Kæshroþrast summons a king (Khangaþyagon)

Happy St Hildegard's day! This is an original story, written in Khangaþyagon, that describes the wizard Kæshroþrast casting a spell to summon a king to himself. This story should give you a good sense of how magic works on Huna. Text and translation available at https://ift.tt/2D08Nih

The Student, the "Raven" and the Ice Ship

This is from Conlang Relay 13, https://ift.tt/2LzYohf Translating this text gave me a feel for the folklore and legends of the Leyen, so it's quite an important text in the development of iljena.

Tales From Other Worlds- The Tower of Babel (Khangaþyagon)

The Babel Text is a de facto standard comparison text for conlangers, and I translated it into Khangaþyagon a few years ago. It proved quite tricky to read - the word "gatafakufsher" (we shall not be scattered) was a particular stumbling block - but after a few practices I decided to just go ahead and record it anyway. To read it (either in the romanisation or in Bukstav runes), go to http://www.frathwiki.com/Khangaþyagon_Babel_Text

Tales From Other Worlds -The Echo Song of the Merchant's Fall (iljena)

This is the starting text of Conlang Relay 22. It's an iljena poem, written in couplets, where the second line of each couplet echos the word shapes of the first. Text and translation can be found at http://ift.tt/2hR8iK1 Watch out for the last line.

Tales From Other Worlds - A Riddle

Here's my second Tales From Other Worlds video. This time I'm reading Khangaþyagon. It's a riddle that I used as the starting text for Conlang Translation Relay 15.

Discerning hidden meanings is an important skill for a wizard, so they use riddles like this to train their apprentices in the art. Can you discern the meaning of this one.

Tales From Other Worlds -  A Riddle (Khangaþyagon)

Tales From Other Worlds - The Boats of the Dead

To celebrate St. Hildegard's Day, I'm launching Tales From Other Worlds, a video series in which I read passages in my conlangs. The first one is in iljena, and tells the legend of The Boats of the Dead.
My pronunciation isn't perfect - despite a few rehearsals, I stumble over my words a few times, and I'm not sure I've got all the sandhi and labiovelars right, but I hope you enjoy it anyway

The Boats of the Dead

Transcribing the Conlangery Podcast

I've managed to get a reasonably accurate speech recognition system up and running, and it's now posting Transcripts of the Conlangery Podcast on Conlang Sources Wiki. This is something I've been wanting to do for some time, since there's quite a lot of interesting stuff on there, and it becomes a lot easier to search and reference if it's available in text form. In particular, it's one of the best sources of third-party discussion of conlangs, which is exactly what the Conlang Sources Wiki is for.

Having been automatically transcribed, it is in need of human editing, so I'd be very grateful to anyone who could help out in that way.

The Conlang Sources Wiki

J.R.R. Tolkien famously called conlanging A Secret Vice. It was the sort of thing where, if you had to do it, you certainly weren't expected to tell anybody about it - they'd think you were at least mad.

The Internet changed all that. For the first time conlangers were able to form communities where they could share and discuss their work. At first, of course, this discussion centred around the descriptions of conlangs posted by their own creators, and conlanging still wasn't taken seriously by many people outside the community, but over time things began to change. There was a feeling among some conlangers that to develop the craft would require us to make constructive criticisms of each others work. Academics realised that making a language was an excellent way to learn linguistics, and that constructed languages were worthy of study in their own right. And as more and more media franchises began using conlangs, journalists became interested in the art.

So now, there's more scholarship, journalism, criticism and other third party discussion about conlangs available than ever before. I felt a need for a site that would easy to find it all, and encourage more of it. Therefore, I've used my LCS webspace to create The Conlang Sources Wiki, and I'd like to invite my fellow conlangers to join in. Please take a look. Links to new sources are welcome, as are original articles about other people's conlangs.

Thanks to Jan Strasser for being the first person besides myself to contribute.

Word Building is World Building

Lexember, the annual conlang community event where we create a new word and share it on social media every day for a month, has just finished. This time, I set myself a goal for the month, which was to create words which don't have an exact equivalent in English. I felt that doing so would make Khangaþyagon a richer language, and so it turned out. Here are the words I created this month, and some thoughts on what I have discovered while creating them.

1. khlatul (n) The space inside a hollow tree.

