conlangery

[conlangery]

I've been doing the captions on the Conlangery episode since starting YouTube by running through Whisper and then checking by hand.

There are many ways to get the word "Conlangery" wrong if you're AI. And of course, no AI transcription will ever be able to handle obscure conlang examples.

i feel strongly about this

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In about an hour (8am Central Time), we're having a special Tongues and Runes. Returning to Ndăkaga, the Voice of the Dragons, to make terms for the eight schools of magic.

[conlangery]

Kopikon II Presenters: Jessie Peterson

Kopikon II is about three months away, so I'm presenting each speaker in the order they’ll be presenting on October 10th at the University of Edinburgh. This year our headliner is none other than Jessie Peterson.

Jessie's been conlanging her whole life, and now makes a living as a professional conlanger. Working with me she's created languages for Freeform's Motherland: Fort Salem, Peacock's Vampire Academy, Pixar's Elemental, Legendary's Dune, and, premiering today, the Kryptonian language Suh Ankripton in Warner Bros.' Suerpman!

Additionally, Jessie has always been invested in putting together resources for conlangers. She created the Conlang Year project, to help conlangers build a language by doing a small piece of work each day; the massive Conlang-Venture .pdf, which is a choose-your-own-adventure that guides you through naturalistic conlanging; and the conlang GramBank spreadsheet, to help conlangers share their work more effectively. This year, though, she's come out with her biggest and best resource to date.

Coming out this October, Cambridge University is publishing Jessie's brand new conlang textbook How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide:

If you ever wanted to read a book that went into more depth than The Art of Language Invention and with greater clarity, this is that book. Weighing in at nearly 500 pages, you can pre-order the book now, or wait until Kopikon when we'll have copies on hand for sale!

Jessie will be closing things up at Kopikon II at 4:10 p.m. at the University of Edinburgh (George Square), October 10th, 2025. To register, go here. The full schedule is listed below:

1:00 p.m. Opening remarks by David & Jessie

1:10 p.m. Keras Saryan

1:50 p.m. Jake Penny

2:30 p.m. Biblaridion

3:10 p.m. Intermission (20 minutes)

3:30 p.m. David Peterson

4:10 p.m. Jessie Peterson

4:50 p.m. Closing remarks by David & Jessie

We hope to see you at Kopikon II! It will be a day to remember. <3

[conlangery]

soucorsour "lifeguard"

soucorsour /ˌsu.kɔrˈsur/ [ˌsu.kʊːˈsʊː]

(historical) bodyguard, attendant, someone who protects a dignitary (often a monarch) from direct harm;

lifeguard, an expert swimmer employed to rescue people at risk of drowning;

(by extension) saviour, hero, lifesaver, someone who has just saved the speaker from a dangerous or embarrassing situation

Etymology: Middle Borlish, an agentive derivation from verb soucorrir "rescue, go and help, come to the aid of". This descends from Latin succurrō "I help, aid, succour", adapted synchronically to the etymological sou- "under" prefix and corrir "run" root. The historical sense had been out of use for approximately two centuries before the modern senses appear, and so the latter are presumably an independent rederivation.

Vos souspectað y soucorsour ou cas y vol? /vɔz ˌsu.spɛkˈtaθ i ˌsu.kɔrˈsur u kaz i vɔl/ [vɔz ˌsu.spɪkˈta‿ði ˌsu.kʊːˈsʊː‿ʀu kaz i vɔl] 2p suspect-2p indf lifeguard q wrt df theft Do you suspect the lifeguard of the theft?

[conlangery]

Kopikon II Presenters: Keras Saryan

Kopikon II is about three months away, so let’s meet the speakers! I’ll present them in the order they’ll be presenting on October 10th at the University of Edinburgh. First up: Keras Saryan.

Keras Saryan is a conlanger and linguist. He has been constructing languages since his undergraduate days. As a linguist, his primary interests lie in the fields of phonetics and phonology, especially the interface between these two and the investigation of sound change. His PhD thesis focused on vowel harmony in Bantu and he is currently working on a project on the Turkic languages.

