#quothalinguist

[dedalvs]

Just saw the Dune: Part 2. What do you think of the empire and fremen languages seen on screen?

I wish they would have let us do something ourselves for the Harkonnens (we could've created a badass Harkonnen language), but we certainly can't complain, given how much screen time our Fremen language got. We translated and delivered over 500 lines of dialogue for Dune: Part Two, and MOST of it ended up on screen. That is absolutely astonishing for a film. I invite you to go through the dialogue for previous films I've worked on—including Dune: Part One—and add up all the lines we've translated, and then see how much of it ended up on screen:

There's more Castithan in Defiance than language work in all the other movies I've worked on combined. For films, in general, they ask for little and use less, and err on the side of not subtitling where possible. Dune: Part Two is extraordinary in the amount of conlang dialogue that actually appears on screen. The only thing to compare it to, honestly, is Avatar (the first one, not the second, where they decided everyone should just speak English most of the time, which is lame).

So, yeah, Jessie and I were very pleased.

Oh, and by the way, those who follow my Tumblr may remember how disappointed we were that only I was credited on Pixar's Elemental, despite the fact that my wife Jessie and I worked together to create that language. Not so with Dune: Part Two! We are both credited. Furthermore, they really treated us right—especially Jessie, as she didn't work on the first film with me. I'd understand if they were a bit hesitant, given the fact she wasn't there for part one, but they welcomed her, treated her as part of the team, credited us both, and even credited her as Jessie Peterson, despite the fact that she hadn't yet changed her name (we were engaged but not married when the credit roll was locked).

And, let me tell you, Jessie was responsible for most of the brilliant semantic work that went into translation for this second film. We've done a lot of press of late, and we often get asked what are interesting words/idioms we've come up with, and every time we find one, invariably, it was Jessie who came up with it. I may have come up with the flesh and bones of Chakobsa, but Jessie gave it the heart that pumps its blood.

[langtimestudio]

Our first Lexember entry for Sarkezhe (a language for cats) is the noun “luck,” which is täähẽ. It is a Class IX noun, which means it belongs to the abstract class of nouns. Its root is the verb tääh, whose primary meaning is “to be dry,” which is then extended to mean “to be lucky.” After all, a dry cat is a lucky cat!

[mindutme]

T’owal T’uesday #12

A few days ago @dedalvs reblogged a very cute image that demonstrates some particles in Ancient Greek. I decided to edit a T’owal version!

All of the T’owal words in the image are actually verbs, but you can use them as prepositions or adverbs as well. In some cases the verb is “to be __” (e.g. “to be above”) but when it’s not as obvious I’ll put the verb version in parentheses. They are:

gyo above · as upon · ul up (climb, ascend) · lid down (descend) · hi in · fdeno on both sides of (surround) · gos out of (exit) · xmes into (enter) · tswos against (touch) · gus under · wan through · dne away from (come/go away from) · syen beside · xi toward (come/go to)

Since there are a few more relevant T’owal verbs, here’s an after picture:

hlon away/apart from · oft’e behind · ts’ana in front of · thyo between (or among) · agsil facing · enk’et tso stuffed with

Some other relevant vocabulary:

dyesi mouse · tsof cat · pwath cheese

The word dyesi is actually a reference to Jessie Peterson, aka @quothalinguist!

Finally, here’s how you say “I know he ate a cheese” in T’owal: Byóx sú í, mám mó pwáth.

[the-skia-projekt]

A summary of the work I did for the Year of Conlanging by @quothalinguist. Starting with day 40, I will make a Journal-like entry any day I can make it.

[quothalinguist]

I've started posting information about the language I'm creating for Conlang Year, right along with anyone else following the prompts!

[strixcattus]

If you've seen my posts from before I was busy being consumed by a media, you might remember the time travel conlang I talked a little about. Good news on that front—I've actually been working on it through @quothalinguist 's Conlang Year prompts. Given what I already had sketched out, the prompts are making me slow down a little at the moment, but they're also forcing me to think about in what capacity this language exists in a conworld.

I mean. Obviously it's meant to exist in our world. But it also exists in our world four hundred years in the future, and four hundred years in the past, and in an alternate timeline where World War II never happened, and in an alternate timeline where some nobody choked to death on a piece of fruit in 7 BCE and it had unforeseen cataclysmic effects.

It also exists in a timeline that diverged in 2013, but which somehow developed wormholes within the past eleven years—wormholes that completely fail when brought to our own world.

The first step was creating a framework for time travel. Something that could be used to explain how things worked and serve as a jumping-off point for beings that interacted with time in an odd way. I included the time worm in my original post half as a joke, but it did end up with its own gender and person when I started sketching those (though it is possible, if not likely, that such things will change some when we reach that point in the year).