Khangaþyagon means "Magic language". It is the original language of Huna, and as other languages diverged from it, wizards preserved it for use in magic. The space inside a hollow tree is a liminal space, and as such may have some magical significance.

2. katost (n) billhook
(v) prune, pollard
katoston pruning

A little bit of fairly obvious polysemy here between the name of a tool and its use. I did quite a lot of this kind of polysemy over the course of the month. The -on/-ont suffix can be either a present participal or an agentive noun, both the form and the meaning varying irregularly from verb to verb (in practice, whatever I feel works best).

3. panne (adj) (of motion) smooth, fluid, easy

I already had words for smooth (referring to a surface) and easy (referring to a task), so here I've split up senses of English words and created new words that are more specific than their English translations.

4. skraða (n) Tree bark
(adj) rough

I made this word by stroking a piece of tree bark and letting the word come to mind. I turns out I already had a word, for tree bark, arkhap, but unlike skraða it doesn't have the polysemy with rough. So, a synonym and polysemy in one go!

5. havrin (n) person who barters services, especially a craftsman whose clients farm his land on his behalf.
(v) barter services
havrinont bartering of services

This began a sequence of words that takes us back into the time when Khangaþyagon was an everyday spoken language. In that time, barter economies were commonplace. Those who had specialist skills, such as blacksmiths or potters, were better employed working at their crafts than in the fields, so a You plough my field, I'll shoe your horse arrangement would exist between them and their neighbours.

Later on, as cash economies became more developed, the term would have shifted in meaning in Khangaþyagon's descendent languages. However, wizards, as a safeguard against selfishness, use gold and silver only for magical purposes, and do not use money. They use their magic to help people in exchange for bed and board, so they are havrinar.

6. kerun (v) barter goods
kerunont bartering of goods.

So, if I had a word that specifically meant "barter services", I needed one that meant "barter goods". What if you're bartering services for goods? You use the one that corresponds to the aspect of the transaction you wish to emphasise.

7. humost (n) work undertaken as payment; time spent working on a havrin's land; turn; rota

Under the You plough my field, I'll shoe your horse system, the farmers of a village would organise a rota amongst themselves so that the work on the craftsmen's land was shared fairly between them.

8. gaurrukh (n) person who evades his humost, freeloader
(adj) lazy, greedy

Of course, there's always someone who expects something for nothing, and this is what you call them.

9. kulesti (n) chalk downland

I very often think of the sound of a word first, and then run it round my head a for a while, thinking of a meaning for it (sometimes I do this while going to sleep at night, and the meaning comes to me when I wake in the morning). While I was doing that with this word, the images that came to mind were of walking in the South Downs...

10. shevras (n) a stimulus that triggers a memory.

...and that was the experience I created this word to describe.

11. þirras (n) red squirrel

12. aliþra (n) grey squirrel

For squirrels, I decided to make more specific terms than in English, so that the red species (native to Britain) and the grey species (native to America, an invasive species in Britain) had different names. On Huna, their ranges are disjoint, so the aliþra is no threat to the þirras.

13. sekhast (n) sickle, hook, crescent moon
(v) reap, harvest
sekhaston harvester

While the polysemy here is all perfectly natural, I already had a word kost which means "hook, sickle, crescent", so synonymy as well as polysemy here. "Hook" appears to be the primary meaning of kost, while "sickle" is the primary meaning of sekhast, which also has a verbal sense.

14. gulvash (n) bowl, goblet, gibbous moon
(v) share wine or mead, pass round
gulvashont sharing of wine or mead

Here I envisaged a big bowl of wine or mead being passed round the assembled company at a feast. Possibly such a feast is held when the moon is gibbous, and celebrates the completion of the harvest, which was begun on the crescent moon.

15. spirraþ (n) hay
(v) make hay, dry out
spirraþont haymaker

Harvesting brought haymaking to mind.

16. kiþur (n) land that is suitable for grazing but not for cultivation.

This land could be too steep to cultivate, or the soil could be too thin, or the climate too arid.

17. zulbar (n) service performed as reparation for wrongdoing.
(v) offer or perform such service
zulbaront person performing such service.

This is a form of restorative justice or compensation. It is most highly valued when the wrongdoer offers it voluntarily as a way of mending the quarrel.

18. navrot (n) tally, inventory, storehouse keeper.

Either the thing used to record the contents of the storehouse, or the person responsible for doing so.

