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LangTime Chat, Episode 10: Jessie’s Conlangs


Neither David nor I can believe we have already reached episode 10 of our podcast! That fact will become pretty evident in the opening 15 seconds when we try to remember how long we’ve been recording these episodes. This episode is titled “Jessie’s Conlangs.” 

In this episode, I introduce five of my conlangs, which are all at different stages in how developed they are, but they all have enough structure that I can translate sentences into the conlang. I briefly introduce each conlang, providing a bit about the speakers and the language’s typological information, and then I send David a sentence or two in IPA, putting him on the spot to serve as the reader.

Here are the IPA transcriptions David reads in the episode; acute accents mark primary stress, and any grave accents mark secondary stress. Otherwise, these sentences are written in standard IPA. Where I had the interlinear glosses handy, I have provided those, too.

Conlang #1: Hiutsath

luxɑkɑθíto tɑɸíhɑ θesúsu luletotóɑʃ letɑɸíhɑhomɑ ɸɑleámo.

‘may your tree grow and have four branches’

Conlang #2: Xyrab

ɣe by ger

(question marker) you understand

‘Do you understand?’ / ‘Understand?’ / ‘See?’

ɣe wə βwɑ Jessie gwe eβ

(question marker) I find Jessie where please

‘Where can I find Jessie?’

Conlang #3: Gnomá

jadúgra bijanns twai gumannim gibmut dzabíjann wasjaka ja waiθaika jadwa bainn.

wizard seed-PL-ACC two man-PL-DAT give-GEN.PAST PROX-seed-PL grow-FUT and become-FUT magical tree-PL

‘A wizard gave two men seeds that would grow into magical trees.’

Conlang #4: gineso

tʃe jibók’ado ata anlúfeje ómwati hédi tajománad.

3sg,hum,nom c4,pl-berry-acc dem c3,sg-tree-loc tall-att near 3sg-3pl-past-find

‘She/He found berries near that tall tree’

Conlang #5: woxtjanato

wúakladɛn àllelát ʀet. fáidɛn itové jiféɛn swa adzé tomúgwe iùɲolenáox íkside dézu adzé totjávi.

‘A tree grows in a field. She believes that she herself possesses strength because of this: her branches are near to the sky goddesses.’


Along with these conlangs, I have created some conlang sketches, but they are so woefully incomplete that they are really more of playthings than something sharable. And I have created one other fully developed conlang, but that work was done for a project that is not my own. While I can’t really share the details of the language or project right now, someday I hope to be able to share that one with you, too.

Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in my conlangs in the livestream comments, and I hope you enjoy this episode!

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 9: Name That Language (Celebrating Indigenous Languages)


In this month’s podcast, we play a round of “Name that language!” where I read language facts and have David try to guess the language being described. In honor of National Indigenous Peoples Day, all languages discussed are native to North America.

SPOILER ALERT!

If you want to play along with David, don’t scroll down because the resources I provide below give away the languages.


LANGUAGE RESOURCES BELOW

Language 1

Navajo Spatial Terms (Navajo Language Academy), which is mentioned in the podcast and is the article I shared with David on the screen: https://people.umass.edu/pspeas/NAVAJO%20SPATIAL%20TERMS%20MADE%20EASIER.pdf 

Young and Morgan’s original work on The Navajo (Navaho) Language: https://archive.org/details/TheNavahoLanguage/page/n1/mode/2up 

McDonough’s article on how to use Young and Morgan’s guide: http://www.sas.rochester.edu/lin/joycemarymcdonough/htouym-june2015.pdf 

Wall and Morgan’s Navajo-English dictionary: https://digscholarship.unco.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=navajo 

Language 2

Ullrich’s dissertation on Lakota: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~rrgpage/rrg/Ullrich.pdf 

Language 3

Chafe’s Grammar of the Seneca Language: https://senecalanguage.com/wp-content/uploads/Seneca-Grammar-Book.pdf 

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 8: LINGsanity!


Welcome to LangTime Chat! In this episode, Jessie creates a language-based game for David to play called LINGsanity (if you’ve ever seen Winsanity, then you’ll know the gist of what David’s in store for).

In terms of gameplay, contestants are presented with numerical-based facts and must “stack” those facts in the correct order to win. For instance, a contestant might be asked to stack “Number of times David has sneezed during the live stream” and “Number of times Jessie has sneezed during the live stream.” Of course, the correct ordering is to put Jessie’s sneezes on top since she had an attack of allergies during a single episode that earned her more sneezes than David.

After the game, David and Jessie keep chatting (it is LangTime Chat after all) and cover everything from games to photos. Jessie mentions a drawing of David presenting at SFA–one of her students brought her son to David’s presentation, and he drew a photo to commemorate the event.

The details are quite amazing (and accurate!). And now for more information about the game.

WARNING!!! SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD!!!

