Conlangery Podcast

We resurrect the podcast with an episode that’s all answering listener feedback. We hope to keep this thing going for a good long time. Top of Show Greeting: French (translation and recording by Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets) Emails below the fold: Hi! I’m a rather bad natlanger. I’m too tempted to make Lojban-ish languages, where things are unambigous and make sense. I often make up languages that have a terminator for relative clauses. I wonder if you know any real languages that have them. There are trailing prepositions, but I don’t if there’s something like “I arrested the man who robbed bank END CLAUSE yesterday.” Some thoughts about Toki Pona. I kinda like it, though I don’t like the philosophy. I think of it more as an artlang that takes pidgin-languages to the extreme. I’m thinking of things like “I want this. You help me.” or “I’m big. You’re small”. They aren’t the most practical way to say these things, but they sound the most pidgin-y to me. Btw, perhaps you could make a show, or a short, about pidgins and creols. I don’t remember if you’ve done so already. Thx for a great show Thomas Lindroth /tʊmːas lɪndrɯːt/ — George, William, and Mike, I wanted to send you guys an email to say that I love the show so far and think you are doing a great job. I have a job where I can listen to my iPod while working so over the past month I have started from the beginning and I have listened all the way to episode 58. I plan on finishing out all the episodes so that I will be current with the show. Thanks for taking so much time to put on a quality podcast that is both entertaining and informative. So I was going to wait until I had listened to all the episodes to comment on anything episode specific for fear that it would become irrelevant. I have a BA in Spanish and quite honestly everytime George mentions Spanish I kind of throw up a little in my mouth (just kidding) and I want to comment on it just to clarify things. Well I couldn’t let this one pass from episode 58 about Middle Voice. What is about to ensue in this email is me taking you to task about Spanish reflexives and the middle voice in general, specifically the verb gustar, and a lot of really just ranting and raving about something that by now is old hat and you probably have better things to do anyway. If you don’t have time to read it now, you can just know that I love the show and can’t wait to catch up on all the episodes. Michael The Middle Voice and Spanish Unfortunately, the majority of low level undergrad Spanish courses are really deficient in this area of grammar, and understandably so, because to give this topic the treatment it deserves you would have to teach some grammatical concepts that are probably too involved for purposes of Spanish 101, 102, or even 201 0r 202. So what usually happens is that se is taught as the reflexive pronoun, that every se construction is reflexive and that anything that is weird or doesn’t quite fit that explanation is just an exception to memorize. A much more cohesive explanation involves defining se as the Spanish middle voice marker. You can read a paper about this here: http://ricardomaldonado.weebly.com/uploads/2/7/6/3/2763410/maldonado_spanish_middle_pedag.pdf if you want a more detailed explanation. For now, just realize that in Spanish the middle voice is will be used to reflect a change in state, either positionally, mentally, emotionally, etc. This jives with William’s cross-linguistic description of middle voice. My first comment would be that you can actually do a test in Spanish to see if a particular verb is middle voice or reflexive. The test is adding the prepositional phrase “a + mí/tí/sí mismo.” The middle voice constructions will either change meaning or not make sense, while the reflexive constructions will just focus on the agent/patient. Let me give you some examples: Es cierto, respetas a él, pero no te respetas at tí mismo. In the previous example, “a tí mismo” serves to contrast against “a èl.” This is reflexive. Compare these two statements: Me enfermé *Me enfermé a mí mismo. The second sentence is ungrammatical. The first sentence means roughly “I got sick” while the second presumably is trying to say something like “I made myself sick.” To express that in spanish, you would have to use hacer. “Me hice enfermo/a.” A final example: Me paré. Me paré a mí mismo. In this usage, pararse means “to stand up.” Now the first example is middle voice, indicating a change in bodily posture (this happens with sentarse, acostarse, etc.). But when you apply the test the meaning changes to something akin to a paraplegic physically lifting their body into a standing position, and that would probably only be understood within that specific context. So the first comment was a clarification about Spanish in general. The second comment concerns gustar. Gustar is neither reflexive nor middle voice! “Me gusta la guitarra” just means that “the guitar pleases me.” This is a simple, basic Spanish sentence with a simple subject and direct object pronoun. That’s it! No middle voice here. No reflexive. Just normal active voice. If you have a question about it feel free to email me. — Thanks for helping clear up, the difference between agglutinating, synthetic & poly-synthetic languages for me. The stuff about Noun-incorporation was pretty cool. I also liked your examples differentiating verb-compounding vs verb serializing. After some follow up reading on Wikipedia, I know understand Mandarin verbs much better. This was another excellent Conlangery episode. I still believe all your Natural language & general linguistics episodes are the best. But then again, that could be because I am only interested in Natlangs & linguistics :- ) Btw, you folks should post your episodes on Reddit – http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics I am sure lots of folks would be interested. — Hay guys, I finally got around to listening to Episode #87, and I find it disappointing that George and William are not opera fans. Of course, maybe that’s because I discovered my love of language learning and developed a serious drive to conlang not through language study, but rather through studying opera. True, you can’t take an aria’s performance and expect to get any linguistic knowledge out of it, but it’s easy to find the text itself. In learning arias, art songs and Lieder (German art songs, a genre on its own), I’ve forgone the traditional “Google it” approach and gotten out my dictionary to translate the text myself. Doing so has taught me much about the internal workings of each of the languages. Regarding “il mio cuore”, the possessive adjective “il mio” is used almost universally. But when talking about a family member, you don’t use it. This can be evidenced in a beautiful operatic aria, YouTube link below. “O mio babbino caro” (Oh my dear Daddy) is a song about a stubborn teenager who’s pleading with her father, “Oh, my dear Daddy, I love him! I want to go to Porta Rossa and buy the ring! If you don’t let me marry him, I’ll…I’ll throw myself off the Ponte Vecchio into the river!” Most beautiful temper tantrum ever. Also, one of my favorite arias is “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” (“My lady, this is a list”, or “The Catalog Aria”) from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. Here, Leplorello cautions Donna Elvira about his master’s many, many lovers: “In Italy, six hundred and forty; In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; But in Spain already one thousand and three.” I do concede that when looking at opera of any kind, it’s important to have the text in front of you for reference, especially if you don’t speak the language. These pieces were originally written to be understood as easily as the text of “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” from My Fair Lady. That’s why I always have subtitles on when I watch “Die Zauberflöte” (which I highly recommend). Most people give opera a bad rap because they immediately picture a Wagnerian soprano singing unintelligibly in Italian (even though they’re thinking of a scene from “Gotterdämmerung”, which is in German). If they took some time to study it a bit, I think they’d come to like it in spite of the stigma of opera being stuffy, rich people music that’s written mostly in foreign languages (John Adams’ opera “Nixon in China” notwithstanding). tl;dr – Because studying opera and art song was what made me discover my passion for language learning, I can say from experience that studying opera, and especially translating opera in order to sing it sincerely, is a good way to study how other languages work, at least in poetry. Renee Fleming – O mio babbino caro (text) Bryn Terfel – Madamina, il catalogo è questo (text) (The Klingon opera William referenced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/’u’) — Conglangeristas: After listening to the latest episode, I think an episode about naming languages would be a great idea. I wanted to point you to a blog post I wrote a while ago about creating a naming language for one of my stories, as it contains some general remarks about naming languages and may be interesting or useful for forming your own episode: http://jsbangs.com/2012/05/15/yakhat-a-naming-language/ Happy conlanging! — JS Bangs http://jsbangs.wordpress.com “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” -Philo of Alexandria Wm: this quote isn’t actually by Philo — http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/ — I enjoyed your recent podcast on Ancient Greek; I learned several new things from it, even though I’ve been studying Greek on my own for years (I’ve never taken a school course in it).  I would like to see some short episodes about Greek discourse particles.   A few of the particles in gjâ-zym-byn are based in some way on Greek particles; some are borrowed directly, others have their syntax and pragmatics inspired by some particle in Greek though their form is a priori.  For instance, the gzb negative imperative {ẑŏ} was based on Greek µη, and gzb {men} “on the one hand… one the other hand” is borrowed from µεν. — Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/ http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org

