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A very special guest host joins us for this episode, where we try to talk about correlatives as a thing, but as correlatives is actually many different things, we end up just talking about indefinites the whole time. We have much more
Top of Show Greeting: pr̝̊ɛmɪsl
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Featured Conlang: Gomain
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Koppa Dasao (
comment on #26): Good news. Was at my check up Tuesday, and my kidneys are patching up. Now I got more than half-a-kidney sustaining me
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James Campbell: Enjoyed episode 26 a great deal – no offence, but the editing definitely
helps the “listener experience”. The whole thing flows so much better.And yes, it looks like Basque does have a vigesimal system, and a pretty
sane one to boot. For a truly twisted vigesimal counting system, see Danish
(a system that was borrowed into/influenced Faroese, with further
extraordinary phonetic mangling – although it looks like Faroese has largely
changed over to a decimal system now).Owen: Way back, William mentioned using LaTeX and LyX to create documents and lexicons. I responded at the time to say I was trying those out, but I am struggling to figure out how I would convert a spreadsheet lexicon into dictionary form and wondered if William has any insight/ideas of how I can do this.Right now, my lexicon is a GoogleDoc spreadsheet with several columns: word–pronunciation–englishequiv—wordtype—notes etc. I would love to be able to present this in “OED” format, with nicer, longer descriptions and a uniform style.Thanks again for the podcast and your shared insights into language in general.
I have installed an add-on that will require you to copy and paste a password to post a comment. This will hopefully eliminate the comment spam that I have to deal with daily.
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We talk about one of William’s pet peeves in conlang descriptions and linguistics in general: the overuse of the word “emphasis”. We start out with some very strong reccomendations against using it in phonology, and then talk about some more standard terms you might use instead when talking about discourse or syntax. We also review Yivrian, created by the writer of the well-known (in the community) “Artlanger’s Rant”.
Top of Show Greeting: Mybutan
Conlang: Yivrian
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We have a guest on, Olle Heikilä, who we totally didn’t forget to add to the Skype call, and have a nice discussion on grammatical voice and what it’s for, what you can include, and just in general. If you believe what your English teacher taught you about voice, prepare to be disabuse. We also review Tseeyo, a wonderful little language with a terrible website.
Links and Resources
Conlang: Tseeyo
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After some observations about the merits of Star Wars and plastic chopsticks, we tell you all kinds of stuff about possession: alienable vs inalienable, various marking strategies, “to have” and more. Oh, and we talk about Abakwi.
Top of Show Greeting: rejistanian
Conlang: Abakwi
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Email from Matt Pearson: Read more »
Over the course of the show we have discovered something … it’s really hard to dig up good conlangs out there. Not that there aren’t plenty of conlangs out there, but a large number are ill-informed first attempts, incomplete sketches, or simply have no documentation online for us to look at. So, we have a couple of things we’d like you, the listener to help us with:
- We need to have more conlang suggestions. Good ones, with enough grammar online for us to make a decent assessment (no, you don’t need a 100-page grammar, but hopefully you have some syntax worked out.
- We are considering whether or not to supplement by featuring natlangs on some weeks. We’d probably start with something familiar to see how it does, but after that I’m sure we can dig up the rare and bizarre. I have a poll below to ask whether you all would like that idea.
[poll id=”3″]
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We talk a little about what we like and dislike about alien languages — and what concepts we think are actually likely to work. Then we reveiw Ebisédian.
Top of Show Greeting: Cardonian
Conlang: Ebisédian
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George’s father has pragmatics issues, but anyway … pronouns! (Almost) every language is going to have pronouns of some sort. We talk all kinds — closed-class, open-class, free, clitic, and even having pronouns for bizarrely specific people. Also, we review Baranxe’i
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Featured Conlang: Baranxe’i
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Bianca’s out for this episode, so William and I take the opportunity to talk about something she hates so much she wouldn’t let us have a show about it: poetry! Figure out how to choose good poetic devices for your conlang, and how history can affect the complexity of poetry. Also we talk about the amazingly verbless Kēlen.
Top of Show Greeting: Delang
Links and Resources:
Poetry Examples:
Gilgamesh:
On the third day they reached the appointed field.
There the hunter and the ensnarer rested at their seat.
One day, two days, they lurked at the entrance to the well,
where the cattle were accustomed to slake their thirst,
where the creatures of the waters were sporting.
Then [came] Enkidu, whose home was the mountains,
who with gazelles ate herbs,
and with the cattle slaked his thirst,
and with the creatures of the waters rejoiced his heart.
Biblical antithesis:
A wise son maketh a glad father,
but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.
Conlang: Kēlen
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