Time is like a tree. It's like a tree in a more literal way than necessary. At the base of the trunk lies the Big Bang, and the trunk itself is the stretch of time afterwards where not enough was going on to form any real branches. Eventually, as star systems (and more importantly, life) began to form, time started to split off into new possibilities. Every event that could proceed in multiple ways has the potential to branch off several new timelines, but for the most part this doesn't happen—the smaller the consequences and the less likely an alternate outcome, the less likely a new branch will form. There is definitely a branch where WWII never happened, and some where it ended differently, but there isn't a branch for every possible outcome of the war, until the time travellers get involved.

If a time traveller heads back in time a few years just to hang around, they probably won't create a new branch unless their presence itself is enough to noticeably alter events. If they actively cause changes, though, they're guaranteed to form a new branch.

The tree can be navigated in a couple different ways. Time travellers take the slow, responsible route—they pick their way up and down the timelines to explore new eras and branches. There is also, however, a school of universe-hopping—essentially, not bothering with time and simply flinging oneself out into the branches and hoping one has aimed right. This is risky.

If time is a tree and people can fling themselves between branches like some sort of sugar glider, there must also be things living in the space between those branches already. Some of them are benevolent. Some of them choose to settle down in linear time, either for a season or permanently. Some of them bore into the branches of timelines and eat away at them until they fall apart. Some of them knock universe-hoppers off course and prey on them. Some of them are plants.

Some of the key inhabitants of this space that I've outlined:

Time worms: I already mentioned these things. They're really big purple worms that inhabit a branch of a timeline and experience all of time within that branch simultaneously. Each worm has a "birth date" where they start existing in the branch, but it's unclear if they are capable of death within a timeline—any attempts to kill a time worm just branch off a new timeline where the worm does not exist. Time worms are sapient beings and also a sign of a healthy timeline—if a time worm has time to grow, the nearby space outside time must be safe, and mature time worms prey on most pests that could bring harm to a timeline.

Outsiders: A general term for beings that live outside time, both flora and fauna. Some of them are capable of entering linear time for a while, and some even choose to give up outsider status, but they all live, generally, between the timelines. For this reason, time worms are excluded from this classification.

"Hawks" and "Borers": Euphemistic terms (which may change later on). Their true names have been lost due to superstition that speaking it would summon them. "Hawks" are outsiders that attack and prey on hoppers, and "borers" are outsiders that burrow into timelines either to prey on their inhabitants or to eat away and eventually destroy the timeline itself.

Dragons and Faeries: Not exactly what you picture, but pretty close. "Dragons" are outsiders which typically only travel between timelines to find new places to live, and do their actual living and hunting within linear time—and, sure, most species do look like dragons if you're willing to make some concessions. Faeries are humanoids which live outside time, but many of their clans give up outsider status to live within linear time, seemingly as a means of protection from "hawks."

"Lichen": Or "Moss." It's debatable what term should be used when translating into a linear-time language, since there's no good analogue to the name. Point is, these are flora that grow on timelines and alter the laws of reality within them, for better or for worse. Think of them as a little like bacteria: some of them will do their level best to kill you, some are beneficial to your survival, and most of them just hang around doing neither good nor harm. "Lichen" spread into the past of a timeline backdates the appearance of their effects, but doesn't measurably change the events of the timeline, and can create worlds where "the magic vanished" if it doesn't cover all branches after where it's spread.

The Rot: Death. An infection that completely destroys any timeline where it takes root. The only known killer of time worms. If a timeline is infected, it cannot be saved—its inhabitants must be sanitized and evacuated if at all possible.

[arayaz]

Conlang Year - day 1

Jessie Peterson, or @quothalinguist, has created a new project for us all: Conlang Year! Every day, a new prompt will go up, with some thing for us to do with a new language that we start today (or around now). It’ll all be at https://quothalinguist.com if you want to follow along.

Yesterday’s prompt was “Set an intention for your language.”

Ruykkarraber and the Lua languages fill up basically all of the area where I think I’m gonna set my story, but some more world languages wouldn’t hurt. This is down to the south, spoken concurrently with Jōlua.

Goals:

be naturalistic

to contrast with the fusional Lua languages and with Ruykkarraber, which is tending towards agglutination for now, it will be analytic

large consonant inventory, again to contrast with the Lua languages and Ruykkarraber - Jōlua has 16 consonants, and Ruykkarraber only 11, or 10 depending on the analysis.

perhaps a situation where every root is CV or CVC…

[savethegrishaverse]

UPDATE: we want to celebrate ALL the talented minds behind the languages of the Grishaverse with today's Twitter party hashtag #conlanger ! @zaaalio, @athdavrazar, and @quothalinguist (on insta) otherwise known as Christain Thalmann, David Peterson, and Jessie Peterson all worked together to make some truly fantastic language detailing for our Grishaverse, and we want to talk all about it today! Come join us at 12 pm ET and again at 8 pm ET!

