Conlangery Podcast (Latest Ep: #94: Face and Politeness)

[finlay]

Heh, I just found your twitter account (and then your blog, and then your facebook) – you look younger than I'd thought.

[Ollock]

Heh, I just found your twitter account (and then your blog, and then your facebook) – you look younger than I'd thought.

You talking to me or Ossicone? (I actually don't know if Ossicone has a Facebook.)

Really all the Conlangery hosts are on Google+. You should find us there.

EDIT: Wait, I just remembered, I think William quit Google+ for various reasons.

[finlay]

No, you. I've seen pictures of Bianca already, and in any case, your pictures are unprotected. I haven't signed up to google +. I don't actually know what the website address is.

I can only see the profile pics of Bianca and William on facebook – he looks a bit older (and balder) than I'd thought, but then you can't really tell these things by voice alone.

I dunno, think of me as a crusader for fb privacy settings. I don't think you'll be able to find me that easily; I've done like three separate things to make sure, although even then, they've stopped you from hiding your profile picture.

[Ollock]

Until I get flooded by requests from people I don't know, I'm not too worried about Facebook. I hardly use it anyway. And if I were to get notable enough that random people will try to find me, I will make a fan page.

EDIT: Just to be clear, though, I may change my settings on pictures. I don't put up many pictures of course, and very few of them are of people, but it might be a good idea to make them Friends-of-Friends.

[Skomakar'n]

I now have three more episodes to listen to... I'll see if I can manage to listen to it and work at the same time. I really want to hear it, but I never find the time.

Working out so far. I don't know if it has already been stated, but here's a little correction for Ossicone; 'djävla' is the old plural genitive of 'djävul', and 'djävlar' is simply the nominative plural, both old and modern.

EDIT:
About formal address; I'm nineteen years old, and in my entire life, I have never been addressed, adressed anyone, or heard anyone addressed, with anything else than 'du', in spoken language; I have, however, although very, very, very rarely seen it in a few applications.

[Ossicone]

Working out so far. I don't know if it has already been stated, but here's a little correction for Ossicone; 'djävla' is the old plural genitive of 'djävul', and 'djävlar' is simply the nominative plural, both old and modern.

Jävla is an adjective now, right? (I don't know why but I like it without the <d> better.) I think I did some self correcting after the show though.

[Skomakar'n]

Working out so far. I don't know if it has already been stated, but here's a little correction for Ossicone; 'djävla' is the old plural genitive of 'djävul', and 'djävlar' is simply the nominative plural, both old and modern.

Jävla is an adjective now, right? (I don't know why but I like it without the <d> better.) I think I did some self correcting after the show though.

Analysing it as a plural noun in the genitive to this day wouldn't make a syntactical difference, and would actually make more sense to me, as it is uninflected (since it isn't an adjective). It's just a frozen form, and I think it makes sense to see it as that. 'Ett djävla svin' is syntactically (and grammatically, at least if you ask me) the same as 'ett djävlars svin'; it's just that the latter doesn't sound natural, because nobody (that I know of) would use 'djävlars' here, since 'djävla' is the frozen form, but it still makes sense.

[Ollock]

New Episode UP! Conlangery #17: Aspect

[Bob Johnson]

And there was much rejoicing.

You people are going to make me make another Frankenlang.

[finlay]

Do you really think aspect and tense are so entangled that one can't make a system where they're formally separate? That's essentially what I've done with a couple of my conlangs.

Anyway... sometimes I think I should sort out my system in Sentalian better or something. Maybe even just get rid of the tense suffixes or something.

[Ossicone]

I certainly don't, which is why I asked the question. But I still don't know of any natlangs that do such a thing.
One of my conlangs marks tense and aspect separately on the verb. I didn't mention it because I try not to talk about my langs too much.

[Ollock]

Do you really think aspect and tense are so entangled that one can't make a system where they're formally separate? That's essentially what I've done with a couple of my conlangs.

I wouldn't think so. My main aim was to make the distinction between the two as clear as possible so that people would be able to separate them if they so chose, or even simply choose one or the other for morphological marking -- though even if you are doing only tense-marking on verbs, I think it's important to think about aspect at least enough to fill in a few distinctions with adverbs and/or particles.

[Přemysl]

It depends what you consider marking but if you look at WALS and looked at the mixed position for Tense-Aspect there are a few that look like they might be candidates. There was one that had an aspect as a prefix and a tense as a suffix, but without finding a grammar I don't know if those can co-occur. There were a few others that marked aspect with a suffix but tense was done through another strategy (e.g. time adverbs).

[Lithray]

This isn't my conlang. It is by Gary J. Shannon also known as Fiziwig. It is called Txtana. It is a 30 day conlang. I thought it was worth showing here.

Pages on it are:

• http://fiziwig.com/conlang/txtana_mcguffey.html
  http://fiziwig.com/conlang/thirty_day.html
  http://fiziwig.com/conlang/dictionary_1.html
  http://fiziwig.com/conlang/dictionary_2.html

[Ossicone]

Indeed. I remember when he started working on that project.
I always thought it looked like a fun and interesting way to start up a lang. It would require quite a bit of commitment to do the full 30 days though.

Here's the CBB discussion of it if you're interested.

EDIT: And thanks for bringing it up. I had forgotten about it.

[Nannalu]

new episode pl0x.

[Ollock]

new episode pl0x.

We publish on Mondays. That is our schedule. Maybe I'll post it before noon if you really want it

[Nannalu]

I can wait

[Ossicone]

Lovely and wonderous listeners,

Please send us your recommendations for cool/interesting/awesome conlangs for us to talk about! Our list of conlangs is becoming slimmer each passing week and we need your input to return it to it's formerly glorious length.

You can can give a suggestion by:
1. Posting here in this very thread!
2. PMing me or Ollock.
3. Using the conlangery email or voicemail that can be found here.
4. Posting on our Facebook or Twitter.
5. Synchronizing your sleep cycles to one of us and sending us your delta brain waves. (This method can be a bit hit or miss though. I'd try the first four before attempting.)

[Gaxa]

I would recommend the ZBB's MisterBernie's Baranxeï, as he has somewhat recently made some additions to his thread here.

It's rather detailed, very interesting, and very creative.

Though someone might have already suggested it...

[Jipí]

Though someone might have already suggested it...

With that attitude nobody will ever suggest anything.

[blank stare II]

I hereby recommend Abakwi. Very cool lang, lot of material, nice site.

[finlay]

So tempted to be narcissistic and offer my own conlangs, but a) none of them are on the web, b) none of them are presentable and c) only -ahem- one of them has any glosses and examples.

I need to get my hands on something like Describing Morphosyntax, I've been meaning to for like 7 years now after all.

[Přemysl]

@finlay: DM isn't too expensive but you could try what I did at first, which is borrow it through your local library if they do interlibrary loans. I did that with Payne's wife's book on verb initial typology as well.

Hmm, if you guys need more topics there are always different typologies, like how certain features seem to be grouped together. Having been focused on VOS ergative conlanging it has been interesting to see how different things work together.

[finlay]

They have it at the university, come to think of it, but I'm not a university student here and I don't think I can borrow books (and I don't think I can actually get in the library – I was able to get in by showing them that I was a student somewhere else and just needed to browse their catalogue and do some photocopying without actually borrowing anything, but I'm not a student anywhere else anymore...)

It's just a question of how much I can be bothered seeing if I can go through official channels like the city libraries to see if they allow interlibrary lending from the university library. I don't think that's very much at all. I might as well just shell out the £25 to buy it on Amazon. It is my birthday tomorrow, after all...