LCC4 Speakers

Comparison in Ayeri

Many Indo-European languages use satellite particles of one kind or another or affixation for comparative constructions (e.g. “My house is bigger than a mountain”). Ayeri does things differently. In this talk, Carsten will discuss various comparative strategies found in natural languages, and then go into detail about how comparison works in Ayeri.

Slides (.pdf)

Verb Control in Constructed Languages

Verb control in natural languages is often illogical and difficult to learn. In different languages, verbs with the same or very close meanings may have completely different control. Often, changing the way a verb controls its objects changes its meaning. While some conlang authors are happy to leave the topic of verb control out of scope, many try to address it in one way or another. This becomes a particularly acute topic for auxlangs as speakers with different backgrounds tend to use different verb control and assign different semantic meanings to differently controlled objects.

During the talk, we first walk through a number of examples of how verb control is organized in natural languages. We will briefly look at morphosyntactic alignment, various case systems and the use of prepositions. Various examples will be given, showing how control of the same verbs can be dramatically different in different languages.

Next, we will look at a number of attempts to address the issue of verb control in existing conlangs. We will discuss the most common approaches, and look at examples, starting with classics like Esperanto and then moving to more modern works like Loglan.

Slides (.pdf) | (.pptx)

Technology Vocabulary in Rejistanian

If someone from a different time would see the modern world, s/he would be quite confused. Our mice don’t squeak, our keyboards don’t play music or hold keys, except of course for the ones which do not open doors. And don’t get me started on joysticks… When new concepts arrive in the world they do not arrive with new words already attached, instead, words are repurposed, re-repurposed and re-re-repurposed for the new concepts. This presentation aims to show how the process happened in Rejistanian but you are encouraged to use its structures in your own languages and projects.

Slides (.pdf)

The Importance of “International” Words to Auxiliary Languages and How to Define Them

Many international auxiliary languages (IALs) are judged based on the familiarity of their vocabulary to speakers of various languages around the world. But which words are suitable to be borrowed in – and from which languages? In this talk, Johan discusses criteria for incorporating loan words into IALs that have been used throughout history, and also proposes criteria of his own.

Slides (.pdf) | Talk (.pdf)

When Morphology Kicks Syntax Out of the Way, When English Just Seems to Lack the Words, When a Boy Plays with the One That Is Wearing the Beret, and When Over-Long and Obscure Titles Seem Like the Way to Go: an Introduction to Surdéclinaison

Engelangers are not the only ones who are fascinated by the limits of human language. Even the most naturalistic artlangers, consciously or not, explore the human language space and seek its borders, even if they do it from the inside. The search for language universals is an enthralling one.

One universal that is hardly ever questioned is a fact of language structure: that inflectional morphology is finite (i.e. however complicated a declension or conjugation system may be, the total number of inflected forms a word can take is always finite) and that only syntax allows us to form an infinite number of utterances. In particular, most linguists consider recursion to be strictly restricted to syntax. But is that true?

After illustrating this universal using examples from various natlangs and conlangs, this talk will start poking holes in it. First, we will take a look at Suffixaufnahme, a type of agreement phenomenon where inflected noun phrases completing other nouns receive a copy of the inflections of their heads, and how this phenomenon results in recursion at the inflectional level.

But even Suffixaufnahme is limited in its application, so we will move to the phenomenon of surdéclinaison, a term used by French linguists to refer to the ability in some languages to add inflections to already inflected forms. After a short passage via Armenian, we will focus on the Basque language, basically the poster language for surdéclinaison. We will show the various types of surdéclinaison found in Basque, and will show how it makes paradigm tables virtually infinite.

Finally, in order to illustrate how surdéclinaison can be used in conlanging, the presenter will show examples of his conlang Moten, a language he created specifically to play with surdéclinaison phenomena.

See the Prezi Presentation Online here

The Case for Verb Classes and Quirky Subjects

My first full-fledged conlang, Æleńa, is built upon three basic requirements: it is/should be a genuine Celtic/Indo-European language, it has to be beautiful (‘cellar door’ ;-), and it should show some semantic consistency. Conforming to the latter two inclinations tends to have Æleńa drift away from the first requirement – voilà the challenge of this conlang.