George continues his phrasebook series with a few musings about telling time. Long form episodes returning soon.

George continues his phrasebook series by considering what you say when you ask “How do you say …?” and “What does that mean?”

George starts off on a sort of informal “series” of shorts on phrasebook phrases with some talk about greetings and farewells.

We’ll be back mid-to-late June.

George shares an idea he is pursuing in the historical development of Pahran. LCC5

Today, we take a little time to talk about the topic of polysynthesis Top of Show Greeting: Gothic (translated by Roman Rausch) Links and Resources: Nootkan/Southern Wakashan grammar (featured on episode 41) ZBB thread on polysynthesis Nice Inuit article Iñupiatun Eskimo dictionary Ancient Egyptian (Amazon link) Feedback: Hello, I’ve posted in the comments as Panglott a couple of times. I have a couple of episode suggestions and a small offer below. There’s no need to read this email on the air, please   I completely understand the need to go biweekly (being in grad school myself, I’ve just been amazed at your ability to keep it going weekly for so long). And as for suggestions for Shorts episodes, you might ought go for really small topics, like individual words or etymologies. Perhaps William could, in a series of Shorts episodes, highlight some of the more interesting entries from his Conlanger’s Thesaurus. It could be an interesting 5-minute discussion to overview a word or idea that often has a strange or interesting semantic range. Or even things like your discussion of 4-character poems in Chinese, highlighting short epigrams or literary forms as a means of developing/expressing a conlang. Are there any Esperanto-specific literary forms?   After listening to episode 85 “Multilingual Conworlds”, I’d like to suggest you do a long-form episode as a “Practicum on Naming Languages”. It’s more of a beginner topic than what you ordinarily do, but I think we’re all interested in science fiction and fantasy writers doing more plausible and developed fictional languages. A practicum episode on naming languages could give us a resource to point to to say “look at that”. And I suspect there’s some demand for more beginner-level content, as when people have requested that you conlang live on the podcast. It could be a way to briefly review stuff you’ve talked about in the past, and lay out a simple framework for creating a small conlang for beginners (phonology, syllable structure, orthography, head-initial vs. head-final compounding). And a naming language or small sketch that is quite different from your main language can be a great way to break out of a creative rut if you’re “stuck” with your main language, as I recently discovered.   I’d also continue to encourage y’all to profile some of your own languages or even your conworld settings for them, sometime. We get hints here and there but little concrete information. After almost 2 years, it’s not self-promotion so much as connecting with your audience  <snip> Thanks, Panglott (Jeremiah)

