#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!

[sombra-conlangs]

Conlang year 2025 · Day 1 - 4

I decided to try out @quothalinguist's conlang year, it is basically a series of daily prompts that guide you through the process of creating a new language, by the end of the year you will end up with a conlang that is developed enough to participate in relays and lexember, you can find it on quothalinguist.com

It looks like conlang year is mostly geared towards creating languages that are naturalistic and evolved from a proto-language, and the concept I have for this is not going to really fit into that, you'll see why once I start describing it, but I don't imagine that'll be too much of an issue, it's still useful to have a guide for the different aspects of the language I should focus on. I'll try to adapt the prompts to work with my idea and I guess I'll skip the ones that I can't figure out how to adapt.

I'll be combining many prompts together into single posts for convenience, I'll tag these posts as both #Conlang year and #Conlang year 2025 so you can search those in my blog to see them all if you want (once I name the language I will also add it to the tags, but the language doesn't have a name yet).

If you want to see all of the information from these posts compiled into one place I will be adding all of the information about the conlang I create on my website: tekseni.bearblog.dev

Day 1: Set an intention for your language

(warning: this gets a bit heavy, but I try not to make it too dour)

I haven't been feeling great lately, I won't go into details, I'll just say that it can be difficult to manage your emotions when the world seems to be in such a terrible state, living through historical events is not easy.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I know there's some people who say you have to be constantly staying informed on every bit of news because if you don't you're a bad person, but that's not a sustainable way to live. It's important for us to keep ourselves sane, if you're going to help others through turbulent times you have to make sure you have your own feet on firm ground. I won't be of much help if I'm having a crisis, so taking care of my own mental health is important, and for many of us that can include a bit of escapism and using art as an outlet, using art as motivation to keep going and enjoy life despite the circumstances. This conlang is my escapism.

With all of that being said, here's my 2 main goals for this conlang:

1: I want this language to make me smile

I want to create something that helps me to find some beauty and hope in the world, I want the choices I make with the language to make me smile, and I want to be able to have fun while working on it, without having to worry too much about how naturalistic it is or anything like that, so ideally I'd also avoid comparing this to other conlangs.

If we compare this to visual art, I'd say this is less like trying to create an awesome painting with perfect perspective, colors and composition, and it's more like me doodling in a sketchbook that is meant primarily for me, but I also want to share it with others in case they find it to be at least mildly interesting or it helps inspire them in some way.

It's not like my other conlangs don't bring me joy, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this time I will try to design the language without worrying about things like naturalism or trying too hard to make my worldbuilding interesting or deep, it's just a canvas where I can throw paint and let myself go wild, trying out things I normally wouldn't, and making choices based on my personal preferences instead of what I think I "should" do, so I guess that makes this is a personal language.

2: This is going to be a surrealistic conlang

I have already decided who the speakers of my language will be, I'll elaborate more in the following prompts but I currently call them "dream angels" because they're basically benevolent beings that exist in the world of dreams, and because of this I want to try my hand at making a surrealistic conlang, @dedalvs wrote an essay on fiat lingua about what such a language might look like, and I keep coming back to it every now and then because I love the concept.

Even before that essay was posted I remember thinking of what conlangs might look like if they were inspired by different art movements, and a surrealistic one fits particularly well into the dream world idea, it will also allow me to fulfill my first goal fairly easily; making something that makes me smile without having to worry about naturalism and letting myself experiment. I've always been drawn to surrealism for one reason or another, not entirely sure why but I know this is something I'm excited to work on.

I'm not expecting this to be the best surrealistic conlang out there, but it doesn't have to be, it just has to be fun for me, and it will work as a learning experience regardless, so if I want to try again at some point I will have a better idea of how to approach it. I'm sure someone out there will make an amazing surrealistic conlang one day and I'll be excited to see it when it happens.

Day 2: Set an intention for sharing your language

Basically the main audience is me, I hope that future me will be able to look at all the different translations, grammar choices and vocabulary I made and feel like it's a fun language that still brings me some joy in some way or another, even if I don't keep working on it for much longer after the conlang year has ended at least I hope it was a positive experience.

