mindutme

[mindutme]

LOOKING FOR PARTICIPANTS FOR CONLANGING STUDY!

Calling all conlangers! I’m Eddie (he/they), a conlanger and Master’s student studying applied linguistics. For my dissertation I’m looking to conduct some research on conlanging and the wonderful amazing people that do it! And if you want, you can participate in this research!!!

If you’re over the age of 18 and have made (or tried to make!) at least 1 language, you are eligible to take this questionnaire! And you don’t need any formal linguistics training or knowledge to complete it! I’ll also be conducting a few in-depth interviews (randomly selected), so if you’re interested in that part of the study as well you can indicate your interest in the questionnaire :-)

The questionnaire is on Microsoft Forms and split into two parts, so if you only have time/want to do the first one, it’s no big deal; Part 1 is more general (~15 mins), Part 2 is where you get to gush about a language you’ve made (avg ~20 mins)!

LINKS TO PARTICIPATE: Part 1, Part 2

DEADLINE: I’ll close submissions in June, but if you want to be considered for an interview, get it done by the end of May!

CONTACT: Casual or clarifying questions are welcome via tumblr (edsmore), but if you have more serious inquiries, you can find my university email on the information sheets located in the questionnaire forms.

(obligatory mention that this research is being officially conducted through the University of Oxford; information on data privacy/collection can be found in the information sheet provided in the questionnaire. The official flyer for this study with more information can be found here)

Of course this is all totally voluntary! If you’re interested, I hope to read about some of your cool languages soon!

#just finished filling out both surveys!

[mindutme]

Sdefa Sdaturday #13

This is another draft of the text from the last Sdefa post, now the entire text. I’m not quite settled on the whole structure, especially the word order. More importantly, I decided it wasn’t working as a duet so it is now a quartet. It may be a while before I have a recording, unfortunately.

In the meantime, I want to talk a little bit about UNLWS and one way it’s influenced Sdefa. UNLWS is a conlang created by Sai and Alex Fink; I learned a little bit of it for the LCC10 conlang relay and liked it a lot so I stuck with it afterward. It’s a written conlang without any spoken component, and it’s nonlinear, meaning there’s no single order in which to read any given text; you can start in any part and move around in any direction. You can read more about it here!

One key feature of UNLWS is that all of the basic glyphs (essentially, words) are verb-like; even the glyph which expresses the idea of “cat” is defined as “be a cat.” Sdefa doesn’t go that far—it still has nouns and verbs as distinct classes—but there are some concepts which tend to be expressed as nouns in other languages but as verbs in Sdefa. One such is “parent/child,” D G E♭ C, as used in this recent relay text. Rather than a pair of nouns, it is a single verb that expresses a relationship: subject is a parent of object, or object is a child of parent. Most often when you use the word you’d be saying who is the parent of whom, but if you just want to say that someone is a parent or a child, you can use the impersonal pronoun suffix as a placeholder, which is like saying “they’re someone’s child.” This is a totally distinct word in Sdefa from “child” as in “young person,” by the way—that is an actual noun, B A G E.

Another such word in Sdefa (B A B A) is “home” or “reside,” also used in the relay text. For that verb, the subject is the home of the object, or the object lives in or at the subject. I used it to translate the concept of “beehive” without having to come up with a new word for it: a beehive is the place where bees live.

When writing the above text I needed a word for “goal.” As all Sdefa words are four- or five-note quotes of other music, I thought about what I might want to reference for this word and decided on E F♯ E G, a four-note fragment from the song “Last Midnight” in Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods: “if that’s the aim.” As I was working more on the text, though, I realized that treating “goal” as just a noun wouldn’t really work—it would have to be in the same category as “parent” or “home.” So now E F♯ E G is a verb meaning “to intend,” and “goal” or “aim” is that which is intended.

The irony of all this is that I may restructure the end of the text such that this word doesn’t even come up at all—but even if I do, I got a new word out of the experience!

#conlang #neography #conscript #Sdefa

[mindutme]

“Tell me that story again.”

I spent forty small drawings and several hours refactoring my conlang to remove linguistic technical debt, and now we have eight possible verb/connection word directions. (1618-37, by the very simple maths of “two of these count as one artquest”)

[mindutme]

“The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse.”

