This is several months belated, but I thought I’d toss this up here: A few final observations on the Conlang Seminar I took at Swarthmore this previous semester.
Firstly, some thoughts on the structure of the class: A class like this really does need to be a seminar – that is, to be seminar-sized. In many ways, the class was attempting to be a “conlanger’s workshop”, with lots of peer feedback. In particular, the professor insisted on having a third of the class present the state of their conlang once per week. With 22 people in the class, this meant that there was never much time for actually giving feedback, or for class discussion; rather problematic. I love the idea, it just needed to be limited to 10-12 people to be practical.
Regarding the content of the class: As I said to the professor several times, I was slightly disappointed that the only established conlangs that we looked at in any detail were Esperanto and Klingon. That seems (to me) to be problematic for two reasons: Firstly, that neither of those are languages created by experienced conlangers, and both show many of the hallmarks of first conlangs; second, that they only cover two points of the Gnolli Triangle. Why no engelang on the list? Yes, we talked briefly about Lojban, based entirely on the discussion in Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, but didn’t look at any primary sources for it. I understand the professor’s argument that Esperanto and Klingon are some of the only conlangs with significant secondary source material (with Tolkein’s work as probably the only third), but I still would have preferred more variety. As I suggested to him: If I were to run this course, at least one weeks assignment would be to pick a conlang from somewhere out in the community, and write secondary source material. Go pick some language that interests you, and review it!
Regarding the products of the class: There were some cool languages to come out of this class! Unfortunately, I don’t have documentation on any of them, and don’t really expect any of the students to post documentation. For me, though, the class was a wonderful chance to observe patterns and trends among new conlangers. Most of the class was made up of first-time conlangers – there were only three of us who had done any conlanging before. The new conlangers, in my mind, fell into two observable categories: Those with significant prior linguistic knowledge (which mostly meant seniors – those who’d had the most time to take other linguistics classes) and those who didn’t (mostly underclassmen). Each of these groups, I felt, could be subdivided into more-or-less two groups based on the pattern their conlanging followed.
The new conlangers with less prior linguistic knowledge mostly went what I call the Kitchen Sink Included route. You know the pattern: The conlanger who just looks around at natlangs, picks all their favorite features, and sticks them all into the language, willy-nilly. The resulting languages feel ad hoc, unfocused, experimental. I certainly went through this stage: All of my early drafts of tükwäi (which are many and varied!) look more-or-less like this. And my experience from watching new conlangers in this class and online is that its a very common pattern. And why not? Conlangs are meant to be personal, right? They’re you’re chance to make the perfect language, just for yourself! It’s a perfectly comprehensible mindset; it also (in my mind) very rarely produces conlanging that anyone else would want to spend much time looking at. (And is it just me, or do nearly all conlangers who start with this move on to create a tri-consonantal root morphology language?)
A few of this group of new conlangers went a different route, conditioned by a very similar mindset. These people, rather than focusing on linguistic features that they like, focused on cultural or world-building aspects that they like, and then built conlangs that matched that culture. I call this the Whorfian Utopia pattern – and to be clear, it’s not mutually exclusive with the above (as evidenced, again, by my own early conlanging!). In our seminar, most of these people seemed to follow the Magical Language trope, with languages that either were magic or reflected magical aspects of the universe that they had created. While I firmly believe that good artlanging involves creating languages that give a sense of cultural background, languages that follow this trope too heavily can feel a bit trite, a bit just-so. And, of course, the utopias that they’re created for are always highly personal, making it hard for the conlang to speak to anyone reading about it.
The most common pattern amongst the students with slightly more linguistic background is one that I like to call All the Cases! You know the archetype: The language that has 503 individually-inflected noun cases, each with increasingly complex Latinate names and super-specific uses. Oh, and they’re all fused with the marking for 7 different grammatical numbers, too. (How many times in the history of the Conlang-L have we had “Name that Case” discussions, basically for this purpose?) Of course, it’s not just cases: Tense, aspect, mood, and phoneme inventory are also commonly subject to the same treatment. We had one (really awesome) language in the seminar that did this with phoneme harmony – it had multiple types of both consonant and vowel harmony, each moving in different directions and subject to different restrictions. (It also had every verb mood or aspect known to human kind, and then some.) This pattern, in my mind, is fundamentally similar Kitchen Sink conlanging, except that the conlanger in question has focused in on one particular favorite feature, and really worked on that. The results are usually less grab-bag then Kitchen Sink languages, but there’s still something fundamentally unnatural about them: When you learn about them, you can see all the evidence, right their on the surface, of the time and effort it took the conlanger to come up with all of those Latinate case names.