I also want to share the language online (on this blog and on my conlang website) mostly because I'm hoping that at least one person is going to look at my conlang and feel inspired, or maybe it will make them smile too, so I'm going to try to describe all the features in a way that is understandable for other conlangers.

Day 3: Determine your speakers and conworld

The basic idea is that there is another plane of existence, one we can't see when we're awake, and the world where dreams exist is connected to this other realm, so when we dream we sometimes come into contact with the ethereal beings that speak this language, and they are kind and loving.

The dream angels usually don't interfere with human affairs too much, but they sometimes help us by making nightmares go away and soothing the people they see, at least while the people are asleep (since they can't interact with us outside of dreams).

They also shift the way they speak to be a bit more familiar to the person they're encountering, so I imagine the phonology of their language might shift a bit from its default form depending on what your native language is, the language would still be unintelligible to you but it would sound a bit like someone speaking your L1 in a weird way (which also means that it will be easier for you to pronounce the language if you are able to speak back at them because you will at least get to use sounds you already know how to pronounce, though you're welcome to pronounce it in its original form).

These beings are very surreal in their appearance, there's probably different types of dream angels but the ones I'll be working with are kind of like a mix of various sea creatures, drifting through space peacefully, building all sorts of things and admiring the nature that exists in their world.

I imagine their settlements are built on floating islands full of all sorts of critters and nature, and their world as a whole is probably a bit weird and doesn't always seem to follow logical rules, in keeping with the kind of things you see in dreams, so they might look a bit like something you'd see in an M.C. Escher artwork, where you're not exactly sure what you're looking at, but it has a certain beauty to it.

Day 4: Describe (or design) your speakers

And finally here's a picture I drew of a prototypical dream angel:

They might look a bit intimidating or scary to you, but I chose to take inspiration mostly from various sea creatures because they help to convey this kind of ethereal and weirdly beautiful aesthetic, when I look at jellyfish I often wonder how those are living beings that exist in our world, they look more like they're inanimate objects drifting in the water and yet they're alive, and they're so mesmerizing and fascinating, like a living nebula.

I imagine different dream angels would have different characteristics, but in general they're basically like some sort of jellyfish with 3 main tentacle-like appendages, many thin tendrils, 6 insect-like arms, 6 little wings (because it makes them look a bit more angelic lol) and they have one eye, but no human has ever seen their eyes because it is always covered by something, in this case it's a butterfly, but whatever is covering their eye it does not prevent them from seeing, this is the dream world after all.

I think there might be other types of dream angels, and they're all able to speak a human-like language because they don't need a mouth to speak, they just telepathically send sounds to other beings, so the speakers of my language will be characterized by being similar to sea creatures, perhaps there's other dream angels that are more similar to other types of animals, or inanimate objects, maybe some are just completely out there and don't even look like anything we're familiar with as humans. By the way if you feel inspired to design your own dream angels go ahead! I think it'd be nice if I was able to inspire creativity in others with my work.

I'm also choosing to use a human-pronounceable phonology because I enjoy pronouncing the words and sentences of my conlangs, but perhaps at some other point I will make a different register of the language that uses different noises as phonemes, maybe sounds of water and nature, or maybe something like one of those really peaceful synths, after all their phonology is not limited by their physiology or even things like logic.

But anyway that's it for now, I feel a bit vulnerable putting myself out there so much, this feels a bit more personal than my other conlangs I've shared, it's not like a regular fantasy worldbuilding project or a fanlang or an a posteriori language, this one is very out there and weird, but again I want to share it in case other people find it interesting, and hey, we need more examples of surrealistic conlangs, so I'm more than happy to contribute to that.

[mindutme]

Come join me and nine (ish) other conlangers today as we do the reveal for a conlang relay! It’s at 4 PM EST, about 3.25 hours after this post was published. It’ll be a livestream, so you can join us in chat!

