magpielangs

[magpielangs]

I almost reblogged this post here by mistake, so here it is anyway, but in T’owal! I thought it would be a relatively easy translation but there were actually a couple tricky points. I didn’t have words for “meter” or any of the compass directions, so now I do (“meter” is kotsi, “north” is k’afu). Figuring out how to actually use the word for meter was another thing: the literal translation here is “under 3000 meters of water in the Weddell Sea.”

My usual strategy for proper nouns in T’owal is that names of places get altered a bit to fit T’owal phonotactics, so “Antarctica” becomes “Antátika,” but names of people don’t get changed. I have on occasion respelled names to fit the T’owal romanization but I wasn’t really sure how to approach “Ernest” anyway (Elnest? Anest?) so I just left it alone.

It’d been a while since I last touched T’owal. I had kind of missed it!

[magpielangs]

ive seen ppl using /gen, but what abt /nom, /voc, /acc, /dat and /abl?

[magpielangs]

I made a caseless conlang! Instead it has horbleshooms which is when you designate the function of a noun or adjective with an affix. It's totally different!

[magpielangs]

They’ve been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again.

The linguists have been really into it. They say the new phonemes are fascinating. As for God, I assume that at this point he’s just curious to see how far this goes.

[magpielangs]

Tyuns is a collaborative map-based worldbuilding and conlanging game hosted on Discord, all about working together to build a vibrant world with interwoven cultures and telling stories in highly regionalized languages.

As a player, you control the shape and destiny of a culture, and the many states that may arise within it throughout its history. Will you work with other players to forge a great empire, create a maritime culture engaging in trade across continents, or play a pastoralist group at the edge of a great and harsh desert? All of this, and more, is possible - imagination truly is the only limit!

Join Tyuns today, and play with a multitude of other players in the bronze and iron age as you navigate your culture through the ages across a fully customized map, with an in-depth technology system for your culture to engage in, and with a system to create customized states that rise and fall across your culture! https://discord.gg/tDfBRg665W

Thank you to Peregrine, Madam Kali, Cted, Gieko, Spath, Nei Leung, Thebigarchitect, Hazel, Tassem, Magpie, Sol Invictus, MokhaFrappe, Gelobranos, Piestag, and Atyx for letting me use the art and scripts they made for this game in this ad.

[magpielangs]

can you do a 3 papers to read on indigenous languages?

this is another huge topic so I'm gonna err on the side of "these are just three really cool papers" rather than "this is representative of the entire linguistic field"

Riestenberg, Freemond, Lillehaugen, Washington. Prioritizing Community Partners’ Goals in Projects to Support Indigenous Language Revitalization. In: Decolonizing Linguistics. Ed. Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197755259.003.0019, and the PDF is here.

Junker, M. O. (2018). Participatory action research for Indigenous linguistics in the digital age. Insights from practices in community-based research: From theory to practice around the globe, 164175. doi.org/10.1515/9783110527018-009, pdf on the author's website here.

Leonard, W. Y. (2021). Toward an anti‐racist linguistic anthropology: An Indigenous response to white supremacy. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 218-237. pdf is here.

(TBH you could just sit down and read the entire Decolonizing Linguistics book, it's like 500 pages/20 chapters by a huge community of authors. It's open access!)

I realize that none of these links are actually describing the linguistic properties of indigenous languages directly, and are more about how and whether non-indigenous linguists should go about doing that. But all of the authors listed above also do linguistic description and analysis, so after you've read some of these pieces you can go look more into their other work.

