Conlangery #48: Designing a Sound System

April 30, 2012 by 4 Comments

After a discussion of George’s recent consumption of bear meat, we get to talking about designing your sound system, a topic we meant to talk about in episode 29 but somehow didn’t end up saying much about.  After a long discussion about that topic, we feature perhaps the second most famous auxlang in history, which goes by the terrible name of Volapük.

Top of Show Greeting: Quenya (translation by Roman Rausch)

Links and Resources:

Featured Conlang: Volapük (“Handbook”, Wikipedia, Volapük.com)

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Filed under Podcast Tagged with , , , , ,

Conlangery #47: Practicum — Isolating and Analytic Languages

April 23, 2012 by 12 Comments

Today we talk about something we wish more conlangers would think about creating — isolating and analytic languages.  It seems that virtually everyone wants some polysynthetic madness or at least a complex verb paradigm, but there are ways to make isolation and analytic syntax interesting, we promise!  Also, Taila

Top of Show Greeting: Hra’anh

Links and Resources:

Featured Conlang: Taila

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Filed under Podcast Tagged with , , , , ,

Conlangery #46: Conlanging for Conworlds

April 16, 2012 by 26 Comments

Check out the Serpent’s Tongue kickstarter I mentioned at the top of the show!

After teasing Mike a bit about his trip to an Anime convention, we get down to business on how to make your conlang fit into a conworld.  Then we cover an interesting and enigmatically-named Arka language.

Top of Show Greeting: German (translation by Carsten Becker) [NOTE: Yes, we are now accepting natlang greetings from native speakers]

Featured Conlang: Iŋomœ́ (Akana Wiki Page)

Feedback:

Read more of this post

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Filed under Podcast Tagged with , , , , ,

Can we get some suggestions?

April 11, 2012 by 19 Comments

As happens every so often, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel on conlangs as of late, so I thought I would appeal to the audience to help us find some gems to feature on the show.  We’re looking for linguistically sophisticated conlangs with good documentation.  It doesn’t have to be a whole book, of course … just enough content for us to talk for about 20 minutes about.  You can consult our episode list to see what conlangs have been featured previously and email suggestions to conlangery@gmail.com.

Also, I am out of top-of-show greetings — another common occurrence.  You can find out how to submit those on our contribute page.

Thanks!

UPDATE:  A viewer has convinced me to accept translations of the top-of-show greeting into natlangs, given that those translations come from native speakers.  So, if your native language is something other than English, feel free to contribute a translation.  So far we have a German one which will be used for the next episode (#46).

Filed under News

Conlangery #45: Questions

April 9, 2012 by 12 Comments

This week we talk about the many peculiarities of how questions can be handled in your language.  Join us as we explore not only polar and content questions, but also talk about rhetorical and conjectural ones as well, with some insight on how different languages handle them.  We also have a natlang featured today, one that I’m sure many people will be familiar with.

Top of Show Greeting: Wateu

Links and Resources:

Featured NATLANG: Welsh (Early and Middle)

Feedback:

In lieu of a regular feedback, we read some of our iTunes reviews.  Unfortunately, I cannot copy-paste from iTunes and really don’t want to retype them, but I will link to Literal Minded’s blog post where he linked to us — you should have a look see at that guy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Filed under Podcast Tagged with , , , ,

Conlangery #44: Negation

April 2, 2012 by 17 Comments

First of all, George was on something called FourCast a bit ago.  You might enjoy it.  Also, CNN is doing a special on Dothraki on April 8.  But the meat of this podcast is all about negation: how to deal with scope, negative concord, and a number of other issues in your conlang.  Oh, and we also talk about Brithenig.

Top of Show Greeting: Qlfhpfsq

Links and Resources:

Featured Conlang: Brithenig (FrathWiki page, Ill Bethisad Wiki)

Feedback:

Email from Lee: Read more of this post

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Filed under Podcast Tagged with , , , ,