All of the above patterns mostly apply to people who were doing more-or-less naturalistic artlangs; a small portion of the more linguistically experienced students in the seminar headed the engelang route. In particular, they were all doing what I think of as What If? conlanging: Setting themselves very narrow questions, and then working through languages that answered that question. All conlanging has a bit of What If? to it, in my mind, but engelangers in particular sometimes raise this to be the most important aspect of their conlanging. Conlangs like this can often be summarized by a single sentence: What if English was reduced to only vocabulary derived from Greek? What if a conlang were used as an intermediary step in teaching monolingual English speakers foreign languages? What if there were a German-Spanish creole? All of those are actual examples from our seminar, which produced very interesting languages. Though I’m not much of an engelanger myself, I love seeing these sorts of languages: At their best, they’re perfectly focused, carefully planned, clever throughout. I tend to feel that most good artlangs start with questions like these, but then expand to fill more of the available creative space.
If it sounds like I’ve been a bit hard on my classmates, know that that is not my intention. I loved hearing about most of these languages every week; I loved watching them progress; I was genuinely inspired by many, and thought many others good enough to be worth continued effort. And seriously: This is exactly where first-time conlangers should be. I’m not trying to criticize, only to notice.
In sum: An excellent class. I hope to see many of these conlangs developed further. I would love to run a conlang feedback circle – any takers? 
We spent much of this class (as a wrap-up to our general unit on phonology) critiquing Klingon. Somehow, the general consensus in the rest of the class was that Klingon was a generally successful language, given its design goals. I’m not entirely willing to concede that. Keep in mind that I actually haven’t taken much of a look at anything beyond the phonology, yet – we’ll get to that in a later week (and I’m sure I’ll rant about it here, too). But I feel fairly strongly that the phonology of Klingon is a complete mess.
This was the list of presumed design goals we generated in class, more or less:
- Consistency (internal and with prexisting dialogue; i.e. don’t piss off fandom)
- Ease of learning (for actors, of course)
- Alien aesthetic
- “Harsh”, “angry” aesthetic
- Believable
That Klingon succeeds in not pissing off fandom is self-evident, of course. Ease of learning for actors is not quite knowable, from where I stand – without actually reading interviews with actors, etc., I have to assume that it succeeded well enough. But, with respect to the next three counts, I feel that Klingon fails somewhat miserably.
With regards to alienness: Seriously, uvulars and a retroflex consonants are the best you can come up with? Of course, a truly alien phonology wouldn’t rely on a human vocal tract, but even leaving that aside… Surely clicks, implosives, and (say) creaky voice are much more effective routes to “alienness”, for Americans. Just a few of these need to get added – too many will violate simplicity . But many Americans can produce at least the usual “tsk” click; creaky voice is easy to train.
Similarly with regards to the “harsh” phonology: Why avoid all consonant clusters? Surely, if we’re just going to go along with standard Western (/Tolkien) sound symbolism, a “harsh” language should have lots and lots of consonants (possibly even the syllabic ones that we don’t get in English). And do alveolar trills really sound that harsh? I’d think that Americans would mostly associate them with Spanish, which I’d think would have generally sanguine connotations…
But, of course, I think the biggest disaster is believability. When explaining why the /d/ phoneme should have a different place of articulation than the /t/ phoneme (it’s retroflex, actually), Okrand basically says, “Well, they’re alien, so they don’t have to follow the same rules!” Ok, sure, granted – but presumably they follow some rules! What motivation could there possibly be? Maybe voicing is partially linked to place of articulation throughout the language (some weird cognitive constraint, say). Well, ok – so why is it only /d/ that moves, not /b/? As another example, real languages generally try to find a balance between laziness and distinctiveness – and uvular sounds are enough harder to produce than velar ones that it would be extremely unlikely that the velar position would have no stops, but that the uvular would have one. Are Klingon’s vocal tracts just different enough to make velar sounds harder to produce than uvular ones? But then, why do we have velar fricatives, but no uvular fricatives (but a uvular africate)?
And I certainly can’t think of any justifiable reason to have the stress system of the language treat syllables ending in a glottal stop as extra-heavy…
So, no: I don’t find Klingon to be at all believable. Part of building a language is motivating the choices you make. In a language like Klingon, with a fictional species of speakers, this means justifying the choices with respect to the biology and culture of the that race; I don’t feel that Okrand has managed that.
