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.