I have been reading about some existing conlangs recently and I am annoyed by things related to them. One thing which bugs me is that most of them generally are very sexist. aUI is probably the worst offender in this respect since it makes women ‘not active’ with its construction. But other languages which appear innocent at the beginning also are offenders. For example Ilaksh. It is of course the 2nd derivation of the root which means woman and the 1st which means man. This angers me. Apparently, grammatically, women are an afterthought, not as important as the men. This is not a radical feminist thought, IMHO. It annoyed me in my primary school days already that when we hat to conjugate verbs, the 3rd person singular was ‘er/sie/es’ (he/she/it) and I confused my class teacher by, when having to conjugate a verb, always used ‘sie/er/es’ (she/he/it). Not because I thought women were more important, but just to show that it was perfectly acceptable this way. Also, job ads in real life often have the ‘neutral’ male form and then in brackets ‘m/w’ to indicate that both genders can apply. This is supposedly neutral. IMHO it still shows a preference though by using a specific order. For quite a time, this was just something which bugged me for no good reason. Today, however, I read that the order of the surname in the alphabet can (slightly) influence the success of persons in real life (in ’59 seconds’ by Richard Wiseman). Females are in a certain respect ‘last’ the same way the Zuse’s are alphabetically. Now I wonder if we could reverse the gender gap by mentioning males last.
Rejistanian solved these issues in the language and the conculture in a very gender neutral way: It has not only gender-neutral pronouns which are normally used, but the names are also assigned before birth so there are no flowery female names and strong male names. This was in-universe to make sure that the child would not have a bad fate in the afterlife if she or he died during birth. It led to some interesting implications of the name in the rejistanian religion and society.
Outside of rejistanian… no idea… I am hiligting a problem, not mentioning a solution. I guess the easiest thing would be to make sure that rejistanian becomes the world language :þ And if I ever have to construct an ad for a job, I will use the female form of the job title and ‘(w/m)’. It might do nothing but confuse people but that in itself is a good thing. 
Something else which strikes me as odd is that conlangers seem to spend a disproportionate time on phonology but very seldomly speak their languages*. I made no formal surveys here, but it seems to be a very prominent topic in the lists and on IRC. I understand the interest in foreign sounds, however I do wonder what the point of an intricate and highly complex phonology is when it is not spoken. I probably spent too little time on it and thus have a rather ‘German’ phonology, I admit that. However, even this is rather hard to speak at the beginning. You need to get into the right mental state. You need to be aware of the stress and the infection. It is not as easy as it appears. It did become easier with every soundbyte I recorded though. So, maybe stop reading this blogpost and read a paragraph in your language out loud. I am sure it will be happy about the attention.
*or if they do, it just seldomly finds the way online which gives me a false impression. Also possible.
In other news, I started working on a universal bending exolang. While it has no official name, I call it quuxlang. Quuxlang is spoken by human-like creatures, at least concerning the shape of their body. Their brain/mind probably works differently. Otherwise, they would not speak such a language. Let me summarize the weirdness:
* no nouns
* no personal pronouns
* no adjectives
So how does quuxlang work? It has relations of 2 or more objects/persons/etc and specifiers, which, well, specify the kind of relation it is. There are also particles which link the specified relation or give the rough equivalent to tenses. There are also pro-relations which are the equivalent to pronouns in other languages. Let me explain this via an example.
uku bantiNala NIa i xugulunYmY fuu i ikI xuhimunuksa fuu ela sijuntabURe ruI
ela sisipa kae i uku sihiHikatA li.
uku bantiNala NIa: uku is a tense which means that the relation existed, but the parts it consist of still exist, ba- is a prefix which indicates that this is a relevant disagreement for the story. It is kinda as if a special infection would be required in a book if hero and villain are used in the same clause. ntiNala means ‘a relation between human and dragon’ and NIa specifies it as a movement of an actor to a place.
i xugulunYmY fuu: i is the simultaneous ‘and’. The previous specified relation left it open who went where so this is now explained: ‘dragon and cave’ ‘actor sleeps at location’. The tense is not mentioned since it does not differ. The prefix xu- explains that the antagonist is described here.
i ikI xuhimunuksa fuu: As further specificatio it is added that the dragon sleeps near its eggs (‘dragon and eggs’ ‘actor sleeps at’). The tense ikI indicates that the relation no longer exists but existed.
ela sijuntabURe ruI: ela is the sequential ‘and’, though here, a ‘then’ would be a better translation. The prefix si- indicates that the protagonist is mentioned. The relation is ‘man and egg(s)’ and the specifier ‘man takes object’. Thus, the man takes the egg or eggs.
ela sisipa kae: si- is again the protagonist suffix and sipa is a pro-relation referring to the last mentioned relation, ie: the man and the unspecified number of eggs. The specifier now is ‘actor carries object’.
i uku sihiHikatA li: and simultaneously, with both parts of the relation still existing even though the relation does no longer, ‘the man and the village’ ‘actor returns to place’.