This is actually just one half of a two-ring relay. Jake (@jakecito98 and one half of @letshaveabouba) and Jessie Peterson (@quothalinguist and one half of @langtimestudio) ran the relay. David Peterson (@dedalvs) wasn’t in this half of the relay but I believe he’ll also be there!

If you’re not familiar with conlang relays, it’s like a conlang-based game of telephone. Each person receives a text in a conlang they don’t know with just enough info to translate it, then they make a translation into their own conlang and send it along. It’s always (at least) a little confusing and very fun!

[kohlrabi]

Conlang Year 2025 — Days 10-12

This is another series of days that I am combining, which henceforth shall be called “Consonant Day.” According to the prompts, these days task you to “choose series of consonants to incorporate, decide whether consonants will have a voicing distinction, and research other places of articulations.” Conlang Year is set up to give the participant plenty of time to do research and gauge what sorts of elements that they wish to include in their language, which is an excellent feature for beginner conlangers. On the flip side, I really enjoy creating phonologies for languages that may never occur, just as some practice to see how the values lie, whether it could be a potential language to explore.

The phonology for this language is one I made in one of these experimentation sessions with not really an expectation, but it’s one that I latched onto and one I wanted to save for specifically this. I’ll present my thought process over these three days and present the vowels on Day 15.

I start all my shit-shooting (that is literally what the folder is called where these are birthed) with this template system starts:

I started by editing out some of the less common phonemes, because for this one, a minimal phonology was desired. The affricates were gutted and the dental, lateral alveolar, palatal, and uvular consonants were nearly completely removed, sparing the glide /j/. The velar nasal /ŋ/ was, unfortunately, among the consonant crew that was cut. It’s less common than the others present, especially in word initial forms.

Generally, I did not want a voicing distinction: too many consonants. The voiceless ones were chosen since it is uncommon for there to be only voiced consonants in natural languages. For the bilabial fricative, however, the voiced fricatve /v/ was elected over the voiceless one /f/.

When it comes to other articulations, the alveolar approximant, or the rhotic in this case, is shown here as a trill /r/, yet I wanted to weaken that a little more to the tap /ɾ/. As @quothalinguist had mentioned, the sound /w/ is a coarticulated labial-velar sound. The velar column was expanded to include the labialized velar stop /kʷ/. With that expansion, the consonant chart is complete!

[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!

[conlangery]

I was a guest on the Artifexian Christmas Quiz! Come listen as myself, @dedalvs, @quothalinguist, Biblaridion, Madeline James, and Artifexian himself all ask each other some unique trivia questions. You might just hear me sing! The premiere is tomorrow, January 3, at 1 PM Central Time (1900 UTC)!

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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)

[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.

[kohlrabi]

Conlang Year 2025 – Day 16

Now, we’re getting close to having a language, or at least words and forms that will eventually become a language. The consonants and vowels have all been worked out, and somehow some way, they need to interact with each other to produce syllables. As @quothalinguist states, today’s prompt is “play around with syllable structures,” get a feel for what sort of sound the proto-language will have.

Before I reveal the syllable structure that was decided upon, I want to raise a point about roots. I make a reminder for myself when creating roots, to give them a maximum syllable amount, usually disyllablic or trisyllabic with heavy restrictions on that third syllable. Having this present when discussing the phonotactics prevents me from making roots that are too long, like /fla.ˈdu.bu.da/ being the verb “to jiggle.” It can be derived to get to a more polysyllabic word, but when it comes to stand-alone proto-form, disyllables are both my comfort and my stretch zones.

For this language, roots are maximally two syllables <S1.S2> , where either syllable has a maximal structure of CV{n, ʔ, h}. Vowel-vowel sequences are allowed only as two discrete syllables. In other words, for a CVV root, the first syllable is CV and the second must be V. Other than this restriction, a root may have any possible combination of open and closed syllables. I am going to put the proto-phonology below if you would like to comment or reply to this post to suggest a form for the language!