Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
We talk about how to organize your conlang, from organizing your notes to writing the grammar and lexicon, and what software is out there to help you. Also, some stupid example sentences, and a little old language called Alurhsa.
Pre-show intro: Ancaron language by ZBB’s Lyhoko Leaci.
Resources and Links:
Featured Conlang: Alurhsa
Solarius
Hi, I just want to say that I really like this podcast. It has helped me a ton with my language, and you guys manage to make it fun as well as informative.
Kraamlep
Me again… Just to say that I find the podcast is inspiring me to want to create a new conlang (#6), but I’ll have no time until I’ve finished documenting Jameld properly! I have more suggestions for the show, but I’ll get back to you on that another time… And this ep made me laugh out loud on a number of occasions, which is embarrassing when I’m out walking the no dog.
SHiNKiROU
I’m working on Kumiko, and I got many notes on paper and computer. Making Kumiko is mainly planning out new operators (grammar words) and demonstrate them.
I found I can draw diagrams easily on paper, and diagrams are crucial for describing the temporal relationships of the connectives.
and I found it’s easy to organize tables on a digital document. I need it to build a periodic table of operators.
I use Microsoft Access for dictionary, and found it’s case-insensitive, which is bad because the romanization I typed is case-sensitive. (Fa = fu a, vs. fa)
Try to translate sentences into glosses, then when a word is made, replace the gloss with the word.
btw, check out Ithkuil, it’s reference grammar is not optimized for teaching
Wm Annis
Here’s a dictionary tool some people might find interesting (Windows, Linux, no Mac version currently): WeSay.
Jai
I’m not gonna lie… my first conlang had sound descriptions not IPA. I didn’t even
know what IPA stood for during the creation of Hseishch.
Thanks goodness I know it now! It’s opened me up to a bunch of new sounds
that I never knew existed. My new favourite: ɬ .
Aidan
You touched on SIL but totally missed Fieldworks, which allows you to build a grammar, tack all sorts of affixes, word classes, and genders, semantic categories, and all the stuff you guys despaired of finding in computer records! It does take a little to figure it all out, but with their walkthroughs, in less than an hour, it all makes sense and you can accomplish amazing things. You should totally do a show on other computer tools out there – I kinda expected this episode to have more of that than just than Awkwords and LaTeX. 🙁 There are tons of resources at SIL, WordNet for semantic parsing, 57 varieties of SCA, fonting software and online apps (FontStruct)… so many things that didn’t get mentioned!
Otherwise – awesome! Loving the show, and keep up the good work!
Vítor De Araújo
I learned the lesson the hard way. My conlanging activity has been in a 5-year hiatus except for some occasional idea here and there, and now I sometimes come across old notes that consist only of two or three sentences in *some* stage of the conlang, with no gloss and no translation. Of course by now I am lucky if I remember the meaning of the words, especially because I often make up words on spot just to experiment with some grammatical feature, so the sentences often contain words that are not even meant to be “official”. So I have to spend some time now guessing what I was thinking five years ago. Nowadays I usually take care to at least gloss the sentences, even in casual notes (as I keep only casual notes anyway), so that I will able to understand these notes six months (or five years) from now.
Michał
In Polish using tird person when talking to someone is the Polite way to do things…