19. morvin (n, adj) unseasonal weather, out of place, badly timed.

While the primary meaning is weather that is atypical for the time of year, (I thought December was for the most part warmer than it should be), it can mean anything that's in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

20. morvin (n) scythe
(v) mow
morvinont mower

More tool/use polysemy, and a homophone with the previous word. The magic of Huna works by symbolism, so I can imagine a wizard using a scythe in a spell to change the weather, or interfere with the timing of an enemy's plans.

21. rakist (n) scraper
(v) scrape
rakiston scraping

Tool/use polysemy strikes again! A rakist is particularly used in preparing animal hides for tanning.

22. tarvos (adj) solid, firm, reliable
(n) foundations, axiom

.

The foundations of a building need to be solid, and axioms are the foundations on which reasoning is built. The word raplat, which means "hard", overlaps with this a little in the sense of "solid".

23. aborið (n) a legendary creature, half-man half-bear, said to lead travellers astray in forests.

I see this as walking upright and having hands like a man, but having the face and fur of a bear. I had the sound first, and worked from that to the meaning. Lexember is supposed to be about creating "everyday words", but what that means in practice is considered to depend on the conlang in question. Wizards would probably discuss legendary creatures on a regular basis. Plus, making up legendary creatures is fun.

24. suraþ (n) message, idea
(v) carry messages
suraþont messenger

Again, working from sound to meaning. I got the sense of "message" first, and elaborated from that.

25. kalvis (n) morsel, treat, snack, appetiser.

I was preparing the smoked salmon for my Christmas day champagne breakfast when I came up with this. This is the sort of thing you offer to welcome guests.

26. iskraþ (n) leftover food, especially from a feast
(v) reuse or distribute leftover food
iskraþon distribution of leftovers

Of course, this word was inspired by eating Christmas leftovers on Boxing Day. After a feast, the leftover food is distributed around the community so that nothing is wasted and nobody is left out.

27. korilsh (n) dangerous stream or current, rapids, false ford.

By "false ford" I mean a place where it appears to be safe to wade across the river, but isn't. The current may be too strong, or the riverbed treacherous underfoot.

Bolton Strid is a stretch or the River Wharfe that this word could apply to.

28. plawan (n) ford
(v) wade
plawanont wading

After a false ford, a real one, and "wade" was the most natural polysemy. This word is probably inspired by the hypothetical etymology *Plowonidonjon for London, supposedly meaning "The place where the river is too deep to ford".

29. malvur (n) ground that is dangerous to walk on

After hazardous water on the 27th, hazardous land. This could be quicksand or marsh, or an unstable or jagged rocky surface, or covered in ice or drifted snow, or a shoreline where the tide may come in rapidly.

30. kæstu (n) a rattle made by putting gravel inside an animal skull.

I imagine that a priest may use this kind of rattle to lead a procession to a shrine or temple. It may have been made from the skull of a sacrificed animal.

31. baruna (n) a musical instrument made from animal horn, with fingerholes

Animal horn instruments can usually only play the notes of a harmonic series. Their modern successors, the brass instruments, use valves to vary the length of the vibrating air column, and so can be tuned to different pitches. However, the was a Renaissance instrument called the cornett, which was blown like a brass instrument and had fingerholes like a woodwind instrument.

Most of this Lexember's words I had the sound first and then made up the meaning. However, with this word, something different happened. I was trying to think up a meaning for salgi, and thought up this instrument. However, the meaning didn't fit the sound, and I found my self thinking "No that's not salgi, that's baruna," so I used that instead. I still don't know what salgi means...

Conscripts on Doctor Who

As mentioned before, my interests in conlanging and Doctor Who don't overlap as much as I'd like, due to Tardis telepathically translating everything. This apparently goes for writing too - in The Impossible Planet the Doctor realises that they're in a particularly dangerous situation when they encounter a script that the Tardis can't translate.

However, something odd has been going on this season. Amidst the rumours of the Hybrid, the theme of Truth of Consequences, the story of Ashildr, and the build up to the death of Clara, there's been another, more subtle theme in the background. In Under the Lake / Before the Flood, the Fisher King scratches this on the wall of his hearse.

