There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. The evolution of Angosey: 5 Translations of the same poem across 11
From: Daniel Bowman
2a. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: Leonardo Castro
2b. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
From: Leonardo Castro
3. Glossotechnia
From: Daniel Demski
4.1. Re: Why are there fewer female than male conlangers?
From: Mia.
5a. On Creating Altlangs
From: Cosman246
5b. Re: On Creating Altlangs
From: James Kane
Messages
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1. The evolution of Angosey: 5 Translations of the same poem across 11
Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" [email protected]
Date: Sat Feb 16, 2013 8:12 pm ((PST))
Hello All,
Last weekend Alex Fink, Herman Miller and I met over brunch and had a great
discussion about conlangs. I look forward to bringing up several things we
touched on during the conversation. The first is the evolution of my conlang
Angosey over the last eleven years. I mentioned that I retranslate the same
poem every so often, and I can trace the changes that have occurred (both
phonological, orthographical, and grammatical) in Angosey via my past
translations. Alex mentioned that he'd be interested in hearing more about it,
so I've written a blog post that shows examples from this poem that highlight
the evolution of my language. Here's the link in case other list members are
curious:
https://glossarch.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/the-linguistic-and-creative-evolution-of-angosey/
Best,
Danny
Messages in this topic (1)
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2a. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:04 am ((PST))
2013/2/15 Roger Mills <[email protected]>:
> --- On Fri, 2/15/13, Njenfalgar <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2013/2/14 Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
>
>> I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
>> final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
>
> RM I don't recall hearing it much in Brazil when I was there in the late 60s.
> But my contact with a lot of spoken Port. was mainly in Sao Paulo. I heard
> the velar/uvular /r in Rio and elsewhere, but at that time it was considered
> a provincialism and/or slightly lower class....
Maybe because it is common in the Northeast states that sent many poor
immigrants to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo state itself,
there's an opposition of urban "cultured" coronal "r" to rural
retroflex/approximant "r". In Brasilia, a relatively new city with
people from the whole Brazil, the gutural "r" is far more common.
My father was born and raised in Goiás state rural zones and he
remembers that some people would speak "porco" as "poico" /pojku/
(maybe an /i/ with the symbol of non-stressed would be more adequate
than /j/).
Messages in this topic (11)
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2b. Re: THEORY: Lost of final-syllable rhotic.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2013 5:17 am ((PST))
Ah, but the intervocalic single r is pronounce as an alveolar flap
everywhere in Brazil. The huge variation in pronunciation applies to
initial, final and double r. Some actors pronounce the intervocalic
single r as a retroflex phone when playing "caipiras" (the Brazilian
"rednecks"), but I don't remember having ever heard it in real life.
Maybe it's like some people who mimic "cariocas" (Rio-born people) by
palatizing all <s>'s while in real life they only palatize final
syllable and pre-consonantal <s> (somewhat similar to standard German
pronunciation).
Até mais!
Leonardo
2013/2/17 Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>:
> 2013/2/15 Roger Mills <[email protected]>:
>> --- On Fri, 2/15/13, Njenfalgar <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 2013/2/14 Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
>>
>>> I have noted that there is a tendency of omission or attenuation of
>>> final-syllable rhotic in French, German, English and Portuguese.
>>
>> RM I don't recall hearing it much in Brazil when I was there in the late
>> 60s. But my contact with a lot of spoken Port. was mainly in Sao Paulo. I
>> heard the velar/uvular /r in Rio and elsewhere, but at that time it was
>> considered a provincialism and/or slightly lower class....
>
> Maybe because it is common in the Northeast states that sent many poor
> immigrants to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo state itself,
> there's an opposition of urban "cultured" coronal "r" to rural
> retroflex/approximant "r". In Brasilia, a relatively new city with
> people from the whole Brazil, the gutural "r" is far more common.
>
> My father was born and raised in Goiás state rural zones and he
> remembers that some people would speak "porco" as "poico" /pojku/
> (maybe an /i/ with the symbol of non-stressed would be more adequate
> than /j/).
Messages in this topic (11)
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3. Glossotechnia
Posted by: "Daniel Demski" [email protected]
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:06 pm ((PST))
I've gotten a little group together to play Glossotechnia semi-regularly.
Given the long silence on the Glossotechnia list I thought I'd post my
experience here as well. Feel free to reply without reading my rambling
account if you've played Glossotechnia within the past couple years and/or
have any useful updates to the deck or rules.
