Week 1 is in the books! Your task this weekend is to complete the first step of your final project. For reading, we’ll be preparing to jump straight into nominal morphology. In so doing, I’ve assigned two readings on iconicity, in addition to the AoLI selection. Iconicity is a really awesome and really important concept we’ll be discussing more next week, but I wanted to give you some background reading on it. Having said that, both pieces are fairly long, and, in spots, fairly complex. Basically, I want you to read the beginning of the Haiman paper to get the gist of what he’s saying, then maybe look at the Dingemanse, et al. paper, which is much shorter, and especially take a look at the tables/figures at the end. Some interesting ideas there!

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• Arthur S. Abramson “The Plausibility of Phonetic Explanations of Tonogenesis”
• Graham Thurgood “Vietnamese and Tonogenesis: Revising the Model and the Analysis”

Links

• Dothraki Blog
• Dothraki Wiki
• The Dritok Language by Don Boozer
• AoLI Video on Register Tone Languages

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 97-112
• John Haiman “Iconic and Economic Motivation” [PDF] (Optional)
• Mark Dingemanse, Damián E. Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten H. Christiansen, Padraic Monaghan “Arbitrariness, Iconicity and Systematicity in Language” [PDF] (Optional)

Practice

• Find a natlang grammar on Wikipedia that has a section related to nominal number morphology. Find one that distinguishes something other than singular vs. plural and post it to our Slack in the #morphology channel.

Mastery

• MA 2: The Phonology of Your Language

Backburner

• Since your phonology is set, why not start generating some roots? Think about what would make good word forms in your language. It’ll be great to have a cache of these on hand as we move forward!

Today we talked about sound change, which sets the stage for stuff like stress and tone. Sound change is the cause of—and solution to—all your problems. I know there was a lot of material today, but the important takeaways are the major types of sound changes (assimilations, dissimilations, lenitions, fortitions, deletions, insertions), and the principles that underlie them. Often when creating a language you have to make up your own sound changes, whether they ever existed or not. Keep that in mind when you look at your homework tonight!

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• The Kahtsaai Language by William Annis
• Index Diachronica

Links

• Sound Change Article on Wikipedia
• FrathWiki List of Sound Changes
• Lenition (This one’s particularly good!)
• Online Index Diachronica

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 66-78
• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 89-96

Practice

• Scour Wikipedia or other sources and find an interesting sound change, and post it to our #evolution channel. (This should help with the homework!)

Mastery

• Mastery Assignment (MA) 1: Sound Change

Backburner

• Continue examining the first stage of your final project.

Today we went over the principles of allophony and sound system organization. Here’s the relevant stuff:

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• Distinctive Features Chart
• Natlang, Conlang, or Gibberish? (Phonology Edition)

Links

• Resources for Typing iPA
• The Lands of Ice and Fire
• The Kēlen Language by Sylvia Sotomayor

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 61-66
• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 79-87 (Optional)
• AoLI Chapter 3, pp. 163-178

Practice

• Find a natlang phonology on Wikipedia and post a link to it on Slack in the #phonology channel, along with a sentence or two explaining what’s interesting about it.
• Select your region from The Lands of Ice and Fire and post it on Slack. You can change your mind, but have one selected by the beginning of our next class period. (As a reminder, students can do the same one! This will just mean that you’ll have two variants arising from the same source!)

Mastery

• (None Today)

Backburner

• Take a look at the first section of your final project, and start thinking about questions you have on it.

First day of class done, so now we’re really going to get into it! Tomorrow we start discussing phonology in depth, so there’s some prep work I’d like you to do for that. In addition, there are a couple of bits of background/course function things I’d like you to do—among them familiarize yourself with the course blog, which you’re currently doing. To that end, each day after class a new blog post will go up. It will have materials for you to download that I gave out during class, and will have assignments for next class. Here’s what that looks like:

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Course Syllabus
• Class Slides

Links

• Rikchik (Tentacle Language) by Denis Moskowitz
• Language Creation Society Homepage
• FrathWiki
• Wiki of Ice and Fire
• Fiat Lingua
• IPA Chart with Sound Files

Assignments

Reading

• The Art of Language Invention (hereafter AoLI) Introduction (Optional)
• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 25-60

Practice

• Set up your Slack account, sign in to our course Slack, and introduce yourself.
• Assessment Test

Mastery

• (None Today)

Backburner

• Start looking over the language options for your final assignment here.

Welcome to Linguistics 183! Class is Monday through Thursday, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:50 p.m. in Moffitt 106. (Note that there is no class on May 29, on account of Veteran’s Day.) Links to readings and assignments will be posted here. There will be a new post for every class period. If you ever have any questions, please email me. Hajas!