Conlang Quest

The Austronesian alignment system is by far some of the most difficult to understand parts of linguistics. For many of us conlangers without a linguistics degree, it can be hard to “get it” and have a mental model of exactly how things go down in Austronesian languages. Fortunately, here’s David Peterson’s response archived here: 

http://archives.conlang.info/pae/qhanghu/duavhualshuen.html

The trigger systems of Austronesia don't actually seem to be anything more than languages with multiple passive formation and applicativization strategies. The "trigger" isn't actually unmarked, it's simply in the case that the subject of an intransitive verb is put into. The morphology doesn't mark the role of the verb, per se, but merely marks what role the new subject played in the "underived" sentence. It would be something like the following:

English:

Direct Object Passive: I ate a hamburger. -> A hamburger eat-PASS1 by me. Indirect Object Passive: I gave you a flower. -> You give-PASS2 a flower by me. Prepositional Object Passive: I walked into a store. -> A store walk-PASS3 by me. (Prepositional information lost.)

As it so happens, the form of the passive is the same for all three in English. They could very well be different, to give the hearer more information about the role of the subject (since its case is invariant). If you add in applicatives, which English doesn't have, you have a wealth of verbal morphology that tells what the role of the subject is.

So, the "trigger" actually is the syntactic subject--just the way the raised patient of a passive is the subject of the sentence. And these languages do have passive morphology--extensive passive morphology.

Here’s also a bonus link, the system of Tagalog verbs explained for non-linguists, that is, simple language learners who don’t want to learn big linguistic jargon. 

https://learningtagalog.com/articles/tagalog_focus.html

A comment from Biblaridion’s Youtube video about phonological evolution, presented here for some learning.

If you wanna be really weird, do it like ancient greek: 1. make EVERYTHING in your language subject to palatalization, all ns, all sibilants and all stops. Then you get a HUGE phoneme inventory which is too huge so you don’t need it anymore so you REDUCE EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SIGN of palatalization. Then you get some nice allophonies. If you have labiovelars you can also delete every sign of the labial element. Because both palatalization and labialization are fundamentally identical to sequences with j and w so it’s a nice symmetry and in fact it happened to Ancient Greek.

examples: 

1. *treyes → delete the palatal and get trees which get’s contracted to trēs written as τρεῖς. 

2. root *gʷem- meaning ‚go, come‘, still present in english come → build a present stem with the suffix *i̯ó → *gʷem-i̯ó- → now m assimilates to the y → *gʷen-i̯ó- → n becomes palatalized and geminated because of compensatory lengthening for the glide → *gʷeɲːó- → now the unstressed vowel becomes a → *gʷaɲːó- → now you get rid of the labialization and turn labiovelar gʷ befor a and o into b (and before u into plain g and before e and i into d) so you get *baɲːo- → now the palatal n influences the a and produces a tiny little i sound right infront of the palatal nasal just as you can hear it in languages like Spanish which have the palatal nasal → *bai̯ɲo- (since you now have a diphthong you need to shorten the geminated nasal to keep the rythm) and then you delete the palatal element → *baino → this is basically the ancient greek word for ‚to go‘ which is βαίνω (baínɔ̄). I don’t know how the accent shifted but this is secondary. The palatal doesn’t get deleted in this case because it’s part of a diphthong, that is the only exeption to the tendency.  

Recently I was browsing r/sindarin on Reddit and I came across this picture that explains the formation of compound words in Sindarin, which is pure goals for any conlanger. The words and sounds themselves are very simple, but it’s what has to change to form the compound that makes it so interesting.. And you know that Tolkien spent a lot of time tinkering and fine-tuning the sound changes from his proto-language, just so the final compound word would’ve sounded as beautiful as possible. (In my opinion the correct “Narchir” was the best sounding option) 

People often ask for translations and the like on r/sindarin and r/quenya. Quenya is usually the easiest language to translate. Its compounds don’t nearly have as many rules. According to some dude named Paul Strack, information on Sindarin has changed since the early 2000s, and a lot of new documents rendered previous speculation obsolete.

If I am not wrong, there are actually more podcasts about conlangs, but this is the only one I have heard so far. This is a podcasts series headed primarily by George Corley, a conlanger who is actually right here on tumblr. He and usually two other hosts talk about a particular conlanging topic for about an hour or two, before discussing a featured conlang.

