Language Creation Society

The LCS Podcast, for all intents and purposes, is no longer being maintained. This blog will remain up indefinitely for historical purposes, but there will be no new content. Thanks to those who listened! If you have any questions, you can contact the LCS at our website.

To everyone that participated in the Language Creation Workshop at Renovation, thanks so much for attending! For those that stuck it out to the end, you know we didn’t get through all the material, so I wanted to provide you with links to download what was there:

• Presentation (.PDF | Keynote | .PPT)
• Workshop Packet (Desert Group)
• Workshop Packet (Mountain Group)
• Workshop Packet (Rainforest Group)
• Workshop Packet (Island Group)

In particular, take a look at Epochs 5 and 6. At this point, the groups were going to begin trading with each other and dealing with linguistic borrowing. I found some good examples to illustrate different borrowing situations in natural languages in the presentation; I was really hoping to get to them! Live and learn.

Also, for Epoch 4, where I wrote “distinctions based on chance”, I was going to have each group pull a random feature from a hat. The features were as follows:

• Tense/Aspect: past/present/future; perfective/imperfective; present/past perfective/past imperfective; past/non-past
• Person Encoding: no verbal agreement; agree with subject in some person/number combinations, not all; agree with subject in all person/number combinations; agree with subject and object in some person/number combinations.
• Exponence: exclusively affixing; mix of affixation and particles; separate words; some affixation and some stem change.
• Wild Card: mark evidentiality on the verb; mark at least three moods on the verb; mark at least two voices or valency-changing operations on the verb; mark intentionality on the verb.

Again, thanks a lot for attending! If things work out, I hope to run this again at future WorldCons.

Conlang (the movie) was just selected to have its film circuit premier in February at the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.

It’s got a new website, and the “Herculean Tournament” scene is posted.

As you probably know, the movie was screened last year at the 3rd Language Creation Conference, and earned our enthusiastic support.

Now is the time for you to voice that support:

1. Join & post to the Facebook fan page.

If you saw the film at LCC3, post a review!

2. If you want a copy of the film by DVD or online distribution, email the producer/director, Marta Masferrer: masferrer@gmail.com

3. Email her information about any other film festivals, ‘cons, conferences, or other venues you think would be interested in screening the film.

4. Subscribe to the LCS Conlang Blog aggregator, which includes the Conlang movie announcements feed.

Please pass this on to anyone you think would be interested. Twitterable link: http://bit.ly/clDhtL

Fiat lingua!

– Sai Emrys
President, Language Creation Society