In my talk I will focus on one important semantic battle ground: verb classes and how to consistently represent them. I will describe how it came to be an interest, how I searched and (for the purposes of my tongue) discarded the various systems and approaches of Beth Levin, Fillmore, Vendler, Kenny and even good old Aristotle. But also how I made use of (some of) the insights of Rick Morneau, Dixon, Butt, Tsunoda and Malchukov and even of our own President (no, not Obama, the other one) to construct a three-conjugation five-types-of-quirky-subject solution.

Don’t worry, I won’t bury you under a linguistic who-is-who pile, just sketch a personal quest for semantic clarity (which to others may be a logical twilight) and in the end even show a glimpse of a way to reconcile this solution with the language’s Celtic/Indo-European roots.

Slides (.ppt) | Slides (.pdf)

Ŧéng Ŧuàn: A Preliminary Monograph

Chrysaor will describe briefly Ŧuàn State, in the context of a fictional world which includes (inter alia) dinosaurs. He will then briefly compare/contrast the Ŧuàn with China and South Africa. He will then discuss the three prominent features of his language: isolating syntax resembling Chinese, contextual dependencies, and how the language is organised around what he calls triplets.

His literary inspirations include Chinua Achebe and Jorge Luis Borges. His musical inspirations include Brian Eno and world music.

When not working on a conlang, Chrys Jordan is busy with (1) his wife, Hilde; (2) drawing amateur sketches of footballers, or (3) at work delivering the post in Bilthoven.

On Olesi

Slides (.ppt) | Slides (.pdf)

Screening of Der Liebe Leo

For a short film from the perspective of a dog, Brenda Hilbig wanted the humans to speak an incomprehensible but natural-sounding language. Through the Language Creation Society, she commissioned Olivier Simon to produce a phonology sketch and translate dialogue into that language sketch. This film will be shown here – with the dog’s thoughts voiced-over in English and the humans speaking the constructed language.

How to Invent Five Conlangs in Forty-Five Minutes (and Still Leave Ample Time for Discussion)

Njenfalgar will describe some techniques that can be used to construct naming languages or sketchlangs, aimed at giving background to some fantasy novel (inventing names for characters and translating the eventual exhortation, wise saying or line of poetry) or at having a language from which the naturalistic conlanger’s main conlang can borrow words. This will mainly be done by using bits and pieces of natlangs (phonology, phonotactics, recent sound-changes, word-building, grammar…) and putting these together to make a new language.

Slides (.pdf)

In his not-free time he has studied physics, so as to be sure the wormhole technology in his conworlds is consistent. But then he got diverted away from general relativity and astrophysics to quantum gauge theories, which are quite useless for conworlding, although they can be interesting in their own right.

Case Assignment and Verb Classes in Dothraki

In natural languages, noun cases tend to have a prototypical usage, and then extended uses dependent upon the prototypical usage for that case, and the demands of the linguistic system in which it’s used. Dothraki is no different, using its relatively small case system to meet the demands of a verbal system that requires more specificity. In this talk, David will discuss some of the verb classes of Dothraki, and how they interact with Dothraki’s case system.

Slides (.ppt) | (.pdf)

States and Scales in Talmit

English, as many other languages, has a grammaticalized plural of count nouns, like “apples” from “apple”. Sometimes, it allows a lexical collective plural, like “herd” or “flock”. When it comes to mass nouns or abstract conceptions, one can use words like “very” or “much” for intensification. Rarely, intensification is lexical, as in “hot” compared to “warm”. Talmit goes one step back and treats concepts like “weak” and “strong” or “warm” and “cold” as various degrees of quantification of the same root, and expresses them by affixes. The two main ideas behind its design are therefore: 1) having states as separate part of speech, distinct from verbs, and 2) the association of scales with them, on which the whole quantification business can be performed.

