Looking forward to hearing you all again in a month or so.

I just thought I would drop a line to show my appriciation for the show.

I have listened to nearly all the episodes and I do it often while walking. A great misfortune of mine was for a long time I got ideas yet couldn’t write them down in a good manner during these walks. But with the usage of a few good apps and the evernote system that is no longer the case. Your Podcast brings me great ideas and with it I can write everything down to do work on it later!

I am also active at a Wiki, Linguifex, http://linguifex.com/index.php?title=Main_Page , which aims to be a good storage for conlangs, a wiktionary for conlang called contionary, and a central source for linguistic information for conlanging purposes.

Keep up the good work!

Best Regards, Zelos

“He did it from the king” => The king made him do it.

By the way, while we are talking about Basque, let me mention that I thought I was being original by having complex morphophonemic changes in Moten hiding a very regular grammar under seemingly irregular surface forms. Now my latest reading on Basque has shown me that that language does exactly the same thing with its seemingly inextricable synthetic verb forms! Once you take into account the very regular morphophonemic changes and a (very) few cases of stem suppletion, all synthetic verbs in Basque are pretty much regular, including the auxiliaries! I knew my Moten was heavily influenced by Basque, but now I’m discovering that it’s the case even for features I wasn’t aware are in Basque too .

To give a short example of how affix ordering is relevant in Moten, consider the noun e|lon: “woman”, the definite infix -e-, and the genitive singular case, marked by the infix -v- and the suffix -i. In Moten, the placement rule is the same for all infixes: they are put just in front of the last vowel of the noun. So we get e|leon: “the woman” and elvo|n: “of a woman” (the changes here are regular morphophonemic changes).

But what if you want to say “of the woman”? Do you add the definite infix first, and the case afterwards, leading to e|levo|n, or do you do the opposite, leading to elveo|n? Well, as it happens, if you want to say “of the woman”, the first option is the correct one: e|levo|n, with the definite infix put in there before the case infix.

However, the second option elveo|n is also valid, although with a different meaning: it’s a nominalisation of the genitive phrase (by surdeclinaison) meaning “the one of a woman”. So as you can see, the order in which infixes are added to a word is extremely relevant to the meaning of the phrase.

Affix ordering in Moten is a complex issue, with many traps for the unwary, and some cases of genuine uncertainty as to what the correct ordering is. Luckily, those are fairly rare.

In any case, it’s nice to hear that there are natlangs out there where infix ordering is relevant to the meaning of a phrase. It makes me more confident about the abilitiy to speak and understand Moten .

A main point is that the trigger for an unambiguously passive interpretation is by having an agent with ὑπό in the clause. Without that, a middle interpretation is just as likely, even for -θη- forms.

ἐργαζωμεν τα εργα του κυριου.
work-SBJV-1PL DEF work-PL DEF lord-GEN
“Let us work the works of the Lord.”

New Testament Greek does have a morphological passive in the future and aorist, according to the grammar (Kubo, Sakae. A Beginner’s New Testament Grammar) and text that my class is using. θ is the sign that gives these passives away. (A quick Google for papers tells me that this is a morphological convention that is traditionally referred to as the passive.)
Aorist
Active: ἐλύσα
Middle: ἐλύσαμην
Passive: ἐλυθήμεν

This is even clearer in the aorist subjunctive mood:
Active: λύσω
Middle: λύσωμαι
Passive: λυθῶ

One example of passive voice used (which I can’t recall, so I’m synthesizing one):
ἐλυθὴσαν οἱ δοὺλοι ὑπο τον κύριον.
AOR-loose-PASS-3SG DEF slave-NOM.PL by DEF lord
“The slaves were freed by the Lord”

For learning materials, I’d recommend Athenaze by Maurice Baume and Gilbert Lawall. It teaches grammar and morphology in an incremental format, and it teaches discourse through the use of stories, starting easily, and building to wilder texts. It has some examples of how discourse particles such as δε (which I stole wholesale borrowed for one of my conlangs) are used.

First, the Modern Greek spelling is not bad at all! It’s only etymological for the vowels, and even then it’s not that difficult (/i/ is the only truly problematic one). For consonants, the Modern Greek orthography is extremely phonemic (indeed, the only places where writing and pronunciation differ are completely and easily predictable, which is why they are not indicated). Even stress is always marked in polysyllabic words, which is great since it’s phonemic (imagine how much easier Russian orthography would be if stress was always marked!). Especially since Greek went monotonic and removed all the breathings and alternative stress diacritics from its orthography (which were useless in Modern Greek). Basically, reading Modern Greek is exceedingly easy, with the orthography being totally transparent. Writing Greek is only slightly more difficult, due mostly to the variety of spellings of /i/ . In any case, it’s nowhere as difficult as English spelling is.

