We resurrect the podcast with an episode that’s all answering listener feedback. We hope to keep this thing going for a good long time.

Top of Show Greeting: French (translation and recording by Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets)

Emails below the fold:

Hi! I’m a rather bad natlanger. I’m too tempted to make Lojban-ish languages, where things are unambigous and make sense. I often make up languages that have a terminator for relative clauses. I wonder if you know any real languages that have them. There are trailing prepositions, but I don’t if there’s something like “I arrested the man who robbed bank END CLAUSE yesterday.” Some thoughts about Toki Pona. I kinda like it, though I don’t like the philosophy. I think of it more as an artlang that takes pidgin-languages to the extreme. I’m thinking of things like “I want this. You help me.” or “I’m big. You’re small”. They aren’t the most practical way to say these things, but they sound the most pidgin-y to me. Btw, perhaps you could make a show, or a short, about pidgins and creols. I don’t remember if you’ve done so already. Thx for a great show Thomas Lindroth /tʊmːas lɪndrɯːt/

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George, William, and Mike, I wanted to send you guys an email to say that I love the show so far and think you are doing a great job. I have a job where I can listen to my iPod while working so over the past month I have started from the beginning and I have listened all the way to episode 58. I plan on finishing out all the episodes so that I will be current with the show. Thanks for taking so much time to put on a quality podcast that is both entertaining and informative. So I was going to wait until I had listened to all the episodes to comment on anything episode specific for fear that it would become irrelevant. I have a BA in Spanish and quite honestly everytime George mentions Spanish I kind of throw up a little in my mouth (just kidding) and I want to comment on it just to clarify things. Well I couldn’t let this one pass from episode 58 about Middle Voice. What is about to ensue in this email is me taking you to task about Spanish reflexives and the middle voice in general, specifically the verb gustar, and a lot of really just ranting and raving about something that by now is old hat and you probably have better things to do anyway. If you don’t have time to read it now, you can just know that I love the show and can’t wait to catch up on all the episodes. Michael The Middle Voice and Spanish Unfortunately, the majority of low level undergrad Spanish courses are really deficient in this area of grammar, and understandably so, because to give this topic the treatment it deserves you would have to teach some grammatical concepts that are probably too involved for purposes of Spanish 101, 102, or even 201 0r 202. So what usually happens is that se is taught as the reflexive pronoun, that every se construction is reflexive and that anything that is weird or doesn’t quite fit that explanation is just an exception to memorize. A much more cohesive explanation involves defining se as the Spanish middle voice marker. You can read a paper about this here: http://ricardomaldonado.weebly.com/uploads/2/7/6/3/2763410/maldonado_spanish_middle_pedag.pdf if you want a more detailed explanation. For now, just realize that in Spanish the middle voice is will be used to reflect a change in state, either positionally, mentally, emotionally, etc. This jives with William’s cross-linguistic description of middle voice. My first comment would be that you can actually do a test in Spanish to see if a particular verb is middle voice or reflexive. The test is adding the prepositional phrase “a + mí/tí/sí mismo.” The middle voice constructions will either change meaning or not make sense, while the reflexive constructions will just focus on the agent/patient. Let me give you some examples: Es cierto, respetas a él, pero no te respetas at tí mismo. In the previous example, “a tí mismo” serves to contrast against “a èl.” This is reflexive. Compare these two statements: Me enfermé *Me enfermé a mí mismo. The second sentence is ungrammatical. The first sentence means roughly “I got sick” while the second presumably is trying to say something like “I made myself sick.” To express that in spanish, you would have to use hacer. “Me hice enfermo/a.” A final example: Me paré. Me paré a mí mismo. In this usage, pararse means “to stand up.” Now the first example is middle voice, indicating a change in bodily posture (this happens with sentarse, acostarse, etc.). But when you apply the test the meaning changes to something akin to a paraplegic physically lifting their body into a standing position, and that would probably only be understood within that specific context. So the first comment was a clarification about Spanish in general. The second comment concerns gustar. Gustar is neither reflexive nor middle voice! “Me gusta la guitarra” just means that “the guitar pleases me.” This is a simple, basic Spanish sentence with a simple subject and direct object pronoun. That’s it! No middle voice here. No reflexive. Just normal active voice. If you have a question about it feel free to email me.

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Thanks for helping clear up, the difference between agglutinating, synthetic & poly-synthetic languages for me. The stuff about Noun-incorporation was pretty cool. I also liked your examples differentiating verb-compounding vs verb serializing. After some follow up reading on Wikipedia, I know understand Mandarin verbs much better. This was another excellent Conlangery episode. I still believe all your Natural language & general linguistics episodes are the best. But then again, that could be because I am only interested in Natlangs & linguistics :- ) Btw, you folks should post your episodes on Reddit – http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics I am sure lots of folks would be interested.

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Hay guys, I finally got around to listening to Episode #87, and I find it disappointing that George and William are not opera fans. Of course, maybe that’s because I discovered my love of language learning and developed a serious drive to conlang not through language study, but rather through studying opera. True, you can’t take an aria’s performance and expect to get any linguistic knowledge out of it, but it’s easy to find the text itself. In learning arias, art songs and Lieder (German art songs, a genre on its own), I’ve forgone the traditional “Google it” approach and gotten out my dictionary to translate the text myself. Doing so has taught me much about the internal workings of each of the languages. Regarding “il mio cuore”, the possessive adjective “il mio” is used almost universally. But when talking about a family member, you don’t use it. This can be evidenced in a beautiful operatic aria, YouTube link below. “O mio babbino caro” (Oh my dear Daddy) is a song about a stubborn teenager who’s pleading with her father, “Oh, my dear Daddy, I love him! I want to go to Porta Rossa and buy the ring! If you don’t let me marry him, I’ll…I’ll throw myself off the Ponte Vecchio into the river!” Most beautiful temper tantrum ever. Also, one of my favorite arias is “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” (“My lady, this is a list”, or “The Catalog Aria”) from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. Here, Leplorello cautions Donna Elvira about his master’s many, many lovers: “In Italy, six hundred and forty; In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; But in Spain already one thousand and three.” I do concede that when looking at opera of any kind, it’s important to have the text in front of you for reference, especially if you don’t speak the language. These pieces were originally written to be understood as easily as the text of “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” from My Fair Lady. That’s why I always have subtitles on when I watch “Die Zauberflöte” (which I highly recommend). Most people give opera a bad rap because they immediately picture a Wagnerian soprano singing unintelligibly in Italian (even though they’re thinking of a scene from “Gotterdämmerung”, which is in German). If they took some time to study it a bit, I think they’d come to like it in spite of the stigma of opera being stuffy, rich people music that’s written mostly in foreign languages (John Adams’ opera “Nixon in China” notwithstanding). tl;dr – Because studying opera and art song was what made me discover my passion for language learning, I can say from experience that studying opera, and especially translating opera in order to sing it sincerely, is a good way to study how other languages work, at least in poetry. Renee Fleming – O mio babbino caro (text) Bryn Terfel – Madamina, il catalogo è questo (text)

(The Klingon opera William referenced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/’u’)

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Conglangeristas: After listening to the latest episode, I think an episode about naming languages would be a great idea. I wanted to point you to a blog post I wrote a while ago about creating a naming language for one of my stories, as it contains some general remarks about naming languages and may be interesting or useful for forming your own episode: http://jsbangs.com/2012/05/15/yakhat-a-naming-language/ Happy conlanging! — JS Bangs

http://jsbangs.wordpress.com “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” -Philo of Alexandria

Wm: this quote isn’t actually by Philo — http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/

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