Conlangery Podcast

Today Christophe joins us as we talk all about copulas, or copulae, however you want to talk about them. Special mention: Intro video for Britton’s new film Conlanging Top of Show Greeting: Dutch (submitted anonymously) Links and Resources: Curnow, T. J. (1999). Towards a Cross-linguistic Typology of Copula Constructions. Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of... Read more »

This episode, William tells us about the noun classifications in Palikúr, a language with both gender and numeral classifers (once thought impossible) and a couple other classifications aside. EDIT: An earlier version of the shownotes linked to the JSTOR page of the Aikenvald and Green paper. The new link goes to a page where you... Read more »

Today we review the Akana conlang Kataputi. In other news, the Sixth Language Creation Conference happened. Links below. Also, George is getting his Masters. Top of Show Greeting: Old English/Anglo-Saxon (translated and read by Scott Brewer) Links and Resources Kataputi Proto-Dumic Announced bits William’s post about legal stuff LCC6 site Day 1, part 1 Day... Read more »

Support Conlangery on Patreon! Announcements: David Salo talking at WiGL on April 11, in Madison, WI, USA The Sixth Language Creation Conference will be on April 25-26 in Horsham, UK Bianca joins us today for an episode on obviation, just another option for managing discourse while clarifying who does what to who. Also, we have... Read more »

Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets comes on to talk about his conlang Moten. Top of Show Greeting: Nærut Nɑnɑ́rɑ Links and Resources: The Moten page of Christophe’s blog Christophe’s presentation at LCC4

Suzette Haden Elgin passed away on January 27th. She will be missed. You can now support Conlangery on Patreon! William can now talk about conlanging he did for a videogame! In this episode, George and William go over the wonderful diversity of auxiliary verb constructions! So much to think about! Links and Resources: Auxiliary Verb... Read more »

This episode, George highlights a few words from last year’s #Lexember event. Words: ihar kopoyamtuki snūgā kwägilärä naagari hintul chyubīne tneban fri

Today George is on his own with a short and a book recommendation. You can find links to Gender by Greville Corbett here. LCS members can borrow it from the LCS Lending Library here.

Today it’s just George and William talking about the wonders of Navajo. Mostly William talking, as he knows more about it. Top of show Greeting: Yanem Links and Resources: Wikipedia The Navajo Language (best resource on the Internet) The Derivation of Meaning in the Navajo Verb Structure of Navajo A bunch of learning resources Reversing... Read more »

Today we discuss how languages talk about time. Particularly, how do we map time onto space metaphorically. Top of Show Greeting: Duojjin Links and Resources: From Space to Time (Haspelmath) — warning, big download Metaphor SPACE AS TIME across languages How Languages Construct Time Time and the mind: Using space to think about time Spatial... Read more »

We’re back! This episode we answer your emails on the show. Check the full emails below the fold. Top of Show Greeting: Fyai Thǔvn Email#1 Cherry-pick and paraphrase without mercy. Apologies if these have been addressed in the 30 released episodes I’m yet to enjoy. Over-long Ingratiating Preamble: I started listening to your podcast 29... Read more »

Today we discuss Afrihili in some detail, a discussion made possible by William’s work tracking down the book and publishing some highlights about the language. Links and Resources: William’s Paper Wikipedia article on Afrihili  

George takes a moment to talk about a kind of language that is somewhat to related to the pidgins and creoles episode. CORRECTION: In the podcast I say that CIA is spoken on Copper Island. It originated there, but currently the surviving speaker population is on Bearing Island. Special note: conlang is now listed in... Read more »

David Peterson joins us to talk about pidgins and creoles and what conlangers (and linguists) can learn from them. Top of Show Greeting: Chudihr (revised) Links and Resources: Wiki on creoles APICS (WALS for creoles) An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles Creole studies: a theoretical linguist’s field guide Wikipedia on Tok Pisin

We had a wonderful conversation with Christine Schreyer, the creator of the Kryptonian language featured in Man of Steel and a professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, who uses a language creation assignment in one of her classes. Top of Show Greeting: Moten Links and Resources: Christine Schreyer’s website Her... Read more »

Today George brings on his fiancé Li Wang to talk about some interesting little lexical facts in Chinese that might be an inspiration. Links and Resources Google shows nearly a million hits for 吃酒 A Conlanger’s Thesaurus Semantic Associations presenation

We have some fun telling you about nonconcatenative mophology — that is morphology that doesn’t involve stringing things together. It’s not just Arabic, folks (though we do talk about that a bit). Top of Show Greeting: Engeldish Links and Resources:  “Down with Morphemes” talk and paper Wikipedia article Wikipedia “Apophony” Indo-European Ablaut “Transfix” Arabic broken... Read more »

In this episode, George points out a really interesting little subreddit that might provide some inspiration to conlangers. Links and Resources Etymology Maps subreddit camel clock beer Jew

We talk about a Papua New Guinea language called Menya. Follow along here.       —

George recorded a special interview with David J Peterson and Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets to talk about some recent events at the Language Creation Society.