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

[brandrinn]

My current project will probably be ready for view in a month, if I keep working on it at a good pace. I almost never publish conlangs (I'm a doodler, so I'm never feel like showing my stuff), but I am determined to make something showable this time. If you'd be willing to keep a slot open for me between 4-8 weeks from now, I'd love to have the podcast be the debut for the language.

[Ollock]

I listened back to the review. A few comments.

"What's his name?"
"Oh - what is his name?"
"aaa - Rik something?"
"Rik Roots ..."
"Sounds like a pseudonym ..."
"Rik Fraud ..."

Not verbatim, but I get the point. I honestly did think it was a pseudonym, which I have absolutely no problem. To me it was just stating a perception. I apologize, and I can assure you that if I ever have the need to refer to you again I will remember that Rik Roots is your real name.

approx@min 35 - name fiasco
36 - horrible phonology

We didn't exactly call it "horrible", we just listed some weirdnesses.

38 - "beginner's language"

In full context, Bianca was saying it was a step above a "nooblang" in that you seemed to know what you were doing in many respects, but weren't familiar with the terminology.

39 - "language spoken by aliens"

I think William was defining a sort of "type" of conlang

40 - "very heavy on low vowels" (huh? It's mostly based on RP English)

RP English has a lot of low vowels. Four of them, according to Wikipedia. Gevey seems to have three, which is still a lot. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

44 - pitch contours - not very believable

Honestly, I was rather baffled by the pitch contours, simply because I don't know much about prosody in the first place.

44 - dictionary

Some good stuff there.

45 - updates on pages in native calendar "really annoying"

Yes, well -- we probably shouldn't have picked quite so hard on that. It's a minor detail.

47 - cognitive metaphors

That was a good thing to include.

48 - conscript - don't like it much

Yeah. We often hate the scripts.

50 - website organisation

You know, a lot of the sites we look at are old and/or poorly designed. We've kind of stopped commenting on it as much, because it's just there.

Like I said, I'm redesigning the website in light of these comments - presentation is king, after all. So something good came out of the experience.

But I won't be doing it again.

I'd like to say, that sometimes my natural speaking style can sound very mean and dismissive, and I think that came out here. Also, I believe I was rather tired that day. Certainly my views toward certain aspects of language and conlanging has evolved -- after featuring a few natlangs with weird phonologies, my phonological fetishes are much reduced. Also, Bianca hates everything -- that's just her shtick. If we were to feature a language of yours RIGHT NOW, you would not hear quite as much negativity, simply because she isn't there. Whether she'll be back in the future, I don't know.

I do think we are much nicer in our reviews than we used to be. Yes, we still will point out things we find incomplete, or unnatural, or wrong, but we're now trying more and more to draw the bits of inspiration we can glean from each language. I understand the impact that negative criticism can have. I get a little tense sometimes when people criticize the podcast -- or one of my languages for that matter. But I'll still produce Conlangery the best way I know how, and I will still publish my languages on the Internet (once I have time to work on them some more). Whether you want to submit your languages to us (or show them online at all), is entirely your choice. It all depends on what your comfort level is.

[Ollock]

My current project will probably be ready for view in a month, if I keep working on it at a good pace. I almost never publish conlangs (I'm a doodler, so I'm never feel like showing my stuff), but I am determined to make something showable this time. If you'd be willing to keep a slot open for me between 4-8 weeks from now, I'd love to have the podcast be the debut for the language.

That would be quite awesome. Let me know when it's finished and we'll fit you into the scedule. Of course, do understand that we record in advance, usually 2-3 weeks, so there will be some lag time between the recording and the episode airing.

[brandrinn]

I'll try to have it ready by mid-August. Early September at the latest. It's good having a goal; that will keep me focused.

[Ollock]

Conlangery #61: amman îar

[finlay]

I haven't finished the podcast yet so I don't know if you address it or not, but on the subject of that email that you've pasted into the description, it's always been a tradition in Shakespearean theatre that American actors retain their native accents; the thinking behind this is that the American and British accents have both developed individually since then, and actual Shakespearean-era people would have had a completely different accent. Ideally this should apply to fantasy genre media too, but I think it's preferable if characters from the same place have the same accent.

Also, I couldn't comment this on your webpage itself because it didn't recognise the "password" thing that I typed, even though I followed the instructions. You know Wordpress comes with spam protection, right? Or is that only used when you have a blog on wordpress.com or something?

[Ollock]

I haven't finished the podcast yet so I don't know if you address it or not, but on the subject of that email that you've pasted into the description, it's always been a tradition in Shakespearean theatre that American actors retain their native accents; the thinking behind this is that the American and British accents have both developed individually since then, and actual Shakespearean-era people would have had a completely different accent. Ideally this should apply to fantasy genre media too, but I think it's preferable if characters from the same place have the same accent.

Really? Thanks interesting. Of course, there's also the Original Pronunciation productions.