I do really enjoy the fact that they take the time to discussed featured conlangs, going into what they liked, disliked or found interesting. Discussing specifically, grammatical features and how they work, unlike a certain other person who claims to critique conlangs. I like that they talk about conlangs that may not be well known.

This podcasts I would say, is recommended only for the moderate to experts in conlanging. Most of the hosts are seasoned conlangers, and don’t often stop to explain stuff. They will make references to certain languages and grammatical terms that you should have a cursory knowledge of.

A weakness is that they can discuss a topic and explain it in detail, but it does not often stick with me very easily. I have re-listened to episodes trying to learn about a topic, only to promptly forget about it. I think something about the audio nature of podcasts makes it hard to really stick with me.

I’ve been pointing to the Language Construction Kit as the primary starting point for someone just starting to conlang. I like the guide a lot, and I generally think it’s useful. However, not everyone is literate, and may find reading 3 entire webpages to be an arduous process. Luckily, there is a very beginner-friendly guide to explaining linguistics with conlanging in mind.

Artifexian does these very quick videos taking you through a conlang step by step. In his video on language creation, Xidnaf linked to his channel, and I must admit that I have benefited greatly from watching them. What I like is that they are really for the absolute beginner, explaining lingustics to the layperson from scratch. Definitely recommend them to anyone getting started.

I used to hate his videos for a few reasons. One, he ripped off his entire syllabus from the Language Construction Kit. His early videos on phonology almost lifted a few sentences word for word, so I was upset at him stealing credit. Second was that his update schedule was horrible. When I caught up, he was a on a long hiatus, and I felt like I was learning linguistics at a far greater pace than he was. But now, he’s back on a very regular schedule, and I’ve been very busy in my personal life, so that’s no longer a problem!

His early videos present himself constructing his first conlang called Oa bit by bit with each video. But of course, this is basically completely unsustainable as you go beyond phonology. There’s just too many features to discuss that could possibly be added. Plus, your conlang needs a vocabulary. Are you going to tell your audience everytime you add 100 words?

David J. Peterson is one of the few professional conlangers on Earth. His breakout success was the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones, but he has also stated that his most famous language is actually Trigedasleng from some random sci-fi TV show called The 100. But even before that, he was apparently one of presidents of the Language Creation Society (LCS), so he’s got a lot of experience under his belt.

The Art of Language Invention is his youtube series. It updates irregularly, of course, but when it does update, it’s good. The videos are basically tutorials on different conlang features or lessons on a certain aspect of linguistics that are useful to conlanging. I like this a lot because he’s a conlanger, and what he teaches about linguistics is made for conlangers.

I could learn about what ergativity is from wikipedia, or a book, but often what I actually want to know is wrapped up in a lot of jargon. Peterson does his videos for those without a linguistics degree, and even has nice tutorials showing exactly how one can add such a feature to their own conlang.

That said however, you should be familiar with a least a certain basic understanding of linguistics before getting into this. I’d rate his content from Moderate to a Beginner level. Definitely learn the IPA before watching, and read the Language Construction Kit before trying it out.

You know, I used to scoff at stealthlangs. I believed the idea of making up an entire secret language to be incredibly stupid. For one thing, your friends are not going to put in the effort to learn a new language just to speak with you. Secondly, speaking amongst yourselves in weird gobbledygook is a surefire way to draw attention to yourselves. Lastly, it’s just an embarrassing idea.

However, that’s not to say that language can’t be effective in hiding secrets. In foreign countries, people speaking in their native languages can definitely pass commons around each other without your notice. In movies, characters speaking languages that the audiences can’t understand is used to varying effect.

In fact, using obscure languages to hide information is a military practice known as code talking. In WW2, the US army used Navajo words for animals as codewords. The Japanese found the code impenetrable, because a language doesn’t have a pattern the way a cypher might. You’d first have to listen and transcribe speech without knowing what was phonemic and what was not, and then you’d have to try and translate it without knowing anything about the grammar.

And that’s not even counting that fact that codewords were used to describe military equipment. You’d have to have learnt this obscure language to even get a hint.

Of course, with the advent of the internet, and with the continuing decline of native languages, using native languages is less feasible. But that’s where conlanging comes in. You can construct a language your own language from scratch so you can talk to the people you choose.

