"Conlang" and the OED

So, conlang got an entry in the OED a few days ago. The word has been in use since the early 1990s, and in the post-Avatar, post-Game-of-Thrones world, it is unlikely to fade out of existence any time soon, so this is an obvious move on the part of the OED editorial team.

Compared to some conlangers' reactions, my own personal reaction to this is fairly muted. I absolutely do not view this OED entry as any sort of vindication of the art. First, if I needed approval from others to pursue my hobbies, I wouldn't play the banjo, much less conlang. I don't usually look to others for approval of my pastimes (except my neighbors, I suppose, if I decide to do something unusually loud). Second, there are all manner of very unpleasant behaviors also defined in the OED, which no one takes as a sign of OED editorial approval. The word's in the OED because it is being used now, has been for a few decades, and is likely to continue to be used for decades to come. The OED entry is a simple recognition of that fact.

I was, however, delighted to notice that one of the four citations was a book by Suzette Haden Elgin, The Language Imperative. Few people are neutral on her major conlang, Láadan. I'm a big fan, while at the same time not believing it capable of accomplishing the goals it was designed to attain. I got a copy of the grammar for the language before I had regular internet access, and so was the first conlang I ever saw that wasn't mostly a euro-clone.¹ I learned a lot from Láadan, so I have a warm place in my heart for it. It's a shame Alzheimer's has probably robbed Elgin of the opportunity to know she was cited in the OED.

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¹ Klingon is not nearly as strange as it looks on the surface. Láadan introduced me to a range of syntactic and semantic possibilities I had not previously encountered: evidentiality, different embedding structures, inalienable possession, simpler tone systems, the possibilities of a smaller phonology.

Afrihili Days of the Week

In anticipation of last week's release of my Fiat Lingua paper Afrihili: an African Interlanguage, I took to Twitter to do a few Word of the Day posts. Because this is the sort of silliness that amuses me, each Word of the Day was the word for that day. Here they are in a tidy list:

• Kurialu Sunday
• Lamisalu Monday
• Talalu Tuesday
• Wakashalu Wednesday
• Yawalu Thursday
• Sohalu Friday
• Jumalu Saturday

I wasn't able to find the source languages for these words, each of which ends in alu day.

For good measure, here are the months:

• Kazi January
• Rume February
• Nyawɛ March
• Forisu April
• Hanibali May
• Vealɛ June
• Yulyo July
• Shaba August
• Tolo September
• Dunasu October
• Bubuo November
• Mbanjɛ December

Again, the source languages aren't always clear, though July is coming from some European language. I must admit I didn't devote too much time to tracking these down, though. Some might be immediately obvious to some of my readers.

There aren't enough examples of time phrases to be sure of everything. The notion of "by (a month)" combines two adpositions, ɛn Shaba fo by August.

What about dying languages?

There are various ways a person can respond the the discovery that I create languages for fun. The most common is noncommittal and polite puzzlement. A few people will be enthusiastic about the idea, especially if they're fans of the recent big films and TV shows involving invented languages in some way. Every once in a while, especially online, someone will object on the grounds that people involved with invented languages should, instead, be Doing Something about dying languages. This objection is so badly thought out that I'm genuinely surprised at its popularity.

First and foremost, anyone complaining about people messing around with invented languages has failed, in a fairly comprehensive way, to understand the concept of a hobby. Time I spend working with an invented language is not taken from documenting dying languages or some other improving activity, it is taken from time I spend with my banjo, reading a novel or watching TV.

Second, while it is true I, along with most language creators, know more about linguistics than the average Man on the Street, documenting undocumented languages is a special skill taking training I certainly don't have. In fact, most people with Ph.D.'s in linguistics won't even have such training. Do people going on about dying languages really imagine anyone can go out and do this sort of work? If someone has a nice garden near their house, we don't harass them about how they should be growing crops to feed the hungry, nor do we demand every weekend golfer go pro. What is it about invented languages that brings out this pious impulse to scold people for not doing something productive with their time when so many other hobbies get no comment at all?

