Hey all,
the 11th r/conlangs speedlang challenge just ended, and I actually managed to submit a conlang! You can read about it here; the other submissions can be found here. The document I submitted is woefully incomplete, but I will work on it in the following weeks. As soon as it nears completion, I will probably upload it to my website too! Until then, stay safe.
Fiat lingua!
Hey all,
here's an update on my conlanging class! In the last two lessons we discussed verbal morphology. At both of these days many of my students were sick or busy with exams, so sometimes we were down to exactly one (1) student attending my class. It was a bit sad, but nevertheless we had interesting discussions.
In lesson 9, we began talking about valency and transitivity. I also introduced some preliminary names for the syntactic roles of verb arguments to facilitate the discussion. We briefly derailed onto morphosyntactic alignment and ergativity, concepts I wanted to introduce way later. But it didn't hurt, and now one of my students has a bit of an advantage.
In lesson 10 we continued our verbal odyssey and mainly discussed verbal agreement. With a quick tangentially related note on Georgian and Kayardild suffixaufnahme we closed off the last lesson before Easter break.
See you guys next time,
Fiat lingua!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
After a quick and very funny joke yesterday, your favourite activity is back on track! This week's paper was submitted by u/Astianthus and provides a typology of participles. This paper is very long, in fact it's a whole academic dissertation! I think the ones that will be most interesting to conlangers are chapters 1-3, but you might as well check out all of them. Participles are forms that are deverbal, meaning they are derived from a verb, and adnominal, meaning they modify a noun. Think of "the broken window": here, "broken" is derived from "to break", a verb, meaning it's deverbal; moreover it's modifying a noun, and is thus an adnominal modifier. There's a lot more to it than that, so read the paper! Now onto the prompts:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
In this paper submitted by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, Dąbkowski presents a typology of free affix order, and discusses how it is present in Paraguayan Guaraní. Free affix order (FAO) describes the phenomenon in which affixes may change their position freely without any modification in meaning. FAO contrasts with scopal and templatic affix order. In scopal affix order, affixes may change their order, but then this also changes the semantics of the whole word. In templatic affix order, the order of affixes is invariant, but their scope may vary. It is this threefold distinction that is probably the most interesting to us conlangers. Now onto the prompts:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
This week's paper was submitted by fellow mod u/roipoiboy and discusses language games in the gulf of Guinea. While this is not really a typological paper, it'll definitely be nice inspiration for all you conlangers out there! Language games are "the result of a transformation or series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or comic effect". You might be familiar with Pig Latin: that is a language game in English! Now it's your turn. Let's move onto the prompts:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
This week's paper was submitted by u/wmblathers and talks about definiteness. This is a rather well-known grammatical categories (unlike the last one), so you'll probably be able to talk about a lot of things. Here are some prompts:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
This week's paper was sent to me by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, and I decided to use it in a TyPoW. According to the paper, "engagement refers to a grammatical system for encoding the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee". It is a relatively newly-established grammatical category, and is, as far as I can tell, not that widely known among us. An example from Andoke, an South American isolate, goes as follows: páa bʌ ʌpóʼkə̃i 'The day is dawning (as we can both see).', páa kẽ ʌpóʼkə̃i 'The day is dawning (as I witness, but which you were not aware of)'. Now onto the prompts:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Hey all,
I decided to post the Typological Paper of the Week series on Twitter too. I will briefly present a paper every day, starting with TyPoW #1 until I've caught up with the reddit series. I already started a couple days ago, so this announcement is a bit late. You can check out my Twitter profile here, or click on the link on the right side to get there.
Happy conlanging!
Fiat Lingua!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/roipoiboy and presents another look at headedness in combination with the noun-verb ratio in various languages. Being probably one of the first typological notions many conlangers encounter, headedness talks about the order of heads and their dependents. While a strict dichotomy between head-initial and head-final is often propagated among conlangers, it's really more of a spectrum, at least according to this paper. Now let's move onto the prompts:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Hey all,
after some time without a new update, I decided to let you guys know about the progress in my conlanging class. Since my last post, there have been three lessons.
In the first one on January 18, we talked about (non-)concatenativity with some examples from Tagalog, English, Motu, Indonesian, French and Modern Standard Arabic. At the end of a lesson I gave a quick overview of the Indo-European language family, since my students had told me they'd like summaries of different language families to broaden their linguistic diversity horizon!
In the second lesson on February 01, I decided to skip verbs and move to a more practically relevant unit, namely, Phonology II. I told my students about phone{t,m}ic inventories, symmetry and gaps in such inventories, and then it was their turn to create their first consonant and vowel inventory. They spent the last quarter of the lesson listening to interactive IPA charts, imitating sounds and browsing through Wikipedia to get inspiration. It was very interesting to watch!
In the third and most recent lesson on February 15, we had a special guest — a fellow conlanger and dear friend of mine: Evár. He gave a short presentation on historical conlanging and Indo-European languages, and replied to the students' questions, of which they had a decent amount. After his presentation, I continued with Phonology II and taught them about syllable structure, and that concluded our third lesson.
See you guys next time,
Fiat lingua!