Second, William gives the impression at one moment that the verbal system of Greek completely lost the perfect aspect. That’s not actually true. Although the synthetic perfect forms were indeed lost, the perfect aspect itself was continued through periphrastic conjugations using the equivalent of “to have” with an invariable form that looks identical to the 3rd person singular subjunctive perfective (for all verbs, no exceptions), but actually descends from an old non-finite form. So Modern Greek still has the three-way imperfective/perfective/perfect distinction, mostly unchanged in meaning if not in form for the last 2000 years.

Finally, I want to mention that I find it interesting to hear how non-finite-form-happy Ancient Greek was, knowing that Modern Greek has mostly lost nearly all those forms. While Ancient Greek used non-finite clauses everywhere, Modern Greek uses instead finite clauses. It hasn’t even kept an infinitive as citation form, using the first person singular present instead! Shows you how much can happen in 2000 years .

Anyway, a great show as usual, keep up the good work!

I started grad school a semester before you, and I’ve just been flabbergasted that you’ve been able to continue producing the podcast so regularly during that time! Especially at this point in the semester. Maybe you can log some extra episodes or shorts over the summer, to make it easier on yourself next semester

There’s a paper on this subject by Irina Nikolaeva (Possessive affixes in the pragmatic structuring of the utterance: Evidence from Uralic) where you find sample sentences like

Amŏlaj-əl kawərl.
something-3SG cooks
“(She) is cooking something.” (N-Khanty)

As “something” is inherently indefinite, the use of the possessive affix -əl cannot indicate definiteness but rather marks the unstated object of cooking as something specific that can be specified further. To me this doesn’t sound to be too far from what Squamish does with its identifiable-to-the-speaker article. Neither use has to indicate definiteness and when something is identifiable to the speaker it’s not in practice very far from becoming identifiable to the listener as well.

The possessive affixes used in this manner can be quite mobile as can be seen from attaching to pronouns and stacking with possessively used possessive affixes in the following examples:

Kod no mi-ys?
who FOC we-3SG
“Who are we” (Komi)

Üδər-em-že, üδər-em-že, üδər!
girl-1SG-3SG girl-1SG-3SG girl
“And my daughter, what sort of girl is she!” (Mari)

Clearly this use of the possessive affixes deals with some quite complicated pragmatic issues and is likely very language specific. I don’t know what it actually means to attach an identifiability marker to a personal pronoun.

Also, the Mari example and its given translation are truly priceless.

“Háček!”

But then, when it comes to borrowings Dutch is weird, and its borrowing patterns make no sense. I have seen people here (in the North of the Netherlands, next to the German border) thanking others by saying merci, which is the French word for “thank you”! The first time I heard that I did a double-take. I hear younger people use thanks as well, complete with the dental fricative, despite Dutch lacking it. By the way, in Dutch borrowings are usually pronounced as closely as possible to the pronunciation in the original language, even if it means using sounds that don’t exist in Dutch phonology. Only very old borrowings (i.e. 3 generations old or more) get adapted.

About the number of languages people in the real world speak, I knew a guy from a West African country once who spoke seven languages. One was his mother tongue, one was the national “common” language, one was the local “common” language, plus French in school and English because, well, it’s English. The other two were just because he’s a genius. If you take out the genius factor, he still speaks at least four languages, and if you take out the modern education, still three.

Of course, that’s in a modern society of people in states. For hunter gatherers living on productive land, they may have been exposed to even more linguistic diversity. My guess is that the average hunter gatherer would speak 1 or 2 languages very well, another 2 or 3 with partial fluency, and have limited abilities in a large number of others. If they live in an area that experienced language replacement recently, they would be learning different dialects of the same language, which is easier but less interesting.

Not sure what the effects of endogamy would be if it meant people moving between different language communities. If your mother’s language is different from your peers’, how likely are you to learn her language, or would you just talk to her in her second language?

Then there’s also Mordvin which has a more fully polypersonal definite conjugation that in principle agrees with the person and number of both the subject and definite object. Quite many forms of the conjugation pattern are however identical with each other.

I could ask them how it is progressing, if you like.

*=the closest concept in atevi (then translated to English) to “friend”

Great job, as always — thanks, y’all!

