#wokuthízhű

[dedalvs]

This is the Valyrian glyph for landis "boot". This was the first boot glyph I created. Based on Jessie's drawing, I created a second boot glyph for our mouse language Wokuthízhű. It's much cuter.

[langtimestudio]

The word “nyűfi” means “moon” and was our Lexember 4th word!

[dedalvs]

If I may ask,

Ive been trying to make a polysynthetic language for quite some time but it always seems to go poorly. I know this is a really vague goal, but do you have any tips for this endeavour?

Thanks! (Also congratulations on the marriage! You two are the cutest couple ever)

Thanks! <3

Re: polysynthetic languages, they're a lot like isolating languages, but there are phonological cues that tell you that the big word you're creating is all one word. Try to get those phonological changes settled. For example, in Inuktitut, a word only ever ends with one of four sounds:

a vowel

-k

-q

-t

As a result, the kind of sound changes that occur are always similar. That is, /k/ will often change to the same thing when followed by a consonant or a vowel, and /q/ will often change to the same thing, etc. so it's really easy to tell that the word isn't done yet (in addition to stress).

When it comes to the kind of affix-building that happens, though, this is what you always need to keep sight of: (1) what constitutes a nominal and verbal termination (where the word is going to end), (2) what word base a suffix applies to, and (3) what the result is. The meanings will get confusing, but the lexical categories shouldn't.

Beyond that, when it comes to inspiration, honestly, the types of affixes you get in polysynthetic languages aren't very different from what you get in non-polysynthetic languages; the differences is that they can be piled onto a single word. The types of meanings you get are usually shunted off on auxiliaries in non-polysynthetic languages. Now they're not auxiliaries: They're affixes.

But, I mean, it's just tough. No two ways about it. In fact this coming Thursday @quothalinguist and I are revisiting our polysynthetic mouse language, and, let me tell you, it was difficult, we don't 100% get it still, and we likely made mistakes. But that's part of the fun!

[dedalvs]

Hey, for those who are interested, @quothalinguist and I have opened a RedBubble store with products featuring our LangTime Studio languages, plus some of the other languages we've created for other projects (e.g. Defiance and Dune). Take a look! There's some stuff there we're pretty proud of. :)

[dedalvs]

Hello David, love your work! Hope you had some good holidays!

Have you by any chance heard of any languages where verbs agree with person but not number? Those two always seem to go together, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough...

Thanks and have a good day!

We created a language Wokuthízhű that does this. I'm absolutely, 100% certain I've heard of a natural language that does this, but it's not coming to mind. It is certainly possible, though.

[dedalvs]

Today begins the sixth season of LangTime Studio!

LangTime Studio is a YouTube live streaming series where my wife Jessie (@quothalinguist) and I create a language for various anthropomorphic animals. These various animal kingdoms are combatants in a board game I'm creating called Sovála. During the first five seasons we've made the following languages:

Engála: A language for rabbits.

Tpaalha: A language for opossums.

Wokuthízhű: A language for mice.

Sarkezhe: A language for cats.

Haughòf: A language for dogs.

Today we start a new chapter as we create languages for the two new species introduced in the first Sovála expansion: Beavers and foxes. We don't know which language we'll be doing yet (that will be determined by a poll which ends shortly before the stream), but eventually we'll do both.

Our episodes are two hours long and stream every Thursday starting at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Many watch live and participate in chat, but many also watch them after they're finished. A season usually lasts around 35 episodes before we move on to another language. The languages aren't done at that point, but they're done enough that we can use them for what we need them for in the game.

If you'd like to follow along, use the link above! And if you'd like to support us, you can either become a member of our YouTube channel, or join our Patreon. (We've also got a RedBubble store if you're a fan of Jessie's artwork and our writing systems.)

Stay grammar!

[dedalvs]

Have you studied any of the languages of the Canadian First Nations?

Yes, I've studied Siglitun and Uummarmiutun, which are from the same dialect continuum. The reason I studied these two languages in particular is because there were a series of grammars and dictionaries produced on these two languages plus one other written by Ronald Lowe. They were funded by C.O.P.E. (the Committee for Original Peoples Entitlement). I've got a link to one of them right here on Amazon, and if you can pick up even one of the six in this series, I highly, highly recommend it. The grammar is a bit dense, and it's written in a way that won't be super familiar to linguistics students (it's a little antiquated, published in 1984, and from Canada), but it's presented very thoroughly, and very well, with lots of example sentences—and, really, with these languages the examples are utterly vital. These are agglutinative and highly synthetic languages, but like all languages, there's more to the meaning than adding up the meanings of the parts.

I ran across two of these books at the UCSD library when I was a grad. student, and I checked them out continuously for something like six years (lol—as a grad. student, you can check a book out for a year, unless someone asks for it back). They made quite an impression on me. I was very fortunate to find a couple of them on Amazon, and have received some others as gifts (a couple from my brother-in-law Will, and a couple from @quothalinguist). If you read The Art of Language Invention, you will have seen an example from Siglitun that I produced using the information in the corresponding book in the series, and @quothalinguist and I made good use of the books when we produced our polysynthetic mouse language Wokuthízhű in season 3 of LangTime Studio.

I'm a big fan of these languages, but of the three, my favorite is Siglitun, due to the phonology.

