Language Creation Society

It’s rare that one comes across something wildly different traveling around the online conlanging world. It’s even rarer to find something wildly different that the conlanger in question can demonstrate live.

Donald Boozer’s presentation on Dritok at LCC2 was an event. If you take a look at the language of the Drushek—specifically, the phonology—it looks like a bunch of gobbledygook. It’s a mess! Look at the way Database Wilson (that’s a nickname for Don I just came up with) transcribes the first line of “The North Wind and the Sun”:

V2&=sx:w.q’t. s’.s’ pr.np’. D5^Q5=V2&=zn.t’.z* P4&^D1>>tf.p*.o.

What is all that noise?!

Well, it turns out it’s Don’s transcription system for Dritok: An entirely voiceless conlang.

“That’s a nice story,” I thought to myself, “but I need to see it to believe it.”

At LCC2 I saw it, and now I’m a believer.

While watching a video is never the same as watching something live, this video is not to be missed. You get to hear Don pronounce a lot of Dritok, and pretty soon you kind of get a feel for it. This also was one of the better question and answer sessions (you even get to hear my disembodied voice towards the end [and you can hear Sai’s gigantic laughter throughout (there’s no better word for it than “gigantic”)]). All in all, it was one of the better presentations I’ve seen at an LCC.

This video is part of the 2nd Language Creation Conference, held at UC Berkeley on July 7-8, 2007, and hosted by Language Creation Society.

We would like to add closed captioning / subtitles to all the videos from LCC2, including this one. If you are willing to help, install Subtitle Workshop, and email your transcribed .sub file to lcs@conlang.org. In return, you’ll get credit and a free copy of the DVD with this video.

[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.