And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous transliteration scheme…
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.
Background:
I’m interested in the topic of indigenous sign languages. They differ from national sign languages such as ASL in at least two respects: They are typically spoken by many more hearing individuals than deaf individuals, and are commonly quite old. We are far from a full understanding of the typology of sign languages; indigenous signs, however, have tended to stretch our understanding of sign universals. Many have unexpected phonologies, utilizing highly marked handshapes or high proportions of full body signs. Some barely seem to take advantage of the potential for iconicity in sign languages, in particular with differences in classifier (“productive”) predicates.
For these reasons, an indigenous sign makes sense as a medium for better exploring the linguistic capabilities of the visual-spatial medium in a conlang. I intend to spend this semester developing a consign used by a fictional culture (outlined below). In particular, I’m interested in exploring use of register in sign languages, and also in pushing the boundaries of sign language morphology. Some of my ideas in this regard will be outlined below. It should be said, however, than on the engelang-artlang spectrum, I fall more towards the art: While engelanging is important to making a conlang interesting, I’m mostly interested in the total aesthetic effect of language and culture.
A brief concultural/historical sketch:
A small village in a mountainous region, off of any major trade routes, generally isolated. An indigenous sign has existed for at least ten generations. For various religious reasons, deaf individuals become high-status in the community, and the sign language gets codified as the primary language of worship, with a particular (highly formalized) body of stories as a sort of religious “text”. Several generations later, the regional culture undergoes a significant economic shift (i.e. to bronze, or to a different crop due to plague), leaving the village at an unexpected advantage.The village becomes prosperous, and begins to expand and to export its religion over the region. By this point, the sign language is intimately associated with that religion, and deaf people of an inherently higher caste. The language, then, becomes spoken by an even higher proportion of hearing individuals than the average indigenous sign, but also begins to show a sort of diglossia between the highly formalized version used in the religious texts, and the kind used as a high-status language between individuals (whether hearing or deaf).
Some aspects of the language I would like to play with:
Register and social deixis are most important. The language will probably display three distinct registers: A highly formal register used for religious texts only; a middle register used in cases of public discourse, or for speaking to individuals of a significantly higher social status (i.e., from a hearing person to a deaf person); and a low register including slang and significantly simplified grammar (mostly used between deaf people, occasionally between hearing people). Differences between the registers will include degree of iconicity and use of productive vocabulary (both greater in lower registers).
On a morphophonological level, I’m interested in systematic word-internal mutation as a possible inflectional process in sign language. For instance, perhaps degrees of deference in verbs might be signaled by systematic changes of handshape; secondary motion could be used to productively indicate aspect. Natsigns do this, but typically highly irregularly; the formal nature of this sign language provides potential reason for regularization. I’d also be interested in encoding morphological categories typically ignored by sign languages, such as case. How far consigns can be pushed before losing a sense of naturalism is an open question, and one that I hope to have some answers to by the end of the semester.
Dear Conlangers,
So, a while back, I started the Monthly Conlang project. Or, rather, I said I was going to, and then never posted again. See, as it turns out, starting a major new blogging project in the same semester as you’re supposed to be writing your senior thesis and also taking an overload of other credits is maybe not such a good idea.
Anyhow, I’m sorry. I still believe in the Monthly Conlang project, and really look forward to being able to do it some day. But that day is not today: I’ve got to graduate, first, and I’ve got nearly as much on my plate this semester as last. My sincerest apologies to any who were looking forward to the project, and to David Peterson in specific: I will, eventually, work on Kamakawi! I promise! But that will probably be sometime this summer, not today.
Here’s the good news, however: Among the many other scholastic things I’m doing this semester is… conlanging. For credit. No, seriously.
Professor Nathan Sanders (now teaching at Swarthmore College, where I am, despite the location of his homepage) is running a class which is, theoretically, on linguistic typology. In actuality, however, it amounts to a conlanging workshop. 21 Swarthmore students are taking it; we’ll spend the semester reading Okrent and critiquing each other’s conlanging. It’s terrifically exciting – in a lot of ways, this fulfills my desire to do something to improve my basic conlanging skills. I’ll keep posting about the class here over the course of the semester.
In connection with the class, I have two new conlanging projects. My personal project for the class is a consign; more about this in a (near) future post. Beyond that, I’ll be working on a collaborative project with a classmate and long-time friend of mine, Nemo Swift. Nemo and I have been talking about doing this project since freshmen year; it’s good to finally be started.
