George brings on Christophe and Joey to talk about their experience at the Eighth Language Creation Conference. We also have clips from interviews Joey made at the conference.

Top of Show Greeting: Bizhida

Links:

• 8th Language Creation Conference
• Livestream: Day 1, Day 2

George and William invite Prof. William Croft to talk about his theoretical approach to word classes and constructions. Forget a language without adjectives, let’s talk about how your property concepts are predicated!

Links and Resources:

• Croft, William. in preparation. Morphosyntax: constructions of the world’s languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1, Chapter 2
• Croft, William. 2013. “Radical Construction Grammar.” The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, ed. Graeme Trousdale and Thomas Hoffmann, 211-32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Croft, William. 2007a. “Beyond Aristotle and gradience: a reply to Aarts.” Studies in Language 31.409-30.
• Croft, William. 2007b. “The origins of grammar in the verbalization of experience.” Cognitive Linguistics 18.339-82.
• Croft, William. 2005. “Word classes, parts of speech and syntactic argumentation” [Commentary on Evans and Osada, “Mundari: the myth of a language without word classes”]. Linguistic Typology 9.431-41.
• Stassen, L. 2003. Intransitive predication. Oxford University Press.

George spends some time talking about his recent revisions of his Istatikii grammar, with a focus on organizing writing to serve the needs of the language and the readers.

You will find the two drafts of the Istatikii consonant processes below.

Script below the fold, see the history here.

First, we are supported entirely by our patrons over on Patreon. Part of my recent revisions mean that if you’ve pledged at $10 an above, you may already know just about what I’m going to say today, because you’ve had access to my script as I’ve been writing it for about a week prior to recording. I appreciate patrons who contribute at every level, as it helps me ensure I can keep the podcast going.

Second, the Eighth Language Creation Conference will be held on the 22nd and 23rd of June at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom. If you’re going there, I’m trying to arrange for someone to run around with a recording device interviewing people for me, so look out for that. For those who won’t be there, the Language Creation Society will be streaming it live. I’ll link to some more information in the shownotes.

Now, onto our topic for today:

After finishing my dissertation, I took a little time to look at my grammar for Istatikii. My goal is to finish it up enough that I can present a proper “published” version before moving on to another conlang project. Life has been a bit hectic, so progress has been slow and halting, but I did manage to start some revisions, and I wanted to talk about something that came up in those revisions.

My first task is to go chapter by chapter and revise what I have written. I followed a pretty classic format for a reference grammar breaking up topics into phonology, morphosyntax, etc. So, the first chapter I have set about revising is the phonology chapter. I had broken that down into sections on consonants and vowels, with each of those having sections on the phonological processes that affect them. On my reread, I noticed that the organization of the phonological processes wasn’t really working for me.

The problem was mainly in the consonants, as they had a long list of changes, where vowels simply have the vowel harmony system, which is complex but contained. My consonant phonological processes were organized into three categories: assimilation, deletion, and “other”, with that “other” section containing only the final devoicing rule. This was a logical idea when I was first writing, but on a second reading it didn’t really work for me.

I noticed that organizing by type of process did not aid the natural connections between processes. For instance, stop gemination and nasal deletion interact in Istatikii, because the nasals participate in gemination, and thus stop gemination can bleed nasal deletion by turning a nasal coda into an oral stop. But in the old version, those two rules were far apart, and there was just a minor reference back to stop gemination. Someone reading through might miss the connection or have to jump back and reread. There was a lot of this going on in the rules — someone would have to jump around the list to refresh their memory or see a rule that hadn’t been mentioned yet. Non-linear reading is of course going to happen in a grammar, and you do want to be sure you cross-reference between chapters and sections, but small sections should be readable linearly as well.

Seeing this problem I looked at my rules and all their feeding and bleeding relationships and reorganized them in a more reader friendly manner. For Istatikii, that meant an organization based on natural classes — the stops and nasals interacted as above, and liquids had their own interaction between a deletion and gemination rule, so I made stops and nasals one section, and liquids another section. There is a third section entirely devoted to glottal deletion rules, as the glottal stop and /h/ have deletion rules that interact with both nasal deletion and liquid deletion. In that case, the idea is to present it last so that the reader is able to relate these rules to rules they already know.

