LangTime Chat

In this episode, we have some fun with fauna! We talk about different ways speakers come up with names for animals beyond having basic roots for them, and we hope it can inspire your own animal-name creation fun!

During our conversation, David mentions a thread on Reddit about butterfly names, which you can find here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1chmc4/eseneziri_im_david_peterson_the_creator_of_the/.

And I created a Keynote presentation for our discussion, which I’ve attached as a resource. When it gets to the discussion on butterflies, you’ll see there are a lot of names in Germanic languages, and those words are not necessarily standard across all dialects (and some are much more archaic!), which just adds to the fun of it all. 

We hope you enjoy!

In this episode of LangTime Chat, we discuss triconsonantal roots, including natlangs that have them, historical origins of triconsonantal systems, and how to approach creating one as a conlanger. Enjoy!

In this episode, we discuss the results from our LangTime Chat proto-sketch we began in Episode 24. Not only did we have our own modern forms to compare, but Patrons also submitted work, so we have a whole family of modern forms based on the same proto-sketch. To keep our discussion organized, I made an accompanying slideshow, which is attached to this post as a PDF. 

This episode was a lot of fun for us, and we hope you enjoy it, too!

We have officially been podcasting for two full years!! This episode is the first of a two-part series and is based on a Patron suggestion, and we are quite excited about it!

In this episode, we work together to create proto-forms of a conlang sketch and discuss why we made particular decisions along the way. We settled on a sound system, created a series of basic roots, and decided on a basic word order for the proto-language. Over the course of the next month, David and I will each work separately with the proto-forms, selecting our own sound changes and grammatical devices and what not. In the next episode, we will bring our work together to compare what we came up with.

For any who want to “play along,” the language sketch document we created in this podcast episode is attached (both in Pages and PDF formats). You can evolve these proto-forms in your own ways over the month to join in on the fun!

After getting a question from a Patron about how to select an area of specialization in graduate school, we decided to devote this month’s podcast to that topic. We hope you enjoy!

In this very informal podcast episode, we discuss Jessie’s first experience at San Diego Comic Con!

(Note: This was the condensed SDCC held during Thanksgiving weekend, 2021, so it wasn’t the full experience. Still, though, it was something!)

SPOILER ALERT! In this episode, we discuss the signed communication system David created for Dune. Because we talk about how it’s used in the movie, there are some (minor) spoiler alerts.!

For this episode, we took a suggestion from our Patron Miles on Discord and decided to talk about food! We talk about words for various types of food in natural languages and how to go about coining food words in a conlang. So grab a snack and enjoy!

In this episode, Jessie totally says the wrong episode number at the beginning… sigh. Eighteen is such a good number, she wanted to use it twice! In terms of content, we talk about our experiences with graduate school and linguistics programs.

Also, if you’re ever in Boulder, CO, you should try out Half Fast Subs!

In this episode, we take a suggestion from Jason, one of our Patrons in Discord, and chat about Avatar: The Last Airbenderand strategies we would take for creating conlangs for that world. Avatar famously didn’t employ any conlangs in their fantasy world, but instead minimally utilized bits of real world languages here and there for style. We discuss what we would have done differently!