The first week of LING 155 – a.k.a. Linguistic Typology and Constructed Languages, a.k.a. the Conlang Seminar, a.k.a. Fun 101 – is past and done. A brief report:
We spent the first part of class discussing chapters 1-7 of Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, namely the discussion of philosophical languages. As a long-time conlanger, I’d encountered most of the languages discussed in this section before; it was moderately interesting to hear, however, the various reactions from the rest of the class. These ranged from wistfulness (“I know Wilkin’s Universal Language was impractical, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could make it work?”) to dismissal (“I can’t believe anyone actually tried this!”).
More interesting, however, was hearing the other (20) members of the class introduce their conlanging projects for the semester. Much of the class is effectively going to be a conlanging workshop, with students presenting their languages and critiquing each other’s. This week, we were just presenting initial (completely non-binding) sketches; these mostly ended up being about cultural/historical context, rather than language details (with a few notable exceptions). A few trends emerged:
Probably around a third of the class is working on a magical language of some sort. These range from Tolkien to Gaiman in magical inspiration, but share the notion that some aspect of the language is “true”, isomorphic to the universe, and capable of causing physical changes to the world when used correctly. At least one of these was specifically influenced by D’ni, as you might imagine. There was also significant overlap between the magical conlangers and the folks who expressed wistfulness about the great philosophical languages – the underlying desire being isomorphism between language and universe. My favorite of these sketches was a story about a culture trying to recover the ancient form of their language, as phonological change had obscured the language-universe isomorphism and rendered any spells not in common use ineffective. Just imagine: A fantasy adventure with historical linguists as the heroes!
On the far end of the spectrum from the magical-language people were the staunch non-conworlders. Probably another third of the class explicitly refused to have anything to do with historical-culture background for their language. In some cases, they set about creating grab-bag languages of their favorite features, sometimes with an overarching goal, sometimes without. Several, though, are working on either a posteriori conlangs or effective auxlangs. One student will be working on a version of English reduced entirely to vocabulary with Greek etymology – a fun twist on the typical “only Anglo-Saxon” trend with English. Possibly my favorite is an auxlang designed not for actual use, but rather as an intermediary step towards learning extant natlangs. Imagine encountering new grammatical possibilities – case, as an English speaker, for instance – in the context of a highly regular language, before you encountered all the complexities of actual language. Possibly my favorite idea for this language, which may or may not be outside the scope of what’s possible this semester, is to make it modular: You could teach learners a version of it extremely similar to their native language, and then start plugging in modules exhibiting properties not extant in their language, customizing it for whatever language(s) they eventually need to learn.
Proposals which did not fit into these two categories were the usual grab-bag of mixed art- and engelanging, my personal favorite genre (and, of course, the realm that my project for the semester falls into). Only one person is working on a non-human language – I was slightly unclear on the physiological details of the species in question, but they sounded a bit like sentient elephants – but was also going to be focusing on the various human dialects of this species’ language. One person is working on a language with the interesting morphosyntactic premise that all verbal afixes form a cluster somewhere independent of the verb (among other interesting ideas). One person is working on a bimodal spoken/signed language (inspired partly by Dritok).
I’ll be working on an as-yet-unnamed consign, which I’m very excited about. I’ve posted the initial design document I handed in this week in a separate post here.
All in all, this class is going to be an enormously fun way to spend my last semester at Swarthmore.