George uses an example from Tagalog to highlight one of the decisions conlangers might need to make if they use infixing.

This week, we are going to focus on a language you’ve probably heard us talk about quite a bit in passing: Ancient Greek.  Learn how it is the oddball of European languages. Ancient Greek dialect map. From Wikipedia. Top of Show Greeting: Pali (natlang) Special Mention: Linguistics MOOC Links and Resources: Tables and tables of morphological forms Some downloadable books Grammar handout Greek Phonology Info on those diacritics we derailed on Feedback: Hi George and co. It’s a pity you can’t keep up with a tight schedule for the podcast but that happens, school is important. For short podcast subjects you might want to do reviews of the variability of certain grammatical structures in some selected languages. Or alternatively go through the variety of uses some simple grammatical forms, such as a case or a participle, can have in a single language. As you’ve said over and over again, nothing in grammar has a simple and well defined function and the available constructions tend to be used for all kinds of different tasks. Hearing some case studies of this from different languages with good examples would be nice and instructive for conlangers at all stages. My main inspiration for suggesting this comes from doing some research of non-finite subordination for my main conlang project. I’ve read some papers about various aspects of the use of non-finite verb forms in Finnish, and the variability of the system and how flexibly many of its member forms can be used doesn’t end to astonish even a native speaker. For example, in addition to their prototypical attributive use the participles are used in some adverbial constructions happily mixed with other forms based on various infinitives. So the non-finite temporal clause denoting posteriority is built on the past passive participle: satee-n lakat-tu-a rain-GEN end-P.P.PARTIC-PART “after the end of the rain”, “when the rain has ended” while the parallel non-finite clause for simultaneous actions is based on the 2nd infinitive satee-n lakat-e-ssa rain-GEN end-2ND.INF-INE “simultaneous to the end of the rain”, “as the rain ends” The use of some infinitives exhibits variation when used with different auxiliary verbs. Some verbs allow pretty free variation between the basic 1st infinitive and the 3rd infinitive illative: ehdi-n tul-la have.time-1SG come-1ST.INF ehdi-n tule-ma-an have.time-1SG come-3RD.INF-ILL both “I have time to come” Whereas some other verbs are pretty picky about what infinitive to use for this same basic verb combining without invoking any additional adverbial meanings: halua-n tul-la want-1SG come-1ST.INF “I want to come”   rupea-n tule-ma-an begin-1SG come-3RD.INF-ILL “I begin to come”, “I’m beginning to leave there”   The causes for these variations are not immediately clear without a historical analysis. I’m also searching information of other languages with similarly rich use of non finite verb forms and would like you to have a take on this. That would very likely be a much longer topic and better for a practicum of getting rid of finite subordination. Finally I recommend you to take a look at Skou as a possibility for a featured natlang. It’s a Papuan language spoken on the north coast of New Guinea just west from the border between PNG and West Papua. There’s a very thorough grammar of it available at http://www.papuaweb.org/dlib/tema/bahasa/skou/ I’ve only taken glances at it because it’s huge but it’s certainly full of juicy goodness. There are also more manageable documents of the language at the site. Take especially a look at the paper on verbal agreement in the language (http://www.papuaweb.org/dlib/tema/bahasa/skou/SkouAGR.pdf) and bend your minds with the overwhelming personal marking shown in its examples 38 and 42. -Jyri (For pronunciation, the IPA for my name is just that. Stress goes on the first syllable.) gloss: GEN = genetive PART = partitive INE = inessive ILL = illative 1SG = 1st person singular 1ST.INF = 1st infinitive 2ND.INF = 2nd infinitive 3RD.INF = 3rd infinitive P.P.PARTIC = past passive participle  

This week, we do a little talking about determiners, a topic that has come up before in many episodes but that we hadn’t really treated on its own.  Also, we get to reading some iTunes reviews we’ve been forgetting about. Top of Show Greeting: Brazilian Portuguese (Vítor) Links and Resources: WALS: Conjunctions and Universal Quantifiers A book about determiners The Conlanger’s Thesaurus Wikipedia on Determiners