Hey guys,I came across your podcast a few of weeks ago on iTunes

serendipitously and just wanted to let you know that I’ve been

heartily enjoying it! I had been meaning to write in just to voice my

appreciation, but then ep #33: Supersegmentals just happened to hit

upon what happened to be the very subject matter of my Master’s

Thesis; namely, derivation of phonemic tone inventories in natural

languages, with field work on Mandarin. And while working with my

collected data that I had specifically observed the tendency for low

tone (i.e. tone 3) in Mandarin to be realized by many speakers,

especially in continuous speech, as creaky voice! And, just as Bianca

mentioned, the hell that wrought in trying to get usable frequency

data from spectrograms of the recordings I had made with my native

consultants! Anyhow, it gave me a good laugh.My main area of research used to be Phonology (though with a heavy

dash of phonetics) and Syntax (very close to the very fuzzy border

with morphology). I had gotten as far as completing a Linguistics

Master’s degree from University of California, Santa Cruz when I took

a “short break” from linguistics, graduate school and academics in

general about ten years ago, but in the mean time sort of accidentally

ended up a professional programmer. Your podcast has gotten me digging

up my old attempts at constructed languages, as well as re-interested

me in my old linguistics work, and, incidentally, LaTeX. From what

I’ve seen since looking at the examples you’ve featured, my humble

artlangs wouldn’t really qualify as much more than sketches, honestly.

Plus, being designed for the use of non-linguists they were

necessarily simplified and restrained from what I might have otherwise

done. Although the content is unchanged from their last being worked

on in ’98 (before grad school took up pretty much all my time), I

think they’re laying about somewhere on the interwebz still in some

form or other. Well over due for a revision, me thinks.Now that I’ve said ‘hi’, I may make some comments on older episodes as

I get around to listening to them. So, here’s fair warning, I guess.

As far as feedback, there were two main thoughts I’ve been having:

1. Aside from the foray into supersegmentals, it seems like phonology

hasn’t figured very strongly in the podcast. The episode on sound

systems and romanization was really mostly just romanization, and left

me wondering if it might not be something worth covering. Especially,

the wonderfully diverse contrasting features in the worlds languages.

Likewise, concepts like sonority scale and what sorts of crazy

phonemes some languages in the world deem to function as a syllable

nucleus, not just syllabic /r/ or /l/, but like /t/, for example. The

sound of a language as spoken by a fluent speaker is a major part of

the appeal to me, and I feel like maybe more appreciation of the sound

of less familiar languages might be a nice source of inspiration to

others. For example, as I’ve heard you guys mention that Pacific

Northwest languages are popular right. Although I don’t share the

philosophy of the website, or the substance or message of the

recordings, this is still a great series of recordings of speakers

reading texts in Nootka

(http://globalrecordings.net/en/program/C06150). There are many others

of quite a variety of American Indian languages on the same site, as

well.

2. Historical linguistics and language change are of strong interest

to me, and I think the level of work in including elements of

historical linguistics techniques in conlanging may not necessarily

need to be as involved as it sounds like is often portrayed in the

podcast. For example, I was thinking how in ep #27 on irregularity how

one of the easiest ways to add irregularity is basically to get a

suppletion pattern in a verb or noun paradigm by simply coming up with

two separate lexical items, sussing out the full pattern for each, and

then create the irregular one for the language by simply picking and

choosing between the two. This is a nice quick way of getting, for

example, a pattern like that of English verb ‘to go’ (go~gone~went).

Another useful idea is to put some historical style structure in your

lexicon by establishing specific strata (like Norman-French vs

Anglo-Saxon vs Latin in English, or Yamato vs Sino-Japanese in

Japanese). Having a subset of vocabulary that was borrowed at some

point from another language, and so doesn’t “fit” quite the same with

the rest is an easy and quick way to add some naturalistic detail. The

thing is, Historical Linguistics, when you’re doing it formally, is

for the most part working backwards toward some common ancestor by

cross linguistic comparison, or internal reconstruction. Sure you can

work forwards through time from a pre-defined proto-language to your

daughter language. But, that’s just one method of using that toolset

with others that can be applied on a much less overarching scale.

This is getting too long, so I’ll just leave off there.

Cheers,

Bryn

— Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam.