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

[Jipí]

Oh BTW, doesn't the header graphic change at random anymore? It only keeps showing me the Kamakawi rendition of "Conlangery".

[Ollock]

Oh BTW, doesn't the header graphic change at random anymore? It only keeps showing me the Kamakawi rendition of "Conlangery".

Fixed. Somehow it got reset.

[finlay]

A couple of notes for Japanese loan words from English: you're right that they have a restrictive syllable inventory, but Japanese has silent/devoiced vowels, so a lot of the time they end up actually pronouncing things fairly similar to the original. They also tend to keep all the consonants (although this leads to them overpronouncing them when they try to speak actual English), unlike other languages that are likely to delete final consonants or whatever. What's more confusing for me are the various mergers – R/L is the obvious one, but other prominent ones are s/θ and START/NURSE. This leads to things like 'アース' (āsu [aːs]) for earth; when I first saw this I spent ages trying to work out why it wasn't 'arse', and what else it could be.

[clawgrip]

At their extreme you get ridiculous words like イヤー iyā for 'year', ウール ūru for 'wool', and アール āru both for 'R' and 'earl'.

[Skomakar'n]

Listened to this before going to bed yesterday (darn you for keeping me up later than I should be awake; I overslept because of your addictive podcast!). The latest episode. I was surprised you didn't talk more about how conservative languages like Icelandic, Finnish and French go about making up neologisms. There was a lot more talk about languages that happily take in loanwords and how those get adapted or not, and that is of course very relevant, but I would've liked to hear more about the other side of the coin too. Maybe you could make an opposite episode!

[Ollock]

Listened to this before going to bed yesterday (darn you for keeping me up later than I should be awake; I overslept because of your addictive podcast!). The latest episode. I was surprised you didn't talk more about how conservative languages like Icelandic, Finnish and French go about making up neologisms. There was a lot more talk about languages that happily take in loanwords and how those get adapted or not, and that is of course very relevant, but I would've liked to hear more about the other side of the coin too. Maybe you could make an opposite episode!

I really wonder how many conlangers actually need neologisms and such. I suppose a modern-world lostlang may have to do this. Auxlangs as well. But quite a few people put their conlangs into fantastic settings where technological change is not nearly as rapid. I'll have to think on this.

[Pogostick Man]

I've just recently started listening to the podcast. While I've only heard a select number of the episodes, I think y'all are doing a fantastic job.

You can suggest topics by going to our suggestions form.

The URL given here 404s; it should point here. Also, the "You" in the name of the second episode should be a "Your".

Keep up the great work on the podcast, guys! I like it immensely.

[Ollock]

Conlangery #60: Syllable and Word Shapes

[finlay]

Just downloaded it, haven't listened yet... but noooooo, I love it when you have looooong shows. Now I can't spread out my listening over a couple of days as I have been able to before. Whoever suggested 82 minutes as an informal limit is wrong – not enough people use CDs anymore to justify that. Besides, this is barely half that.

(I have a sort of schedule for podcasts and when in the week I can listen to them on my commutes; if they change in approximate length or skip a week then it messes that up! Yours isn't the only one, to be fair; for instance, the BBC film review podcast has been shorter than usual over the past few weeks and another one I listen to is skipping this week...)

[Ollock]

Just downloaded it, haven't listened yet... but noooooo, I love it when you have looooong shows. Now I can't spread out my listening over a couple of days as I have been able to before. Whoever suggested 82 minutes as an informal limit is wrong – not enough people use CDs anymore to justify that. Besides, this is barely half that.

(I have a sort of schedule for podcasts and when in the week I can listen to them on my commutes; if they change in approximate length or skip a week then it messes that up! Yours isn't the only one, to be fair; for instance, the BBC film review podcast has been shorter than usual over the past few weeks and another one I listen to is skipping this week...)

For the record, this isn't about 82 minutes. I'm never going to put an arbitrary limit on the length of the podcast. But one thing that this will allow us to do is have longer, meatier discussions of our featured conlangs without going over two hours, which tends to squeeze the hosts' schedules and does bother some of the listeners. Next episode you'll hear what we can do when we have more time to talk about a conlang. Plus, we can stretch our list of conlangs a bit, even if it means we have to find meatier conlangs to talk about.

BTW, we really need people to point us to some well-developed conlangs to feature. Our list is getting rather short and includes a few more impressionistic works that we may have trouble getting much discussion out of.

[clawgrip]

Maybe someday I can offer you mine as an example, but I'm not sure if it's interesting enough, and right now the resources are not yet developed enough.

[brandrinn]

Have you done:

Gevey
Rawang ata
Dritok
Ithkuil
?

Also, I am still waiting on that episode on pragmatics. I will gladly help you or even write a whole show if you like, but sadly it would have to wait until after my job stops working me 60-70 hours a week, in about a month.

[finlay]

http://conlangery.com/about-conlangery/episode-list/

Ithkuil was done in episode 3, apparently, and Gevey was done fairly recently.

I'd suggest that some of these topics are ripe for discussion and it'd be worth going over them again. I'd still be willing to talk about prosody with you if you want, although my knowledge is kind of English-centric, and I haven't done much (ok, any) formal linguistic reading recently.

[Rik]

Have you done:

Gevey
Rawang ata
Dritok
Ithkuil
?

Also, I am still waiting on that episode on pragmatics. I will gladly help you or even write a whole show if you like, but sadly it would have to wait until after my job stops working me 60-70 hours a week, in about a month.