[mirageindex]

Conlang Year days 26-32: historical sound changes

It took way more steps than I thought it would to get something I was really happy with but I'm glad I kept fiddling with it. Quothalinguist's method of putting everything in a spreadsheet was a huge help! I generated a thousand random words using Awkwords and then ran them through all the sound changes with code I wrote on Lexurgy. Now I can consult my big spreadsheet whenever I feel stuck in a rut coining new words.

[haomnamu]

So I watched the latest episode of Langtime Studio, and wanted to create a version of my own of the phonemic inventiry they made, because it seemed very interesting. here is the process I went through to come up with it:

The original inventory:

Consonants

First thing I did was to rearrange the table to include a seperate row for pharyngealized stops, and add seperate columns for the labialized consonants.

3 things that jump out to me first:

There are pharyngeal labial and alveolar stops, but no velar or uvular. I think collapsing th uvular and velar columns under "dorsal", and leaving a note for future sound changes that the fricatives and pharyngealized velars are technically uvular is a good way to "fill the gaps" and make the table more compact.

I don't think it's that important for the plain unvoiced stop to be written as aspirated, just another note for the pronounciation guide like the uvulars.

because labialization comes in this phonoloy as a set I think it's fine to have /ʟʷ/

I also changed "alveolar" to dorsal, because /ɹ/ can be either alveolar or postalvelar, and also that wording fits the vibe I'm going for, more on that later.

After those changes we end up with this:

After that I got rid of the pharyngeal fricative, because it's out of place, with pharyngealization being a feature of stop only, other than it. I also think that it's not very needed from a sound change point of view - I think that the dorsal fricative can make anything that the pharyngeal one could.

Using the terms "dorsal" and "coronal" reminded me of Australian languages, and that reminded me of how they are usually grouped there into a natural class of "peripheral consonants" that share similar features. That gave me the idea of making labialization a feature that is exclusive to the periphral POAs. There are many labio-velar consonants, and there are more "velo-labial" ones than labial alveolars (/mʷ w/ vs /ɹʷ/, so I think it fits.

That decision removes /ɹʷ/, and gives us /bʷ bʷˤ ɸʷ βʷ β̞/

Because the distinction between /β/ and /β̞/, /βʷ/ and /w/ isn't very strong (and I can't really hear it, I dropped the fricatives.

I also dropped the unvoiced bilabial ficative, with the idea that each POA some of these 4 features - voicing distinction in stops, nasals, fricatives, and labiolization:

Dorsal is the "Strong" POA, having 3 out of the 4 - labialization, voicing of stops, and fricatives. (I also remember Jessie saying that she feels like the dogs will use the back of their tongues more, so dorsal being strong here fits that.)

after that is Bilabial, with 2 out of 4 - labialization and nasal vowels.

And last but not least is Coronal, the "Weak POA", having only one of the 4 - Voicing distinction in stops but no labialization, fricatives or nasal stops.

That leaves us with a final proto-consonat inventory of 25* consonants:

*I thought about dropping /β̞/ aswell because I feel like it's not that distinct from /w/, but I'm not 100% sure either way.

Vowels

There isn't much to say in this section. Jessie suggested a 4 vowels system which I think is a neat idea, so I think this system is a nice fit:

With all the labialized and pharyngealized consonants I don't think it'll be hard to get a lot of back vowels, and having 2 front vowels can give us a lot of front round vowels which I like.

So yeah that's it! I hope you liked it, and @dedalvs and @quothalinguist if you see this I hope it doesn't come off as a FixEd uR aRT sort of thing, but as me participating and sharing ideas on stream! (which I can't really watch live because of time zones, oof)

[madelinelovesick]

Sound Change of the Day - 2024 February 22

Coda consonants are broadly lost and become tones of the preceding vowel; namely, the loss of a coda stop results in a high tone, while the loss of any other coda consonant results in a low tone. Open syllables take on a high tone.

(unnamed conlang developed in LangTime Studio season 3, by David J. Peterson | dedalvs and Dr. Jessie Peterson | quothalinguist)

[dedalvs]

Ts'íts'àsh Language from Elemental

Hey, I just wanted to throw this out there. I've been getting a lot of requests for info about the Ts'íts'àsh language from Pixar's Elemental, and I totally want to answer them, but I did want to make something clear. While this is my Tumblr (so I'll be answering asks, etc.), I didn't create the language by myself. Jessie Sams and I created the language together.

Now, when I say that, you might think like I did the nouns and Jessie did the verbs, etc., but that's not really how we work. We sit down together with our laptops on the couch working on the same document in Pages (shared via iCloud), and we sit there and create every single bit of the language together. There's no part of it you can point to and say that it's all me or all Jessie: The whole thing is us. That's how we work.

