, George gives a short discussion of the idea of language as having infinite fractal complexity, and what this means for conlangers building fictional worlds. Special Mention: Resources on the Line 3 protest: Stop Line 3, Center for Protest Law and Litigation, Sierra Club Fact Sheet, Line 3 Legal Defense Fund Original Script Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast abou t constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. Today, I’m going to talk a little about the realities of what naturalistic conlangers are trying to simulate. What does it mean for a language to look natural or realistic, and can a conlanger actually create something as complex as a natural language? I’m going to suggest that you ultimately can’t, but I also think that you don’t have to. Most people’s goals in conlanging will not really approach that, and I’m going to talk a little bit about how to decide what you really need out of your conlang. Instead of doing my normal Patreon pitch, I wanted to draw attention to something I think is important to point to. You may have heard of Line 3, the pipeline that is being built in Minnesota to bring tar sands from Alberta into Wisconsin. This pipeline is going through Anishnaabe land. It has the potential to pollute waters through much of the United States, and it’s going to contribute greatly to climate change. I would encourage you guys to go to stopline3.org. I’m also going to link a couple of other resources in the shownotes, and I have decided to make a small donation to the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, which is providing some legal defense funds to people who are protesting the pipeline. I would encourage people to learn about what’s going on here. Of course, there are many important reasons to oppose Line 3. It’s going to have huge ecological impacts. It’s going to impact water in a huge area. It’s going to contribute to climate change. And it is going through treaty land. I, personally, feel the need to highlight it in this podcast specifically because we, as conlangers, often draw inspiration from indigenous languages, and I, myself, have drawn inspiration from the Nishnaabemowin language, also known as Ojibwe, so it seems kind of wrong to take that inspiration and not care about the issues of the actual people who speak those languages. But this is up to you guys as individuals, what you want to do to support this cause. I just want to raise some awareness and let you guys know that I’ll make that small donation. Thank you. Now on to natural languages. Many of us conlangers have a goal of creating a language that at least looks like a natural language, and people do succeed at that in varying degrees. In some ways, it’s not so difficult. There is a reason that ANADEW, A Natlang Already Did it Except Worse, is such a common term in the community. You have to almost deliberately go out to the edge to come up with some grammar or phonology that really looks impossible for humans to come up with naturally. The lexicon can be a bit harder, but with some work, you can avoid relexing and come up with realistic senses for words. What is difficult, and likely impossible, is to come up with the massive amount of variation in language. You can work on dialects and registers all you want, but you won’t really get to the complexity we see in the real world. The reason for that, I’m going to propose, is because in the real world, natlangs have infinite fractal complexity. What do I mean by infinite fractal complexity? Let’s start with your language. For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume a language that is relatively unified and not part of a dialect continuum. That language can naturally be divided into a number of dialects, based either on geography or on social divisions, though most likely both. But those dialect divisions are not hard lines, and there is variation within each dialect. You can subdivide and subdivide until you get to the idiolects of individual people. You might assume that idiolects are atomic, but they’re not. Even there, you’re going to run into variation. Most people code switch between several different varieties, even if they are monolingual. Not only are there different registers for different situations, but you subtly change the way you speak in individual interaction. Sociolinguists often model this by simply taking statistics on how often one variant of a word or construction is used as opposed to others and reporting the percentage. Those percentages change depending on who you’re talking to, and it may even change over the course of a conversation. Add to this the fact that every speaker knows thousands, even tens of thousands of words, and each speaker may have slightly different understandings of their meanings. There are also thousands of collocations, idioms, and combinations involved. And of course, infinitely many unique sentences that can be constructed. All of this extends back into history as well. Historical linguistics attempts to classify languages into neat family trees, but this is still an abstraction. In reality, every reconstructed proto-language is really just an approximation of a messy collection of different dialects. There were many branches off of our languages that we will never know, and others that were reabsorbed into another, surviving branch, possibly leaving traces behind. Words take their own individual journeys, branching out through derivation or hopping across languages in unique patterns reflecting trade routes or migrations. We even have mysterious words that may be from languages that we otherwise know nothing about. So far, I think I’ve impressed on people the fact that it is truly impossible for anyone to construct a language that truly approaches the complexity of what happens in natural languages. The question, I guess, is “What do we do about it?” The seeds of this short are in my interview with Lauren Gawne. We talked a little bit there about determining how much of a language you need for worldbuilding. Lauren told me that Aramteskan mainly just needed enough fleshed out for the needs of the book, though she did go beyond that a bit. My own current project mostly requires a number of naming languages, with some of them related to others. That led me to do some significant historical work on sound changes, in order to create families, but only to get me to phonology and basic morphology. Depending on how the story goes, I might actually do some significant grammar work on two of the languages, but that really depends on whether I decide to include any dialogue in those languages. To understand what my goal should be, I had to think about what these languages were for. This is a story set in what is, for lack of a better term, magic grad school. I have two protagonists and three other viewpoint characters, all from different cultures, and probably from three different language families. There are also other characters: students and professors from a variety of cultures, plus locals to the area the university is in, which I plan to be speaking another language. Being in something resembling a modern academic environment, I intend for characters to be citing names from various cultures, too, potentially including names from significantly earlier times. All of these factors led me to think that I needed the basic structure of at least two language families with enough sound changes and morphology to make names, and possibly a few extra isolates with room to expand on. In addition, at most two languages might need to generate sentences for this story, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll actually have to go that far. My historical work, for now, is limited to sound changes. I may need to add a few grammaticalized forms for the more synthetic languages, but I’m not going to go all out on verb forms or syntax evolution until I decide I need to make sentences. There isn’t really a standard shape for what you need here. The complexity is still something to think about, but precisely what parts of that complexity you need to simulate is something you need to consider when you’re building. For one world, you may decide that you will only ever need names for one culture, and so you just make one naming language. For another, you might decide that you want a few phrases in an archaic form of a language, so build one language out to build those sentences, and maybe do a little bit of historical work to get modern names or a bit of a modern version of a language. But what if you want two characters from the same linguistic culture communicating in the language, well, then you want to have that one language built out, but you also want to think about not just broad strokes diversity, but the particular idiolects of these two characters. You want to ask if they come from different regions. You want to ask if their social class, gender, or other social identifications affect how they speak. Perhaps most importantly for this one dialogue, you want to work out just how these two particular characters would speak to each other. That involves some thinking about register, politeness, and relative social standing, but also about the emotional state of these particular characters and their own tendencies to adhere to norms or not. That sounds like a lot of detailed conlanging work, but it’s specific to the two characters in the dialogue. Some of it has implications that could affect other things down the road, but you only need enough framework there that you can expand later if you need to. You can focus on the differences between these characters, and along the way, work out some basic ideas of how to expand things in the future. Now, there are plenty of conlangers out there who enjoy going deep into a language without some particular application in worldbuilding, and there are always people who don’t mind building more than you need. If you are building a language for a work of fiction, though, I hope these ideas are helpful to you. The bottom line is, language is fantastically complex in myriad ways, but you don’t need to deal with all of that complexity at once. Consider what you need right now, and where you need room to expand in the future.

