September 03, 2012

Conlangery #65: Tayéin

1 hour 30 minutes

William is leaving (temporarily), but don’t worry, we have one more episode before he goes. Also, we talk with Eric about his lovely language Tayéin

Top of Show Greeting: Frixàð

Featured Conlang: Tayéin

Feedback:

Email from Sai:

George, William, & Mike –

Howdy.

Alex & I were just listening to your podcast #62 while on a road trip,

and you mentioned a couple things we’d like to respond to.

1. You mentioned that you don’t know any conlangs that have logophor;

our gripping language does. (http://000024.org/conlang/gripping.html)

Gripping is built specifically as a two-person tactile language,

communicated entirely through finger presses made between two speakers

who are holding hands (with opposite hands’ palms facing). Because

Gripping intrinsically has two extrinsincally asymmetric speakers,

there are likewise two well defined pronouns rather than the usual

first/second person – one for the speaker whose thumb is underneath,

and one for the speaker whose thumb is on top (which we call ‘sub’ and

‘dom’ respectively).

These two pronouns are part of a range of five terms (which we call a

‘thumbscale’); they are produced by one speaker’s thumb tapping the

other speaker’s thumb at any of five locations, from wrist to

thumbtip. Thumbscales are extremely frequent in Gripping, and mostly

made to take advantage of the natural feature of the mode. The other

three pronouns in the scale are a neutral third person pronoun, one

for the last bound referent of dom’s, and one for the last bound

referent of sub’s; the last two function somewhat like a deixis

system, for things that are closer to one speaker or another, either

spatially or metaphorically (eg ownership).

For subordinate clauses, we use logophor. Within the clause, ‘dom’ and

‘sub’ refer to the (first mentioned) speaker and their audience

respectively (as if they were the ones speaking), and the dom’s 3rd /

sub’s 3rd pronouns refer to the dom and sub of the matrix clause; the

neutral 3rd pronoun is unchanged (becoming the only general purpose

third person pronoun).

Gripping is of course an engineered language, in which our objective

was to optimize for the medium, rather than any concern for

naturality. Neither of us know of any naturalistic artlangs that use

logophor.

2. You suggested making a new conlang on the show, mentioning my

conlang presentations as an example. Of course I think this is a great

idea.

As you probably know, I’m actually not an artlanger at all; my own

conlanging interests are pretty strictly in engelanging, mainly in how

the boundaries of language can be stretched or how languages could be

made to better exploit an underused medium. The reason I do artlanging

for my presentations is because I think it’s actually a much better

and more approachable teaching exercise. You get to cover the whole

gamut of linguistics, you have to consider (and therefore know) what

the normal range is and what works well together aesthetically, etc.

It’s also a lot easier to do quickly, since the options are usually

relatively clear, and the considerations are more ones of aesthetics

and consistency. With an engelang (at least for me), I find that my

major difficulties are in just understanding what the possible space

of solutions is, how to drastically reframe a familiar linguistic

feature to better suit a new situation, etc. It’s of course a process

I quite enjoy, but doing it quickly and out loud is rather hard.

I’d be quite interested to see how actual artlangers, like yourselves,

would take on the problem of making a new collaborative artlang live

on air. I’ve always felt a little awkward doing it for my

presentations, since for me it’s kinda like composing poetry in a

language whose grammar I’ve read but which I don’t really have any

practice at speaking – something I can do when needed, but doesn’t

come naturally. I’d love to see native speakers at work, as it were.

For that matter, if anyone feels like trying their own hand at giving

such presentations at conferences, I’m happy to help, and all my

materials are CC by–nc-sa, so feel free to copy my slides; just share

them yourself and give me credit.

3. If you’re interested, we’re both curious as to what you have to say

about UNLWS (see http://saizai.com/nlws &

http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3&torch=04&ringlish=N&tlit=n&torchlish=y&reverse=n).

Not sure how it’d do with an audio-only medium, though.

I enjoy the show, and hope you keep up the good work.

As for your length, from my own experience I’d suggest you actually

try to keep the length a little bit shorter; your last few podcasts

are pretty reasonable. Don’t cut good content, but if you find that

you’re starting to ramble or repeat yourself, that’s a good place to

cut. Tighter presentation tends to be more interesting and easier for

people to listen to (since everyone has limited time); of course it’s

a balance with requiring more time to edit, and a somewhat less chatty

feel.

Just as a comparison, I generally do interviews with a rough outline

in hand of what I want to cover, and I do them for whatever length of

time feels natural; typically this means about 1.5h of interview,

about half of which can get cut without really leaving anything

substantive out.

Fiat lingua,

Sai

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