Yeah - they done mine. They didn't like it, though I took the comments on board and have started to re-write the grammar pages to minimise my tendency to use grammatical terms in non-conventional ways.

I'm still sore about the fiasco they made with my name, though. I'll probably not be offering up any of my conlangs for their future consideration.

[Ollock]

I'm still sore about the fiasco they made with my name, though. I'll probably not be offering up any of my conlangs for their future consideration.

What fiasco? Did I have trouble pronouncing it? We generally don't make a habit of making fun of people's names.

Also, I am still waiting on that episode on pragmatics. I will gladly help you or even write a whole show if you like, but sadly it would have to wait until after my job stops working me 60-70 hours a week, in about a month.

We have no shortage of topics to cover. If we do pragmatics in the future, we may invite you on as a guest, if you like.

[Melteor]

http://web.archive.org/web/200809052138 ... kardii.htm

You haven't covered Kardii right? I'm surprised the language isn't there anymore, people were learning it on the zbb awhile ago.

[clawgrip]

I'm still sore about the fiasco they made with my name, though. I'll probably not be offering up any of my conlangs for their future consideration.

What fiasco? Did I have trouble pronouncing it? We generally don't make a habit of making fun of people's names.

If I recall correctly, someone on the podcast said that "Rik Roots" sounded like a made-up name, or something to that effect.

[Ollock]

I'm still sore about the fiasco they made with my name, though. I'll probably not be offering up any of my conlangs for their future consideration.

What fiasco? Did I have trouble pronouncing it? We generally don't make a habit of making fun of people's names.

If I recall correctly, someone on the podcast said that "Rik Roots" sounded like a made-up name, or something to that effect.

If someone did say that, and it's actually his real given name, then it was an honest mistake and I apologize.

[Jipí]

I guess it may have been the spelling <Rik> instead of the more common <Rick> that triggered the assumption that it's a psuedonym?

[brandrinn]

I think this is a general issue with the podcast. Many conlangers, even if their languages are publicly visible, are very sensitive to public scrutiny and criticism by people who are not very familiar with their work. I know it's extra work, but I think every podcast that features a language should be done only after the creator has consented. It would prevent any fiascos like... What was her name? I can't remember, but you know what I mean Ollock. Just a simple email to each creator a week or two before the podcast is published. It will protect you as well.

Also, I've been wondering, what makes a conlang worth featuring? What makes a language interesting to you and William and... Matt? (can't remember, sorry). I like making languages that are realistic and subtle and cleave pretty closely to existing linguistic regional patterns and areal features. I fawn over them like a parent over a child, but I'm pretty sure most people would find them incredibly uninteresting.

[Ollock]

I think this is a general issue with the podcast. Many conlangers, even if their languages are publicly visible, are very sensitive to public scrutiny and criticism by people who are not very familiar with their work. I know it's extra work, but I think every podcast that features a language should be done only after the creator has consented. It would prevent any fiascos like... What was her name? I can't remember, but you know what I mean Ollock. Just a simple email to each creator a week or two before the podcast is published. It will protect you as well.

After that incident, we do always make an attempt to contact the creator if possible. I stop short of actually asking permission, because if we needed affirmative permission before featuring a conlang, then I don't know if we'd be able to do the show. We don't have time to be looking at alternate picks. We have pulled a conlang because the creator said it wasn't where they wanted it to me. In fact, that case led to us to rushing into the change in format, which I'm not sure we should have done.

Also, I've been wondering, what makes a conlang worth featuring? What makes a language interesting to you and William and... Matt? (can't remember, sorry). I like making languages that are realistic and subtle and cleave pretty closely to existing linguistic regional patterns and areal features. I fawn over them like a parent over a child, but I'm pretty sure most people would find them incredibly uninteresting.

We're all naturalistic conlangers, but that's not necessarily the only thing we will be interested in. Right now, the biggest thing we are interested is well-developed and well-documented conlangs, especially since we want to try to get an hour of discussion out of them now. It doesn't have to be a 500-page grammar, but 30 pages with glosses plus a lexicon is pretty good.

[Rik]

I'm still sore about the fiasco they made with my name, though. I'll probably not be offering up any of my conlangs for their future consideration.

What fiasco? Did I have trouble pronouncing it? We generally don't make a habit of making fun of people's names.

If I recall correctly, someone on the podcast said that "Rik Roots" sounded like a made-up name, or something to that effect.

If someone did say that, and it's actually his real given name, then it was an honest mistake and I apologize.

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

approx@min 35 - name fiasco
36 - horrible phonology
38 - "beginner's language"
39 - "language spoken by aliens"
40 - "very heavy on low vowels" (huh? It's mostly based on RP English)
41 - like the prepositions
42 - lack of glosses on examples - "makes the examples kinda useless"
43 - nouns - kinda cool
44 - pitch contours - not very believable
44 - dictionary
45 - updates on pages in native calendar "really annoying"
46 - in-world perspective confusion
47 - cognitive metaphors
48 - conscript - don't like it much
50 - website organisation
52 - critique ends.
(running time: 17 mins)

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.

[Pthagnar]

they are right -- it does sound like a pseudonym

[Rik]

they are right -- it does sound like a pseudonym

It's my real name. Deal with it.

[Wattmann]

they are right -- it does sound like a pseudonym

It's my real name. Deal with it.

Your name's like a powerword!
Anyway *shrug* I might put forward my conlang once I have a good reference on it - thank gods I haven't put anything online yet.