The Doctor can't read it, and has to get Cass to lip-read what the ghosts are saying before he can work out what it means. The reason that the Tardis can't translate it is that the writing is intended to plant a message in the mind of the reader. Also, in that story we have the use of British Sign Language, which the Tardis can't translate because The Doctor's forgotten it.

In The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion we see this where the Zygon rebels have been active.

Neither The Doctor, Clara nor the Tardis is present in these scenes, and whatever the poster says doesn't come into the story.

In Sleep No More, we see this Indo-Japanese script (apparently a hybrid on Kanji and Devanagari) on Le Verrier Space Station.

In this case it's not translated because what we're seeing has been hacked from the visual cortices of those who experienced the events, most of whom could read the script to start with. As in Under the Lake / Before the Flood, Ramussen's broadcast is meant to be a vector for mental malware.

Finally, in Face the Raven, we get this.

This is a bit of an oddity. It's the Aurebesh script from Star Wars, which is simply a cipher for the Roman alphabet (Star Wars never having cared about plausible languages). It says Delorean, which is presumably a Back to the Future reference. It looks like this is just an in-joke.

So, is this leading up to something? Might Doctor Who be about to start using conlangs? And if so, please can I make one?

Conlanging and Progressive Rock

Earlier this year, I helped to organise the Sixth Language Creation Conference, which I did so that I could finally get to meet so that I could finally meet some of the friends I've made online over the past few years. Among these were John Quijada (who later wrote some very flattering things about me in the Language Creation Tribune) and David Peterson, of whom some of you may have heard.

Conlanging is not the only thing we have in common. We're all progressive rock fans, too, but while I have never managed to get a band together, John has composed an album's worth of material, and recorded it with David singing. Here's the first track.

The impressive thing here is that David is singing in Ithkuil. Ithkuil is John's conlang, and it's very complex. It has about twice as many sounds as English, and allows more complex combinations. Due to the great precision and concision of Ithkuil, the slightest mispronunciation would change the meaning. It must have taken David ages to learn to sing it.

Starting a new conlang

I've been thinking about starting a new conlang project for a while now. I'm planning to do something with a bit of nonconcatenative morphology, not exactly Semitic but with some similar features, and I really want to try my hand at diachronic conlanging. Over the past few days I've put together the phonological development of the first few stages of the language.

Stage 0

Consonants

pʰ tʰ cʰ kʰ
p t c k ʔ
b d ɟ g
f s ç x h
v z ʝ ɣ
m n
     r
     l

Vowels

i      u
   a

Syllables

CV

Sound changes

V>±hightone/ _ʔ
ʔ>∅
t,d>θ,ð /VV
+asp > -asp

Stage 1

Consonants

p    t    c   k
b    d   ɟ    g
f  θ s  ç    x   h
v  ð z  ʝ     ɣ
m    n
        r 
        l

Vowels

i       u

    a

Tones

Low, High

[C]V[V]

Sound changes

i,u,a> j,w,∅/ _ V

Palatalization
pj, tj, kj > pʲ, t͡ʃ , t͡ʃ
bj, dj, gj > bʲ, d͡ʒ, d͡ʒ
fj, sj, xj, > fʲ, ʃ, ç, ç
vj, zj, ɣj > vʲ, ʒ, ʝ
mj, nj > mʲ, ɲ
rj > ʎ
lj > ʎ
cj, ɟj, çj, ʝj > cː, ɟː, çː, ʝː / V_V
cj, ɟj, çj, ʝj > c, ɟ, ç, ʝ

Labialization

tw, cw, kw > tʷ, cʷ, p
dw, ɟw, gw > dʷ, ɟʷ, b
fw, θw, sw, çw, xw, hw > ɸ, θʷ, sʷ, çʷ, ʍ, ʍ
vw, ðw, zw, ʝw, ɣw > β, ðʷ, zʷ, ʝʷ, w
nw > ŋʷ
rw > w
lw > ɫ
pw, bw, mw > pp, bb, mm / V_V
pw, bw, mw > p, b, m

Stage 3

Consonants

p         t          c         k
pʲ
            tʷ        cʷ
b          d         ɟ         g
bʲ
             dʷ      ɟʷ
                   ͡tʃ
                   ͡dʒ
ɸ   f  θ  s    ʃ   ç        x         h
      fʲ θʲ 
         θʷ sʷ      çʷ    
β    v ð   z   ʒ   ʝ        ɣ
      vʲ ðʲ
          ðʷ zʷ     ʝʷ
m      n             ɲ      
                                  ŋʷ
w       r             j
          l              ʎ       ɫ
ʍ