Note that Portuguese (standard or otherwise) often uses an article where English would use a possessive pronoun (e.g., “machuquei a mão” (“[I] hurt the hand”)).

Since listening to your podcasts, my conlang has split into two–the second of which has the original first name. (It’s complicated, lol)

Thank you very much for these–I’m learning a lot.

@Tristan, I know it’s half a year late, but here’s a list of words in themes for several languages:
http://www.uld3.org/uld27/index.html
The Universal Linguistic Database was created by Rick Harrison and has words in the following languages: English, German, Netherlands, Italian, Japanese, Esperanto, Novial, and Tsolyani. *Note that not all languages have all words.

I hope these help.

I have no idea what you are talking about with grammatical vs semantic ambiguity. All ambiguity is semantic. I don’t see how I can misunderstand what someone said in any interesting way without also misunderstanding the meaning.

On a basic level, creoles often take significant vocabulary from one language, a number of basic grammatical rules from another language to create a very simple structure, then elaborate internally from that small stock via means such as reduplication and ideophones. Creoles like Tok Pisin, for example, you have mostly English as the lexical input but, since it’s used as a lingua franca among speakers of the very diverse Papuan languages, can anyone determine all the grammatical/substrate influences on the language? Check out how many different languages Broome Pearling Lugger Pidgin draws from in the Wikipedia example.

So first you’d have to make a lexifier language, but it’s probably not necessary (at a basic level) to specify the grammar in detail. It could be a shameless relex of English or another language, or just a sketch with well worked-out phonotactics and a word generator. You’d need a process to nativize this vocabulary into the creole, which means that you’d want an idea of the phonology of the substrate language. And as far as grammar goes, the easiest thing to do would be to take “generic creole grammar”, with the sort of common features held to be universal as part of the language bioprogram theory, or the creole prototype—regardless of what you think of those theories, of course

For this purpose, Pacific creoles may make an easier model than Atlantic creoles. And I’d love to see some comparative work on North American pidgins like Chinook Jargon, Mobilian Jargon, Broken Slavey, or non-European creoles like Nagamese creole.

Making a whole post-creole continuum, OTOH, seems like it would be a ton of work and definitely require two or more very well worked-out languages.

For my upcoming conlang Ponese, I was going to go with a tonal, isolating language featuring contour tones, but I think I might go for a simpler 2-tone or 3-tone system and a more complicated syllable structure. It might be a little bit easier. I still think I’ll use tones phonemically for lexical distinction, and I don’t know whether I’ll keep the isolating morphology idea.

This reminded me of a German language I saw awhile ago on here called tviskengermaanske. http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t9935-0.htm
There’s also talk of a ‘semiti’ which links to here and the enormous. Grammar for a ‘delason’ http://www.nizarhabash.com/

Cheers!

I really can’t think of any linguists whose books one should avoid. Pinker drives me up a wall, but I figure people can work out how they feel about Universal Grammar on their own.

My question was this: are there any any good reference materials on the Cornish language? (on a related note, are there any linguists whose books we should avoid?)

ps: I’m going to check my local library – they have some Cherokee language books, and when I type up their info, I’d like your opinion on if they’re high-quality.

And most importantly, I had to sacrifice heat for conlangery too! My electric blanket used to create a hum (outside of human hearing) that would get picked up. I think you should form a union and demand heating rights from George.

as to the podcast, great work to one and all involved. definately food for thought as to how my concreole can regain definatenesses.

thanks.

While I do need to return to work on Arimaspean Creole, it does exist: http://aveneca.com/cbb/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2278 and will be getting a webpage within the next month.
(the parent conlang doesn’t technically exist – but sometimes with A.Creole and its sister conlang Arasamean, I say “here’s the Arimaspean word it comes from”)

B. Why would I be interested in an engelang podcast. The main problem with engelangs is that they are subject to the same reinvention of language by children as any language is, not to mention the same naturalistic tendencies to change as normal languages, I’m listening to your podcast both so I can learn new things and so that I can built a language that can resist or attempt to resist such changes, what’s the point in building the “perfect language” if it will stop being perfect in a 100 years. (and I’m looking here both at the auxlang Esperanto and at Classical Arabic)

Seelinnikoi. Mieleni alenevi.

On relativism: the problem with linguistics (and anthropology in general) is that the subjects of study are human beings. As such, it can be very difficult to dispassionately study them, and even when you think you have blocked out prejudices and biases, your results might still offend people, and could be taken by others as validation of their own prejudices. Some arguments for equal complexity of languages invoke this argument, though the obvious counterargument is that we don’t have to consider complexity good or bad. In any case, it’s still difficult to measure.

