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George shares some ambitious plans for a new world with lots of naming languages.
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Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I’m doing a short this month, as being at home for me actually means I have less time, mainly due to small children. In what time I have, I’ve been able to do a little bit of conlanging, and I wanted to share a little bit about my plans there.
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. Recently, I have been working on writing what now looks to be a novella. It’s set at a fantastical university with the equivalent of graduate students preparing for their final test by inventing new spells.
One thing I want to do with this world is to create a number of naming languages. The primary characters come from two different cultures, and one of them has ancestry from another one. Currently all of the characters have placeholder names, some of which are fantasy names made up on the spot, like Hregan, Chan, and Siira, which may or may not survive, and some of which are just variables like Masters A, B, C, D, and E. Those will not survive.
My aim is to create enough naming languages with enough history that I can expand them into full languages later without losing continuity. As such, I’m doing a lot more historical work than you would necessarily need with a naming language. I want these languages to have evolved and branched off into families to generate a ton of different names I can work with, and I want an idea of what cultures were in contact when, so that I can later figure out loan words and influences.
Right now I have a number of proto-languages started. I started off generating a bunch of phonologies in gleb. Then, I selected a few that I liked and came up with a few initial sound changes just to give them a little bit of allophony. From there, my plan is to evolve each language in stages, going around 1,000 years at a time until I have 3-5 millenia covered. It’s a bit ambitious, but I want the option to have large, deep language families where I want them.
As far as tools I’m using here, in addition to gleb, I’m also using William’s lexifer to generate words and JS Bangs’ Phonix to apply sound changes. I did a short about Phonix some time ago, and I believe lexifer has been mentioned on the show. They’re both command-line tools that work from a text-based definition file.
I also inform my sound changes with Contrastive Hierarchies, like those that Joey Windsor discusses in his LCC talks. I do things a bit differently from him in that I use a different feature set, based on work by Avery and Idsardi, which combines with the Contrastive Hierarchy to leave me with really seriously underspecified segments. I may do a future episode on these features. They’re interesting to use, but not necessarily for everyone, and there are some tricky bits and some things they don’t do perfectly. For one thing, you need to be okay with the fact that one segment ends up with no features at all.
I’m going to link to the Google Docs where I’m working on these languages so people can look at what I’ve done so far.
The first one, labeled the “Ankong” family has a three-way laryngeal distinction (plain, voiced, and aspirated). I plan on having tonogenesis develop in the branch of this family that I will be using, and I can already see the avenues for that. I like the prospect of the three-way distinction, as I can easily lose voicing to tonogenesis, and I also have an easy way to get final glottal stops. Although I don’t generally like cultural coding, because of some personal aspects of the story, this culture will probably be inspired somewhat by Chinese culture. We’ll see how it goes, as I do need to think in terms of where they will be on the map and what that environment will do to the culture.
The second family, the “Ingar” family, is a really interesting situation. I’ve got a big, unwieldy vowel system, with nasalization and too many central vowels. I plan on doing a lot of work with the vowels, partly to tame those central vowels (I find it difficult to distinguish /ɜ/ and /ɘ/, anyway, and would prefer just a schwa). Then I’ll see if I can artfully get rid of nasal vowels. You can see the first step in my central vowel taming in the initial sound changes, where I’m assimilating them to front and back. This culture will be somewhat more European inspired, again for personal reasons, with the same caveats.
I have a third family named “X” for now. I’m not sure what to do with it at the moment. It’s an interesting system, with an oddly minimal, very symmetrical consonant system, paired with a seven vowel triangle. I definitely want to play around with it, just to see where I can take it. In any case, I will be having many more families in this world.
Right now, I am working on a map of this world in order to get a better picture of where languages are and how they end up interacting over time. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with maps, and I’ve started to realize that they can be very important to worldbuilding. I previously abandoned one novel that I had started writing without a map, and I think part of me abandoning that world comes from not having a clear sense of where things are.
My current story takes place entirely in one location — a university located in one city — so I can at least write the narrative without a map, but I realize it would really help to know where my characters come from and where they are heading after the story, and it will be especially helpful as I develop my languages to know which languages interact at which stages.
This led me to look for ways to generate maps that would do some of the work on climates and realistic continents and whatnot for me, and I landed on a game in development called Songs of the Eons. It spits out very richly detailed maps that use all sorts of models to give you plate tectonics and climates and everything. It’s going to be a strategy game with richly modeled politics as well, but that’s not really what I am interested in. It will take some effort to transform this map into something that can be used in a book, since it’s built on a hex grid on a globe (with a couple pentagons somewhere), but I find the world generation really useful.
