#wsperat

[dedalvs]

What's Chomsky's deal with conlangs?!

I honestly could not give a single blink what Noam Chomsky thinks about anything having to do with language.

[dedalvs]

Two question about English-like systems: how do I get something like English's weird Spelling rules and its amazingly ridiculous adjective order?

Spelling: Fossilize the spelling system at a time before major sound changes—also deregularize spelling at that time, and have different regions with different spelling traditions. As for adjective order, it’s just the order that makes sense to speakers. Have something else make sense to speakers.

[dedalvs]

Continuind from my last ask, my objective is to develop a language with a definite article that works like hebrew's 'ha' prefix, but having it evolve from the accusative declension; and the same with the indefinite article, but from the dative. My question is if it is naturalistic to have that kind of development from a declension, instead of the appending of another word (like hebrew did (as far as I know...)). Thank you!

I was still trying to imagine how this would work, but no, I can’t see it. It doesn’t make sense to me that one declension would evolve into a definite used everywhere, and the other would evolve into an indefinite used everywhere—and especially not the ones you chose. I don’t see that working at all, I’m afraid. :(

[dedalvs]

In some languages, one or more glyphs have a word-final form. How do these evolve? Would it be posswfor all of the glyphs to have one?

Happens just naturally in handwriting. The reason it happens with some and not others has to do with the shape of the glyphs and how they’re written and their word-final frequency. I’m not sure what mechanically explains this, but it’s easy enough to see it happening in various writing systems.

[dedalvs]

Regarding your recent 'Thought on "all your conlangs are English". Spanish 'papel' doesn't exactly translate to 'paper' so, when making up a conlang's words, do you conciously design the different possible uses of all words? I'm asking particularly about common words such as your example, 'man'. Such words are (my opinion here, I don't know for sure) much more translatable between languages than 'paper'; I'm thinking about 'man' and 'hombre' which, to me, seem much closer than 'paper'. Thanks!

Close?! I don’t think so!

Man the ship! *Hombrea el bote!

I’m a root beer man. ??Soy un root beer hombre/un hombre de root beer.

How many men (lives in a video game) do you have? ?¿Cuántos hombres tienes?

Man, I’m tired! *¡Hombre, estoy cansado!

Nah, if you want to find words that are used almost the same in every language, you have to go way in the other direction. I’m talking words like “caesium” and “interdimensional”—words whose meanings are so specific and so specialized that they’re unlikely to be used in any other context than their literal context. (E.g. how many idioms do you know involving caesium?)

To answer your question, yes, of course—and so are you, by default. Every single word in every single language covers a range, even if that range is too trivial to note. If it didn’t, each word would apply to one and only thing throughout the history of time, and it would be impossible to generalize. When you create a word, you’re creating (most likely) its initial range, and its initial range may be small. But as you use the word, you expand its range. Sometimes the expansion is so great and so non-obvious that the new expansion has to be listed as a separate definition in the dictionary. Even if the expansion makes sense, you’ll often have to list it. For example, adere in High Valyrian means “slippery”. It also means “fast”. I think it’s pretty obvious how you got from the first one (the initial one) to the second one. Nevertheless, this is nothing that anyone would assume by default. Thus, if you’re making a useful dictionary, you have to list that as a secondary meaning.

If you do any kind of translation into your language, you’re also likely coining non-obvious secondary meanings, whether you’re recording them or not. If you’re consciously avoiding this, though, you’d better be creating a non-naturalistic conlang, because natural languages don’t do that. It’s never one word = one object/idea. It’d be too tedious to use.

[dedalvs]

Hi! On several of your talks, you (and other conlangers) have talked about the possibility of simulating an alternate vocal tract. As we know how the physics of sound waves works, it makes sense that it's theoretically possible so... do you know if there exists a program somewhere, or if somebody has done it? By "it" I mean the simulation of a different vocal tract to that of current humans'. Thank you!

Not that I’m aware of. The false vocal tracts I know were done to simulate human noises, and they’re static (so if you blow into them on one end a vowel will come out the other). Such a thing should certainly be possible with software, but that kind of thing sounds technical and expensive to me—and while the former favors conlangers, the latter does not. I’m happy to post this here, though, to see if anyone else knows of any interesting experiments!

[dedalvs]

how do you think language began? which of all the circulating theories do you think is the most likely? and which one would you like to be true, regardless of the evidence? If I had to choose, I'd say aliens are my favorite (though I personaly do not consider it likely)

I honestly haven’t looked into it. Frankly, I’m shocked language didn’t develop in the course of a single person’s life. Then again, looking back on technological advancement, I’m constantly surprised that certain technologies lasted as long as they did with no one getting on to the next thing in, like, four or five years. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like without having all one’s modern assumptions at one’s disposal.

It really seems like it shouldn’t take long for someone to go, “Hey, this person made this sound when this thing happened. What if we made a different sound when a different thing happens?” And then language would follow. But it’s probably something that happened gradually over many centuries, with first analogical patterns leading to culture, and then leisure time leading to language. Honestly, though, I know so little about the early history of humankind or, like, biology, then any guess I make is worth less than the paper it’s printed on (and no one’s printing this).

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Hey there. I ask this despite knowing that you haven't have much spare time in the past few months (years?): do you still conlang for yourself? That is, do you create languages just for the sake of your own amusement, not having been payed to do so? Thanks

When I’m working on a show or movie, it’s an active project, and I work on that exclusively. When I have no active project, I work on whatever I happen to want to work on at the time. That includes every language I’ve ever created. At this stage, what are the languages of Defiance other than personal projects (since Trion can’t be bother to give a single shit about the languages I created)? They’re all my own conlangs; I was just paid to create some of them and given a few extra constraints.

Also, now that I’ve been running my own D&D campaign, I’ve been working with languages I’ve created in the past that I’m using for the campaign—specifically, Bodzvokhan and Övüsi from Bright (figured in case I get to work on the sequel, it’d only help to beef up the vocab of each); Shiväisith from Thor: The Dark World; and Gweydr, one of my old ones. The latter is just awful. It needs so much work to be respectable. And the font is an abomination. I really want to rework it, but it’s really not a good use of my time (Gweydr is simply a naming language, since it’s the language that everyone speaks. Consequently, you don’t hear it—it’s just English—but if there are decorative signs, etc. that players don’t need to read, they’ll be in the Gweydry script).

Honestly, though, I really don’t draw a distinction, or think of one. These are all simply languages I created, and I work on them because I love them.