Also, I couldn't comment this on your webpage itself because it didn't recognise the "password" thing that I typed, even though I followed the instructions. You know Wordpress comes with spam protection, right? Or is that only used when you have a blog on wordpress.com or something?

Why are you typing the password? All you have to do is copy-paste. And no, Wordpress doesn't have spam protection built-in. I can use the Akismet plugin, but it costs five dollars a month. It might be worth it at that, but the current system has kept away the worst of the spam attacks.

[finlay]

yeah well it didn't work. I have this akismet thing but i've got the free version that's hosted on wordpress.com...

[Jipí]

Akismet costs money from a certain number of monthly hits on. For small, personal blogs that's likely few enough to be free of charge, but if you've got hundreds of visitors a month, it isn't. Plus, wordpress.com was quite limiting you to the basics if you were on the free plan last time I checked, so no plugins, no custom CSS etc.

[brandrinn]

Hey Ollock, out of curiosity, what are your listener statistics like? Is your audience still growing, or has it plateaued? Have you thought about promoting the podcast in any way?

[Ollock]

Hey Ollock, out of curiosity, what are your listener statistics like? Is your audience still growing, or has it plateaued? Have you thought about promoting the podcast in any way?

The listenership has been growing fairly steadily if you look at the long-term, but we are still very small. We got 466 downloads and 1,341 site views last week (many people will come to the site multiple times, because they are subscribed to comments, most likely). I do maintain a presence on the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and Google+), and every so often I will buy a "listener sponsor-spot" on the couple podcasts I listen to that do that. Of course, since Conlangery doesn't make any money itself, that is just an occasional occurence.

Mostly, I'm hoping for more and more viral spread. I don't really know how big the audience is for Conlangery. Conlanging itself is a small community, but there has been interest from linguistically-inclined people outside of it. For now, I enjoy having a small but engaged fanbase that I have the time to pay attention to (I don't always respond, but I do read every comment, email, and every reply on the forum threads). I'll ride along and keep doing the podcast for as long as I'm still having fun, and we'll see how big it gets.

[Ollock]

Conlangery #62: Practicum — Anaphora and Co-reference

[finlay]

I was going to do an introductory greeting for you just now but it transpires after trying to pronounce it for half an hour that I hate the sound of my language (Yaufulti), and I'm going to have to seriously go back to the drawing board with its phonology, particularly the stress pattern.... :/ (This is the second time I've done this, essentially, since I felt I needed to add /n/ to the previously nasalless language, although technically the older version of the phonology still exists as the Eastern dialect. I also keep revising its morphology and I recently made its lexicon more regular, with standardised meanings/translations of many count/mass and perfective/imperfective pairs. Part of the problem with the phonology is that I have a morphophonemic orthography that is messed up by various phonological processes like vowel reduction and the aforementioned stress pattern, so it doesn't sound much like it's written, but I pronounce it mentally roughly like it's written, which doesn't help much. I might have to make stress in a regular position in the root rather than the morphological word, for one thing, since it's quite synthetic/agglutinative, or give it a different orthography)

The sentence goes thuslywise:
Kunlangeli, sufuzupitisai liligisupetuu giiyulize feisesipanzusipaileisu sinelekalikutilfeiza.
Kunlangeli, sx₁-fuzupi-tisa-i lx-ligi-sx₁-pe-tuu gii-yul-i-ze fxi₂-(sesi-pan)-zusipailei-su si-nx-leka-liku-til-fxi₂-za
Conlangery, CT.INDEF-make-language-and IPFV-start-AGR-NULL.AGR-REL MASS.DEF-person-and-ALL CT.DEF-(connect-electric[internet])-radio.show[a borrowing]-ACC FUT-PFV-join.in-OPT-please-AGR-2

[Melteor]

Conlangery #62: Practicum — Anaphora and Co-reference

Are there any not crazy complex languages with switch reference?

[brandrinn]

Conlangery #62: Practicum — Anaphora and Co-reference

Are there any not crazy complex languages with switch reference?

I think the word they used was "analytic" languages work well with switch reference, which does not mean simple. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[finlay]

Re: sign langs: when i studied BSL at university (linguistically) we learnt about the kind of reference system you mentioned - I got the impression that either all or the majority of sign languages have this kind of system. It seems like a natural thing to be able to do. The upper limit on number of distinct referents is quite high, too, and in theory could probably get up to about 15 or so before it becomes difficult to "find more space" as it were.

Signlangs that don't have such a system are likely to be coded spoken languages, eg Signed English, which will come across as stilted to native SL users.

[Jipí]

I read about this in the LCK and thought it was a cool feature, so my 3rd person pronouns originally assigned a different vowel to each 3rd person in discourse. Since my conlang as 5 vowels, you had 5 slots. However, I found this extremely inelegant for a spoken language, so I dropped that feature. The only thing that's left are -ya, -ye, -yo as 3rd person agreement markers.