[magpielangs]

i've been thinking a lot about that episode and what it means that BSL is used in it. for one thing, the caption devices are technology carried by the people on the world they visit - they're entirely independent of the TARDIS. (though the TARDIS is probably translating both the spoken and written language into english.)

if we assume the TARDIS does not translate SLs, they are actually using BSL. this has the fun consequence that it would mean the doctor actually knows BSL - which makes sense, we know he's learned languages that the TARDIS can't translate (such as Baby), and considering how much time he ends up spending with brits, BSL would be one of the most useful SLs for him to learn. good for him.

except this episode takes place 500,000 years in the future. these people have never heard of earth or humanity. the likelihood that BSL has somehow remained unchanged? basically zero. which means some amount of translation is happening.

what i think is happening is that the TARDIS does not translate across modalities. spoken language is translated into spoken language, written language into written language, and signed language into signed language. when someone does not know any languages of a given modality, it goes with whatever they have the most exposure to. in this case, we're seeing through the perspective of the companion, a british woman who has most likely had at least brief encounters with BSL even if she does not really understand it. if the TARDIS was built on the assumption that everyone would know a SL, this is reasonable design! (and means the time lords don't suck in quite every way imaginable)

this raises a number of other questions. what counts as the same modality? do whistled languages go together with spoken languages? (they're both sound-based and the TARDIS needs to account for different vocal apparatus, but SLs and writing are treated differently despite both being visual). what about a language based on vibrations propagating through something other than air? would that language based on cephalopod-style color changes everyone comes up with count as signed, written, or something else? how does it translate SLs between species with different limb configurations? what would it do with a language using a medium humans can't perceive, e.g. manipulating electric fields? or a medium time lords can't perceive, if that might be different? if someone speaks multiple languages of the same medium with the same proficiency, how does it choose which to use? i could come up with these and other questions about TARDIS translations for ages

how do science fiction real-time universal translators (the type where people automatically perceive everything as being in their native language as it's being spoken) handle sign languages. does it alter the perception of native sign language speakers so it looks to them like people using spoken language are actually signing? for that matter, would it "translate" written language into a spoken form for someone who natively speaks a spoken-only language?

[magpielangs]

Here’s how to tell if a language is easy to learn

None of them are easy

They’re all stupid and terrible and will kick you in the nuts

That being said

Languages similar to ones you already speak

Languages you have a lot of motivation to learn

Languages that have a lot of resources and media to watch and/or listen to and/or read

So, if you’re reading this with relative ease (aka you speak English fluently) probably French or Spanish

Do whatever you want though idk

Don’t just choose a language based on how easy it is

Unless that’s what it takes to keep you motivated idk

Go learn Frisian or something

[magpielangs]

Sdefa Sdaturday #21

My first youtube video is now live!

This is a video all about my musical conlang Sdefa! You’ll hear some music, learn the basics of how the language works, and go through a few examples in detail!

I couldn’t get into too much detail in a short(ish) video, so I didn’t cover Sdefa writing, but I plan to in a future video. The main example in the video is what I showed in last week’s post, but here it is again in both writing systems:

That means “You’re hearing Sdefa, a musical language that I made.” Now you get to actually hear it!

[magpielangs]

anti turned E propaganda: the lowercase form and the schwa are two separate characters in unicode, despite being identical. if you use one, then do a control+f search for the other, you will get no results. these characters get mixed up constantly and cause minor inconveniences.

terrible character. exists only to create problems. this probably reads as positive propaganda to some people, which is fair. i simply want to ensure people are properly informed of its awfulness.

Letter Tournament: T vs TURNED E

T

SEED: 54

CODEPOINTS: U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T, U+0074 LATIN SMALL LETTER T

BIO: the first letter of "the alphabet".

Ǝ (Turned E)

SEED: 75

CODEPOINTS: U+018E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER REVERSED E, U+01DD LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED E

BIO: looks a lot like schwa, but it's legally distinct.

[link to all polls]

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[magpielangs]

wiktionary can have decent etymology information, but it varies depending on the language you're looking at. unsurprisingly, european languages are covered pretty well, asian languages are ok, other regions tend to be pretty lacking. it's a good place to check first, at least!

Do you have any good resources for etymology programs like Etymonline that work for languages other than English?

i do not, but i'll post this in the hopes that others know more than me!