Vowels

i        u
    
     a

Tones
High, Low

Syllables

[C]V
Medial consonants may be geminated

Sound changes
Feature spreading

a, u > e, y / _Ci
i, u > e, o / _Ca
i, a > y,o / _Cu

Tone sandhi

Low>  Rising / _High
High>  Falling / High_

Syncope

Primary stress on first syllable, secondary stress on odd syllables

Where 2 identical vowels (modulo tone) occur in adjecent syllables, the vowel in the less stressed syllable is deleted.

Stage 4

Consonants as Stage 3.

Vowels

i y         u
  e       o
       a

Tones
Low, high, rising, falling

Syllables

[C]V[C]

By stage 4, the phonology is more or less where I want it to be, and subsequent stages will mainly be about gramaticalisation and analogy. However, I've left myself some phonological loose ends for later.

The plan is to go backwards and forwards between Stages 0 to 4 for a bit, building up basic vocabulary and grammar, and then move on to the later stages. Going backwards and forwards is partly an attempt to reconcile the diachronic method with my love of hand-crafted vocabulary. The finished product will probably be about Stage 7.

NoSQL for Conlangers

In his blog, fellow-conlanger +Wm Annis writes that the best database format for dictionaries is text.

All his points are valid, but at one point he says The standard is SQL, and that got me thinking. I've done a fair bit of work with SQL, and can do scary things with it, but I wouldn't choose to use it. It's inflexible and clunky. You have to decide your schema in advance, and if your requirements change at a later date, you have no choice but to rebuild entire tables. Anything more complex than a simple one-to-one relationship requires a second table and a join. SQL basically expects you to fit your data to the model, and what you need is to fit the model to your data. Using an ORM like SQLAlchemy doesn't help - it's just a layer of abstraction on top of an inherently clunky system.

For a good dictionary system, you need the flexibility of a NoSQL database. One popular system, that I've done a lot of work with, is MongoDB. This stores documents in JSON format, so a dictionary entry might look like this

{"word":"kitab",
  "definitions":[{"pos":"noun",
                            "definition":"book"]},
"inflections":{"plural":{"nominative":"kutuub"}},
"related":["muktib","kataaba"]}

If a field exists for some words but not others, you only need to put it in the relevant entries. If a field is variable length, you can store it in an array. One slight disadvantage is that cross-referencing between entries can be a little tricky.

Another possibility is ZODB. This is an object persistance system for Python objects. In many ways it's similar to MongoDB, but there's one important difference. If a member of a stored object is itself an object that inherits from persistant, what is stored in the parent object is a reference to that object. Cross-referencing is therefore completely transparent. The only small disadvantage is that it's Python-specific, but unless you really need to write your dictionary software in a different language, that shouldn't be a big problem.

You might also want to consider a graph database like Neo4j. This stores data as a network of nodes and edges, like this

kitab-[:MEANS]->book
kitab-[:PLURAL]->kutuub-[:MEANS]->books

In theory, this is the most flexible form of database. I wouldn't say it was easy to learn or use, though.

There are plenty of other NOSQL databases, these are just the ones I'd use, but I think they're all more suitable for dictionary software than SQL. But do make sure you have a human-readable backup.

Reverse Conlanging

As regular readers will be aware, I like Doctor Who and conlanging.
Unfortunately, these don't intersect much, as the TARDIS has telepathic circuits that can translate any language. However, here's an exception

Venusian lullaby

The Curse of Peladon was written in the days when, if you wanted an alien language, you made up some gibberish and hoped for the best. However, this is coherent enough to make some sense of it. Using the Doctor's translation Close your eyes my darling, well three of them at least! I've worked out the following so far

klid

child

kloklid

diminutive, used to express affection

klida

1st person posessed form, used to express kinship

kloklida

My dear child

pɹaθ

eye

paɹθa

paucal, used for more than two, but not necessarily a complete set, for which the plural would be used

men

you

mennin

your

klatʃ

close (hortative)

One thing that might be harder to explain though, is why it's sung to a slowed-down version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.

