The random nerdy interests of a random nerdy person
bibliobibuli n. – those who read too much, and hence tend to be unaware of or oblivious to the real world
Trying to clear out the backlog of links so this is going to be a big one. But I’m including pretties this time.
(as always pics are linked to their source and you can view more of my favorites on DeviantArt)
Enjoy this post? Support me on Patreon or Ko-fi
Sorry, this is going to light on pretty pictures and heavy on things that are of limited interest to most people. You don’t like it, there are thousands of other blogs you could be reading.
Teach yourself linguistics
From all things linguistics:
Other Things
From Aveneca.com, host of the new CBB (aka the conlang board I’m on)
Linguistics lessons for language learners. Includes IPA, phonology, morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, sound change, and more. (from Nativlang, which also has some free lessons in different languages and published some books on Amazon and Lulu that look interesting)
It’s ‘not’ history – how negation usage changes in a cycle through languages. (from the University of Cambridge)
Lexique Pro – a free program for creating a lexicon for your conlang (or natlangs). I wish it was portable. Windows only.
How many languages did Tolkien make?
From Frathwiki.com, one of the conlang wikis:
Enjoy this post? Support me on Patreon or Ko-fi
In no particular order:
After that, I’ll probably be burnt out on conlanging for a while, but if not, I want to fix up one of my other languages (something simpler, sheesh – probably Ylis, which is basically the English of Thundera) and then working on splitting Ŋyjichɯn into two dialects, which will mostly just be vocabulary changes.
I know probably no one cares, but I’ve uploaded a new version of the tiddlywiki. As always, and more visibly now, it’s a work in progress.
Enjoy this post? Support me on Patreon or Ko-fi
Okay, I’ve finally uploaded the Ŋyjichɯn tiddlywiki*. I’ve also updated lesson one there, with more stuff and assignments (working with the idea that it’s meant to be a textbook). As any conlanger would tell you, it’s very much a work in progress and pretty much everything is subject to change at any time. But now I can go to the conlang forum and ask for input without having to rewrite things. Which is what I’m going to do next.
Notes for using the tiddlywiki: You can navigate from the Table of Contents or tagCloud. Links open below in the same window. I’ve got it set up so the last 20 or whatever links you follow show up on top. And no, you can’t edit it.
* I should do a blog post about tiddlywikis. They’re very awesome.
Enjoy this post? Support me on Patreon or Ko-fi
As I said last time, this is one of my languages that I made for Thundercats fandom. Specifically, this one is the one that Wilykit and Wilykat speak, along with one of my original characters, Felino. First of all, I haven’t seen all of the 2011 revival, so all of this is from the original series and the 80s comics. Second, my personal theory is that Wilykit and Kat are adults, but that their clan don’t get as tall as other Thunderians and grow up slower.
None of that is incredibly relevant to the language itself, to be honest. This post will cover phonology (the sounds of the language) and colors. Here we go.
| IPA / Trans | labiodental | alveolar | post-alveolar | velar |
| nasal | ɱ m | n n | ŋ ŋ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | t t | k k | ||
| affricative | tʃ dʒ ch j | |||
| fricative | f v f v | s z s z | ||
| approximant | ɰ w | |||
| tap | ⱱ β | ɽ r | ||
| lateral approximant | l l |
The International Phonetic Alphabet notation is given in red. The standard transcription is given in black. Honestly, the only reason I use β is because the IPA symbol doesn’t show up in my browser. It looks better than β, but what are you gonna do?
My accent is Standard American English. Since this is a conlang, it honestly doesn’t matter that much if you pronounce things incorrectly, but I’ll be giving approximate sounds based on my accent, with heavy help from Wikipedia.
The majority of consonants should not give students trouble, although Ŋyjichɯn speakers may detect an accent on the ‘m’ and ‘w’. If you wish to prevent that, pronounce ‘m’ against your top teeth and ‘w’ in the back of your throat.
| IPA / Trans | front | near-front | central | near-back | back |
| close | i y | ɯ ɯ | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| near-close | ʏ i | ʊ u | |||
| mid | ɜ o | ||||
| open | a a | ɒ ɒ |
The pairs ‘i’ & ‘y’ and ‘ɯ’ and ‘u’ are primarily distinguished by how rounded the lips are. Vowels are most likely to give students trouble, but the approximations below will generally be sufficient.
(If I don’t have IPA available or it’s too much hassle, I cheat and use ‘h’ for ‘ŋ’, ‘B’ for ‘β’, ‘x’ for ‘ɯ’, and ‘p’ for ‘ɒ’.)
Doubled vowels are pronounced twice as long. Any vowel may combine with another to form a diphthong, and are pronounced long. On the occasion that a vowel is meant as a syllable it is written with apostrophes separating it. For example ro’ɒ’ryi, za’yr’ta, ny’i’an, kyo’yt.