George talks to Jasper Charlet and his opera, Heyra, written entirely in the Carite language, which is currently in crowdfunding. Top of Show Greeting: Opaki Aŋkuati Links Heyra on IndiegogoCarite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George brings on 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.

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.

This episode, we discuss Coptic, the last descendant of thousands of years of Ancient Egyptian, now spoken mainly as a liturgical language in Coptic Christian churches in Egypt. Top of Show Greeting: Nalathis Special Mention: Go watch Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues! Links and Resources: Plumley, Martin (1948) An Introductory Coptic Grammar. London: Home and van Thal. Tattam, Henry (1863) A Compendious Grammar of the Egyptian Language. London: Williams and Norgate. Layton, Bentley (2000). A Coptic grammar: With chrestomathy and glossary: Sahidic dialect (Vol. 20). Otto Harrassowitz. Loprieno, Antonio (1995) Ancient Egyptian: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge University Press. Lambdin, Thomas Oden (1983) Introduction to Sahidic Coptic. Mercer University Press. Youssef, Ahmad Abdel-Hamid (2003) From Pharaoh’s Lips: Ancient Egyptian Language in the Arabic of Today. American University of Cairo Press.

This month Christophe and William come on to talk about their experience at LCC7. Along with a few people William recorded on his phone. View the conference page here and all the videos of talks here. Top of Show Greeting: Croatian (translated and performed by Dorian Frangen)

Kaye Boesme joins George to talk about her far-future audiodrama Epiphany. Top of Show Greeting: Narahji (Note, I am working on a transcript for this episode. It has been delayed by irregular baby napping.)