Category: Tryddle’s Conlanging Class

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!

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!

Hey all,

this post shall serve as an update for my last two lessons. I wasn't able to post anything as the exam phase just ended and I was kinda stressed out. Anyhow! In the fourth lesson on November 30th, we finally discussed the concept of phonemes, talked about allophony and minimal pairs and watched some videos on the topic. At the end we had some time left, so I decided to give them a sneak peek on the next slides, which were about morphology. So we quickly went over glossing and then called it a day.

In the fifth lesson, we then started with a revision of the phonology stuff, as well as of glossing. I then presented the different variants of morphological typology, viz. the analytic-synthetic and fusional-agglutinative spectra. I recently learned that there are some more modern notions in that field, but I decided to teach them the traditional ones since those are the ones that are most widely used by other conlangers. So yeah, that's it!

See you after winter break,
Fiat Lingua!

Hey all,

on Tuesday the third lesson of my conlanging class took place. We discussed non-pulmonic consonants and other consonants that are not included on the IPA chart. Then we went through the most important diacritical marks, and as this took quite a while, we didn't have that much time left. After briefly talking about suprasegmentals (incl. intonation and tone), I presented the difference between orthography and romanisation based on examples from Japanese and Russian.

I hope we'll finish the phonology lesson next time; what's left is just the difference between phoneme and phone, and while that will take a while to explain, I'm already excited for the unit after that: morphology!

See you in two weeks!
Fiat Lingua!

Hey there!

In this new series on my website I'll inform you guys about the state of the conlanging class I'm teaching at my institution. I had one lesson on September 28th, but I forgot to make that first post, so now, after the second lesson took place yesterday, I have decided to write this short post.

In the first lesson we didn't do that much, just some organizational stuff and a bunch of definitions. We discussed the difference between a priori and a posteriori conlangs, famous conlangs and conlangers and some common terms like "kitchen sink" or "relex". I should note that I'm basing my class's curriculum on the Conlangs University project that some of my friends organized. At last I gave the students some useful wikipedia links they could check out to get some first introduction to linguistics.

In the second lesson yesterday we discussed the basics of phonology, i.e. the difference between phonetics and phonology, the IPA, consonant PoA and MoA, as well as the basics of the vowel chart.

This was my report for the first two lessons, see you next time!

Fiat Lingua!