If you want to play along with David, do not keep scrolling to view all the images below. The images below present the facts in each round that David is asked to stack, and then the next image provides answers for that round. If you don’t mind seeing the answers before listening to the game, then scroll away.

Jessie selected each fact for this game for specific reasons, and each round is followed by discussions and chit-chat focusing on those facts and the reasons they were selected. Whether you play along or peek at the answers first, enjoy the first-ever unveiling of LINGsanity!

Round 1: Duo for the win

Below are the first two facts David has to stack, both focused on Duolingo and courses offered through that app. The first round is always the easiest. 🙂

Round 2: All in the family

Now it gets MUCH trickier, especially with a fact about WALS, and David sweats his answers to this round, which focuses on language families and speakers.

Round 3: Against the WALS

This round focuses specifically on data provided in WALS chapters, requiring David to stack facts whose answers are quite close. While this round should have been more difficult than the last, David astounds Jessie with his knowledge of linguistic feature frequencies.

LINGsanity: Final answers

The image below shows all facts from the game stacked in the correct order with their numerical values assigned.

What a game!

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 7: Conlang Game (David’s Conlangs)


Not to build up too much hype, but this episode will be an instant classic! It features a “conlang” game that David had no idea was coming.

As resources for the episode, here is a link to the Wiki mentioned:

https://wiki.languageinvention.com/index.php?title=Main_Page.

And here is a photo of the cards used during the game:

We hope you enjoy the episode as much as we did!

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 6: Childhood Ambitions and Random Memories


Welcome to the sixth episode of LangTime Chat, where we discuss childhood ambitions and other random memories! We recently discovered that we both had dreams of being cartoon artists when we were kids, so we decided to devote an episode to exploring our young dreams. We hope you enjoy!

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LangTime Chat, Episode 5: Dictionaries


This episode’s focus is dictionaries–a favorite topic of mine! Throughout the episode, we talk about several resources, including…

The ConWorkShop: https://conworkshop.com/

Polyglot: https://draquet.github.io/PolyGlot/

David’s Language Creation template (Pages): https://artoflanguageinvention.com/papers/djp_template.pages

David’s Language Creation template (PDF): https://artoflanguageinvention.com/papers/djp_template.pdf

And an image from the self-published grammar of my first conlang (Hiutsath), which provides a dictionary in a spreadsheet format:

We hope you enjoy listening and pondering the many wonders of dictionaries!

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LangTime Chat, Episode 4: Basic Vocabulary in Conlangs


This episode is a wild ride beginning with a story about a vent and ending with a story about raunchy pizza. In between those two points, we discuss children’s language use and basic vocabulary in conlangs. There are several resources to accompany, including some photos and PDF documents.

One discussion takes us into the territory of snow-covered gloves. In case you are like David and have no experience with snow sticking to your gloves as you play outside, here is a photo of a very young Will in the snow. If you look closely at his gloves, you’ll see how snow sticks right to them.

The discussion veers into Meridian’s “permanent hat,” and you all need a photo to see that darling hat!

The final photo is a screenshot of a chart I drew about basic vocabulary as we talked about words in conlangs. If you follow us on Instagram or Twitter, you’ll recognize this photo!

Attached to this post are two PDF documents: the Swadesh List and the Leipzig-Jakarta List, both of which are discussed in the podcast.

And, finally, here is the transcript. Enjoy!

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 3: Inspiration


This episode’s theme was “inspiration,” and David and I were so inspired that we managed to abandon all plans I had made for the podcast and talked about everything from music to breviloquence, from airport mishaps to our initial enemy-ship. It’s a wild ride!

This episode also comes with resources: there are two pictures discussed in the podcast that we decided you just had to see, so you can see for yourself the psychology behind our first-ever photo together.

DAVID AND JESSIE’S FIRST PICTURE TOGETHER: 2013

DAVID AND JESSIE ARE NO LONGER BITTER ENEMIES: 2019

See? Even enemies can become friends.

As an additional bonus, I created a transcript for this episode! I hope this is something we can regularly offer, but I can’t make promises because it relies on technology… And we all know how that can go. 

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 2: Conlang Communities


For this month’s episode of our podcast, David and I discussed conlang communities, focusing on online communities that offer conlangers the ability to connect from afar. Since David is much better educated than I am on this particular topic, he gave me a bit of a history lesson before diving into what’s available now. Along the way, we also managed to fit in discussions on everything from Brooklyn 99 to Men of a Certain Age. It all connects–I promise!

These resources/images are mentioned in the podcast; here they are so you can check them out for yourself!

http://library.conlang.org/web/oncomm.html

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Podcast

LangTime Chat, Episode 1: A Bunch of Beginnings


After finishing our first live stream video, David and I sat down (actually, we continued sitting down) to record our very first podcast episode. This first episode includes discussions on how we became interested in linguistics and conlangs, what lessons we learned from our first conlangs, and how we almost could have met ten years before we actually met. Oh, and balloons. You never know where discussions will go in LangTime Chat!