Slides (.pdf)

Author-Created Languages: Complicating the Reading while Keeping the Reader

People don’t read books in languages they don’t know…except for when they do. What should be a self-evident statement is confounded by the linguistic inventions that authors have been using for centuries: their very own, entirely created languages. Choosing to alter the mode of communication, the language itself, in a written work is not a trivial decision. Readers have to ‘work harder’ for meaning when sections of a text are rendered in a language known only to the author, yet people will cheerfully buy, read, and recommend novels with author-created languages. Though most authors do not bother investing much more than an interesting phonemic inventory in their languages, examples cover everything from pre-linguistic grunts to acquirable languages. In some instances, they represent a huge project that has been undertaken separately from the creative work of writing a book.

Including fictional languages in literature is hardly obligatory. In such cases, something inescapably important is being done to the reading experience – it is being deliberately complicated. How do authors overcome that, if they even want to? How do readers react? What methods are used to present these languages to non-native speakers, namely, the reading audience? It is important to look at author-created languages as a purposeful subset of the larger category of non-natural language precisely because they are presented in texts. By looking at the linguistic and stylistic features used in the representation of fictional languages in texts across several centuries, my research aims to explore the relationship between creative writing, philological enquiry, and linguistics in both its academic and non-specialists forms. For this case study, I will focus on some late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century novels’ representations of fabricated linguistic material to give greater depth to our modern understanding of the practice of conlanging in speculative fiction.

Slides (.ppt) | (.pdf)

Towards a Unified Slavic Language: Past, Present and Future of the Interslavic Language(s)

The Slavic language family consists of some fifteen languages, most of which have evolved beyond mutual understandability. Over the centuries, many people have been pondering about a Slavic language that would be understandable to all Slavs. According to some scholars, Old Church Slavonic was actually a constructed language, created over a thousand years ago by St. Cyril and St. Method. Even if we disregard Old Church Slavonic, the first publications in “Slavic” date back to the 16th century, and since the 17th century, over sixty different projects have been launched, carrying names like “Panslavic”, “Interslavic”, “Common Slavic” or simply “Slavic”, which describe a language for Interslavic communication. Even though nowadays Pan-Slavism is practically dead as a political ideology, their number has more than doubled since the birth of the Internet. Can these projects be considered separate languages, or should they rather be treated as various efforts at the very same language? What are the differences between them, and what different approaches do they represent? Can these differences be overbridged, and how? And what are the perspectives for an Interslavic language nowadays?

Slides (.pdf)

Akana: A Long-Lived Collaborative Conworld

Collaborative conworlding projects are rarely successful. When they are proposed on a web forum or mailing list, they often receive enthusiastic responses at first, but then fade out of favour after only a few months of activity. The Akana project, however, has been running for six years so far. It features one of the largest known conlang families, and new material is still being created by a stable team of about a dozen main contributors. What is the key to its longevity?

The talk will summarize the rather unique history of this conworld, which has developed from two diachronic conlanging games, and outline strategies that have helped to keep it alive for such a long time. We will have a detailed look at how some significant pieces of content were assembled, describe how these particular methods of collaboration have shaped the world of Akana, and single out obstacles that have arisen as the result of a certain approach. Some of the conclusions drawn from our experience with Akana may be applicable to other collaborative projects as well, and we hope to provide some hints how to keep people interested in contributing.

Slides (.pdf)

Tam Blaxter discovered conlanging through studying Tolkien at the age of 12. It sparked an interest in languages and linguistics which later led him to study linguistics at the undergraduate level – he has every intention of continuing these studies, and will begin a masters in philology in the autumn. He has been an intermittent poster on the ZBB (under the pseudonym TzirTzi) since 2005 and his conlangs available online include Proto-Núalís-Takuña, Takuña, Aríe, Yēt, Wistervitezj, and Proto-Coastal-Western. His main areas of interest are diachronic variation and phonology.

On a Language with Adverbials

Engineered languages, or engelangs for short, are often language experiments where the creator tries to explore natural language by driving some aspect, often grammar or phonology, to its extremes. It may be that the regularity or the irregularity is extreme. There are languages with nothing but verbs, or with all possible grammatical categories represented explicitly in grammar. This talk will report about an experiment of constructing a language where adverbials are the basic skeleton everything is based on. The design goal is to construct a viable language from adverbials plus a minimal set of grammar rules.

Slides (.pdf)