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Bianca joins us as we tackle a fun and wacky conlang with some serious phonological processes.
Top of Show Greeting: Neo-Simikaka
Featured Conlang: Alũbetah
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Today we have a very enlightening discussion about conceptual metaphors and how thinking about them can help you avoid a relex as well as have loads of fun in usage and translation. Also, this will be William’s last episode for a while 🙁
Top of Show Greeting: Arahau
Links and Resources:
- List of English conceptual metaphors (in categories)
- Metaphors in Iraqi Arabic
- John Quijada on cognitive linguistics (video)
- Metaphors in Hmong
- Organ/body part metaphors in Thai/Japanese/English
- Metaphors in Basque
- Mandarin Chinese metaphors for the Internet
- Metaphors in Modern Greek
- Dog metaphors in English
- Culinary metaphors in Persian
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William is leaving (temporarily), but don’t worry, we have one more episode before he goes. Also, we talk with Eric about his lovely language Tayéin
Top of Show Greeting: Frixàð
Featured Conlang: Tayéin
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Email from Sai: Read more »
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Today we tackle a very interesting typology topic: head-marking and dependant-marking. Turns out that whether your language leans one way or another affects (or depends on) a wide variety of grammatical features. Be sure to check the links below for additional info.
Top of Show Greeting: Toki Pona (translated by Vadim Fomin)
Links and Resources:
- Great paper on the subject
- WALS: Locus of Marking in the Clause
- WALS: Locus of Marking: Whole Language Typology
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Thought I would put out there, Conlangery episode #64 will probably publish later than usual. In my haste to move I apparently had not synced my computer to my backup service before moving. Hence, after several days of syncing my laptop up to said service, I discovered that Conlangery64_rough.aup was no where to be found. My hope is that it is, in fact, saved on my desktop computer, which will be sent to me via UPS in a few days, and I don’t end up with a “lost episode” — just a late one.
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Today, we cover one of the weird and wonderful languages of Papua New Guinea. It turns out to be surprisingly not so weird, but there’s still quite a few things in it to inspire conlangers. Do check out the crazy verbs though — that bit is quite nuts.
Top of Show Greeting: Pøplish
Featured NATLANG: Kuot
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Today we tackle a big grammar and discourse topic: anaphora and co-referentiality. We go through a list of options you have for cleaning up ambiguities and keeping your discourse coherent. Just don’t throw them all into the same conlang.
Top of Show Greeting: Minhast
Links and Resources:
- Indexicality, Logophorality, and Plural Pronouns
- Logophor in Ogonoid languages
- Switch reference in Pomo
- Wiki on switch reference
Special Mention: Talossa has been reunited
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This week we cover the monumental and yet incomplete amman îar, a heavily Tolkien-inspired language that nevertheless manages to have its own flavor.
Top of Show Greeting: Uskra
Featured Conlang: amman îar
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Email from FE: Read more »
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So, for various reasons we have now changed the format of the show. Now we will be doing only one topic per show, alternating weeks between discussion topics and featured conlangs. We hope that this addresses the issues some people have had with show length while still allowing us to have thick, meaty discussions. As such, this week’s show is all about phonotactics and how the way you allow sounds to combine into words is often more important to the overall sound of your conlang than your phoneme inventory is.
Top of Show Greeting: Khangaþyag
Links and Resources:
- WALS on Syllable Structure
- Lakhota syllable structure
- Proto-Algonquian
- Georgian and its plainly ridiculous consonant clusters
No feedback today, sorry.
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Today we take some time to talk to you about a conworldy topic: loan words in your conlang. What words are likely to be borrowed? What kinds of situations cause borrowing? And how does grammar work for loan words? Also, we talk about Kebreni, our second feature of an Almean language.
Top of Show Greeting: Lojban
Links and Resources:
- Presentation on “Borrowability”
- World Loanword Database
- Loanword Typology (paper)
- Loanword Typology (PPT)
Featured Conlang: Kebreni
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Saluton!
A friend just posted this on my Facebook wall: a list of measure words in English! Everything from a murder of crows to a stand of flamingos to a blessing of unicorns (because it’s Unicorn Appreciation Day, of course!), and even some obviously contrived creations like “a brace of dentists”.
http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/collnoun.htm
Now I wonder what the measure word for conlangers would be….
Cheers,
Michael from California
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