Introduction to the LCS Podcast
[podcast]http://conlang.org/podcast/LCS_Podcast-001-Introduction.mp3[/podcast]
Ahh, creaky voice…
For those unfamiliar with linguistic terminology, creaky voice is the term for what my voice sounds like. My old phonetics professor at UCSD asked me once, quite honestly, if it hurt to talk the way I do. I haven’t the slightest idea how I do what I do, or why. It seems natural. That’s how I got the nickname “Creaks” at Berkeley.
I think the importance of goals in language creation can’t be overstated. If there is no stated goal (or, perhaps, no obvious goal) that a given conlang is trying to achieve, how is one to evaluate or interpret it? The answer is, one evaluates it based on whatever goals one creates, or attributes to the language, even if this is done implicitly.
Now, if it comes to that, I’d say there’s something wrong with the presentation. Who knows what associations the viewer has built up in their mind? Here’s a nonce example from a made-up conlang:
Yo te amo.
Without a gloss, someone will look at that and think it’s another romlang (and not a very good one, if it’s so close to Spanish). Of course, if you gloss it…
/1sg.Sbj.”to be” DEF. walrus-NOM./
“I am the walrus”
…things change quite a bit.
Sometimes the unstated goal, as Sai mentions in this episode of the podcast, is just to create “what sounds good” or “what feels right”. For outsiders, this is important to know when looking at a language. When evaluating one of these languages, how natural, how original or how logical a language is simply doesn’t matter. For these truly personal projects, what’s interesting is to then try to analyze what it is that the creator finds pleasing and/or appropriate. Chances are an unreflective language creator may be mimicking the patterns of whatever languages they’ve come into contact with, but sometimes what makes sense to one is senseless to another. That in itself can be interesting.
To reiterate a point made in the podcast, this blog is what we all make of it. The thing itself is strong kind of an experiment, and we’re interested in experimenting further. If you have ideas for the blog, or come across something interesting on the wilds of the internet, let us know. Anything that is of potential interest is interesting to me. 🙂
Edited by Virgo Audio Production Services; music by Gary Shannon, and Scotto Hlad.
Tags: conlang philosophy, conlanging, lcs podcast, linguistics, requests