Basic sentence order:
Subject Verb Object: how are those ordered
SVO
SOV
VSO
VOS ….
S: NP VP
subject V object
NP VP
VP NP
syntax: how you build phrases from other phrases
phrases have heads (the most important/central parts)
NP: N
VP: V
AP: A
where do the heads go in their phrases?
initial (start) prefix
final (end) suffix
medial (middle) infixShould we do one lang first, or both at the same time:
one first: thumbs up 77
both at same time: thumbs down 42
Fire first or water
fire: thumbs up 80
water: thumbs down 30
Should the two languages have different basic headedness orders?
yes: up 85
no: down 24
Fire slug
left (leave in the past) slug+NOM see bird+ACC
leave-TENSE slug-CASE see CASE-bird
subject case is after the N, object case is before the noun
will leave (leave in the future)
TENSE-leaveS → VP NP
NP VP: up 84 53 subject at start (like 80-90% of langs)
VP NP: down 20 70
VP → V NP
V NP up 70
NP V down 24
NP → D AP N
N AP D up 46
D AP N down 60
AP → A ADV
A ADV up 75
ADV A down 36
Slugs [VP like very honest insects]
like honest very insects slugs
[V like] [NP very honest insects]
honest very insects
Water slug
S → NP VP
VP → NP V
NP → N AP D
AP → ADV A
WATER: slugs insects very honest the like
FIRE: like the honest very insects slugs
05.17 meeting
Verbal morphology
We decided to go with past/pres/fut
FIRE WATER
past
pres
fut
fef ‘to swim’
swam (past) pe
pe-fef prefix
fef-pe suffix
fepef infix
Should both fire and water slug languages have the same placement of tense morphology?
same: thumbs up [YES]
different: down
Should the different tenses have the same placement
same: thumbs up 53
different: down 63
Same morpheme and it’s placement is tense:
past pe-fef
present fe-pe-f
future fef-pe
Do you like this proposal:
Yes: up 81
No: down 41
Same morpheme and it’s placement is tense:
past pe-fef
present fef
future fef-pe
Do you like this proposal:
Yes: up 110
No: down 10
Should one slug have infixes and the other not?
Yes: up 30
No: down 80
The TAs will come up with this morpheme.
Should water and fire reverse where past goes? [TAs will decide]
Yes: up 61
No: down 42
Should the languages use the same agreement characteristics or not?
Same: Up 77
Different: Down 24
What type? [TAs decide]
person: up 40
number: down 12
both: clap 70
Nominal morphology
Noun number:
singular (exactly 1)
plural (more than 1)
dual (exactly 2)
collective (a lot)
Three approaches:
singular & collective: up 61
singular & dual & collective: down 57
singular & dual: clap 1
What if one slug has dual and the other doesn’t?
Thumbs up: 80
Down: 25
FIRE has dual: up 54 TAs will vote
WATER has dual: down 62Cases:
nominative (subjects) & accusative (objects): 86
Noun classes: 70, 3 say no
fire slugs
water slugs
fire language:
xxx
water language:
xxx
For 05.17 Meeting
Our morphology survey had some strong consensus. Here are the results.
For tense people said:
future/non-future (12%)
no tense (18%)
past/non-past (17%)
present/non-present (21%)
past/present/future (52%)
For tense form, people said:
infix (3%)
circumfix (8%)
none (17%)
prefix (27%)
suffix (44%)
For agreement, people said:
none (19%)
noun class (37%)
number (47%)
person (60%)
For noun number, people said:
paucal (9%)
none (11%)
collective (32%)
dual (36%)
plural (61%)
singular (61%)
For noun case, people said:
none (17%)
dative (25%)
genitive (37%)
accusative (57%)
nominative (70%)
For noun class, people said:
none (11%)
phonology (23%)
biological gender (27%)
conceptual category (27%)
animacy (55%)
For ideas, look here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14mubW-byNC1V-vfRDYMkE6EiTHI-j6F0t9c8HGKO9p8/edit?usp=sharing
04.26 Meeting
Our survey of consonant types wasn’t very helpful. Basically, everything was 40% or above, but nothing was above 66%. If I do what’s above 50%, this is it:
places: bilabial (66%), velar (54%)
manners:
voiced stops (66%)
voiceless stops (60%)
voiced fricatives (61%)
voiceless fricatives (51%)
glides (51%)
So I think we’ll have to do this all fresh.
I also put up your more open-ended comments here. Some of them are very general, but there ones that specifically mentioned slugs, so I’ve separated those out.
There was also a lot of thinking about what should be in the slug languages last time. You can find those at the end of the document too.
