LCC7 Speakers

From Fantasy to Reality: Conlanging as Psychosocial Activism

Constructing languages informs world-making and vice versa. It provides a platform to question one’s assumptions, not just about language but about everything. Together, we will conduct an inquiry into our own assumptions that are so taken for granted that they “fly below the radar.” This process (hopefully) will leave participants with a lot of niggling questions to crop up at (in)opportune times in the creative process as you construct new languages and new worlds.

Lexical Boundaries in Your Conlang:  What We Can Learn From Real-World Languages

This talk will compare and contrast the differences in the lexico-semantic ranges of certain everyday words in French and English from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, as a means of analyzing the reasons for such differences, and how a conlanger might apply such an approach when creating one’s lexicon.

 Auxiliary Languages in the Bahá’í Faith

Did you know that there is a religion whose scriptures explicitly speak of an international auxiliary language? Although many early auxlangs created in the 16th and 17th centuries had religious motivations, these were individual efforts. The Bahá’í Faith is unique in that its promise of the creation of a global auxlang is scriptural.

This presentation will describe what the Bahá’í Writings say about an auxiliary language, what the implications of these statements are, the way in which questions about these passages have been answered by various personages and institutions of the Bahá’í Faith, and how the Bahá’í community has reacted to these statements. The presentation will be purely factual and historical, and will avoid any discussion of religion or matters of belief.

“Because if we don’t get this right, someone from that planet might be in the audience”

The title of this presentation comes from an interview with Bill Hader, who played the character of Alpha 5 in Power Rangers, regarding how he and the other actors learned the Eltarian language created for that movie. While Hader provides this line in a joking manner, and while there may not be other Eltarian speakers in the audience (yet!), authenticity in world building is something that movie studios are continuing to focus on as fan audiences continue to demand these details, particularly in franchises with long histories (such as Superman and Power Rangers). In this presentation, I describe some of my experiences creating languages for Hollywood to provide a glimpse into the world of fast-paced, quickly-changing conlanging. I will discuss process, from being hired to providing initial materials, as well as my experiences working with actors, and, finally how I was required to adjust the languages as edits were made to the movies.

Alternations & Your Conlangs

This talk discusses (morpho-)phonological alternations and its related field, morphophonotactics. We will discuss the theoretical ideas on how to distinguish between phonologically and morphologically-conditioned alternations and what sorts of behavior one family of frameworks (Stratal OT/Co-phonologies) predict for alternations, all with an eye for application to conlanging. Examples will come from both natlangs and (my own) conlangs.

William Annis

Using Construction Grammar as a Conlanging Tool

Construction Grammar (CxG) is an umbrella term for a collection of theories of language in cognitive linguistics. In this talk I will introduce a few key ideas from CxG which can clarify our thinking about how we create meaning from linguistic elements, in both natural and constructed languages.

Thus God Wills Ever: Constructing Stephen King’s High Speech

This talk will focus on the work I’ve been doing in reconstructing Stephen King’s High Speech from his series The Dark Tower, based on what there already is in the novels. I will explain the methods I used to derive High Speech’s grammatical structure and phonetical rules using Stephen King’s worldbuilding as a starting point, and how my reconstruction of the language, in combination with King’s own work, led me to develop my ideas regarding the relationship between Mid-World culture and High Speech itself.

The Performative Embodiment of Conlangs: Constructing Characters

How does spoken language inform an actor’s intentions? And furthermore, how can constructed languages specifically work to contribute to the development of an actor’s character? These questions begin to address how conlangs can and do function in performance. Using a case study from a 2017 theatre adaptation and it’s conlang Vrodash, this presentation will offer an actor’s perspective as well as that of the language creator. We will discuss how Vrodash developed as a collaboration between writer and actors, through consideration of embodied character-building.

Allyn Anthony Moriyon is an MFA Acting student at UC San Diego. He received his BFA in Performance from Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida. FIU credits: The Cherry Orchard (Peter), An Ideal Husband (Goring), Rumors (Ernie), Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Dwight), Flea In Her Ear (Victor/Posh). UC San Diego credits: Are You There? (Adam, WNPF 2017), Taming of the Shrew(d).

Hyperluxian: A Language Based on Numbers & Knots

This engelang comprises a detailed analysis of the possibility of a language based on numbers instead of sound.  The wide-ranging implications of such a qualification—with respect to syntax, “phonology,” orthography, and naturalism—will all be discussed.  Additionally, a potential artlang context will be proposed.