The disadvantages are as follows:

You don’t have a community of native speakers. The strengths of Navajo lay in its devilish phonology, filled with all kinds of strange sounds non-speakers couldn’t pronounce, at least without much training. Your language will need to be fitted to the capabilities of who you want to teach it to. However, this can become an asset. You can intentionally design your phonology to be easily spoken, so that whoever is let in the circle.

Either way, it takes a long time to learn. However, this means it isn’t easy for someone to share it. You need the practice of using it, which can only be provided by being in the group.

And of course, knowledge of the language has to be kept secret. Any knowledge of even basic words or names could crack the secrecy. The language also has to be limited in where it is taught. Preferably it should be passed down face to face, without any recordings. Evolving the language through expressions and euphemisms can help to avoid this problem.

The big advantage is that, without a key, no computer algorithm can ever decrypt your messages. To my knowledge, there is no machine that could figure out if you’ve been using an ergative-absolutive alignment this whole time. Or if you’ve been using Lojban’s grammar this whole time. And if you master it to a certain degree, you can mess with it and make games only humans can play, lk hw y cn rd nglsh wtht rdng th vwls.

But the thing about secrets is that there’s a reason why you’d want to keep things secret. Very few people will ever get so motivated to hide what they want to say among people. After thinking about it, the only real uses I see in this are from drug-peddling crimelords, crazy cults and hate groups going incognito.

But I just have a fascination with foreign language websites. When I tried to find some Chinese websites, I was struck by the difference in culture between the English internet and the Chinese side of it. You’re not missing much but there’s an allure in it’s foreignness.. And Esperanto websites show the potential in online language communities. I’ve yet to see Latin websites, but boy to I want to.

This is a link to the front page of Zompist’s “The Language Construction Kit”, which is, as I understand it, the first guide ever made about creating constructed languages. The page design has that simple, old-school HTML look to it. Personally, that’s really cute, but the content is what matters. Does the Language Construction Kit still hold up?

This post will talk about the front page of the LCK, and what I think about the guide as a whole. It’s essentially a table of contents that links to 3 other pages, which together comprises the entirety of the LCK. There’s “The basics”, “The grammar”, and the “Writing it down.”

This arrangement of steps is deliberate, as Zompist explains how it helps to create a coherent language instead of a jumbled mess of words. You need the sounds of your language, words with morphology, a grammar, syntax, and then finally a writing system.

This order remains the standard to this day: Both David Peterson and Artifexian uphold it, more or less, in their guide and a half. I compare the LCK to these two, by the way, because these are the only two sources that teach conlanging that I know of.

This order remains important to this day because I feel like a lot of people don’t actually follow through with this order. Many conlangers, especially on r/conlangs, tend to create alphabets and other writing systems without actually having a language to write it with. I know my own very first foray involved writing English like it was Chinese, an idea which Xu Bing stole and made his entire career out of. That thief!

Due to the popularity of Artifexian’s conlang videos, many people have start their conlang by making phonologies and phonemic inventories. However, Zompist actually suggest is coming up with fake sentences in your conlang, and then working out the phonology from there. Just type out some gibberish that sounds nice, and sort out the sounds based on that.

This is a pretty good way of designing a conlang, because it forces you to create sentences, and to revise those sentences as you update the grammar. At least personally, I think I’ve neglected the word-creating and sentence building aspect of conlangs. People are too quick to assume that a good phonemic inventory means a beautiful sounding language, but we’ll never know how it actually sounds until we have a sentence.

It’s also really quaint. It reminds me of children creating made up words and babbling amongst themselves, like Tolkien did when he made Nevbosh. It reminds me that conlanging is a geek’s hobby. Conlanging is about looking at some made up gibberish an author thought up as he went along and trying to piece together a complete grammar for it.

Speaking of which, this page has a hidden gem in the middle. Zompist randomly links to another page where he reverse-engineers an entire grammar for Syldavian, the fictional language of Syldavia from the Tintin comics. Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed that Syldavian was a language, but Zompist picked up on it and made it into something fascinating. I should check it out sooner or later.

All in all, a great front page.

But what do I think about the LCK as a whole? Overall, I think it’s a great guide for beginners, but it has its limitations once you start advancing in your skills. It covers the basics of how a language works to the layperson, but once you start to understand more about the differences in grammar between languages beyond phonology, the LCK becomes somewhat inadequate.

