#protolanguages

As a worldbuilder one thing big thing I occasionally decide to take part in is protolanguages and conlangs. Worldbuilding a language can be quite difficult. One thing that has helped me tremendously is a select few channels, communities, and resources.

Biblaridion

Youtuber number one being showcased today. His whole channel is all about conlanging, worldbuilding, and fun biology stuff. He has amazing tutorials in working on protolanguages and conlangs.

Etymology Nerd

I don't think this guy is human, but we're all going to pretend he is for now. You want to know anything about languages, conlangs, linguistics, dialects, etymology, anything words and language- look to this guy. He not only is incredibly entertaining, but I have learned so much from him in the very little time I've discovered his content.

Learning About Language First

A good place to start is learning about the nuances and funnies of language. One of my favorite videos in this category is this one. Go explore, look into languages you like or want to learn, etc.

r/conlangs

Some of Favorites:

Tsevhu (Koilang) by Koallary

Language that is drawn through the lens of an inked out koi pond. Yes, you are looking at a poem. Yes. A whole poem right there.

A'e'i'a (Dolphin Language) by Etymology Nerd

I can't make this shit up. Don't worry he has more animal languages, and has even started created Creole between them.

Baksami (Circular Script) by MeatThatTalks

Lingthusiasm Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history

Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces the way writing does. So when linguists want to figure out how people talked before history started being recorded, we need to engage in some careful detective work, by comparing two or more similar, known languages to (potentially!) reconstruct a hypothetical common ancestor.  

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about these prehistoric languages that historical linguists have reconstructed, known as proto-languages. We dive into some of our favourite proto-languages (Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Algonquian, Proto-Pama-Nyungan, and Proto-Bantu), look at their characteristic grammatical signatures, and explain what we can and can’t know about the people who spoke them based on their vocabularies. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants. Here are the project titles for the 4 grantees, and there’s more information about each project on the LingComm website, as well as two honourable mentions. We’re very excited to share more with you as they develop.

The Black Language Podcast (Anansa Benbow)

Nonbinary Linguistics youtube channel (Nina Lorence-Ganong)

Jazicharnica (Јазичарница) blog (Nina Tunteva and Viktorija Blazheska)

War of Words podcast (Juana de los Santos; Angela Makeviciuz; Antonella Moschetti; Néstor Bermúdez)

We had over 75 applications from around the world and we'd like to thank all applicants for making the job of deciding extremely difficult! 

This month’s bonus episode is about doing linguistics with kids! Child language acquisition is a perennial source of entertainment for the linguistically-inclined – and so is helping any young people in your life develop an interest in linguistics. In this episode, we talk about some of our favourite things to observe about how kids are learning language as well as linguistically-relevant books for children, middle grade, and young adult. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 39 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Shadowscent book 2 - Crown of Smoke - is out now!

We discussed Lauren’s experience of creating a conlang for the book in Episode 37: Smell words, both real and imagined

Proto-Indo-European homeland and surviving vocab

Proto-Indo-European lexicon

Proto-Algonquian

Algonquian Linguistic Atlas

Pama-Nyungan languages

Pama-Nyungan database

Australian Aboriginal languages

Proto-Bantu

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

First, a crash course in "proto-langauges", also known as common ancestors, or parent languages, are grandmums and granddads of current, known languages, which are descended from them and have evolved from them. One proto-language can result in many languages that form a language family, depending on how promiscuous that proto-language was. (Sorry.) Latin is a proto-language, an exception in that it has been very well documented, unlike others.

The earliest known proto-languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and Proto-Austronesian, which resulted in modern-day languages in modern-day Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific. Knowledge of proto-languages isn't, generally, very detailed - these languages are old, and reconstructing them takes time, even for the best linguists. The good folk over at UC Berkeley have gone and done one better, by creating a time machine - or, if you prefer, a "computer program" - that can

reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually.

Those numbers are insane, and this is great, big news for everyone, because it saves the time linguists would have otherwise spent to painstakingly recreate and reconstruction proto-languages - hence, the time machine. (Time and Reconstructing Discourse in Speech? It's probably bigger on the inside.)

The model the researchers at UC Berkeley made use of the established theory in linguistics that the evolution of words follows along the branches of the family tree of that language. The method linguists use to find and research proto-languages is called the "comparative method", which is exactly what it sounds like: finding links and connections between languages, between sounds and their evolution, and if they share similarities to one mother tongue.

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role."