[Ollock]

Re: sign langs: when i studied BSL at university (linguistically) we learnt about the kind of reference system you mentioned - I got the impression that either all or the majority of sign languages have this kind of system. It seems like a natural thing to be able to do. The upper limit on number of distinct referents is quite high, too, and in theory could probably get up to about 15 or so before it becomes difficult to "find more space" as it were.

Signlangs that don't have such a system are likely to be coded spoken languages, eg Signed English, which will come across as stilted to native SL users.

It does sound like a very natural thing to do. After all, pointing at someone is probably the easiest way to mention someone in sign language discourse -- and once you make the fairly easy metaphorical leap to pointing at empty space for a person who isn't there, it seems it would all fall into place from there.

[Melteor]

Not to mention, ASL only has two persons, first and not.

Wanted to also mention, Talossa also reminds me of Boontling. These langauge games that get out of hand are an inspiration.

[Ollock]

Conlangery #63: Kuot (natlang)

[Kereb]

I love this language and want to have its children. Or at least steal some ideas from it.
In the podcast you don't end up talking about Kuot nouns much. Obviously the insane verbs were the thing you wanted to cover. The SIL grammar linked on the podcast page says that Kuot nouns "do not take case markers to specify gender, number, or animacy", but elsewhere in the document I found a mention of the fact that all Kuot nouns referring to plurals end in a p.
And then I found this! There are eleven classes of nouns, most of which delete something when they add the plural p, and there are some neat mutations that happen in the process too.

[Ollock]

I love this language and want to have its children. Or at least steal some ideas from it.
In the podcast you don't end up talking about Kuot nouns much. Obviously the insane verbs were the thing you wanted to cover. The SIL grammar linked on the podcast page says that Kuot nouns "do not take case markers to specify gender, number, or animacy", but elsewhere in the document I found a mention of the fact that all Kuot nouns referring to plurals end in a p.
And then I found this! There are eleven classes of nouns, most of which delete something when they add the plural p, and there are some neat mutations that happen in the process too.

Interesting. I will have to tell William (I will be at his house for today and then tomorrow move into my new apartment).

[Jipí]

(I will be at his house for today and then tomorrow move into my new apartment).

So you can look at his collection of calligraphy stuff that he mentioned in the episode on writing prerequsites :)

[Ollock]

(I will be at his house for today and then tomorrow move into my new apartment).

So you can look at his collection of calligraphy stuff that he mentioned in the episode on writing prerequsites

I have seen his calligraphy stuff. He only has a few pieces displayed, but they are all interesting. Now I wish *I* could have a giant Chinese character written by a calligrapher hanging on my wall.

[Xephyr]

Apologies for the late update: Conlangery #54: Reduplication

A few things:

• Calling Sandawe "Khoisan" isn't THAT problematic, I don't think, because researchers no longer believe that "Khoisan"-- even excluding Sandawe and Hadza-- is a phylogenic grouping that can be scientifically demonstrated anyway. The former division of the core Khoisan languages into Northern, Southern, and Central is slightly out of date-- the modern division is between !Ui-Taa (which includes such as !Xoo, |Nu, and |Xam), Khoe (which Wikipedia says is linked to Kwadi, which Güldemann and Voßen classify as isolate, so I dunno), and Kx'a (which includes the !Kung languages and ǂHoan). Thus, "Khoisan" is only as problematic as "Amerind", i.e. it may not be a phylogenic clade, but it's still a very useful word with no real synonyms.
• I may have misheard or misunderstood you, but I believe you implied in this podcast that Sandawe has an especially large click inventory. This is quite incorrect. Within the Khoisan group, pretty much all of the other languages except for Hadza have larger inventories... even Khoekhoe, which is one of the "lightest" of the Khoisan languages, has a larger inventory. Outside of Khoisan, the Bantu language Yeyi has significantly more clicks than Sandawe-- (how many exactly, I don't know, and fucken I ain't paying Phonetica 40 dollars just to find out). Even the archaic prestige Tshiwo dialect of Xhosa has more clicks than Sandawe; modern dialect has the same number as Sandawe. Click inventories significantly smaller than Sandawe are basically only found in the other Southern Bantu languages like Sesotho; Hadza (as I said), as well as of course Dahalo.
• You are correct about the "voiced" consonants being phonetically voiceless with a breathy voice effect on the following vowel. This is a documented phenomenon in Zulu and Xhosa, not just in the clicks but in the stops as well. Wouldn't surprise me if it's some southern African areal feature.
• I was going to deduct 20 points from you all for not mentioning the coolest thing about Sandawe phonology, but then I saw that Eaton's grammar doesn't mention it. The alveolar ejective lateral affricate /tɬʼ/ becomes an allophonic velar ejective lateral affricate [k͡ʟ̝̊ʼ] before /u/ or /w/. Isn't that cool? Cf. http://www.sil.org/silewp/2008/silewp2008-004.pdf, pg 12.