Keras will be opening Kopikon II for us at 1:10 p.m. at the University of Edinburgh (George Square), October 10th, 2025. To register, go here. The full schedule is listed below:

1:00 p.m. Opening remarks by David & Jessie

1:10 p.m. Keras Saryan

1:50 p.m. Jake Penny

2:30 p.m. Biblaridion

3:10 p.m. Intermission (20 minutes)

3:30 p.m. David Peterson

4:10 p.m. Jessie Peterson

4:50 p.m. Closing remarks by David & Jessie

[conlangery]

Hello, thanks for your great content

I’m starting to get into world building and conlanging, do you know if anything like conlangery exists but for world building (planets, architecture, music, animals, geography etc)

Thanks in advance :D

I mean, I don't know about things "like Conlangery" specifically, but there are tons of resources for worldbuilding generally.

I would point to three YouTube channels: Biblaridion, Artifexian, and Madeline James Worldbuilds.

Also, I'm going to be participating in a stream weekend on September 5-7, where there will be a bunch of worldbuilding YouTubers involved. Might be a place to discover people.

[conlangery]

Can you help me learn about about phonology? (I am simple) I don’t know how to create one out of nothing. I get syntax and grammar but not phonology for some reason. The textbooks I found are unfortunately very boring. Thanks in advance

This is something I'm thinking of making a video series about, since my PhD focus is phonology, and even just making the inventory can involve several different ways of thinking about sounds.

But for someone just starting, I would say look at the phonologies of languages you're familiar with and then one's you're not, and look at the patterns.

Also, while the inventory is important, do not forget to define phonotactics (that is, syllable structures and valid words), since that defines more of the sound of a language than just the inventory will.

I'm sorry I can't give a more thorough guide at the moment.

[conlangery]

Do you know why there isn’t a Vulcan conlang? Or is this an issue for a higher authority? (Star fleet for example)

Not really.

To be clear, Marc Okrand did create small fragments of Vulcan for a conversation between Spock and Saavic in Star Trek II, but I don't think there has ever been any consistent presentation of Vulcan beyond that.

There have been some fan projects, such as the Golic Vulcan project by Mark Gardener, and the calligraphy work of Britton Watkins (who also worked for the Star Trek franchise officially as a Klingon consultant), but I guess it hasn't been a priority for Paramount.

It's a shame that we don't have more info on the Romulan language that Trent Pehrson created for Picard, since that would at least give fans a canon language related to Vulcan to bounce off of.

[conlangery]

Jessie Peterson very first foray into conlanging as a young child involved scrambling up English words into different words. She called her “language” Ishglen. Decades later she decided to explore what it might mean to redo the original experiment as an actual conlang, and she’s written up the results for Fiat Lingua.

[conlangery]

Okay, I'm gonna have to investigate. I did not expect content from Dimension20 that would be this relatable to conlangers or for them to be this smart about talking about it.

Also, Elvish speakers in the audience, how bad is her mashup pidgin Elvish?

Elvish is the new romance language 🥰🧝‍♂️

Watch the full episode on Dropout!

[conlangery]

Big tables of morphology are fuuun!

when you're watching a linguistics youtuber and they pull up yet another table that you've never seen before in your life that has like 20 rows and 50 columns

[conlangery]

William is back! And he's giving us an overview of subordinate clauses. So tune in to learn all the ways your conlang can stick a sentence... in a sentence!

[conlangery]

Tongues and Runes will be live in about an hour! Join me at 8 AM CT as we continue working on the morphological changes of the four Faerie dialects. I'm thinking to finish up auxiliaries and move on to prepositions.

[conlangery]

[conlangery]

Reading Syllable Weight in African Languages and apparently compensatory lengthening can happen when a coda gets resyllabified— including when a nasal coda merges with a stop to become a prenasalized stop!

So that’s a thing you can do.

[conlangery]

Join me in an hour for Tongues and Runes as we work out paradigms for all of the auxiliary verbs in the Fae dialects.

[conlangery]

I just recalled that we had Jim Henry on as a guest to talk about gyâ-zym-byn. Excuse the poor audio quality and the very different format.

We lost a long time member of the conlang community today. Jim Henry's primary work was his longtime personal language gyâ-zym-byn (frequently referred to as gzb), in which he was completely fluent. He'd journal in it daily, which I found astonishing. I used gzb in a reverse relay, where you use someone else's conlang to translate a text, and then send it to the conlanger who created the language. I spent time with him at a number of conlang events over the years, and was saddened to hear of his passing. If you have a spare moment today, take a look at gyâ-zym-byn. It was a large, impressive work. Jim will be missed. <3