Presentation Title
Author
Can you make your own language?
Language and Culture
Ling Link
- Are you a fan of science fiction? Great! Name as many fictional languages that belong to (science) fictional universes!
- This might be in books, movies, television, comics, video games, etc.
- Even if you aren’t a fan, can you list some?
- Spend a minute talking to your partner about what you know about conlangs (we’ll talk about this term soon!)
- Bragging on UK Linguistics: You’ll see a bit about my colleague later, but one of our undergrads went on to co-create Torfan, a language spoken by the inhabitants of Torfa in the movie Captain Marvel !
Media
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/04/linguistics-students-create-language-captain-marvel (story about Joseph Rhyne)
Recall
- We’re focusing on the interaction of language and (pop) culture
- Language and the media = mediators between worlds!
- Language and movies – storytelling, dialect coaches
- To talk about those, we needed to talk about
- Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology
- Cognition and learning theory
- What’s most important about this unit is that nothing we do with language is detached from the rest of what’s going on around us – including our bodies, our societies, and our pop worlds!
Create your own?
- One of the key things we have said about language is that it is acquired , which suggests something that happens to a human naturally
- Languages that are used in the “real world” are called natural languages (sometimes natlang for short)
- But, in “fictional world(s)”, we may run across constructed languages (or conlangs for short)
- Conlangs are any language that has been consciously created
- These might be like Dothraki from Game of Thrones or various languages in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, for example
- We can also call these kind of languages fictional languages
- Not all conlangs are just in fictional worlds though – languages like Esperanto exist
Q slide
Did you or you and your friend/sibling/cousin ever try to make up a language?
A little plug…
We actually teach a whole class on this!!
LIN 200: How to create your own language
Fulfills UK Core Arts and Creativity requirement
And can be your other LIN course for C&I majors
We regularly offer sections in person and online; fall, spring, and summer!
Q slide
Are you planning to sign up for LIN 200 next semester?
Yes, I’m already signed up
Yes, I plan to
No, I already took it
No, I’m taking a different linguistics class
Maybe, just not next semester
Probably not, but I don’t want to hurt Dr. Cramer’s feelings…
Why would we make our own?
- Aside from the Hollywood angle, one might make another language to:
- Help make communication easier (like making what’s called an international auxiliary language , which can be used by people who speak other languages when they need to communicate; kind of like a lingua franca ) = Esperanto
- Experiment with what is possible within the areas of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning
- Make a game! As a hobby!
- As we’ll see, they require a lot of work, so very few gain a lot of traction beyond their original creation reason
- Esperanto has gained a bit of ground over time, but no other planned languages have really caught on
- With the advent of the internet, fans have been more particular about having “good” languages in their films and shows (and will drag producers online if they don’t)
- Think about our “bits and pieces” we’ve been discussing
- Sounds
- Rules about sounds
- Morphemes
- Rules about morphemes
- Sentence structure
- Rules about sentence structure
- Pragmatics
- Writing system (maybe)
- Etc., etc., etc.
What do you need?
- Here is just a small list of things you would need to decide about your language:
- Which consonants/vowels?
- How do you make syllables?
- What are the rules about putting sounds together?
- Is your language stress-based or tonal?
- How would someone know you were asking a question?
- What parts of speech?
- What are the words?
- How do you mark nouns for number/gender/role?
- Do adjectives agree?
- Does it have articles like “the” and “a”?
- How do you conjugate verbs?
- Do you mark tense/aspect/mood?
- What is your language’s word order?
Think about it…
Media
To be a language…
- You need a self-contained sound system that is distinct from other languages
- This is why “Pig Latin” isn’t really a different language
- You need a self-contained word/sentence system that is distinct from other languages
- Also why “Pig Latin” isn’t a different language
- It must be systematic…
- Ubese ( Star Wars )
- Yaté __ __ yaté __ __ yotó .
- I have come for the bounty on this Wookie.
- Yotó __ __ yotó .
- 50,000, no less.
And…
- Your language will inevitably be embedded in some kind of culture
- When a character in a movie uses another language, it is because that person is being represented as belonging to that culture
- Like with our discussion of movies, it is important to the character development
- And it shouldn’t be random! There will be aspects of your culture that matter to your language
- Ex. If your culture is very focused on politeness, your language will need to have built-in ways to show deference, kind of like Japanese does
- Ex. If you want to represent a hierarchical society, you will have standard/proper dialects spoken by those in higher positions and non-standard versions spoken by people in lower positions
Media
Writing system
- We already talked about the fact that
- Not all languages are written
- Writing is learned, not acquired
- There are many ways to represent language in writing
- Writing must represent language (not pictograms)
- What does this mean for a conlang?
- You can use a pre-existing writing system!
- You can make it up altogether!
- Remember – the squiggles we make to represent English are just as arbitrary as any other way to represent language!
- Must be systematic!
Media
- Remember – last class, we were talking about whether actors are good at doing dialects
- We said that this matters for the sake of a believable story, even in cases where what is going on is not like our own real worlds
- E.g., we need someone who “sounds” like they could come from Africa in a story told about a fictional world where people have super high-tech weapons that we can’t even begin to dream about making in the real world
- So, in certain fictional worlds, it will make the most sense for a culture to have its own language
- And, again, the fan base for many of these fictional universes is huge, vocal, and online
- The success/failure of a franchise may lie in the conlang!
- Ok, so Star Wars had bad ones, and they did fine! But those movies (originally) pre-date the internet
- Things like Game of Thrones were more successful because fans got on board with the languages!
Who cares?
What’s next?
- Wednesday we will talk about animals!
- “Do animals have language?”
- Read “LA Times 2018” PDF in Canvas
- Quiz 12 in recitation on Friday (last one!)
- Extra credit
- Data Analysis
- Evaluations
Organization