Thanks for the ask!

[dedalvs]

welcome back! i’ve really been enjoying langtime studio. it’s been really inspirational for my own conlanging, both regarding the linguistics stuff you guys use as well as your general workflow

Thank you! That was the hope.

For those unfamiliar, LangTime Studio is a joint project by me and Jessie Sams (@quothalinguist). Jessie and I created the Méníshè language for Motherland: Fort Salem, and we loved working together so much that we wanted something else to do in the downtime between that first season and a potential season 2 (which was no guarantee, at the time). I couldn't wait for some other job to come along, so I decided to do something with a project I'd been neglecting.

For a long time, I've wanted to do something that was essentially a board game version of the Sega Genesis game Shining Force (for newer gamers, it's like proto-Fire Emblem, but better). I wanted to set it in a post-human Earth featuring anthropomorphic animals (mutated somewhat like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and I wanted them all to speak their own languages. They'd have absolutely no connection to previous human languages, just as they'd have no connection to previous human culture. In order to have any characters in this game, I'd have to create actual languages to draw names from, and I kept stalling.

Originally my plan was to "upgrade" my old languages. I was goingj to have five different anthropomorphic species, and I was going to take the following languages and redo them, bringing them up to my current standard:

Cats: Zhyler

Rabbits: Kamakawi

Opossums: Sidaan

Dogs: Gweydr

Mice: Njaama

I even started with Zhyler (I have a tiny little document called New Zhüler on my computer), but there was just too much to change... It ripped the heart and soul out of the original projects, and the new versions simply weren't as good as I wanted them to be.

Then I hit an idea that combined this idea with one I'd had earlier (to wit: Some famous author could set up a subscription service where essentially they write their new novel on, like, Google Docs, and they let people watch literally while they write). What if Jessie and I created these languages together, and did it on YouTube, and then started a Patreon to justify the work hours we were putting into it?

And this is where LangTime Studio was born. Jessie and I worked together to come up with the details, and ultimately we decided we'd stream every Thursday at 2 p.m. Pacific. We've been doing it now since February of 2020, and we've worked our way through the languages for the rabbits, opossums, and mice, and we're nearing completion on our cat language. Only the dog language remains!

I'd always hoped that anyone could pop in at any time and not have to be there from the beginning of the season. I mean, if you're watching Bob Ross, it's fascinating to see him start from a totally blank canvas, but if he's already got a sky, ground, and a mountain on there, it's not like you turn it off. It's still fun to see a happy little tree come into being!

Most of the time it looks like this:

That is, Jessie and I spend a lot of time to thinking and trying to figure out what to do next, and people watch and chat and give us ideas, answer questions, etc.

It's been a fun Thursday tradition for us for what's coming on three years now, and we're looking to keep going!

So that's partly what we've been up to. We didn't know how well we'd be able to keep it up with my travel schedule, but you'll notice this started in February of 2020. February 27th, in fact. I actually did have a talk in between then and the total lockdown which put our second episode on a Wednesday. The next talk I had was canceled. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one...

Of course, catching a live stream isn't something everyone can do or wants to do, but hey, if you want to know what it's like for a conlanger to work on a language from absolute zero to fairly functional, this is it. I'd always hoped especially that beginning conlangers would find it inspiring and encouraging to see how utterly and completely lost we get—and how often it happens. Like anything else, you just gotta keep plugging away. :)

[langtimestudio]

When we decided (with our wonderful Patrons’ help!) that the mice would vote with pebbles and seeds, we realized that, while we had a word for seed, we didn’t have one for pebble. So we fixed that! “Pó” means “pebble.”

[langtimestudio]

For Lexember 5th, our new Wokuthízhű word is “ki,” meaning “to help.”

[langtimestudio]

Our Lexember 3rd Wokuthîzhű word was “sát’í,” meaning “acorn.” When @dedalvs asked me what the proto-form should be, I told him there had to be an ejective. If you’ve ever been hit on the head by a falling acorn, you’d agree the word needs an ejective!

[langtimestudio]

For Lexember second, our Wokuthízhű word was “ngéngé,” which means “eight.” The mice have a base-8 number system, and this word is a reduplication of their word for “four,” which comes from the noun “paw.” So ngéngé is “paw-paw,” or two paws’ worth of counting!

[langtimestudio]

For our final Lexember 2022 word, we present a very important word for our STEM-minded mice: “wákuf’íthí” means “math” and is the collective form of “wákuf’í” (“sum, total”).

[langtimestudio]

Today’s Lexember word is “th’anímile,” which means “minutes” (as in minutes from a meeting). This is a mega-compound of two smaller compounds: “th’yaní” (“meeting,” from “meet-speak”) and “mile” (“paper,” from “birch-bark”).

[langtimestudio]

Because our mice society is so committee-based, we definitely needed a word for “quorum.” If you have a warm room, you must have a quorum, or “zhólák’wa” (literally “warm nest”)!

[langtimestudio]

For Lexember 18th, we are getting decorative! Based our new verb “to shake” (yesterday’s entry), we created another verbal modifier: the iterative “-f’í.” Adding that suffix to the verb “lú” (“to cover”) creates the verb “lúf’í,” which means “to decorate.”