It is after all, built for creating naming languages. It’s for the fantasy author who wants to make a plausible language for his/her exotic creatures. The more serious conlangers who create languages are left out in the cold. There is a book version of the Language Construction Kit out there, with more detailed explanations of various stuff. I haven’t been able to buy it, but I’m assuming that maybe some of my complaints are addressed with it.

But, even for a book, there is still the problem of sound. There’s a lack of audio on the webpage, beyond a recorded sample of his own conlang. This hurts a lot when you’re discussing things like phonology. It’s hard to explain phonemes without hearing these sounds for yourself. And more exotic phonemes have to heard to be really understood.

Still, I feel like I’m being a bit harsh here. It’s hard to really be negative towards what’s practically the first conlanging guide ever made. There are many positives to it. The author’s smooth and comfortable writing voice is very much suited to guiding the initiated through the basics of linguistics and how they can be used to create a new language. And besides, it’s just a starting point. The LCK leaves it up to you whether you wish to go down the rabbit hole of languages, or if you just want to have a alien tongue that doesn’t embarass linguists.

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors.

I don’t need to explain much more than that, honestly. It’s an online database of language features. You can search for a language and see what grammatical features it has. You can search for a feature and see what languages have them. There’s also the “chapters” section that explains each kind of feature, with a table that says how many languages have them.

For the conlanger, the WALs can be a useful tool that let’s you get a sense of what features of a language are typical and what aren’t. For example, if you want your conlang to distinguish voicing in plosives? WALS tells you that among 567 languages surveyed, 158 contrasted voicing in both plosives and fricatives and 38 had a voicing contrast in fricatives only. So you have a general idea how “weird” a feature can be cross-linguistically.

I think I’ve hear Conlangery, the conlang podcast, raise some issues and concerns with WALS, so don’t take it too seriously, of course. Something like this is almost too good to be true, so if you hear reliable evidence to the contrary, go with it. But in the general way I described, it can be a handy guide on hand.

The video I talked about in my first post. It’s a fantastic introduction to constructed languages. It is deceptively well written. The video has a very informal tone with Xidnaf explaining everything as if he knew it off the top of his head, but it has a very deliberate structure to it.

It goes through the reasons why people made conlangs in the first place, detailing how the history and cultural mindsets of the time motivated these language creators. The enlightenment era influenced philosophical languages, the international tensions of colonial empires influenced international auxiliary languages and etc. He ends off with Artifexian appearing as a guest in the end, to depict conlanging in the modern age, as an art form to be enjoyed.

Artifexian, as a person who makes videos teaching people how to construct languages, definitely approaches it from the perspective of creating an artlang. I would say that I generally agree with the zeitgeist of modern conlanging. There’s really no more reason to make a more rational language, or to make yet another pointless and ill-conceived auxlang. Conlanging is most useful right now as art to be enjoyed by people.

Also, I haven’t read it, but I would wager that Xidnaf took a lot of his information from Arika Okrent’s book In the Land of Invented Languages. If you’re looking for more information of that sort, I’d recommend checking the book out. I’m planning to, one day.

I find the way Xidnaf regards Lojban to be interesting. He basically calls it an entirely alien language that’s more a computer code than it is a human language that people can speak. It sounds rather negative. Which is funny, because he said that he used to be really into Lojban? Xidnaf is supposed to be a Lojban name.

For the first post of Conlang Quest, I want to start at the very beginning by explaining how I became interested in language and conlangs. My particular story may not be interesting to people, but I am curious about how people who conlang discovered conlanging in the first place. What was the first conlang they’d ever heard of? Was it Esperanto? Klingon? Or maybe Dothraki?

My first exposure to constructed languages was Tolkien and the Elvish languages. At a young age, I hadn’t even read the entirety of Lord of the Rings, let alone make it to the Appendices to read all of the linguistic information about Sindarin or Quenya. All I knew was that Tolkien had invented his own language, and that fascinated me. I told my parents that I had an interest in languages.

However, the years that followed seemed to paint me as a liar. I was fine at English, but absolutely rubbish at Chinese, the compulsory second language we had took take at school. I didn’t pick up much of Malay or any other Chinese dialect spoken locally. I was monolingual in an environment that actively encouraged bilingualism. There was a variety of reasons behind this, but the end result was that I hated learning Mandarin and couldn’t be bothered to try. I didn’t read to much Tolkien inbetween, either.