Is this organization the best possible for Istatikii? I’m not sure. Will it be the go to for every language? I think on that the details are going to really depend on your language. Everyone will have rules interacting in different ways, and every conlang is unique. I think any conlanger who wants to present their conlang to others should do a readthrough of their documentation from the perspective of someone new to their language. Have someone else take a look if you can, as well.

I’m thinking about how I should present things in other sections of the grammar as well. For instance, Istatikii devotes a huge section of morphosyntax entirely to prepositions, giving a great deal of time to the two classes of inflecting prepositions.. In fact, the Class I prepositions section basically goes through each preposition and lists out its uses with examples. At the time, I felt that was the best way to present it, and it is similar to how I handled Aeruyo’s moods, which also have lots of noodly uses that need listing, but I have been reconsidering it recently.

The main issue I have is that the information I have on those prepositions is going to be replicated in a much condensed but still similar form in the dictionary. Redundancy is not necessarily an enemy — it can be useful to present the same information in different ways in your documentation, because readers won’t necessarily read linearly and they won’t necessarily get things the first time. However, I have been considering recently that I could pare down the prepositions just to their inflectional paradigms and the basic syntax of the prepositional phrase, and then use the examples I have in a section that covers syntactic constructions more generally. This would help me to build the syntax section, which I’m a bit stuck on how to start, and to think more about constructions aside from how prepositions are used in them.

That, of course, is a different problem I’ll be thinking about in the weeks to come. Circling back to the phonology example, your rules might not interact in the same ways as my rules, and the details of my organization may not work for you, but the basic principle here is: If you write a grammar for public consumption, take a step back and reread it from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about the language. Because that’s who it’s for — we are conlangers, there is no greater expert in our language than ourselves. Go back in and restructure things in a way that teaches about your language and builds upon knowledge already presented. In truth, this is just a general tip for writing, but it certainly applies for us conlangers as much as for everyone else.

I’m going to attach two different versions of the consonant processes in my Istatikii reference grammar — one in the old format with my editing notes included, and a second with the new reorganization so people can compare. It’s by no means a finished product, I still need to go through and get the text right on the individual rules. Take a look at it. If you have your own suggestions, let me know.

I’d also love to hear from conlangers on how they reorganized or revised their own grammars. I put out a question about this topic on social media and the answers I got were more about the larger scale organization of the grammar, such as what chapters you would include, or technological issues such as preference for PDF vs HTML grammars. Those are things I might cover in the future, but I really do want to ask — have you ever looked at one section, or a subsection, even — and reorganized things to make it an easier read? What did you change? How did it turn out for you?

And as always, Happy Conlanging!

Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets joins us to talk to us about Ainu, a minority language of northern Japan.

Top of Show Greeting: Bwángxùd by alr2569 (Translation Notes)

Links and Resources:

• Japan’s new policy on the Ainu is misleading
• A Topical Dictionary of Conversational Ainu
• Bugaeva, A. (2004). Grammar and folklore texts of the Chitose dialect of Ainu: (Idiolect of Ito Oda). ELPR Publication Series (Vol. A-045). Suita: Osaka Gakuin University. (Texts, Preface, Index)
• Refsing, Kirsten. (1986) The Ainu language: the morphology and syntax of the Shizunai dialect. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
• Corso, E. D. (2016). Morphological alignment in Saru Ainu : A direct-inverse analysis. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 18, 3–28.
• Bugaeva, A. (2017). Polysynthesis in Ainu. In M. Fortescue, M. Mithun, & N. Evans (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jessie Sams comes on the show to talk to us about how she uses conlanging in the classroom. We discuss how these courses can be designed, what fields of linguistics they address well, and the results she saw from the course. Jessie also requested the following message be added to the notes:

I would also like to thank David J. Peterson, who has visited with my conlang students the last three times I’ve offered the course. His visits have been incredibly beneficial for both my students and me. Students don’t often have the chance to speak with the author of their textbook, so it’s an amazing experience.

