linguistic(s) education through constructed languages
Elen Karadeniz (This is a guest blog by a student on Queen Mary's Constructing a Language course, with an interesting philosophical angle.) Descartes was deeply interested in language. What would he have made of Papašajem? “there is a great difference between a mind and a body, because the body, by its very nature, is something …
Continue reading "I think, therefore I am: The representation of dualism in Papašajem"
(This is a piece I wrote for Issue 26 (Summer 2021) of Teaching English, the magazine of the National Association for Teaching English (NATE). The full version with the pretty pictures is in the mag itself!) Linguists typically spend their time analysing languages. We try to work out what makes them tick, how they differ …
Continue reading "Creating Languages: Invented Languages in the Classroom"
By Maya Kilgariff Based on a project for the QMUL Linguistics Constructing a Language course Fejasi Speakers! When creating a constructed language, it can be quite tempting to make it as original as possible, making choices that would be odd, or even unheard of, in natural languages in order to create a language that feels …
Continue reading "Getting creative: the benefits of a backstory"
How inventing languages helps us understand the psychology of language. Hash yer dothrae chek asshekh? This is how you ask someone how they are in Dothraki, one of the languages David Peterson invented for the phenomenally successful Game of Thrones series. It is an idiom in Peterson’s constructed language, meaning, roughly “Do you ride well today?” It captures the …
Continue reading "What Invented Languages Can Tell Us About Human Language"
When putting a lot of work into building an interesting conlang, I think it is important to have a way to show off the way everything fits together. You have to balance the way the language sits within its constructed world with its own linguistic properties. One way that I have highlighted the interesting properties …
Continue reading "The writing system of XXiiaaxi: Connecting a world with its language"
The thought of making up a new language out of thin air can be quite intimidating. Where do I start? What should words sound like? It's also quite difficult to block the languages you speak from seeping into your constructed language. For example, suppose you want to create a word for "food", but the first …
Continue reading "Starting up (and spicing up!) your conlang: avoidance languages"
How was the first human language structured? [This is a sequel to a previous blog about creating an oral language for a fictional tribe of early humans.] Part one of this blog post ended with me boarding a plane, script in hand to be translated, and an idea of the sound system of the language …
Continue reading "The (invented) language of early humans: Part II"
What might the first human language have sounded like? Last year I was involved in a project with Maggie Tallerman and Coppe van Urk, part of which involved creating an oral language for a fictional early modern human (Homo sapiens) tribe. The project in the end didn’t pan out (I’ve learned that in the world …
Continue reading "The (invented) language of early humans: Part I"
Last week was a busy week at Queen Mary Linguistics. Coppe van Urk and I ran a week long summer school aimed at Year 10 students from schools in East and South London on Constructing a Language. We were brilliantly assisted by two student ambassadors (Dina and Sharika) who, although their degrees are in literature rather than linguistics, are …
Continue reading "How to teach linguistics to school students"
Early in 2015, I was sitting in my office, reading a student’s thesis, and the phone rang. It was a TV company, with an odd request. “Could you”, the producer on the line asked, “make up a language or two for us?” The TV series was a version of Beowulf, the Old English Epic, which ITV was …
Continue reading "Ur-Hag Hesh: the language of Beowulf’s Warig"
Creating Languages 