Conlangery Podcast

In this episode, I spoke with Gideon Henner about his language Laut, a thought experiment on how to create a language to illustrate some of the communication differences autistic people have. Links: Introduction to Laut Upcoming site for autistic conlangers

I have a chat with linguistics short-form creator Human1011⁩ about his language, itræχnâħyq̇, or Draconic. We compare it to my dragon language, Ndăkaga, and discuss the challenges of making short form conlanging content. Links and Resources: WIP itræχnâħyq̇ grammar WIP itræχnâħyq̇ dictionary

William Annis has come back to the show to talk to us about subordinate clauses! This will be a broad overview of the topic, which we may dive deeper on in future episodes. Links and resources: Lingweenie: https://lingweenie.org/conlang/ Wikipedia on balancing and deranking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_and_deranking Dixon, Robert M. W., and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Semantics of Clause Linking: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cristofaro, Sonia. “Is There Really a Syntactic Category of Subordination?” In Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, edited by Laura Visapää, Jyrki Kalliokoski, and Helena Sorva, 249:73–91. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.249.03cri. Wälchli, Bernhard. “Selectives (‘Topic Markers’) on Subordinate Clauses.” Linguistics 60, no. 5 (September 27, 2022): 1539–1617. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0242. Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. “4 A Medial Clause Does It All: Coherence, Continuity, and Addressee Involvement in Manambu.” In Celebrating Indigenous Voice, edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert L. Bradshaw, Luca Ciucci, and Pema Wangdi, 73–94. De Gruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789836-004. Dahlstrom, Amy. “15 Clause Combining: Syntax of Subordination and Complementation.” In The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America, edited by Carmen Dagostino, Marianne Mithun, and Keren Rice, 345–62. De Gruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110600926-015. Shibatani, Masayoshi. “12. Nominalization in Crosslinguistic Perspective.” In Handbook of Japanese Contrastive Linguistics, edited by Prashant Pardeshi and Taro Kageyama, 345–410. De Gruyter, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614514077-013.

I had a nice discussion with author Madeline James about how she has just begun learning conlanging to create naming languages and formulaic spells. Join us as we discuss how she focuses on limited conlangs for the needs of her story and about her journey learning the craft. You can see a continuation of this conversation on Madeline’s channel here.

Jake and Miles of Let’s have a Bouba come on to talk about conlanging on YouTube.

I interview Jessie Peterson of @LangTimeStudio about her Conlang Year project, as well as her other conlanging education and promotion projects. See Conlang Year here: https://www.quothalinguist.com/

Today, I interview Agma Schwa about dog languages, cursed conlangs, and creativity. Make sure to check out this year’s Cursed Conlang Circus!

George breaks down a paper that discusses ChatGPT’s supposed ability to create languages. It is not impressive. Citations Diamond, Justin. “Genlangs and Zipf’s Law.” ArXiv Computer Science, 2023. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2304/2304.12191.pdf De Marzo, Giordano, Francesco Sylos Labini, and Luciano Pietronero. “Zipf’s Law for Cosmic Structures: How Large Are the Greatest Structures in the Universe?” Astronomy & Astrophysics 651 (July 2021): A114. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141081. Gabaix, X. “Zipf’s Law for Cities: An Explanation.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 3 (August 1, 1999): 739–67. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355399556133. Li, Wentian. “Analyses of Baby Name Popularity Distribution in U.S. for the Last 131 Years.” Complexity 18, no. 1 (September 2012): 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21409. Wang, Ding, Haibo Cheng, Ping Wang, Xinyi Huang, and Gaopeng Jian. “Zipf’s Law in Passwords.” IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 12, no. 11 (November 2017): 2776–91. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2721359. Links The Tweet that stared this: https://twitter.com/JPSoucy/status/1638747703332175872?s=20 Genlangs and Zipf’s law data https://github.com/Justin-Diamond/genlangs-and-zipfs Law brief article https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/

George talks to CD Covington about her upcoming book about linguistic worldbuilding, funding through Kickstarter. Links: The Kickstarter SFF Linguistics YouTube Channel The Tor Column A post about the Kickstarter

George has obtained information on the conlang Rasharnian created for Immortals of Aveum. This is a critique of that language as well as a discussion of issues surrounding it that were brought up in the conlanging community.

Here’s the audio of my talk at LCC10. The video version can be seen here.

George talks about his experience streaming during Lexember. NOTE: This episode was written and recorded in the middle of the D&D OGL debacle. The way it was resolved changes some calculations slightly, but I’m still a bit perturbed by it. Original Script

George will be streaming word creation for Lexember every Saturday of the month at 1 PM US Central Time! You can check it out here!