Thankfully, my hatred of Chinese was chipped away by various teachers. I knew enough to get by exams at the very least. The breaking point was when I got into Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, and I torrented Drunken Master 1978 in its original Cantonese voices, complete with Chinese subtitles. For the first time in my life, I had fun learning Chinese by trying to study from the subtitles. It also helped that Cantonese is far better sounding than Mandarin.

My earlier fascination with language seemed to resurface. One fateful day I decided to watch Youtube videos about languages and such, and I stumbled upon Xidnaf’s Youtube channel. And I when I find a creator I like, I usually try to experience almost everything they make. His videos are usually pretty interesting and teach a lot of useful linguistic information. But the most important one I saw was “Why People Make Their Own Languages”.

The video is still good, by the way. It covers the basic history of constructed languages and the general motivations behind creating them. I’d recommend this video as an introduction for someone who’s never heard of conlangs before. It does leave out a few important artlangs, like Klingon and Quenya, which are only mentioned at the end by his guest, Artifexian. 

The description of Xidnaf’s video then links to Artifexian’s channel, who plans on showing his viewers how to create their own constructed language.

Artifexian’s channel was fascinating. His videos are neatly and clearly presented. He started off by teaching his viewers the basics of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Being aware of the sounds I was making for the first time was mind-blowing. Then he had an entertaining guest video with Xidnaf where he put together a phonology for his language. That was probably the best video on conlanging that he’s made, even if the advice given is a bit spotty.

However, Artifexian updates infrequently, so I looked around to find more information after I finished all of his videos. He linked to Zompist as a guide, and so did r/conlangs, so I went and checked out Zompist and his Language Construction Kit (LCK).

Interestingly, Zompist is where Artifexian got most of his advice. There are many striking similarities between the first page of the LCK and Artifexian’s videos.  The sequence of linguistic topics presented is the same. But to Artifexian’s credit, he elaborated on them in far more detail. The usage of sound and diagram to explain place and manner of articulation went a long way in teaching viewers how this stuff works.

But there’s more to making a language than merely a phonology. Gradually I kinda fell out of following Artifexian, because he doesn’t really have videos that explain conlanging beyond phonology. Don’t get me wrong, phonology is still a deep rabbit hole that you could continue to explore, but after a while I feel like I get it. I know most of what I need to know to make a phonology for a conlang. I intuitively understand what what your stereotypical natural phonology should look like.

In the end really, a lot of it comes down to taste. I’m not really that interested in seeing other people’s phonology charts. Give me a text at least! I don’t have evidence for this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there are a lot of conlanging noobs out there who obsess about phonology and only have phonology charts to show for it. Like I said, there’s more than that.

Right now, I’m trying to understand stress systems, but I’m also trying to wrap my head around basic syntax, different kinds of special words and things verbs can be marked for. Stuff like the grammar, the bones of how you express yourself in a language and how meaning is conveyed. Phonology to me is just the skin. The outer layer. It’s cool, and can look really awesome, but it’s just scratching the surface. And a language can have any sound really. The structure and grammar is what really makes it tick.

I’ve yet to actually make a constructed language, at least, not one in it’s entirety. My goal of 2018 is to produce a working grammar of my first language, which is really just a test to get my feet wet in conlanging.

But conlanging is artform especially demanding for a beginner to learn, considering that an education in an entire field of science is required to become good at it.

So here I am. I don’t think that taking linguistics at a higher education seems to be in my future. But I am interested in learning. Conlang Quest is blog meant for self-studying. By writing posts about linguistics, conlangs or any related topics I happen to be looking at, I can get some of this stuff to stick in my head. Thankfully, there are well defined ways describing and classifying languages, so I have a fairly linear path ahead of me. Or at least, that’s the kind of road I’m hoping to chart ahead with this blog.

As an older teenager, I went back to Tolkien, read all of LOTR, and even peaked at the language section of the Appendices. I could understand most of it and I loved the Tengwar. It’s probably the best featural alphabet, no, the best constructed script ever made. I really like Tolkien as an artist. Not only has he written really awesome books, he’s pioneered conlanging. And he did it all for fun. To tell you the truth, I’m making a conlang for a comic I want to make. But making comics is even harder than making conlangs, even if it’s easier to appreciate. I’d love to spend as much time as possible learning about languages and conlanging, but I’d also love to spend all that time drawing and making comics. In the end I can’t spend to much time conlanging.