Fire slugs
Emotional/Dispositional: aggressive, fast, violent, self-centered
Physiological: smoky, fiery, big, red/orange/black, structurally changeable (magma to rock)
aggressive, violent
velar sounds
fricatives
fast/fiery
voiceless fricatives
rhotics (r)
big
labials, d, g, l
Water slugs
Emotional/Dispositional: peaceful, smooth
Physiological: bioluminescent, water-absorbing, hermaphrodites, nocturnal
peaceful
• glides (w, j)
• liquids (l, r)
• labials
• voiceless fricatives
• nasals
silky, soft, smooth, slippery, slimy
s like sounds (s, θ,ʃ)
glides
hemaphroditic, pansexual, asexual….
voiceless affricates (ts, more exotic ones)
nocturnal
voiceless
palatals, uvulars
clicks
• k
• Xx
• K
• T
• Unvoiced, aspirated stops, affricates and fricatives. Preferably
• Z
• X
• K
• K – voiced stops
• K, L, X, V, R
• B
• F, K,
• J
• K
• K
• Voiced and voiceless labial, alvelar, and velar stops.
• K
• X
• H
• D
• T
• S
• D
• ∫
• H
• R
• S
• S
• S-hissing sounds
big
labials (b, m)
d, g, l
• bilabial
• X
• B?
• D
• D
• S
• S
• voiced
• S
• G
• G
• G
• D
• G
• S
• Voiced stops and long with either long back vowels.
fast
voiceless fricatives (s, f, theta)
rhotics (r sounds)
• X
• S
• ?
• x
• S
• S
• S
•
• V
• F
• V
• R
• r(trill/rolled)
• X – fricative, velar
• S
• Fricatives like x, ʃ, s, z
smoky, fiery
voiceless fricatives (s, f, theta)
rhotics (r sounds)
• θ
04.12 Meeting
From our survey:
• 57% wanted an artlang
• 32% wanted an auxlang
• 10% wanted an englang
I looked over the artlang comments and roughly classified them. You can find them all here.
I think we are doing a language for aliens, since of the 356 artlang voters, 38% mentioned those. The next biggest category was fantasy, with 7%. There was a bigger push for a variety of aesthetic criteria (basically, sounds nice) at 10%, but that’s logically independent.
We then discussed aliens vs. other ideas, and aliens lost. After a series of votes, we settled on slugs.
What type of slug? The following summarizes our various ideas:
Elementals: fire, air, earth, water
Chimeras: dragon, fairy, unicorn, angel, ogre, zombie/undead, centaur
Plant: mushroom, some plant
Other: alien, horror
Characteristics: magical, fly, horns, shapeshifting
You can find all the ideas at the end of this document, here.
After voting, we saw a tie between fire and water slugs, so we decided to keep both.
We then had to decide how the fire and water slugs related, if at all. We considered 4 options:
different species (incl. sister species)
different social category
different biological category
different speech communities (dialects)
There was a tie between social and biological categories of the same species. So we need to figure out a way to make this work.
We then discussed characteristics of the slug types. Here are the ideas:
Fire slugs
Emotional/Dispositional: aggressive, fast, violent, self-centered
Physiological: smoky, fiery, big, red/orange/black, structurally changeable (magma to rock)
Water slugs
Emotional/Dispositional: peaceful, smooth
Physiological: bioluminescent, water-absorbing, hermaphrodites, nocturnal
fire slugs
Emotional/Dispositional
• Aggressive
• Fast and aggressive
• Self-Centered – high worth of individual status and rank
• Violent and Aggressive
Physiological
• Leaves a trail of fire
• Huge fireballs
• Smokey boys
• Big and red/orange and pink
• Big and black
• Smoke signals
• Cycle between being magma and hardened rock
Linguistic
• Smoke sounds
• A lot of breathy sounds
• Their words sound like fire crackling and spitting: [c] [s]
o I like this idea, fire has a sharper dialect and water has a softer/more flowing one
o Harsh-sounding
o Spicy slug food
o Blow smoke shapes to illustrate their speech
• Fire slugs are elusive and hard to find – their language is guttural and difficult to understand and sounds like fire
• Crackly – like the crackle of a bonfire
• Very short, quick sentence structures
• Speak in a rhyming or poetic manner, albeit somewhat rap like
o I dig this
• Dank breath
• Almost as fire as my
• Attitude is fiery/heated and language has “spitting” quality to it, flat and sharp so ending in consonants (probably lots of dental/alveolar sounds) Also dry quality, maybe hoarse
• Energetic, and deep sounds – similar to Dothraki
o agree
• Almost as fire as my diss track
• Sharper words with barbaric notes “sh, kr, tr, Sthr,” pretty much sanskrit-russian-german sounds?
