In this post I’m merging two topics – conlanging and phonetics/phonology – into one, because if I split them it would be hard to know where to put the information relevant to both. This post contains website recommendations on both subjects.
My interest in linguistics developed largely as an offshoot of the hobby of conlanging – the creative endeavour in which practitioners invent a fictional language (or part thereof). My introduction to the online conlanging scene was a process rather than a single event, so there is no one person I can thank for it all, but it was Irena Rempt who introduced me to the Conlang mailing list and quite a lot followed on from there.
I knew Irena via online Terry Pratchett fandom, viz. alt.fan.pratchett. She and her husband Boudewijn offered hospitality to my family and me when we visited the Netherlands, as part of our holiday in Europe in 2000. I was already vaguely aware that Boudewijn was involved in conlanging, because I’d spotted his name in conlanging-related contexts on the Internet, so on the train from Deventer (where the Rempts live) to Utrecht (where a meeting of Terry Pratchett fans was scheduled) I raised the topic with Irena. It turned out they were both active conlangers and – as I said above – she directed me to the Conlang mailing list.
[Update June 2007: I have decided to add the following photograph of my family with the Rempts in February 2000. I am also making quite a few other changes to this post, mostly by incorporating links and other information previously contained only on my website.]
I’m not active on the mailing list anymore, mostly because I haven’t worked my conlang in a long time. I was never a dedicated conlanger, more of a dabbler in all things creative, and I never developed a language to the point where it could be used for communication. For me, the delight of conlanging lay mostly in the invention of grammar – thinking laterally about the fundamental rules by which an exotic language might operate. For example, my own creation (“Gzarondan”) makes extensive use of what linguists call nominal clausal TAM (which I invented independently). Another (much better) conlang with a grammatical focus is Kelen by Sylvia Sotomayor. Other people design conlangs with a very different emphasis, for example some (including Irena) are motivated by the invention of a fictional culture, into which the language breathes life and realism, and some are interested in the languages of an alternative history of Earth (e.g. see Brithenig by Andrew Smith). While you’re browsing conlangs, don’t forget to check out the languages of Tolkien.
A useful resource for people wishing to get started in conlanging is Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit, which is an excellent tutorial for beginners. Its main weaknesses are that the section on phonetics can be confusing if you don’t share Mark’s accent (I might have understood the vowel diagram sooner had the word “suit” not been labelled quite so far back in the mouth) and that the section on relative clauses is sketchy. When you’re ready to discuss your attempts at conlanging with other hobbyists, you might consider joining the Zompist bboard. Alternatively, the Conlang mailing list can be subscribed to (assuming nothing has changed since I was there) by sending an email to listserv@listserv.brown.edu with subscribe CONLANG your name in the body. Messages for the list should be sent to conlang@listserv.brown.edu.
The Conlang mailing list has its own flag, displayed below. It shows the sun on the horizon behind a layered tower. The colours represent creative energy, and the layers of the tower imply that a conlang is built piece by piece, never completed. The tower itself also alludes to the Tower of Babel, as it has long been a tradition to demonstrate a constructed language by translating the Babel legend. The Conlang flag was decided on by a vote between many competing designs, and one of my own contributions to the conlanging world is that I was the person who facilitated this election. The winning design was drawn by Christian Thalmann, who introduced the layers. The idea of including the Tower of Babel on the flag had been introduced by Jan van Steenbergen, and the idea of placing the sun on the horizon behind it by Leland Paul. The idea of having the rising sun on the flag had been introduced by David Peterson, who saw it as representing the rise of conlanging from obscurity to popularity and notoriety.
Outside of conlanging, much of my interest in linguistics is focussed on phonetics. I take an interest in differences between people’s pronunciations of words, especially vowels (consonants are less interesting in English), and this is an interest that can be pursued whenever people speak. There’s a page on the Macquarie University website about Australian vowels, but it’s based only on data from speakers near Sydney, not from across the country, and I’ll dedicate a future post to instances where I differ or disagree with the information there.
Personally, I dislike the terms “high” and “low” for describing vowels. I find them unintuitive, because the important thing is the gap between the tongue and the palate, not the absolute position of the tongue. I find it far more intuitive to use “open” to mean “high” and “closed” to mean “low”. There are various transcription schemes used to represent symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII text; two of the most famous are X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum, but the Conlang list invented its own variant known as CXS. This is a modified and improved version of X-SAMPA, taking some of its inspiration from Kirshenbaum, and is the transcription scheme I prefer. CXS is almost the same as X-SAMPA, but circumvents some problems with the latter such as the difficulty of remembering which is which between } and {.
- The central closed unrounded vowel is i\ instead of 1
- The central closed rounded vowel is u\ instead of }
- The vowel as in English cat is & instead of {
- The front open rounded vowel is &\ instead of &
- There are a few options for indicating stress, of which I strongly favour (‘) for primary stress and (,) for secondary stress
For learning about phonetics and phonology, the best source is J. C. Catford, which I’ve recommended before. Internet resources will help you realise whether you’re interested enough, and perhaps give you a working knowledge, but they won’t substitute for a good book.
Additional relevant websites from my bookmarks, other than those mentioned above, include:
- Studying phonetics on the net, an index of websites most of which I have not browsed myself.
- Speech internet dictionary, a good glossary of terms
- (X-)SAMPA to IPA translator, for creating an image of an IPA transcription given the equivalent representation in X-SAMPA.
[Update June 2007: I have since discovered this very useful Unicode-enabled IPA chart.]
On my computer, I have a copy of Praat. (I don’t recommend this for beginners, though.)