Shey Gadán Sonsayara! Ta Sit’sholós seti ta Aralbatan ta Drindaa vey ta Shinara

‘Every Word is a Portal. Conlanging at the Crossroads of Art and Mystery’

Every conlang has its genesis, its unique point of origin and it own path of development. Not all are born from science and structure, some take their beginnings from art and metaphysics, such is my experience with Itlani. This short review will explore that genesis and development, a very different way of conlanging.

How Best to Slice a π — Categories, Taxonomies, Ontologies & Philosophical Conlangs: Carving up the semantic space into discrete concepts & words, with lexical resources you can use for language creation

This presentation is about categorization and the efforts from Aristotle to modern times to classify the knowledge of the world into hierarchical taxonomies and ontologies. Along the way, I will highlight some philosophical language schemes based on classification from the 17th century to the modern day. I will discuss how these have informed current projects in Natural Language Programming and theories of how words are stored in the brain. I will end with an overview of some exciting research, lexical databases and related resources you can use in your own conlanging endeavors.

Sociolinguistic Elements of Constructed Languages in a Constructed World Setting

The constructed languages I have been building for over 17 years led to the creation of a world setting, Aeniith, to give a fictional speaker base to the languages (visit http://aeniith.com for more info). Along with the languages, I have created a sociolinguistic environment in which they can exist, along with systems rich with history, politics, sociology, etc. This presentation will explore some of the diverse social aspects to the cultures that have evolved around my conlangs, and how these cultures impact the languages themselves.

Medieval Conlanging: What the Scholastics Can Teach Us About Constructing Languages

One idea I find very interesting is the idea of a grammatical tradition and its relation to language. The Paninian school is likely to be familiar to linguists and amateur conlangers alike. Lesser known, however, is the Modist school of grammar, which flourished during the European Middle Ages, and was centered around the work of the philosopher Thomas of Erfurt. The Modists developed a highly original account of language that in some ways prefigures the modern linguistic theory of universal grammar.

For my talk, what I would like to explore is how what we might call ‘alternative’ formulations of grammar might inform language construction. Furthermore, I would like to argue the case for what might be termed ‘conlinguistics’ (so to speak). Simply put, I take conlinguistics to be the development of fictional grammatical traditions, pedagogic methods, linguistic theories, etc. designed with the intent to enrich conlangs and to increase the general verisimilitude thereof. Using the Modist school as an instructive example, my talk will trace the development of this body of thought out of its linguistic and philosophical context, while also working backwards from theory to language itself.

Theory selection and conlang generation

Conlangers have any number of reasons to invent a language and probably an equal number of strategies to go about doing so. In this talk, I present one approach that can aid the conlanger if their ultimate goal is a conlang that seems as if it could be a natural human language.

Peterson (2015) advocates for utilizing the processes of historical linguistics and diachronic derivation to achieve a linguistically plausible human language. However, you may wonder where you start before historically deriving a new conlang; I suggest that the selection of linguistic theories may help you in that endeavor. As one example, I highlight the parts of the creation process from some of my personal conlangs created for use in Dungeons & Dragons games. I show how the phonological framework, The Contrastive Hierarchy (Dresher 2009) can be used to achieve a natural sounding phonology and even guide the implementation of phonological alternations that can enhance the naturalness of a new conlang.

Doing Without Adpositions in Okuna

In designing my conlang Okuna, one of the challenges I set for myself was to minimize the number of lexical categories in the language (cf. Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen, which famously lacks a verb category). One decision I made, which other conlangers have adopted for their languages, was to express states by means of verbs rather than having a distinct category of adjectives. However, another less-common decision I made was to see if I could construct a workable grammar that completely lacked a category of adpositions (prepositions/postpositions). In this talk, I discuss how I implemented this decision, reviewing some of the grammatical strategies that Okuna uses to express spatio-temporal relations (as well as more abstract relations) without the need for adpositions. These strategies include case marking; relational nouns and verbs; co-verb constructions; and classes of motion verbs which encode the source, goal, or path of motion. I also present comparative data from natural languages which use these strategies.

Sound Symbolism in Constructed Languages

As a scholar of the process of language construction, I am interested in sound symbolism and the role it plays in creating the sounds of a conlang. Phonosematicism is the idea that phonemes carry meaning, irrespective of their lexical value. My research primarily deals with the conlangs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and I use philological sources contemporary to Tolkien to describe the impact of phonosemantics and “phonetic fitness” in his languages. There are many phonetic trends across constructed languages that I will highlight in this presentation. While the emotional or expressive quality of language is relevant to any author, for conlangers the phonosemantic affective quality is given even more attention. I will discuss how this is one way that ethnocentrism is present in language construction, and particularly how Tolkien’s ideas of phonetic fitness are influenced by his subjective perception of beauty in sound and language.