Hopefully this semester will be much more active, blogging-wise! Sorry again for the long silence, and the continued delay on the Monthly Conlang project.
Announcing a new regular feature for this blog:
I’ve said before that I believe conlanging to be a highly skilled endeavor, and that I currently feel that I lack the necessary skills to do it well. I have some long-term goals in terms of conlanging exercises for myself to help build these skills; saa nglok is one of these exercises. But I feel that there’s as much to learn from studying other people’s conlangs, and trying to identify what makes them work. Like all conlangers, I suspect, I spent a certain amount of time perusing other conlangs, looking for inspiration, but what I’m talking about now is something a bit more formal: Studying a language in enough depth to get a sense of what’s important.
And so, to that end: Every month, starting today, I will pick one conlang from out in the community. Over the course of the month, I’ll try to study the language in some detail – actually working on learning the grammar and some basic vocabulary, posting regularly about my observations. By the end of the month, I hope to know enough to translate an English text or two into the conlang, as in the Reverse Translation Relay. Then, if the conlanger agrees, I’ll conduct a short interview with them, in their conlang, and post that here with translations.
I’m actively looking for more conlangs to work with in the future, so if you want me to do yours, just send me an email or leave a comment below! Just as a general rule, I won’t ever work on a conlang without the creator’s specific permission – part of the point of this project is to think critically about the language in question, and I know that not all conlangers will be willing to have their creation subjected to public scrutiny. Furthermore, if any creator wants to respond to my comments publicly, I’ll make sure that their response makes it onto this blog in a post.
And so, without further ado – this month’s conlang will be Kamakawi, by the inimitable David J. Peterson! Kamakawi’s high level of development and strong web presence make it an obvious candidate for this project, and it’s an intimidatingly cool language to boot. I’m definitely looking forward to spending some time with it.
In the conlanging world, I’m what often gets referred to as a “serial monogamist” – for the most part, I just work on my One True Conlang. The “serial” part comes in when you try to compare versions of that conlang from, for instance, when I first started conlanging back in middle school, from the middle of high school, and from now: Only Proto-World cranks would give any credence to the claim that those versions are in any way related. As with many conlangers, my primary language is of great emotional significance to me, and so it’s very important to me that I “get it right”. Hence the endless complete revision.
I’ve been realizing more and more, lately, that I just don’t have the conlanging skill to realize my vision of what my primary language (tükwäi) should be like. It seems to me that the conlanging community is only just now starting to come to grips with the fact that “good” conlanging (scare-quotes because even the contention that conlang quality can be judged is contentious) involves more than just an encyclopedic knowledge of world language structures and some creativity – that there is skill involved in making the aesthetic decisions that lead to an interesting language. Conscious skill development is not something conlangers have traditionally engaged in, myself definitely included. And so this summer I made the decision to put tükwäi aside for a bit and work on a side project, as an exercise.
I’m already seeing the fruits of this decision, at least in one particular respect: This is the first time in my conlanging life that I’ve had the attention span to translate the entirety of the Babeltext. (For non-conlangers: The story of the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11:1-9, is a traditional first translation exercise for conlangers, and sort of a bare-minimum standard of completion for a lang. It’s culturally salient enough that we based our flag on it.) I think this makes me a real conlanger! Finally!
Soon I’ll have up a page for this language, including an interlinear and recording for this text, and also a post about the genesis of the lang. For now: The Babeltext in saa nglok, with accompanying smooth English translation.
- lon lin doa sa nglape tik nai-dong.
(Everyone’s speech was the same.) - çapa pia gatoa sasan no dlesa nlai ngatoa cetoak keket sa ka xineu pet me sa cinoak.
(It happened that they travelled out from the rising sun, and found in the land Shinar a plain, and resided there.) -
anglapoa sasan su sikan su sikan: gatok! gefoa nasan tle neka nimoa xenok! tik neka tlesa didok, ngo tik dux nosa gekxa.
(They said to each other: Go! Let us make brick, and cook it. And brick was their stone, and mud was their mortar.) - anglapoa sasan: gatok! gefok nasan no ngada bokoa kasan, ngo gebokok nasan ka nonia kix geblote tle fok. gefok nasan nona ngue xixoa nai pia le nue çapxing nakan fe neboa sa dik xu.