Top of show Greeting: Nál [nɑːl] by Carl Avlund

Links and Resources:

• Jessie’s course syllabus
• Linguistics Olympiad sample problems
• Merrifield, W. R. (1987). Laboratory manual for morphology and syntax. Intl Academic Bookstore. (Google Books)
• Condis, M. (2016). Building Languages, Building Worlds: An Interview with Jessica Sams. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 4(1), 150–161.
• Sanders, N. (2016). Constructed languages in the classroom. Language, 92(3), e192–e204. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0055
• Pearson, M. (2017). Using Language Invention to Teach Typology and Cross-Linguistic Universals. Fiat Lingua, (April), 0–11.

George and William come back to talk about telicity and lexical aspect. Listen to us talk about endpoints in events and puzzle over why achievement and accomplishment are supposed to mean different things.

Links and Resources:

• Agbo, M. (2010). Verb classification and Aktionsart in Ìgbò. California Linguistic Notes, 35(1), 1–21.
• Aoki, N., & Nakatani, K. (2013). Process, Telicity, and Event Cancellability in Japanese : A Questionnaire Study. Journal of the English Linguistic Society of Japan, 30, 257–263.
• Kato, A. (2014). Event cancellation in Burmese. In 24th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Yangon Event (pp. 1–15).
• Khanina, E. (2006). In search of Lost Telicity: Evidence from Basque. In First Central European Student Conference in Linguistics (CESCL-1) (Vol. 1).
• Lares, E. (2014). Observations about the Aspectual Structure of VO Idioms. In LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (pp. 1–15).
• Levin, B. (2007). The Lexical Semantics of Verbs II : Aspectual Approaches to Lexical Semantic Representation. LSA, (3), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/416485
• Maier, E. H. (2004). Above or Below: Modeling a Telicity Restriction on Karuk Directional Applicatives. Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, 2, 317–330.
• Sahoo, K. (2012). Telicity vs. perfectivity: A case study of odia complex predicates. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 25(2012), 273–284.
• Santiago, P. J. (2003). Event Cancellation and Telicity in Tagalog. In Program for the 150th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan (pp. 388–399).

George reflects on completing his PhD, and talks to those conlangers who might be considering graduate study in linguistics.

Script below the fold:

Welcome

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George gives a short talk about how phonology affects phonetic transcriptions and why the narrow “phonetic” transcription of your language does not have to be overly specific (especially with vowels!). We should have a regular episode again next month.

ORIGINAL SCRIPT:

There is a tendency in the conlanging community to hew toward more narrow, standardized definitions of terms than among linguists. There have been a few times when someone has criticized me on a use of a term that I defined in the text where they felt another term fit. This is most obvious in morphology, which is pretty notorious for having different traditions among different languages for naming different categories or morphs, but it extends to other places as well. I understand the impulse of conlangers to hew to standardized systems.

Conlangers, by our nature, are describing our languages to an audience that is unfamiliar with it and wants to understand quickly. We want to standardize our description so that other people can quickly comprehend it and give feedback. That is somewhat the case in linguistics, but as a linguist you are not only talking to the broader linguistics community, but also to an audience of linguists who are particularly interested in a specific language, family, or areal group, and will be familiar with the peculiar traditions in describing that language.

While I understand the interest in hewing to the standard, it’s important to know that there is some flexibility, and all sorts of descriptive terms are used differently among different languages. That’s important for reading linguistic research, but it’s also important for writing descriptions, because the labels you give things will be influenced by an analysis of the language at hand. I want to give an example through the lens of a part of linguistics I know fairly well: phonetic transcription.

A note: yes, I do, in fact, mean phonetic transcription. It is obvious that the labels you use for phonemes in a phonemic transcription will be influenced by the structure of the language. It’s also pretty clear that those labels have a degree of arbitrariness, we choose which symbol is the phoneme based on an analysis of how it behaves and on standard conventions of the field. What is less obvious is that the symbols we use in phonetic transcriptions are informed this way as well. If we were to fully specify a phonetic transcription at the absolute, unaltered surface, we’d just print a wave form and spectrogram. But in linguistics we understand that as the pure sounds are translated into phonetic categories, there has already been a perceptual filter applied, so we never make it perfectly detailed.