If we step back to more modest goals than documenting a dying language, we're in much the same boat. There is little point to me going out and learning, say, Kavalan (24 speakers left as of 2000) unless I go to Taiwan and spend most of my time among the people who speak it. Sitting at home in Wisconsin learning Kavalan does nothing to preserve it in any meaningful way. You just can't really learn a language from a book. You have to spend time with native speakers.

Using other people's cultures — or fantasies about their culture — as a rhetorical foil has a long history. When Europeans were less approving of sex, they complained that Muslims were libertines, while others used this an example of a more sensible cultural trait. This is all part of the usual Noble Savage industry. The death of so many languages is a real issue, representing the permanent loss of a wealth of cultural and environmental knowledge. It deserves to be treated with more respect than to be used merely as a rhetorical club to browbeat people who have a hobby you don't like.

Agreement of What?

I recently ran across this page about transitivity. Section six, "Problem Cases," mentions two languages in which it appears that the verb transitivity is cross-referenced on other constituents in the clause, in particular, adverbs and noun phrases acting adverbially. The first of the Shipibo-Conibo examples has two other elements in the clause so marked, Jain-xon-ra there-TRNS-EV and xobo-n-xon house-LOC-TRNS.

I don't think I'm going to be using this feature any time soon, but some people might find it alluring.

Kahtsaai Word of the Day: Keilo'éík

Ok, so I'm not going to start a series on Kahtsaai words just now, but I thought I'd share this one...

When I arrived home today I noticed that the poor, ratty poppy I planted two years ago finally outpaced the bunnies and produced a single bloom. I decided Kahtsaai needed a word for "poppy," and I immediately thought of the vivid Homeric simile, when Gorgythion is hit by an arrow,

μήκων δ᾽ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ᾽ ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ᾽ ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν.

His head fell to the side, just as a poppy, which in a garden
is weighed down with fruit and the rains of spring,
so his head nodded to the side, weighed down by his helmet.

(Please forgive the Old High Translationese. It is an occupational hazard of even the amateur classicist.)

So, the Kahtsaai word for "poppy" is keilo'éík, from keil soldier, fighter and éík head.

A Gallimaufry

Na'vi

I've managed to get myself on a panel for a local con this fall to chat about the science of Avatar. In theory, I'm there to talk about language. We'll see how many people in the audience are interested in that.

Tsrai

Tsrai now has nice set of postural verbs. I'm still thinking about the semantics of these, especially in verb chains, but I'm ridiculously pleased to be able to say this,

we	or-ta	blas	rabbë	dzwai
3SG	drink-PST	beer	get.horizontal	happen
He drank so much beer he ended up on the ground.

Inspiration

I recently got myself a copy of The Languages of Native North America by Marianne Mithun. What an astonishing diversity of languages this continent used to have. Language inventors will find so much inspiration in this book.

Airenen! Sózil! Howdy!

I've been inventing languages for a long time. The first one happened after my first encounter with Latin. I was probably 14 or 15. I never really stopped, though there have been slow times when other things occupied my time. For example, work on Vaior, the only language of mine other people have tried to learn, pretty much stopped when I got focused on Ancient Greek. But even then, I might create a quick sketch of a language on a few scraps of paper while awaiting to be called for the tender ministrations of a dental hygienist.

Recently I've been involved in the community of people trying to learn Na'vi that exploded after the film Avatar came out. For the first time in my life I was seeing people eager to know about verb aspect and ejective consonants. I like to encourage that sort of thing, so I've been happy to help them. This has also resulted in me getting back to language invention of my own. Rather than fill my old blog, currently mostly devoted to ancient Greek, I decided to start a new blog just for my conlanging musings. Creating languages is a pretty obscure hobby, and not a populous one, but I hope there will be a few people who find my agonies of deciding between different ways to form relative clauses interesting or instructive (if only as a caution).

Right now, as I start this new blog, I have two quite different projects in development. The first, Bixwá, bears many signs of my recent attempt to learn an Athabascan language, Navajo, along with a few Algonquian touches. It is much further along, and right now is mostly in the arduous vocabulary-creation phase, though much syntactic fine-tuning remains. The second, Tsrai, is what happens when I decide to deliberately step away from old habits, with a little help from the WALS, and create a SVO language with no declensions and more features common across the world's languages.

From time to time I suppose I'll comment on the odd political or social developments among conlangers.