If you've sat through the credits of Elemental, you'll see that only I'm credited. That was, in a word, bullshit. We also had no control over it. We can say whatever we want ahead of time, but who gets credited—or whether we get credited at all—is totally at the mercy of the studio. Even when it's written into our contract it sometimes doesn't happen. We noticed that we didn't get the credit in our contract for Peacock's Vampire Academy, and we complained, and the best they could do is credit us in the episodes they hadn't finished yet—the last one. And so we're in the credits only for the very last episode in which we have no lines.

This is an unfortunate part of the job. As language creators, no one in Hollywood knows what we do, and they certainly don't care if we don't get credit. It's up to us to make sure people even know that we worked on something.

Anyway, in this case, it's really important to me that everyone knows this was a joint project of mine and Jessie's. It's our work, and we deserve equal credit.

[stars-conlang]

starting to document my conlanging project! i've had this on the backburner for a while, but i haven't had much time to work on it. i'm currently following the quothalinguist daily work guide, though i've already done several days worth of work, so i'm going to be zooming through these i think. oh well, this is the day 2 post, just announcing what it is i'm working on. i am doing a "realistic" conlang based on the "make a protolang and then go through evolution process" method, with the ultimate goal of having a vso language. my other main goals are to have a somewhat animacy-based gender system (with human, zoic, edible and inanimate genders), polypersonal agreement, and maybe a complex determiner system (in the style of the salish languages, especially nuxalk) .

[mindutme]

Fen Sawul Tal Fes

Hné hu bel su xí kal sú. E hmu af dné k’a hné kén hne, a sémfa k’a xi nwat le. Sáwul k’a psil fen tuf hne sú hné. Hox byóx oth súwu na lal hne. Hox ól súwu le p’és, a p’íl k’a dá le syád hne. T’ud e bon sos mán oth fóna le umen hi sk’el. Béta kulum ma bón sos fóna le a hné gan. Xél pa oth tóf le un af. Hox émbe pa xmen hné fél nolyo yebi hox. Mélk’o le hne hú tso fél xu. Ts’úth ma dá le hné a syád hne a tyútthin le hne sín ex. Kwét sos dá le. St’ók k’a a fúk k’a sú hné, os fám pa li e fen wi hné fél nolyo yebi. Byóx oth í, sos kwáf k’a sú hné. Xél pa oth! Hox émbe pa xmen hné fél nolyo yebi hox. Tu nólyo da tsúba. Sbét tso mán nolyo t’en ix kxe. Há dá néden od! Yo sémfa xmen hné hu bel su! Sémfa oth a k’ú oth il boyo!

Translation and more info after the cut!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since I’ll be participating in the LCC 10 Conlang Relay and haven’t done one before, I decided to practice with materials from a previous LCC Conlang Relay!

The text above is a T’owal translation of my attempt at an English translation of a text in Teonaht, a conlang by Sally Caves, itself translated from English, from Jessie Sams (@quothalinguist)’s Hiutsath, from English, from David J. Peterson (@dedalvs)’s Dothraki. That’s the basic idea of a conlang relay: each person receives a text in someone else’s conlang with enough information to be able to translate it, and they produce a translation into their own language for the next person to use. Since the translations and conlang info from the LCC 5 Relay are all available here, I picked a spot in the relay and treated it as if I was next in line!

This practice was sort of “on easy mode” since I knew what the original text was, and Teonaht was surprisingly easy to translate from. A very cool language, too! Sometime soon I’ll practice again using a different past relay.

Regarding the audio, I’m annoyed that I forgot to start with the title, but not enough to go back and edit it in. My pronunciation was a little off in some spots; in particular, I kept mixing up hne and hné, which should have [ɛ] and [ej] as the vowel respectively. I also mixed up some instances of o [ɔ] and ó [ow]. ó well. Levuna’s pronunciation was perfect, though!

So anyway, here’s the English translation of the T’owal text above:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Father’s Advice

My child, come to me. Today you will leave your family and ride to the mountains. I will advise you before your journey. Don’t trust any turtle that speaks to you. Turtles cannot burn and will frighten your horse. Eat carrots (which grow in the soil) only during the full moon. The full moon makes the carrots stronger, and also you. Listen to these last words: you must not touch any plum tree. Those trees are your enemies. They will make all people hate you, your horse, and your ancestors. They are completely evil. I will hunt and kill you if you look one time at a plum tree. Know this: I will destroy you. Listen! You must not touch any plum tree. But their fruit is sweet. It may be eaten fresh or dried. It tastes great! Now you must ride, my child! Ride and scream like a goat!

[gacorley]

I love telling my kids that I know the guy who made the language for this or that movie.

Thing is, it’s almost always @dedalvs, or it’s @dedalvs and @quothalinguist.

Like, I have lots of conlanger friends, but I also do happen to regularly talk to Movie Conlangs Georg.

[quothalinguist]

The Conlang Year Week 4 preview is available on my website!