The most obvious example of this is in vowels. As I have said on the podcast before, vowels in real languages are never defined as points in the vowel space as the IPA chart would have you think. A vowel, perceptually, will fall into a range of values in a region of that space, determined relative to other vowels. Languages with fewer vowels will have a wider margin of error — As an Arabic speaker’s /i/-vowel may fall down to the region of English /ɪ/ or even /e/. In some cases, the distinctions may be important, but in many cases, we really don’t bother.

Consider the English /u/-vowel. In many dialects of English. This vowel is fronted. For some speakers it is so far front that it is in the same region as the /i/ vowel. You would think that we would sometimes transcribe it as central [ʉ] or even as front [y] sometimes, but the fact is that even in relatively narrow transcriptions, you almost never see that. The reason for that is that the fronting of /u/ isn’t really phonological. There aren’t really phonological rules governing it, and it doesn’t have an affect on other sounds. It seems to just happen on the phonetic level without the higher level processing of phonology. So, unless we are specifically talking about this phenomenon, we don’t worry about it so much. We just transcribe it as [u].

Linguists can also disagree on a transcription, or transcribe differently depending on their perspective. For example, if I’m going by ear, I would phonetically transcribe the vowel in Mandarin Chinese zhong as a mid back vowel, [o] or maybe [ɔ]. San Duanmu instead transcribes it as [u], and I have also seen [ʊ]. Duanmu’s justification is that it is underlyingly /u/, and I won’t get into the reasoning there, I do agree with it. I don’t know if my lack of native intuition gets in the way there, but I would probably differ as I think that the lowering is a phonological rule we’d have to take into account.

Now, vowels are notoriously fuzzy. Tonal systems are even moreso — I would not really want to give a confident transcription of a tone on any level without figuring out the tonal system first. But even consonants can have these. For instance, in English, [ʃ] is almost always rounded. If you are a native English speaker, just make a shushing sound and you’ll see it. But linguists never transcribe it with a rounding diacritic, because it is not affected by any rule and it doesn’t condition any rule. The theory is that the lip rounding enhances the distinction between [s] and [ʃ].

Finally, we can even disagree about a sequence of sounds. What is the rhyme in her. Is it [ɹ͈]? Or rhotacized schwa [ə˞ ]? Or is it a sequence of [əɹ]? It depends in part on how you think English works. I have seen many times a question something to the effect of what the difference is between a palatalized consonant and a sequence of a consonant plus [j]. And the fact is, the difference is mainly phonology — is that glide a property of the consonant or its own vowel. Now, the “glide” will often be phonetically shorter if we’re talking about palatalization, but that’s a side effect. How you transcribe it really depends a lot on the phonology.

There are a couple of takeaways I want conlangers to come away with here. First, is that, when reading linguistic descriptions of languages, look for descriptions of the sounds if you want an accurate view of the phonology. The transcriptions will only go so far. Even if the linguists are using IPA (and not all do), their use of it will be informed by their theories and by traditions in transcribing that language. Also understand that just because something is in square brackets, doesn’t mean that represents precisely what comes out of a speaker’s mouth. It’s still filtered.

Second, yes, use standard IPA values, but understand that IPA is just a tool, and an imperfect one. Don’t stress about finding exactly the right symbol with diacritics and whatnot. Transcribe what you need to transcribe, and write up a description of how things are pronounced. This basic principle follows for other parts of your grammar. Need to name your cases? Find labels that fit well enough, then give detailed descriptions of their usage. Syntax? You can try some high-level typological labels, but you need to also give example sentences and explain how they are working. In all these cases, the labels are just to give you a shorthand — the real work is in the description.

Colm Doyle comes on to talk about his Nymeran language, created for the comic series Glow, as well as some of the process and challenges of making a conlang and script for comics.

Top of Show Greeting: Vaq’ǫ̀ʔ Nąśą /vàqʼõ̀ʔ nã̀ʃã́/

Glow issue 2 Kickstarter

Joey Windsor and Christophe Grandsire-Koevets join George to discuss what tools we can get from more advanced linguistics theoretical frameworks. What tools do they provide the conlanger, and where do you have to be careful about applying them.

Top of Show Greeting: Gidurguyt [ɡɪ-ərdɡuː-jɪt]

LCC Presentations:

Academic Sources and Textbooks:

Mihalic̆ek, V., & Wilson, C. (2011). Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics. Ohio State University Press.