(They said: Go! Let us build for us a city and a tower, and build the tower so that its head touches the sky. Let us make our name big, so that no event can cause us to scatter on the rivers.) - duela mimex fefex mim no ngada ngo kix gue abokoa doa no nluesa.
(The Spirit of the Headwaters came down to see the city and the tower built by the people.) - nglapa fefex mim: nluesek, me ngada ka nai duedua ngo nai nglapnue mete pino bokek. belix gele nue lin do sano no dongxa mike gedisnakoa.
(The Spirit said: See! The city has one race and one language, and this they begin to build. From now on nothing will prevent them from accomplishing their will.) - gatok, gefok na mune ngo xixek nosa nglapnue dikan sua me pia le nue sasan tlesa nue poa ninoa.
(Go, let me descend and make their words choppy, so that they cannot understand what they say.) - pia fa fefex mim tlesan neba sa dik xu agatoa sua, ngo atingoa san no ngada bokoa.
(So the Spirit scattered them on the rivers, and they ceased to build the city.) - nisik sua la xixa fefex mim tlesa nue dikan, ngo sua la fak siksa sa dik xu aneboa, pia xepe ngada no nlue baple gue pe sa dongex xixa dikan.
(Because there the Spirit of the Headwaters made choppy their language, and caused them to scatter on the rivers, so the city has the name Babel, which means “made choppy”.)
Last summer or so, in conversation with another conlanger, I explained my intention to go into fieldwork, and in particular endangered language work. He laughed a bit in surprise — “A conlanging fieldworker, huh!” I think I might be the first (that’s a member of the conlanging community, anyway).
Furthermore, in the LCS podcast interview with Arika Okrent (author of the fantastic In the Land of Invented Languages), there was a brief conversation regarding the typically derisive reactions of “real linguists” to conlanging, which was paraphrased by the interviewer as “Why don’t you go do something useful, like save the endangered languages?” (As though this were possible! As though these options were mutually exclusive!) This is a pretty common reaction for conlangers to face, really.
Clearly, as a conlanger/fieldworker, I hardly find these two activities to be mutually exclusive.
From the perspective of a conlanger, a deep concern for natural languages is only, well, natural. As Okrent points out very well, conlanging proper (i.e. not auxlanging, etc.) really amounts to a celebration of natural language and all the wonderful ways that humans can say things. Conlanger Jeff Burke explained in his talk at LCC2 that his entire Central Mountain family of conlangs came about because of his encounter with the Apache natlang family, and the powerful aesthetic hold those languages have over him. Natlangs are a conlanger’s muses, perhaps; or if we think of conlangs as portraits, than natlangs are our subjects. It only makes sense for a conlanger to be concerned about the endangerment crisis we face, and only makes sense for conlangers to take to the field, both to help face this crisis and to experience first-hand languages to inspire our work.
From a fieldwork perspective, though, it seems to me that conlangers, by and large, would make excellent fieldworkers! A few reasons:
- As previously noted, conlangers care deeply about language, and so would generally be uniquely dedicated to the task.
- Conlangers tend to have encyclopedic knowledge of language structures, born of many years of researching natural language in order to enlarge their conlanging palette, as it were. (It’s not without reason that Payne’s Describing Morphosyntax, a handbook for fieldworkers writing first descriptive grammars, has become something of a conlangers’ Bible.)
- More than that, conlangers are well-accustomed to thinking of the totality of language, from sociolinguistics to interesting lexicon features to phonology and syntax. One must consider all these things, and how they fit together, to create a language; surely the same is true of documenting a language.
- Conlangers are used to being self-taught, linguistically speaking. Many conlangers get started on their hobby in middle school or earlier, and thus have to teach themselves everything they know about linguistics. This habit of independent learning can only serve them well in the field. Many conlangers also develop very good linguistic intuitions through this process.
- Finally, an obvious and (I think) very important point: Conlangers are used to thinking about language creatively! The encyclopedic list of Describing Morphosyntax is wonderful in some respects, but also restrictive — it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it encapsulates all the possibilities for language. But real language is a lot weirder than it would lead you to believe, and having the creativity, in an elicitation session, to play around with different possibilities and explanations, is hugely valuable.
And so: conlanging and fieldwork — better together.
I, myself, have been conlanging actively throughout my time here in Ghana, making more progress than I have in years, really. (More about this project and its interactions with my fieldwork in a future post.) I would greatly urge other conlangers out there to consider heading out into the field — the world needs more linguists quite a bit, right now.