The whole story on my “regular irregularity” probably can’t be adequately summed up in a comment. I’ll see if I can work up a blog post on the subject in the future.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

So, let’s go back to square one. Different conlangs are different. A conlang is defined by its goals. Naturalistic conlangs attempt to appear like natural languages. No natural language is perfectly regular. Ergo…

Moro at EndangeredLanguages.com

The Moro Language Project at UCSD

Don’t be surprised if you see them calling Moro a tone language. I think they’re nuts; they think I’m nuts. They should just put up recordings and let folks decide for themselves…

2. Regular irregulars, would you mind expanding on that? it sounds very interesting. (if that sounded disingenuous, it was; I just want to pick your brain for ideas, since I personally dislike irregulars and see this as a great opportunity to advance my engelang)

To the second: Vowel harmony is a great way of achieving what I call “regular irregularity”, where a perfectly regular process can create something that seems irregular to someone unfamiliar with the system or who is linguistically unsophisticated — especially if your vowel harmony system includes multiple features harmonizing in different ways (ie Turkish having all vowels harmonize on [back] but only high vowels harmonizing on [round]). It’s still not a substitute for genuine irregularities, though — since once someone figures out a highly regular vowel harmony system, it’s going to become very transparent.

On topic: is vowel/consonant harmony an acceptable way of circumventing highly regular conlangs and making them look(sound/feel) more natural?

“Anyway, most people tell me that ESL is only a temporarily ceiling fan.”

Don’t think that would have gone over well. Cheers!

(The drawing and my description date back to 1997, so please forgive…)

Alifa ruið! He iðu Konlaneri, h-podbirlax ek ju-mia xenteðl uz ju-h-kizul ek xef xentiros hen et ii et.


Ali-fa ruið!
face.ALL mutual

He iðu-0 Konlaneri,
be.3SG this-[ABS] [name]

h-podbirlax-0 ek ju-mia xent-eð-l
DEF-podcast-[ABS] REL» ABL-language(G2) create-PASTADJ-PL

uz ju-h-kizu-l
and ABL-DEF-person-PL

ek xef xent-ir-os hen et ii et.
REL» 4PL.G2.ABS create-PRSPTCP-3PL.G2.OBJ be.3PL «REL talk.3SG «REL


As you can see, relative clauses can be nested.

Does any natlang do this, i.e. mark the start and end of relative clauses?

I enjoyed the episode, and will be putting some feedback on my blog fairly soon. Just thought you’d like to know that it was Sylvia Sotomayor who used Khangaþyagon in Inverse Relay 2.

By the way, it’s been a while now, but I wanted to say I very much enjoyed the installment on conlangs in movies and TV–with clips and stinging critiques. Very entertaining! Keep up the good work, guys!

2. As far as Indo-European goes, I find the Gothic relative pronouns very interesting: They are formed by agglutinating the complementizer ei (pronounced [i:]) to a demonstrative pronoun: sa manna ‘this man’, manna saei… ‘the man who…’. What’s interesting is that ei can be combined with 1st and 2nd person pronouns to relativize them just as easily: ikei ‘I who’, þuei ‘you who’.

The lines are:

adj-V-genitive-S
adv-S-V
adv-V-S
imp! S-V, int-S-V

In fact, there isn’t a single O to be seen in the stanza, unless you’re counting the genitive plural “der Männer”, which isn’t a direct object.

And my favorite SOV clause in German is from a stanza of Waldesgespräch (Eichendorff):
“Groß ist der Männer Trug und List,
Vor Schmerz mein Herz gebrochen ist,
Wohl irrt das Waldhorn her und hin,
O flieh! Du weißt nicht, wer ich bin.”

Just beautiful!

So the English phrase “I know a guy whose girlfriend speaks French” could be translated in these two manners:

Formal (what most Germans would consider correct): “Ich kenne einen Mann, dessen Freundin Französisch kann.”

Informal (most Germans would peg this as sounding either uneducated or dialectal, but you do sometimes hear it): Ich kenne einen Mann, DEM die Freundin Französisch kann.”

Note that in the second example, they’d add the definite article to the subject in the relative clause.

To David: It’d have been a treat to see how Castithan or Irathient mark the relative clause. Also about that, I couldn’t help but wondering… did you think of the word “rejo” for “sport” first or did you actually think of all the roots and proto-language words and came up with *raidi which you then transformed into “rejo”? How does your process work in this regard? Or is it a mixture?

