Conlangery 97

Conlangery #97: Interview with Britton Watkins

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Today we interview conlanger Britton Watkins about his journey from natlang enthusiasm through Vulcan and Na’vi fandom to creating a conlang for his and his husband’s ‘nano-budget’ movie.

No Responses to “Conlangery #97: Interview with Britton Watkins”

  1. Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets

    Great episode! And this Senn movie makes me extremely curious and interested. Spent a moment on the site, and the trailer looks extremely good! I want to watch this movie! I also think it would be great to have a screening at the next LCC, it would be a perfect fit :).

    As for the language, I can’t comment on the grammar, but at least the alphabet looks really good! Original, yet immediately recognisable as a writing system, and very believable. The posters look really good too, very communist in design and yet slightly different, with a bit of a North Korean vibe. I think you nailed it! 🙂

    A quick comment on “bravery” and learning languages. I think that’s quite a good comment here. You need courage to try and express yourself in a language you don’t master yet. I mean, ridicule may not kill, but it can definitely kill one’s self-esteem! So it’s a catch-22: you don’t dare to use a language because you don’t master it, and because you don’t master the language you don’t dare using it. Only courage can break that vicious circle.

    • Britton

      Christophe, thank you so much for this. I’m afraid the grammar is still largely undisclosed. I need to get that written up and distributed. Will probably do that around the time that the film leaves the indy film circuit, which probably won’t be until late 2014. It’s probably unlikely that a film of Senn’s scope will get in, but we have applied to http://www.imaginefilmfestival.nl and have not heard back a “no” yet, so fingers still crossed. If the next LCC is 2015, I can personally promise that we can screen Senn there. 🙂

    • Britton

      Wm., The one (new-to-me) tool that I wish I had know about at the time that I put together that presentation is Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/en/). If I were not already an Adobe Illustrator user for glyph design, I would probably teach myself this application. It’s cost-free and looks like it holds great promise for font (letterform) exploration.

  4. Matt Henke

    I just have to say that I loved this format. It was a nice change, and really interesting interview.

    That’s all.

    • admin

      Thanks for the feedback. We haven’t really done many straight interviews, but I think it’s something we’ll branch out into in the future. Of course the heart of the show will still be our standard linguistics talk and featured language episodes.

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