[magpielangs]

this post is originally about conlangs, but it applies to other forms of art too!

Do you ever get nervous bc your conlang isn't as naturalistic or as well-thought-out as those of the literal masters of the craft and so that must mean it's Literally Garbage

[magpielangs]

there have been sightings of a previously unknown morphosyntactic alignment in some guy's closet. in the past two weeks, three more theoretical frameworks for linguistics have turned into Optimality Theory overnight. the complex houses, unnamed sources say, married garden paths. "we're still expecting the baby," a proto-world recapitulationist is heard saying. jovial diffusions happen lexically down the mountain trail. on their father's death, local historical linguist told us that the aging of a family is a pull chain. two undescribed sci-fi alien languages stir neighborhood controversy for trying to become real. typesetting IPA on a typewriter: is it a good idea? specialist says you'll have to say yes very soon, but declined to explain when we asked, and when we asked how they got in the studio. did you feel that, listener? just now, all island effects disappeared for one second, then came back as if nothing had happened. a grad student won 1 dollar by perfectly drawing a spectrogram by hand. there have been reports of New Nouns. just like Newton was hit by an apple, a generativist was hit by an entire tree. and now, the weather

[magpielangs]

Lexember Day 31: Lhab

lhab, *ɬasub, /ɬàb/ - (n) elbow (archaic); (n) bend, curve, turn; (vi) to be bent, to be curved; (n) gay, homosexual, queer

If you know, you know.

Se suutlhu jéch, se milhab. person see-IRR DEM, person PRES-bend If you read this, you are gay.

The Svinık cognate is less humorous.

shashıv, *ɬasub, /’ʂa.ʂɨβ/ - (n) elbow; (n) bend, curve, turn

[magpielangs]

Lexember Day 30: Atá

atá, *aztak, /à.tá/ - (vi) cold, to be cold; (vi) to be hostile azatá, *az~aztak, /à.zà.tá/ - (n) winter, dry season, year

The Proto-SZ word *aztak was a stative verb meaning "to be cold." In Lu Izhél, it also gained the metaphorical meaning of "hostile." The reduplicated form refers to a cold period of time, or winter - however, while the northern portions of the Zhél Empire have four seasons, the southernmost portion has only a wet and a dry season, so the word got extended to also refer to the dry season that occurs during the same part of the year as the northern winter. Seasons are also used to count years.

Chí yatá miniiqida nékól yazatá. turtle GEN-cold PRES-live-PAST LOC-ten GEN-winter The hostile turtle has lived for ten years.

Over in Svinık, the same basic meaning remains. Derived from it is a word for cold wind, though it is sometimes used for wind in general.

azkı, *aztak, /’az.kɨ/~/’az.gɨ/ - (vi) to be cold azttık, *aztak-dik, /azt.tɨk/ - (n) wind (especially cold north winds)

[magpielangs]

Lexember Day 29: Zhüü

zhüü, *ziwna, /ʒyː/ - (vt) to bury, to plant, to sow; (n) plant, crop zhüna, *ziw~ziwna, /ʒy.nā/ - (va) to farm

The Proto-SZ word *ziwna meant "to bury," and as the ancestors of the Zhél shifted from pastoralism to a more agricultural lifestyle, the thing they most often found themselves burying was seeds. This led to the word coming to mean "to plant" and then "thing that is planted." The reduplicated form was used for planting many things, or farming.

Se izhüna qutta uzhüü ikás person GEN-farm NEG-past ACC-plant GEN-rock The farmer did not plant rocks.

The Svinık, who remain nomadic and do little to no agriculture, never had that shift happen. The word "shovel" is derived from here, being a dig-tool.

zivna, *ziwna, /’ziβ.na/ - (vi.G) to dig; (vt.G) to bury áluzuna, *adiw-ziwna, /’a.lu.zu.na/ - (n) shovel, spade