Best wishes! Great show!

A funny thing happens in Croatian and many other languages where you have a 3rd person feminine and masculine and their possessives also mark the gender of what’s possessed. So you have poss-MASC-MASC or poss-FEM-FEM. It’d be like having in Spanish “suoyo/suoya” and “suayo/suaya” hehe.

Love the show!

Guys, sort your German grammar out!

The grammatically standard version of what David was trying to say is “der Mann, DEM ich das Buch gegeben habe.” The relative pronoun in all cases except Genitive is identical to the definite article. So you “die Frau, DIE mit dem Kind spielt, heißt Jane.”

Case of the relative pronoun follows its role in the subordinate clause, similar to the Russian example Mike gave. “Der Mann, den du siehst, heißt Günter.”

For genitive, there are two special relative pronouns corresponding to the English word “whose”, “dessen” (for masculine or neuter possessors) and “deren” (for feminine or plural possessors). Interestingly (I think), Spanish has a similar thing (cuy@(s)) but the gender matches the possessed, not the possessor.

Regards word order, in a relative clause the finite verb is always last.

Love the show, keep it up (and learn some more German)

I was just afraid there may had been some pun that I missed…

The one I could think of is “Like heck they awe”, “Like heck they or”, “Like heck they ore”, and possibly one or two more – neither of which seems to make much sense.

Rac jojsajs cacôgejton nu tumajnoe jaesajs jtapon. Tâ jaesajs raegen côro tumajnoe jtamen. Tâ cos catjon côro tâtae cohoc hacan.
[ ɹɐk jɔɕɐɕ kakɔ̞̃ŋitɕɔn nʉ tʉmaɲɔɪ jaɪsɐɕ tɕapɔn. tɐ̃ jaɪsɐɕ ɹaɪŋɛn kɔ̞̃ɹɔ tʉmaɲɔɪ tɕamɛn. tɐ̃ kɔs katɕɔn kɔ̞̃ɹɔ tɐ̃taɪ kɔhɔk hɐkɐn. ]

A man went into a cave because he thought there were bats there. He looked inside and there were no bats. He went home and told his son.

Again as I said, great show! And great point. I did post something inspired by all this in one of my blogs (you can access it through the link in my name here), I would be excited to know you opinion about it.

About the gender one, well, in Spanish “masculine” is the default gender, in fact you guys mentioned “nosotros” in the podcast and it’s not like it’s that weird to use “nosotros” even with a group of mixed genders, because Spanish always uses masculine even when we talk of a couple. You would use “nosotras” if they were only women, but if there is at least 1 male, then you go back to “nosotros” as a default. Also another funny word very agglutinative and that’s masculine “correveidile” which means “a person who’s a gossip” and is composed of “corre, ve y dile” (run, go and tell him/her)

…or is it? Consider: sacapuntas.

Because those references were for you guys, you lunk! It was to give you and Michael background on where I was coming from, so that you knew what I was talking about. What’d you want me to put in there, a link to Redfin listings in Maine?

I do find home life a good place to look to develop interesting culturally relevant vocab.

Oh George, you’re spoiling us!!!

~Na’amina ia Inurín

Like Klingon normally fits its affixes into slots, except for the affix meaning “no, not”, which is a floater; it’s scope-ordered in a broader template-ordered paradigm.

I am learning some interesting things about Tagalog. For instance, today I learned about the most awesome contact effect: Tagalog speakers use native numerals for everyday counting, Spanish for dates and times (even borrowing the a la(s) X structure, and English for large numbers.

Cheers!

The episode was great, William’s absence will indeed be missed but he can’t complain about his great replacement. There was great material and ideas for people with agglutinative languages. One interesting thing about vowel harmony is that each language that features it seems to have its own version, right? Of course always would a logical system, logical in its own terms.

“Don’t use morphemes”, I found this final warning very interesting, I wish David could have expanded on it! Are you objecting to bound morphemes, free morphemes or to the whole idea of analyzing languages as composed of “morphemes”?

Well, hope to hear more episodes soon! Great job!

Joe

Also, if you like bitter melon, you’ll be set. For some reason, the Hmong farmers always have it, though I have no idea who all is buying it. I buy at most one a season. Hmm… now I know what I’m having for lunch this Saturday.

Regarding the cheese section: George, the cheese expert was not there for tourists, but locals. I know the store you went into and it has snooty aspirations. And they have plenty of cheeses not from Wisconsin, too. Although I like the idea of someone in Pigeon Falls making a good manchego.