Discussion on Glossotechnia list:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/conlang-card-game/0X0vrozcrPc/Ie8tYoI9GH4J
I missed the first game the group played, but here are the details. Two of
the players were professional linguists (not field-oriented linguists
though). The game lasted two hours and 23 words were coined. It took almost
an hour until a sentence structure was played; they didn't make any
sentences until then. The group didn't have any vowels for a while either.
Mistakenly they thought translating the group sentence won the game for
whoever did it. Hand size was four. It was generally agreed that the game
went slowly and should have more people; the hand size and correct starting
rules would have helped, but the consensus was that more people was the
missing element.
The sentences were translated without any secrecy; everyone knew what was
being said, and simply tried to follow whether it was really being said.
This was not a deliberate modification, just a result of not reading the
rules carefully.
Despite the problems everyone enjoyed this game and all three players came
back for our second session.
The second session had five people, still with two linguists. Only one
person had never played before. We started out with one vowel, a. Plenty of
phonemes were played right away. Later on in the game one or two people got
tired of drawing phoneme cards; we didnt play a whole lot of syntax cards.
Also, we ended up letting people display and discard unuseable cards at the
end of their turn in exchange for a new draw; mostly phonemes which were
already in play. Though I always had an interesting card to play, Im
thinking of allowing people to do this at the end of their turn regardless
of what the card is. I dont see much reason to make someone lose a turn in
order to get a new set of cards.
A big element of our session was adding nuance to our words after the
charade was guessed. It ended up being a little like playing with the
cultural rules. We had ha, to follow blindly; aha, to console someone
blindly (ie, the person you are consoling is blindly following you);
several words which could only apply to sentient adults; and mystical
connotations to most sensory words. This was very fun but most or all of
these details didnt affect gameplay. Some people did try to compose
interesting example sentences after a cool coining; but we werent awarding
points for it and it sort of died out. Im hoping we can try out the
sentence scoring rules in the future. Has anyone been playing with them?
The charades element went smoothly with five people; not a single charade
went unguessed or dragged on for any length of time. However, once someone
played a preposition card we started allowing people to state ahead of time
what part of speech they were coining. People had already been latching
onto a charades guess once it was pretty much semantically correct, then
possibly saying but as a verb (followed by any other odd twist they
wanted). So saying part of speech didnt seem to be adding much
information, but using this all the time might limit peoples thinking.
The way we did the scoring was a bit different, and I cant say Im too
happy with the alteration. At the beginning of the game I explained that we
have to figure out a persons (English) goal sentence, accepting simple
variations, from their game-language sentence. It was pointed out by an
especially competitive player that then any one person winning depends on
everyone else's cooperation; so we agreed to give a point to a person who
translates their goal sentence, a point to the person who first understands
it, and just one point for the group challenge sentence. This was nice in
that even though most everyone ignored the group challenge sentence,
someone who finished a challenge sentence could draw another and everyone
would still have something to do. But awarding a whole point for
understanding a sentence was too much, and having a race to translate the
sentence into English didn't make sense, especially with only one word list
to hand around and flip through. (Nobody felt the need at first to keep two
lists.) If a significant part of the game consisted of racing to understand
game-language sentences people would get in tune with that goal and it
could be fun, but as it was there was some side-conversation and not a
whole lot of competition to do this.
Im pretty happy with the way the game ended. The group challenge sentence
was have a cup of tea with me and we were only missing me and a way of
dealing with commands. The winning move was to coin one word for both, a
pronoun whose meaning was mainly based on gesture and context. This sort of
strategizing is much more interesting than trying to create a meaning
change or obligatory as-yet-uncoined inflection to hopefully trip up
someone's sentence. I also like how it semi-plausibly mimics creation of
natural language, since the game language is being pragmatic in a way which
helps it meet its goals.
So, this makes me wish that the game had more of that. The charades aspect
certainly gives a feeling of people without a current means to communicate
trying to create one, but the card portion of the game is more or less
artificial. Not that the cards aren't a good mechanic; I think of the cards
as a way to help limit players' view so that they're making a choice from a
small set rather than staring at a metaphorical blank page (or huge list of
options) and trying to create a language.
Maybe I should simply try and tweak my goal sentences collection with an
eye toward having those sorts of possible semantic
shortcuts/double-coinings be there. Actually, this is something which may
be eliminated by replacing goal sentences with a point system; a goal would
have to be pretty carefully designed to if it were to allow clever coinings
to reach it more quickly.