Once again, I revisit the Impossible Stele and its inscription. (1638)

[mindutme]

souvolar "sweep"

souvolar /ˌsu.voˈlar/ [ˌsu.vʊˈlɐː]

sweep, be swept, to be caused to rise up into the air from the ground (as of the clothing of a person spinning, or of dust);

glide, to move through the air gracefully and unpropelled;

go along with something, play along, to cooperate in continuing something by passively allowing it;

(in a performative context) yes-and, commit to the bit, take things in stride, go with the flow, stay in character

Etymology: borrowing from Latin subvolō "I fly upwards from below", adapted to existing sou- "under" and volar "fly". In metaphorical use the word is attested from the eighteenth century; in a theatrical context it is seen from 1888, originally in use by a specific school of acting in Axbane.

Y rimband ag fruyour souvolaurn apar. /i rɪmˈband ɛj fraˈjur ˌsu.voˈlorn̩ aˈpar/ [i ʀɪmˈband ɛj fʀɐʝʊː ˌsu.vʊˈloːn ɐˈpɐː] df ribbon at.df dancer sweep-pst-3p through The dancer's ribbons swept through the air.

[mindutme]

T’owal T’uesday #13

I’m changing the T’owal alphabet again! I would say I should have seen this coming but last time I did say “There may yet be further changes—we’ll see!”

I decided I wanted to make some changes while working on the font. I was writing with pen and paper and found that certain letters were a little too similar and were hard to distinguish when I was writing quickly. Plus, I’d never really liked the forms of the letters for i and x. All that together meant it was time for a revision.

Thinking about the alphabet led me to wondering about the status of h and x in T’owal. I suspected that I could combine the two into one phoneme without too many problems. As it turns out, there are only three minimal pairs that are contrasted only by the difference between h and x:

hen “to breathe” and xen “to be the same”

hi “inside” and xi “go to/towards” (both featured in last week’s post, coincidentally)

hu “to be” and xu “there/that/those”

Some of those are pretty common words so I’m not sure that I do want to change them, but I am leaning towards doing so. I’d definitely keep hu and xi as they’re the most common words of the six, though the latter would now be spelled hi. For now, anyway, the alphabet has one fewer letter than it did before.

At the top of the post is the text from this post, translating the first bit of one chapter of The Left Hand of Darkness. Below is the beginning of the same passage, written a little more carefully:

Here’s a pangram which translates to “In the winter I wear a magic yellow onion because it makes the cat’s whiskers warm.” Since this pangram was made two revisions ago I could probably make a shorter one now.

And finally, a translation of the classic line “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died”:

That’s Mó é o tal su e gas i Ámason, tswés bós gwíwil, psíl tset ót í, k’ép bós. It’s at least as awkward in T’owal as it is in English.

#conlang #conscript #neography #T’owal

[mindutme]

Sdefa Sdaturday #12

I’m working on a new Sdefa text! I’m thinking it might be a duet for violin and viola, though it sounds neat on piano too. This is a short post because it’s not finished yet, but I wanted to give a preview anyway! Here’s the first quarter or so of the text:

I’m trying out a slightly different style with this orthography, to fit some of the themes of the text.

Here it is in the other script:

#conlang #neography #conscript #Sdefa

[mindutme]

Tlette Tlursday #11

Let’s talk about maps!

Tlette has two and a half words for maps, to refer to two very different kinds. The first kind is a tlalkequ /tɬaɬ.ˈkɛ.qu/, or tlalké /tɬaɬ.ˈke/ for short. The longer word is used in formal Tlette, and the shorter one in informal speech. Their plurals are tlalkeqúy /tɬaɬ.kɛ.ˈquj/ and tlalkéy /tɬaɬ.ˈkej/ respectively. This kind of map is relatively small-scale, used for navigation. The category includes street maps of towns and cities and maps of roads between nearby towns and cities, but not much larger-scale than that. The word comes from the verb kequ /ˈkɛ.qu/, meaning “to guide” or “to lead.” It’s derived as an inanimate agentive noun, like tlahllán, so it literally means “thing that guides.”

Tlalkéy are often very inacurrate in terms of scale and proportion. They’re not attempts to accurately depict the world as it is; instead, they’re navigational tools. They show how roads meet and what landmarks they are, which are the important things one needs when traveling, but will often distort distances and angles as a matter of convenience for the mapmaker and map-reader. In a way they’re a lot like subway maps!

From left to right: tlalkequ, tlalké, tlalkeqúy, tlalkéy, kequ.