So I have generated some worlds with Songs of the Eons and picked one, and now I am going to work on the language expansions. At present, I have picked out the urheimats for ten different language families seeded around the world. I’m going to work out the stages of their migrations over time in order to get a handle on where family splits are and what languages will come into contact. I’m probably going to be seeking feedback about my migrations and such, as I’m getting a bit out of my depth there.
It’s interesting the amount of random generation I’m doing right now. I feel that it’s a useful way to get my juices flowing, as I have a lot of difficulty visualizing a map and putting it down from scratch.
So that’s where I’m at with the project. It’s quite ambitious, I will say, but I do hope to get some feedback from friends and the community on this. I am still continuing to write the novella, now on the second draft, but there will always be some details that have to be worked out later as I work out where things are and what happened when. Are your conlangs set in a fictional world? How did you develop that world? Did you work it out by hand, or do some procedural generation? I’d love to hear if others have had similar experiences.
Happy conlanging!
Lauren
Just wondering if you have a version of the map you’re willing to share? Love world building with maps!
All of my conlanging has been very deeply based in world building and narrative, a lot of it collaborative. It’s the best way to push both the language(s) and the story.
gacorley
Hi Lauren,
Sorry it took so long to reply. There have been a lot of things going on in my life — and in the whole damn world. I’ve put my map into the episode description to give people an idea of what I’m doing.
I have considered changing my approach the next time I get to do more worlbuilding. For one, looking at a map of real-world urheimats, I realized I have a lot less clustering than I should. I can probably also do with more focus on the story region, and possibly a simplification of the map to make things easier on myself.
reɪ
I’m doing this right now! Well, not for a novel, but I’m creating a set of connected language families with histories mapped out a few thousand years back.
I’ve tried to do this before a few times and this has been my takeaway:
(1)
My oldest family is currently around 3,500 years old and will start splitting off between approx. 3,000 and 2,500 BP. I might adjust this a bit, but I’m trying not to let languages get to be over about 4,000 years old at first.
As I see it, the problem with making your proto-language particularly old, especially the first proto-language, is basically as follows:
— Some degree of unintelligibility is common after 1,000 years; to that end, I personally tend to think that around 10-40 sound changes per 1,000 years creates enough of a difference for me to be happy with my work (depending on how dramatic each change is, the degree of language contact, my own aesthetic sensibilities, etc)
— For one 3,000 year old language, then, I will want to write 30-120 sound rules in my word document, well over 30-120 lines of code for the SCA², etc.
— I also need to test these changes, eat food, and sleep, among other things. I’d estimate for myself that I will finish and finalize sound changes at an average rate of 2-3 changes/day, so 10-60 days all told.
— That’s up to two months for just the phonology of one branch of one family, at the most extreme.
6,000 years (I’ve tried it before, agh) is twice that, or roughly three transitions between Latin and Spanish. I have a single book on the history of the Spanish language (starting from Latin, not PIE) that is 269 pages long.
I find it easy to get distracted by some interesting idea and add on to my workload, so it can help me to think through just how much additional work “just one more naming language” really is, but ofc you’re a much more experienced conlanger than I am, and you seem to have a good sense of this already.
(2)
Organization is very important. Everything that can be dated, I date. I clearly mark in both Word and my SCA² code doc when this or that set of changes occurred (in bundles of 250 years). I have a list of sound changes in my word doc instead of just code for SCA². I have timelines to help make sure the broad strokes of everything is how I want it.
250 years is an arbitrary amount, but keeping every so many years of change very distinct makes my life much simpler, and I feel that making this a somewhat smaller number gives me more flexibility. In any case, “What sound change should this come after?” is not a fun question to ask yourself repeatedly imho, especially not if you ever change the order of any sound changes in the future.
With this all in mind, I’m sticking to a simple BP-based dating system that I am unlikely to want to change in any way later. I love making calendars, but I don’t want to try and finalize a calendar before I have any set vocabulary or more extensive cultural notes.
(3)
I also needed a map. Not only is it helpful for areal features and language contact, but I like my languages better when I know more about their speakers’ cultures—plus idioms are eaiser, I know what to borrow, I can estimate how many languages I even want, etc.
~
I think you’ve covered most of this anyways, but I’m less frustrated this time around than the last few times, when I really did not think most of these things through at all. I’m excited to hear more about your project—the starting phonologies are excellent. Good luck. I’m maybe halfway done with my first language’s sound changes now, it’s fun to see things take shape.
As an aside, I’ve been listening to the show for over seven years now. Thank you so much for hosting it. I truly and deeply appreciate the time that you and everyone else who’s participated in this podcast have taken to do this over the years—William, Bianca, Mike, Christophe, David, anyone else I’ve forgotten here. Please stay safe everyone.
James Taylor
Thank you for introducing. us to Songs of the Eons.