There was not a whole lot of use of game language in coining new words; I
think next time I will remind everyone of the reward of getting a larger
hand.
22 words were coined; 2 individual sentences and the group sentence were
translated; I think 14 phonemes were played; and all this in about two
hours, which is probably how long we'll be meeting each week.
The game was really fun for everyone. Hopefully as long as I have varied,
interesting translation sentences play will be different enough each week
that we'll continue having a fresh experience.
Looking back at my old notes, and thinking of a couple things that happened
during this past game, I think I will definitely want to add cards for
things like evidentiality, patient/agent, and other interesting contrasts.
These would be similar to 'add inflectional category' but give players
specific ideas. Those sound like 'advanced' cards but would explain the
concept to a non-advanced player. Similarly I'd like to figure out how to
make good, specific 'grammatical details' cards to help players add
conjunctions, relative clauses, etc., but I'm not sure which ones are
needed or how they should look.
I'd love to hear about any other additional cards that might be fun, as I'm
not trying to keep to a small deck; and of course any other shifts in the
rules that have occurred over the three or four years. :)
Messages in this topic (1)
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4.1. Re: Why are there fewer female than male conlangers?
Posted by: "Mia." [email protected]
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:21 pm ((PST))
I know I am a little late to this party, but I am a female (although not
terribly gender-typical) and I really don't care much about what others
think of me at all. I don't care much about what I look like. Avoiding a
citation for indecent exposure is my fashion priority. I don't care if
people are impressed with what I do; I am doing what I want to do. I
don't try to fit in at all. I just don't have that kind of social
awareness. And I tend to be friends with women who are like me.
Conlanging is a pretty low priority for me, but I am a single mom, a
full-time student, and I work, so there's very little downtime in my
life, and there's no way for me to shift my priorities that wouldn't end
up costing me something I'm not willing to give up. As a result, I work
on my languages between other things, and I hardly ever participate in
the online communities, which renders me invisible, for the most part.
It's not that I'm not doing it. It's just too much extra effort to post
about it regularly, and I definitely don't have the time to read what's
being posted.
I am not sure that the numbers of women with languages projects is as
low as it appears from participation in the community. It is, after all,
a pretty solitary activity in the first place, so unless you make the
effort to get out there, nobody would know you were doing it.
(Today is the first time I've looked at CONLANG mail in months. Most
other people would have unsubscribed by now, but this goes to an email I
use exclusively for CONLANG and a couple of other lists, so it is
invisible to me most of the time.)
Mia.
On 2/12/2013 4:43 PM, Randy Frueh wrote:
> My girlfriend has an interest in many 'geeky' activities: roleplaying,
> linguistics, ancient cultures, and other things. But she tells me that it
> is hard to fit these less than critical activities into her life.
> I'd probably be more successful were I as driven as she is. But my
> priorities are different. I've noticed that she cares A LOT about how
> others see her. I couldn't care less about what others think of me.
>
> Is this a common difference? Men and women of the list; what are your
> impressions on this?
>
> (Sorry if this is getting away from the OP's question but I feel that the
> comparative geekdom of men and women may be closely related to the topic.)
> On Feb 12, 2013 1:01 PM, "Krista D. Casada" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
Messages in this topic (28)
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5a. On Creating Altlangs
Posted by: "Cosman246" [email protected]
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2013 12:51 pm ((PST))
Hello. I'm thinking of creating an altlang; does anyone here have advice or
experience to guide someone new to altlangs?
(To clarify: I am a student of linguistics in pursuit of a bachelor's
degree, and I am already working on one artlang as well. I had a previous
auxlang project, but I found it too linguistically naïve when I looked over
it again after several years of forgetting about it.)
-Yash Tulsyan
Messages in this topic (2)
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5b. Re: On Creating Altlangs
Posted by: "James Kane" [email protected]
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2013 1:34 pm ((PST))
What do you mean exactly by altlang? What are the details of your project?
James
On 18/02/2013, at 9:50 AM, Cosman246 <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello. I'm thinking of creating an altlang; does anyone here have advice or
> experience to guide someone new to altlangs?
>
> (To clarify: I am a student of linguistics in pursuit of a bachelor's
> degree, and I am already working on one artlang as well. I had a previous
> auxlang project, but I found it too linguistically naïve when I looked over
> it again after several years of forgetting about it.)
>
> -Yash Tulsyan
Messages in this topic (2)
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