Fonts for Conscripts on FrathWiki

FrathWiki is a MediaWiki-based site for conlangers. I use it to host the documentation for Khangaþyagon and iljena. One drawback, however, is that it was difficult to use a conlang's native script, as this requires a custom font. My friend David Peterson created a font for Bukhstav runes before he was famous, but short of uploading a lot of .png files, it would have been very difficult to make use of it on the wiki.

But no more! I've looked up how to use web fonts in CSS, and created a couple of templates that should allow the use of any conscript you have a font for on FrathWiki. Behold!

http://www.frathwiki.com/Templates_for_using_web_fonts

Exciting Voynich Manuscript News

A couple of years ago, I came across a new technique for analysing documents, developed by Marcello Montemurro and Damian Zanette.  It identifies the most significant words in a document by the entropy of their distribution in the text. I tried it out on subtitles at the BBC, and got promissing early results.

Now Dr Montemurro has applied the technique to the infamous Voynich Manuscript, and discovered that it appears to contain a meaningful language, rather than gibberish. No news yet as to what any of it might mean, but hopefully my own efforts to uncover the syntax with a Hidden Markov Model might eventually bear fruit. I'm convinced it's a conlang.

My Philosophy of Conlanging

A few weeks ago, on Twitter, +Wm Annis of the +Conlangery Podcast pondered whether he should add ideophones to an existing conlang or create a new one. I said "Let your conlang decide." This remark deserves a bit of explanation.

I think that a good conlang should feel like it has a mind of its own. Yes, Khangaþyagon is my creation, and I can technically do what I like with it, but whatever I do has to feel like it naturally belongs to the language. So, to start with, I don't use word generation software. I'm a committed handcrafter of vocabulary, because I have to feel I've got the right match of sound to meaning. Sometimes the word comes first, sometimes the meaning, but whichever way round it is, it has to mean what Khangaþyagon wants it to mean.

A good example is "oplen". When I first thought of it, I thought it was a verb. I'd worked out what the correct form and sense of the present participal were (Khangaþyagon verbal nouns have quirks), but I didn't have a suitable meaning (it was meant to be something to do with travel). So I slept on it, and in the morning I had the answer. "oplen" wasn't a verb at all. It's  a noun, and it means "glade".

If you want to work this way (and it won't be to everybody's tastes) it's important to internalise your language's phonaesthetics. When I started work on Khangaþyagon, my wife and I were doing an evening class on History of Art. Under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky, I decided that all wizards should be synaesthetes. This set me an interesting challenge, as I'm not one myself. You should have seen me, when I was making up names for herbs and spices, going round my kitchen, sniffing at jars, trying to fit sounds to scents. I'm particularly proud of those words.

Another word I'm proud of is "dapt-" which means "be the weather". I had been thinking that Khangaþyagon would express the weather with phrases like "The sun shines", "the rain falls", "the wind blows" etc. However, during Lexember, I came up with this verb, which fits in much better with the character of Khangaþyagon. Given that Khangaþyagon is a magical language, just think of the possibilities of the first and second persons.

Khangaþyagon can reject words too. Early on, I coined egorigik and namassateus, but Khangaþyagon didn't want them. If your conlang does, it can have them.

It's not just about the words. A language's personality should pervade every aspect of its grammar. You remember I said that verbal nouns had quirks? I started Khangaþyagon by taking a runic inscription from an Anglo-Saxon ring, ærkriuflt kriariþon glæstæpontol, and parsing it as "Let the bleeding be healed by conjuration." This gave me two forms, on and ont, for what I loosely call the present participal. However, I later created words for which these forms acted more like agent nouns. Which form and which sense go with a particular verb are lexically determined, and they don't correlate. This started out as a mistake, but I liked it so I kept it.

The segunak "ut" means "at" or "exact location". "omb" means around. So why does the combination "utomb" mean "made of"? Your guess is as good as mine.

Does the verb "to be" even have a passive in any language? It's Khangaþyagon's way of expressing "there is". It seems to work.

You might say that all this talk of letting your language think for itself is all a flight of fancy. After all, aren't I the one making all these decisions in the end? But creating a language is a flight of fancy to start with, one that you have to be fully involved in to undertake successfully. This is a flight of fancy that I've been on for over 10 years. Khangaþyagon is part of me now.

