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Cat slide

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If you're in the Phoenix area, Jessie and I will be presenting at Arizona State University at the end of next month! We'll be doing things October 20-22 with a public lecture on the morning of October 20th.

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just wanted a visual demonstration since I was talking about how much I love them

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by dimda_

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New Art of Language Invention video on color terms!

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Hot Grunge Monday Gato

Digital Cat with an intentionally grungy feel, just because that's what I wanted to do today. Take it or leave it, but at least you've seen it! 🙂♥️

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Your daily dose of fluffy animal content ♡

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This month's Fiat Lingua is a write up of the beautiful song @levunalangs (Jonathan Kane) wrote in anticipation of the first Kopikon at Georgetown in their musical conlang Sdefa. It's honestly wonderful! You can read the description or listen to it here:

And as a reminder Kopikon II is just around the corner! On October 10th at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland we're all getting together again, and we'd love to see you there! You can register here:

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Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

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Hey everyone, I wanted to share this thing Jessie and I are participating in. Madeline James is hosting a worldbuilding festival on YouTube with tons of different YouTubers participating, including, among others, us (LangTime Studio), Biblaridion, Artifexian, @levunalangs, @jakecito98 (Let's Have a Bouba), and many others. The goal is to have something streaming every hour for over two days. It's a marathon! Check out the site for the full schedule and the playlist, but this is going to be a lot of fun! It's September 5-7, and, like, any time. Jessie and I are doing something at 2:00 p.m. on the 6th and the 7th, but they'll be stuff going all day long!

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@wholesome-animal-images

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How why what

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Salmon

Marvin Oliver

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@wholesome-animal-images

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Introducing … a new musical conlang! Name to be determined, but I’m calling it the Cursed Musical Conlang for now. Here’s a sketch of the orthography so far, though it needs a lot of adjustment:

Unlike Sdefa, which conveys meaning through the pitches of melodies, CMC conveys meaning with chords. In theory these chords could be presented in lots of different ways, with different combinations of instruments or maybe with a melody put on top, but in practice (for the time being) I’ll be using only computer-generated sounds.

That’s because doubly unlike Sdefa, which uses the twelve notes of the equal-tempered scale as its phonemes, CMC uses … well, more than that. Potentially infinite notes, if it goes on long enough. It would be an absolute nightmare to try to play on an acoustic instrument, and getting the computer to do it right is hard enough. I started learning a new computer program just for this.

Meaning is conveyed not by specific pitches, but by the chord qualities and how each chord relates to the last. I won’t get into the specifics of the tuning system or the language itself just yet, because that would be a loooong post. Instead, I’ll just present an example, which translates to “I’m going to make a new language! I started making the language. These sounds are it!”

Note the increasingly weird accidentals! If you’re not familiar with music notation, it doesn’t normally look like that. If you are … don’t worry about it. Instead, give it a listen:

Fun fact: there are 24 unique notes in this example, not counting transposition. Normally you only get 12! F and C in the second chord are not the same as E♯ and B♯ in the twelfth, even though they would be identical on a piano. I’ll get more into the musical side in a future post, including another way of visualizing the weird harmonies!