To talk about the other kind of map, first I need to talk about the world where Tlette is spoken. I’ve talked a bit about it in some previous posts, but here’s a brief overview: it’s a fantasy world that is completely fixed in space, neither orbiting a sun nor rotating on an axis. It has no moon, so the only celestial objects are the stars, which don’t move in the sky—unless you travel. For every star in the sky, there’s a place on the surface of the world where that star is directly overhead, and for many cultures each star is thought of as a deity that protects that part of the world.

This is true of the Tlette people and their neighbors who speak Mindutme. The associations between places and stars are so strong that the Tlette word for the Mindutme speakers is Kottúllate, derived from name of the brightest star above where those people live. Many other exonyms in Tlette are derived from the names of stars rather than names from the respective languages. Tlette fiction even sometimes describes travelers journeying to far-off lands, referring to made-up places and peoples with names of stars that Tlette speakers are familiar with.

So the other kind of map that Tlette speakers use is called a kıssì /kɨs.ˈsɨ/, plural kısswí /kɨs.ˈswi/. The word comes from a borrowing from Old Mindutme, *kus suu, literally “star paper.” It’s basically a star map with additions, showing (usually with two different colors of ink) major stars and major cities, plus some combination of coastlines, rivers, roads, borders, and such.

kıssì, kısswí

Because kıssì maps are drawn so that the stars on the paper match the stars as they are seen in the sky, the geographical features on them are actually mirrored! If you were to travel using such a map, you would orient it with your destination at the bottom. That way, the stars above you are near the center of the map, and those nearer to the horizon ahead of you are at the bottom, and stars to your left are on the left side of the paper as well. You could also think of holding the map above your head to match up with the stars, in which case the bottom of the map actually is farther ahead. But Tlette speakers are used to mirrored maps, so they don’t usually do that.

The map at the top of the post is a kıssì. It’s more of a sketch, really, and not necessarily final—I’m not sure how much I want to even define the map of this world at all. Don’t look too closely or you’ll see I don’t really know much about how rivers work!

The map is labeled Tan Qelút /ˌtã.qɛ.ˈlut/, “The Known World,” though it’s a fairly small portion of the world. In black are the stars and national borders, drawn very abstractly. Some other maps may show borders in more detail, but they are often defined broadly as paths between major stars, and narrowly by geographical features that line up with those paths for a stretch. The large polygon is Lwé Tlette, and the smaller one to its left is Lwé Kottúllate, where Mindutme is spoken; the large star within that region is Kottú. A few other important stars are also labeled, and in purple are coastlines and rivers.

#conlang #conscript #neography #worldbuilding #Tlette

[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.

#conlang #conscript #neography #T’owal

[mindutme]

T’owal T’uesday #11

For some reason I decided to recreate a screenshot from a tumblr post in T’owal. Here’s the original:

I think more effort went into making it look similar to the original than actually making the translation. There are a few too many differences between the fonts (serifs, line weight, general proportions) for it to really look right to me but it’s okay.

“m4m” becomes f.u.f in T’owal. I haven’t dealt with any abbreviations before, but I kind of like the look of the dots between letters but not after the last one. It stands for fes us fes (“male intended for male”) which is completely agrammatical but feels like it could work here.

A weird rabbit hole I ended up going down was figuring out what verb form should be on the button. In English the plain verb/infinitive and imperative look the same, so it wasn’t clear to me which was intended. Turns out, different languages do this differently: some use the infinitive or something like a verbal noun, and others use imperatives. I decided to go with the unmarked verb in this case to keep it from being too wordy.

New words coined for this post were hlade “key” (also “password,” or anything else that unlocks something), p’onta “avocado,” ts’obi “pocket,” and hek’e “assume.” Proper nouns were left as they were, though the “and” of “Hawk and Co.” was translated.

Here’s the full text, with an overly-literal translation to show the feel of the structure of the T’owal text without resorting to a gloss:

Sín fes, ts’ún we adin hné hyúno su – f.u.f (ZuZ Guy, you accidentally took my jacket – m4m (ZuZ

Iwax / Iwax fem men af Reply / Reply to this message

Há sáx hyúno Hok a Ko xen. We have the same Hawk and Co. jacket.

Ts’ún adin twalthi e fwol psil hné sá su dne tiyeth Zuzu, a gúthos sá hne hné. You, seemingly accidentally, took mine last night from the Zuzu couch, and you left yours.

Sá su pyén hláde su dax tso su fot. Mine had my keys, which I obviously need.

Sá hne pyén p’ónta e ts’obi, a hék’e sú í, bmá xen dá. Yours had an avocado in the pocket, and I assume that that’s equally important.