Custom Sorting For Conlangs again

I've just revised that Python code I posted a while back for sorting lists of strings in customized alphabetical orders. I realized that it would be more efficient to implement it as a key function (which is evaluated once per item) rather than a cmp funtion (which is evaluated for each pair of items). Fortunately Python compares lists in a similar way to strings, thus making it possible.

 class CustomSorter(object):
    def __init__(self,alphabet):
        self.alphabet=alphabet

    def __call__(self,word):
        head,tail=self.separate(word1)
        key=[self.alphabet.index(head1)]
        if len(tail):
            key.extend(self(tail))
        return key

    def separate(self,word):
        candidates=self.Candidates(word)
        while candidates==[]:
            word=word[1:]
            candidates=self.Candidates(word)
        candidates.sort(key=len)
        head=candidates.pop()
        tail=word[len(head):]
        return head,tail

        def Candidates(self,word):
            return [letter for letter in self.alphabet if word.startswith(letter)]

Lexember

Teliya Nevashi: Chairs, Rebels, and Closing on 600.

Over on Twitter, Mia Soderquist, a fellow conlanger, mentioned that, after 5 years, she finally had a word for "table" in her language, Nevashi. It's a common enough experience - no matter how long you work on a conlang, there are always gaps in the vocabulary. I mentioned that Khangaþyagon has no word for "dog" (I've only been working on the language for about 10 years). Between us we came up with the idea of creating and posting an everyday word each day during December. A few other conlangers wanted to join in, and after a bit of debate, we decided to call it #Lexember. As I write, it's 2 days to kick off, and I'm getting excited about it. It will run in parallel on Google+, under the auspices of the +Conlang Tip Exchange.

One story I'd like to share about how this got started. I saw some seals on TV. I thought, "You know, a seal's face looks a bit like a dog's. The Khangaþyagon for seal should mean sea-dog. That's þoa… bother, no word for dog."

Khangaþyagon on the Conlangery Podcast

Conlangery #73: Khangaþyagon Conlangery Podcast The Conlangery Podcast has just released an episode featuring Khangaþyagon. Unfortunately, timezones meant that I couldn't contribute in person, but George, Mike and David seemed to enjoy talking about my language, even if towards the beginning they went off at more tangents than Tristram Shandy. Mike, in particular, seemed to have enjoyed diving into the depths of the grammar to fish up interesting things to talk about. As Khangaþyagon is a magical language, Harry Potter was inevitably mentioned, which is ironic as dissatisfaction with JK Rowling's "Point your wand and shout Canis Latinitas" magic system was part of the reason I created Khangaþyagon in the first place. There was some amusement that my phonology section specifically points out that there is no schwa. I wrote that bit quite early on. Since I'd based Khangaþyagon's phonology on familiar Germanic models, I thought that might lead people to expect vowel reduction. This brings up my favourite quote from the episode. "Pronounce it like you're really looking forward to chomping down on that apple." Mike noted that 2 dipthongs, æ and œ, are written with ligatures, and David correctly surmized that I would have written them all that way had it been possible. They're all written with ligatures in the Bukhstav. On the subject of the Bukhstav, David's Bukhstav font can be seen in action here and here. mœzawana shuþa ya Davidye. George mentioned that the URL for Khangaþyagon was hard to type, as it had a non-ascii character in it. Surely everyone knows that þ encodes as %7E? What, only people as geeky as me? OK, I've made a redirect. George was interested in the fact that while Khangaþyagon numbers are base 10, multiples of 12 are counted as dozens. This is because 12 has important magical symbolism, and so merits special treatment. I got a bit of kudos for consistently referring to affixes as "segunakar". Anyone who knows David can imagine how pleased I was when he said "They're not morphemes." Khangaþyagon has a very regular, agglutinating morphology, so it's nice to feel that I've avoided some of the potential pitfalls of that. On the subject of affixes, I wonder what the three prefixes the team claim to have discovered are? One of Khangaþyagon's more unusual features, adverbs agreeing with verbs, attracted attention. The team wondered if it would be possible to drop the verb and use the adverb as a verb. That's a brilliant idea, I wish I'd thought of it. If it happened in a descendent, it might lead to the segunak wan being reanalysed as a verb meaning "do something in a given manner." The word yagaazh does have a vowel hiatus in it. That's something that I can imagine changing in descendents. I'll end with the thing that surprised me most about the episode. David, George and Mike managed to talk about Khangaþyagon for an hour without mentioning its noun system. I don't think I could manage that.