And now for some fun stuff.
Color words in Ŋyjichɯn are heavily associated with nature and the exact color meant is heavily context specific. The pictures below give a sampling of the hues associated. If you’ve checked out the link dumps, there was a long article about how different cultures see color. Wikipedia also has a fair overview here.
To reference the color itself (or to create new color terms), the color is incorporated into chanyki, thus chajɒɯwnyki, white; chawaovonyki, fire colored (waovo, fire), etc. Native speakers would say that metal terms would fall under lyasim, even if the shade itself might fall under ŋafnɯŋ or kiɯk.
You’ll note that most of the words have meaning beyond colors. Words will be given in Ŋyjichɯn alphabetical order.
| Modern Ŋyjichɯn | English | Notes |
| chanyki | skin, surface, color | |
| jɒɯw | day, to be daytime, white, light | |
| jio | water, to be wet, to be liquid, juicy, black, brown, blue, green, blue | For colors it describes deep cool colors like black, brown, green, and blue. The base color is black/brown. May also be used how we would use ‘tomato red’ to evoke the flavor |
| jasa | fruit, flower, pink, red, magenta, purple | References flowers and describes anything from pale pink to vibrant purple |
| ŋafnɯŋ | child, unripe, green, raw, yellow, pale | When used as a color it’s the color of unripe fruit, early morning sky, young shoots and grass, and can cover white, yellow, and light greens |
| kyi | ripe, adult, mature, full-size, green, blue | When used for colors it means the green of ripe vegetables, or noon-sky (vibrant greens and blues) |
| kiɯkjio | red-brown | Given as an example of combining colors. From kiɯk and jio |
| kiɯk | blood, red, orange | Describes the color of blood. |
| kouch | night, dark, black | Describes the dark, usually blue and unsaturated colors, you would observe at night. |
| lyasim | stone, grey, beige, pale, yellow, tan, off-white | Primarily inorganic colors (the color of stones), but also pale bark, the yellow of wheat, etc |
I’m creating all this using a combination of Excel, Tiddlywiki (basically a wiki in a single file. It’s awesome), and various text files. At some point I’m going to write up an in-character description of Ŋyjichɯn, but I have to figure out how I want to approach it. And probably the next post will be simply ‘I’ve changed this in the tiddlywiki, here’s a link!’ rather than making it work in WordPress, which is somewhat of a pain. I have to get the tiddlywiki uploaded.
(Editted 2-18-13, because I screwed up when I derived kiɯkjio.)
Enjoy this post? Support me on Patreon or Ko-fi
Conlang is short for constructed language. Conlangers make up languages, whether that’s basically an English cypher or something as involved as Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin or Klingon created by Marc Okrend, which has taken on a life of its own. Generally, it’s done by people who love language for their own pleasure. It may or may not end up being used in stories (it seems most conlangs made up for as background are fairly skeletal). Some might be little more than a phoneme inventory, how to build words (morphology), and a bit of grammar. Some are as involved as any real language. There’s way too many different ways to do it for me to explain it, but the wikipedia page and the links at the end are a good start.
I like language. I unfortunately don’t have the knowledge necessary to be good at conlanging (I only learned IPA1 last year, for instance). It works my brain in different ways. I tend to work in spurts, which makes going back to things a challenge, but I have fun anyway. Pretty much all of my languages started as background for writing. My first (really bad one) was for a bunch of stories I started writing in junior high, I think, and was basically an English cypher. Several of them I came up with a phonetic inventory during class when I was supposed to be paying attention and did pretty much nothing else with it. I have a tendency to use mostly affixes and to create a writing system for each one.
When the Thundercats fandom was a lot more active in the 90s and early 00s, I started several Thunderian languages. Most of my languages started from that. They’re mostly going to get applied to other things (specifically the world of the White Knight, because creating a language is obviously easier than translating something into a real language /sarcasm). Some of my newer ones I take more inspiration from other, real languages, as you’ll see.
Some of my languages, in no particular order:
1 International Phonetic Alphabet
2 A language that will evolve into other languages. Latin is the proto-language for Romance languages, for example.
3 The word order of a language. English is subject, verb, object. There are six possibilities (I leave figuring them out as an exercise for the reader, or you could look at the link at the beginning of this).
4 A language is isolating, like Chinese, when the majority of words can’t be broken into smaller meaningful parts (aka morphemes). Synthetic is the opposite of that.
5 A form of synthesis, where you just keep adding bits (as opposed to fusional, aka inflectional, where the bits added mean multiple things)
Enjoy this post? Support me on Patreon or Ko-fi
I'm alternately known as Silvercat, Silver, and Silver Tyger. Check out the categories for regular features.
Like what you see? You can help me out with a one-time or monthly donation
