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

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You mentioned Japanese with relation to tonal languages in the last episode, and I've been meaning to take you up on that. It's confusing for amateur linguists because we're often introduced to ideas such as pitch accent in a very theoretical manner, without necessarily being exposed to examples, but from my general impression, the pitch accent in Japanese is more akin to something like stress than tone. I think one reason linguists like to distinguish it from stress is that stress in English implies a lengthening and tensing of the vowel, neither of which would make any sense in Japanese phonology. The other thing is that it seems to be one of the first things to vary a lot by accent, which to me suggests that it's not particularly important to comprehension. It more affects the melody of the sentence. I think basically the same thing about the pitch accent in Swedish (again, just from general impression) – the main difference here with stress is that Swedish has a distinctive melody.

Still, I'd like to echo the praise. You're still part of my weekly roundup of podcasts that I look forward to.

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Conlangery #81: Tone

[clawgrip]

How timely, I've recently been working on a tonal language related to one of my others. Hopefully I can get some useful stuff from this.

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Haven't listened to it yet but as an addendum to my previous post, Japanese people are as baffled by tonal languages like Chinese as the average English speaker.

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Coda ejectives occur in English, George. I guess I don't know how much this varies by accent but it's there.

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Coda ejectives occur in English, George. I guess I don't know how much this varies by accent but it's there.

Oh, yes, I forgot about this. A sort of "emphatic" -- like coda aspirates -- IIRC.

[clawgrip]

http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.jp/2011/1 ... glish.html

I got this link from a post by AnTeallach. It's an article with a video demonstrating exactly this.

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Coda ejectives occur in English, George. I guess I don't know how much this varies by accent but it's there.

Oh, yes, I forgot about this. A sort of "emphatic" -- like coda aspirates -- IIRC.

Kind of. Perhaps it occurs more in accents with glottalisation. Like in BrE, it happens a lot on, for example, The Weakest Link, when people say the word bank. It happens at the end of an utterance, not in the middle.

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Conlangery #82: Rikchik

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Conlangery SHORTS #05: Classification

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Conlangery #83: Conlanging through Translation

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So is it #85, or Short #83?

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Conlangery #84: Delason

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it's funny when you announce it and i've already finished listening to it.

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it's funny when you announce it and i've already finished listening to it.

Yeah, there are times that I don't exactly get it posted in all the places at once.

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Conlangery SHORTS #06: Borrowing Cultural Concepts

[Grunnen]

I really enjoy listening to the podcast, thanks for doing it.

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Just wanted to confirm that kimono does have a specialised meaning in japanese too - after all, they all wear western clothes now. But from a couple of conversations i've had, i think they use it differently from me - i think for me it means japanese clothes, but they will consistently distinguish it and other clothes like yutakas or something. Dunno. Might be the other way around.

[Ollock]

Just wanted to confirm that kimono does have a specialised meaning in japanese too - after all, they all wear western clothes now. But from a couple of conversations i've had, i think they use it differently from me - i think for me it means japanese clothes, but they will consistently distinguish it and other clothes like yutakas or something. Dunno. Might be the other way around.

Interesting. I hear the "something to wear" story from people knowledgeable about Japan all the time, but I knew somehow that kimono still refers to a particular garment in Japanese. Perhaps the usage has shifted through influence of the Western use.

Anyway, we have a new episode up: Conlangery #85: Multilingual Conworlds

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着物 literally means "wear-thing", so it would be literally translated as "something to wear" in English. You could probably get away with using it as a translation of "clothes", and it's given as that in my dictionary, but in my experience it's used differently. It's possible that they're correcting for a western person. You also get 洋服 (youfuku), which is western-style clothing. IME this is used for "normal" clothing.

This may be similar to the way that Japanese people consistently seem to distinguish 電車 and 列車 (electric train and regular train), or English people consistently distinguish watches and clocks. One is clearly a subset of the other (in this case I would say 洋服 is a subset of 着物), or they're very clearly two sides of the same coin, but you would never actually use one to describe the other.

[clawgrip]

I've never heard Japanese people refer to youfuku as kimono. Kimono is really just another word for wafuku (Japanese clothing), which is in direct contrast to youfuku (Western clothing). I think these days though the word kimono is mostly associated with any type of women's traditional clothing that is at least semi-formal, excluding women's hakama (yukata are considered very informal, so they are not included). It is not limited to this though. I have heard Japanese people use the word kimono in reference to men's montsuki haori hakama, but I think when talking about traditional men's clothing, kimono is mostly limited to this one garment.

Edit: Summary:
In my experience, kimono can refer to:
- any women's semi-formal/formal clothing that is not hakama
- men's hakama

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Conlangery #86: Himmaswa

[clawgrip]

Thank you for your review of this. I'm glad you found it interesting. I'm sorry I wasn't able to be on the show, but family responsibilities just make it next to impossible to reserve the amount of time necessary without being constantly interrupted.

To answer some of your questions, first of all, I am male. It only occurred to me after the fact that you had no way of referring to me other than the name of a fictional crab. Sorry!

The seemingly unpronounceable onset clusters (such as /mt/, /wb/, etc.) can be considered sesquisyllabic (also Mon-Khmer influence), as there is a short schwa between the consonants (though this schwa is absent in clusters such as /nt/, /kp/, /ps/, /fk/, etc.). I imagine all initial clusters as being reductions of full syllables in an older form of the language. This lines up with several other bisyllabic roots (that somehow resisted reduction, perhaps due to irregular stress or something else), which have only simple vowels in the minor syllable and never have an onset cluster. So /mt/, /wb/ and /db/ are pronounced [mə̯̆tʰ] and [wə̯̆b].

I recognize the vowel tones is kind of odd. I figure a future version of the language may become tonal because of that. I can't explain what could have brought it about initially though. It was not so much planned as just a tendency that arose when I pronounced some words.

As far as the writing system is concerned, believe it or not it was not really inspired by seal script (or at least not consciously) but I can't deny there is some visual similarity, primarily the roundish-squarish curves and bold strokes of uniform thickness. I don't think I even really knew what seal script was when I first started designing the earliest characters that established the general aesthetic. I do have a way of counting strokes, and a way of organizing characters by radical, which I find useful when I am creating new characters and need to confirm whether there is anything else which is too similar. But the dictionary I started is done phonetically according to the Romanization. I haven't decided on a specific order for the various radicals. Also, the characters are stored in the CJK unicode space...I map them to Chinese/Japanese characters with similar meanings.

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@clawgrip: Thanks a bunch for that feedback. I apologize for not seeing it earlier -- I don't spend as much time on these forums as I'd like.

Meanwhile, there is a new episode: Conlangery #87: Quantifiers and Determiners Remember, Conlangery is fortnightly now, though I'm hoping to record a bunch of shorts for the off-weeks if I can get it together.

[clawgrip]

My own thought on the difference between 'some' and 'any' is that 'some' is always a finite, natural number (i.e. 1 or more) or real, existing thing, and typically represents a limited range or exact number/thing that is simply left unspecified. On the other hand, 'any' is generally infinite, and represents 0 or any conceivable number or object (even if context will often define the extents), and as such, is inherently unspecifiable .

This is why 'any' is useful for questions and negatives, where, no natural number or object is specified (i.e. "Do you know anyone who can help?" means "Do you know 1 person? 2 people? 3 people? etc." because I am not specifying any thing or number), but not quite as much for affirmative statements, where specific numbers/things are more likely to be required outside of hypotheticals or listener-choice statements, "he can do anything he wants," (i.e. "no matter what you think of, he can do it").