#megdevi

[dedalvs]

Do you have any personal language making projects that you fiddle with as of currently?

I appreciate the sentiment of the question, but (a) no language project I've ever worked on, personal or otherwise, is finished, so even if I haven't worked on a language in over ten years it doesn't mean I'm not working on it; and (b) I draw absolutely no distinction between languages I've created for television shows and films and those I've created on my own. I consider every language I've ever created an open project, and I'm liable to work on any of them at any time. In fact, I'm going to have to dust off Megdevi as I agreed to use it in a relay coming up next year…

[dedalvs]

In two and a half hours Jake's ring of the Let's Have a Bouba Relay will be unveiled, and you'll get to hear the first text in Megdevi in 20 years. You...may want to miss it.

[dedalvs]

Have you ever created languages for yourself that you never shared with the public? Like pet projects for your eyes only

No. My very first language was Megdevi and I shared it quite a bit with the CONLANG-L once I found out about it. I continued to participate regularly there, and eveyrone shared their work with one another. I think the only conlangs I have that very few have seen are for professional projects that never materialized.

[dedalvs]

Following the logic of that last ask about affricates, could a language have a cluster like [ks] appear with the same distribution as single stops? Are Megdevi-esque affricates found naturally?

This is what I believed when I created them. In the case of Megdevi, it came directly from (a) learning about affricates, and (b) realizing that Ancient Greek had the letters ξ and ψ. I assumed they were affricates and phonemes, because they have single letters for them, but they’re not. Technically an affricate has to feature a stop and fricative in the same place of articulation (with some wiggle room allowed on the symbol used for either element. For example, the /t/ part in English /tʃ/ is not in the same place of articulation as our actual /t/). Even so, it seems trivial to take aspirated stops and turn them into stop + [s]—i.e. *pʰ, *tʰ, *kʰ > ps, ts, ks. I’d be surprised if that didn’t happen somewhere, even though actual affricates is more likely (i.e. pf, ts, kx). At that point, they’d be acting like single consonants, because that’s what they were. Still, I think what they’re trying to capture with the idea of the affricate is that it’s a stop with a crazy slow release—so slow that your tongue (or lips) hold on a fricative sound before you let the whole thing go. For that reason, something like Megdevi’s [ps] and [gz] couldn’t be affricates, because no matter how slow you release a [g], you’re not getting to [z]: that takes effort on the part of the tongue.

That said, there are phonemes that begin as one thing and end as another that aren’t affricates. For example, prenasalized stops like [ᵐb], [ⁿd], and [ᵑg], or labiovelar consonants like [kp], [gb], and [ŋm].

Nothing, though, is going to rescue how these things were used in Megdevi. It’s a lost cause.

[dedalvs]

Can cluster of phonemes be considered as separate phonemes? 99% of the time, all consonant clusters of phonemes of a lanuage are phonemic but they are considered clusters and are not really independent. But, when I look at Megdevi (one of the best conlangs!), I see that "psh", "ps", "ksh", "ks" are presented as phonemes. So is this just an error, a miss-interpretation and clusters cannot be phonemes or can they really be phonemes? If so what makes them differ from a classic consonant cluster?

You should read what I wrote here on Megdevi before calling it one of the best conlangs. There are many mistakes there—including mixing up clusters and affricates. The following can be affricates (can also be sequences): /ts/, /dz/, /tʃ/, /dʒ/. The rest of the ones in Megdevi are not. I was led astray by Greek, which has separate letters for the sequences /ks/ and /ps/. Just because it has a letter, though, doesn’t mean it’s a phoneme! (So, of course, it’s still nominally all right in Megdevi, if you’re just looking at the orthography. Unfortunately the other ones actually act like phonemes, so it’s just a mistake.)

Theoretically, you can treat any sequence like a phoneme, even if it would never happen in nature. I mean, you can take an entire sequence like /itapu/ and say it’s a phoneme and then really treat it like one, having it appear anywhere another (I guess vowel?) would appear. You can demonstrate using your conlang’s grammar and examples that the sequence must be analyzed as a separate phoneme. It won’t be a great example of naturalism (and wouldn’t even make sense to a linguist), but you could do it (theoretically, anyway). Just a matter of what you’re trying to accomplish with your language.

[dedalvs]

Have you ever created a non Naturalistic conlang?

Many. My first language Megdevi; my minimalist language Kelenala; the signed version of that KNSL; the visual language X; the Verbis Diabolo language from Penny Dreadful; the Inha language from Emerald City; and a series of projects that never made it onto the web.

[dedalvs]

When I first read about High Valyrian I found it so nice that I decided to create a language too. BUT it ended up just too similar to valyrian lol. Did something like this happen to you when creating your first languages?

Kind of, but it wasn’t unintentional. When I created my first language, it intentionally had the regularity of Esperanto (a language I was studying at the time) and a triconsonantal root system similar to Arabic (another language I was studying at the time). In some ways, that first language was very similar to Arabic and Esperanto; in other ways, very different. You can judge for yourself here. I never had enough familiarity with a conlang beforehand to create something that was unintentionally similar. It was a different era. When I started, I didn’t know of any other conlangs than Esperanto and some of its competitors (Volapük, Ido, Novial, etc.). I didn’t know there were any other living language creators, either. It wasn’t until I was further along that I found other language creators, and by then my preferences were set, even though I had a lot to learn about the nuts and bolts of language creation.

Anyway, if you find yourself in a rut, look at something really different. Look at a language from Australia. Look at an Amerind language. Look at a sign language. Look at Rikchik. Plenty of languages around that are like nothing you’ve ever seen before to draw inspiration from.

[dedalvs]

Zombie Megdevi.

Zomlang.

Do you have any personal language making projects that you fiddle with as of currently?

I appreciate the sentiment of the question, but (a) no language project I've ever worked on, personal or otherwise, is finished, so even if I haven't worked on a language in over ten years it doesn't mean I'm not working on it; and (b) I draw absolutely no distinction between languages I've created for television shows and films and those I've created on my own. I consider every language I've ever created an open project, and I'm liable to work on any of them at any time. In fact, I'm going to have to dust off Megdevi as I agreed to use it in a relay coming up next year…

[letshaveabouba]

The 'Let's Have a Relay' becoming the 'Let's Disinter Megdevi' was not the plan, and yet how glorious it shall be!

Do you have any personal language making projects that you fiddle with as of currently?

I appreciate the sentiment of the question, but (a) no language project I've ever worked on, personal or otherwise, is finished, so even if I haven't worked on a language in over ten years it doesn't mean I'm not working on it; and (b) I draw absolutely no distinction between languages I've created for television shows and films and those I've created on my own. I consider every language I've ever created an open project, and I'm liable to work on any of them at any time. In fact, I'm going to have to dust off Megdevi as I agreed to use it in a relay coming up next year…