#conlang #conscript #neography #T’owal

[mindutme]

A lot of my conlang ideas are fucked up mistakes I make while speaking English made more systematic and crosslinguistically palatable

[mindutme]

Sdefa Sdaturday #11

Here is the longest Sdefa text to date, written for a conlang relay and performed by me and my friend on viola and cello!

Last week was the premiere of this video, the presentation for the relay. The above is included in that, but there’ll be better audio and video quality if you watch it here instead. You can also check out this amazing website that Keras (one of the relay participants) put together with the relay results and even some statistics!

There’s a translation in the video, but here it is as well. This translation is slightly different, as the one in the video has some awkward phrasings to accommodate Sdefa’s word order, so that the English translation can match what’s happening in the music at any given time.

Long long ago there was a person who lived here and learned to respect their ancestors. Listen as I tell you their story!

Their parent took them into these woods so they could gather blueberries together. They saw a plant with many berries, so they very happily began to collect them.

The parent knocked down a beehive, causing the bees to emerge and swarm around them! The two quickly ran away from the bees, dropping the berries they had gathered.

The child asked, “Why do we gather blueberries?”

The parent responded, “Don’t say that! By gathering blueberries, we are connected with our ancestors.”

After this, the two gathered blueberries for many days.

Now I have told you the story of the person who learned to respect their ancestors.

I posted the text in both of Sdefa’s orthographies last week but here it is again:

#conlang #conscript #neography #music #Sdefa

[mindutme]

@ Conlangers out there

who among the hordes of tumblr has developed their own conlang?

[mindutme]

if you don't mind me asking, what are you using to write in sdefa? (for both writing systems)

Not at all! For the older writing system I use Inkscape. I have a document set up with a grid guide and a standard line thickness that I can copy from one line to another. For the newer system, I have a font that I made, so I can use pretty much any program that can handle text for that. I designed the glyphs in Inkscape and made the font itself in FontForge.

Here’s a demo of making the word {B C B E} “cat” with a third-person pronoun suffix in both systems:

For the first sytem, each 4-note root word’s glyph is contained within a 6×6 square, which gives everything convenient proportions to get the types of curves I want without having to do lots of little adjustments. Initially I played around with copying and pasting parts of root words, since there are only 12 different note shapes which fit together, but in the end it was easier to just make each new word from scratch.

For the second system, I just set the font (and fixed the fill and stroke settings) and then typed “7274132,” which corresponds to the notes {B C B E E G A}.* Certain glyphs automatically change when a following letter is typed to form ligatures. This word doesn’t have any sharps or flats but if it did they’d be typed with a + or - respectively after the adjusted note.

#conlang #conscript #neography #Sdefa

[mindutme]

happening now! come join us!

Sdefa Sdaturday #10

Later today, at 4:00 EDT (about three and a half hours from time of posting), please join me and my friends for our conlang relay presentation! We actually already gathered to discuss the relay but today the video of that discussion is going up on Youtube as a premiere, so you can join us in chat!

I’m not going to post details of my contribution to the relay yet, for spoiler reasons, but here’s the text in the first Sdefa script, which is what the person after me in the relay had to translate:

(A draft of this text was posted a few weeks ago, but there are some differences.)

And here is the same text in the newer Sdefa script:

I hope you can join us today!

[mindutme]

One hour to go and I just realized I forgot the link!

Sdefa Sdaturday #10

Later today, at 4:00 EDT (about three and a half hours from time of posting), please join me and my friends for our conlang relay presentation! We actually already gathered to discuss the relay but today the video of that discussion is going up on Youtube as a premiere, so you can join us in chat!

I’m not going to post details of my contribution to the relay yet, for spoiler reasons, but here’s the text in the first Sdefa script, which is what the person after me in the relay had to translate:

(A draft of this text was posted a few weeks ago, but there are some differences.)

And here is the same text in the newer Sdefa script:

I hope you can join us today!

#conlang #conlang relay #Youtube

[mindutme]

Sdefa Sdaturday #10

Later today, at 4:00 EDT (about three and a half hours from time of posting), please join me and my friends for our conlang relay presentation! We actually already gathered to discuss the relay but today the video of that discussion is going up on Youtube as a premiere, so you can join us in chat!

I’m not going to post details of my contribution to the relay yet, for spoiler reasons, but here’s the text in the first Sdefa script, which is what the person after me in the relay had to translate:

(A draft of this text was posted a few weeks ago, but there are some differences.)

And here is the same text in the newer Sdefa script:

I hope you can join us today!

#conlang #conscript #neography #Sdefa