• Lots of plosive sounds
• Ends each message with a puff of smoke.
• Magma/Lava sounds?
• Rash, quick
• Words are harsh
• End in ahh sounds
• A two-part language:
o Their everyday dialect/speech: (maybe I should move this part to the Water section) A fey, haunting, lilting sound and rhythm to the language. Like a thin trail of smoke on the wind, like the faint crackle of a distant fire.
o But their Ceremonial/traditional dialect: loud, explosive, filled with plosives and guttural sounds. The flame. The spark. The explosion. Not aggressive, but definitely lends itself to passion and excitement.
• Crackling bc they eat burn
• t treesToo hot to touch
• Rough, commanding
• Fire slugs are hot and their language should be harsh sounding because fire is dangerous
• Fire slugs talk slow just like their movement
• Aggressive, guttural sounds
• Similar to the “barbarian” language some of us made last week
• The fire it breathes out forms into the words that its saying
• Certain combinations of words create a fire magic spell
It sounds like these are gonna be two different languages, what if they were the same language with different ways to pronounce the words?
water slugs
Emotional/Dispositional
• Smooth, peaceful
Physiological
• Nocturnal
• Bioluminescent
• Musical, water, ish
• Uses echolocation to communicate slightly (whale-like? Whistle tones)
• Endosymbiosis with a photosynthesizing algae (Elysia slug!)
• Can absorb water and increase size by 5X body size
• All are functional hermaphrodites
o Gender pronouns are complicated
o NO GENDER HERE
• BLOOP BLOOP
• Can absorb water and release it fast as a weapon
• Eats a whole bunch of seagrass and algae
•
Linguistic
• Non-honorific language that has the Object before the Subject because they’re that considerate of others before themselves
• Words are backwards compared to fire slugs (eg. hello vs. olleh)
• Water sounds, sloshing
• WOOP WOOP
• Precambrian era, ancient
• Soothing like the sound of waves with lots of “sh”
• Write in circles
• Peaceful and Calm sounds
• II
• Smooth, flowing sounds
• Mellifluous
• Ien
• lsh
• Flowy sounds, lots of sibilants and fricatives and glides, maybe some fluid motion splash type biospecific sounds as well, diphthongs?
• HSissdsH
• Om
• Speak with umlaut sounds for vowels, gurgle when laughing, disdain for wasting water
• Fd
• Fluid sounds, preferably common syllables that have to use the front part of the mouth instead of using the throat to “hack up” syllables for sounds
• Dfrequencies
• Language could be sounds that would travel well underwater (low frequencies)
• Water having an influence on the sounds they make
• Smooth, clear sounds. With “zzi zzi” sounds
• Sounds similar to water droplets
• A lot of “sh”
• Language fluid sounds like waves and rivers
• Fluid sounds, roll off the tongue. Maybe resemblant of French. Lots of L and S sounds.
• Peaceful, tranquil sounding language.
• Some sounds song like. Long vowels.
• Wowowowshackalingoooo = hello
• Hand clapping ties in with verbal language.
• language is flowing and calm, sometimes turbulent depending on the situation
• Becomes invisible because it becomes water
• Loud and obnoxious
• Water sp
• Water slugs’ Favorite drink is cream soda!!!!! Sounds loud and can sing
• Able to be a liquid which in any form (also change their color)
• Waves
• More flowy sounding language that sounds more calming and dragged out vowels
• SLUG THAT PROJECTILE VOMITS WATER
• Has a lisp
• Sounds like alarms in the morning
• Smooth
Lashing
Musical sound
No harsh sound
sLotseas
of S’s
Ability of illusion
•lots of sh sounds
• Lots of voiced sounds
• Backwards words
• Every letter starts with an F
• Piano music emits from it
Sounds like boba and/or bubbles sloshing around blub blub blub slug slug slug
• Ancient, pre-cambrian beings
• Calm and peaceful language
o agreed
•
• Look like nudibranchs
• Mostly fricatives or trills
• Vowels are mostly back of the mouth
• Helps during fire accidents.
• Prediction
• Lots of tongue used
• Words that flow. Lots of ‘la, li, lu” sounds.
• able to use hydro pump
• Mouth popping noises
• Smoother sounds-glides?
• Aesthetically pleasing sounds
• Gurgling noisesL
• Lot of accents in the language
• Has “flow”to it
• Abnormal
• Leaves a trail of water
• They sound like the ocean, it has waves in the way it talks
• Dorsal sounds like a mouth full of water, definitely a lot of vowels
• Maybe some whale l
• ike low freq
• Hissing sounds
• Musical sounding
• Syllables have “shwa” sounds like water
• Sounds that flow
• Angelic
Sample Solution