So the text is about a human who stole the egg or eggs of a sleeping dragon and brought them home into his village.
Is this confusing? I hope so. I got the idea for this language when I read a thread where someone wanted to create a weird language. Let me preempt a few objections you have:
* you cannot describe things!!! I can compare things to each other. That suffices, hopefully. While I cannot say that I have brown hair, I can say ‘currently person to higher up speaks and simultaneously hair to person belongs and simultaneously hair and ground have the same color’. The first specified relation would explain who is the person here, that this person is indeed me.
*A relation is just a unified subject and object!!! Well, there is no rhyme or reason to the way the relations are composed, there is no rule for this, so why impose a pattern?
*Not every verb is transitive!!! In Quuxlang? Sorry, but here every specifier is transitive. Which for example means that I could not say that the dragon was asleep, I had to say where it slept.
And now for the word of the day: it is nahsua which means south or ‘south of’. Nahsua’het is ‘the south’ as in ‘a specific area to the south of us or generally associated with the south’. This word strays from the current topic, but I have eventually managed to scan some handwritten rejistanian text and uploaded it, so I wanted to use the first word of the text. This also means that the example sentence today is written, not spoken. It is the first one of the file: Nahsua’het mi’oejelu. The south is beautiful.
I wanted to comment on this yesterday, but I didn’t have the time (had to go to sleep early to wake up for the World Cup).
On the first part: In English, we have “s/he”, where the feminine comes first. And, of course, there’s the example I keep bringing up, where in Moro, you have a word for “man” and a word for “woman”, but no word for “person”. To refer to “people”, then, you say “women”. The same is true of “boy” and “girl”. This linguistic feminism, however, has had little to no effect on the culture of the Sudanese Moro speakers, who are quite chauvinist. Perhaps, then, gender equality (or inequality) in language really isn’t a reflection of culture.
Regarding this, though…
One thing which bugs me is that most of them generally are very sexist.
Do you really think it’s most? I would have said the opposite. Indeed, if you take the number of conlangs that have gender-marking on pronouns (to pick out one example) and compare it to the number of natural languages with gender-marking on pronouns, I’ll bet that natural languages will have a lot more gender-marked pronouns. Conlangs, in my experience, have always swung the opposite way, creating unnaturally neutral languages that attempt to make no gender distinctions of any kind. (For example, in all of my languages, the only language that has gendered pronouns [Kamakawi] also has a gender-neutral pronoun and an inanimate third person pronoun. I’d be shocked if one ever found such a thing in a natural language.)
Regarding Ilaksh, though, I had noticed this, but not with gender. In Ithkuil, there are “degree” suffixes which help to define the realm of degree-type words. So rather than having words for “hot” and “cold”, Ithkuil has a word for “temperature”, let’s say, and “temperature” plus degree suffix 1 means “absolute zero”, while “temperature” plus degree suffix 9 means “hot as hot can get”. This scale is metaphorical in nature, and, thus, not entirely logical (or at least not devoid of human intuition). What you point out with Ilaksh is exactly the same problem. To fix it, the affixes would need to be divorced from a linear marking system (though a reflex of this can be seen in the phonology itself). I don’t think it was John’s intent to be sexist here: It’s just the way the language works.
Now for the second part:
…I do wonder what the point of an intricate and highly complex phonology is when it is not spoken.
One might say the same thing of a conlang that isn’t used actively for communication. I don’t find this reasoning very compelling.
If I may offer an alternate hypothesis, there’s a reason you see a lot more phonological descriptions online rather than texts, context-dependent pragmatic rules, fully-searchable online dictionaries, etc. A phonology, no matter how complex, is finite, and relatively small compared to the rest of the language. Furthermore, it’s not likely to change later on as the language is developed further—or, at least, not as likely to change as the morphology and lexicon. If a conlang has only one fully-developed, documented element on its website, I expect that to be the phonology. That, of course, doesn’t mean that the other elements of the language haven’t been developed: It just means they’re not fleshed out enough to put online yet (or the conlanger sees it as too big of a task to undertake).
Taking my languages as an example, the minimal amount of information I put up is the phonology and the orthography (the latter can be considered an artefact of my love of writing systems). That doesn’t mean that the rest isn’t fleshed out, though (I gave an entire talk at LCC2 on the historical development of Sidaan‘s verbal system); it just means that that was the easiest part to put up. If you look at my non-verbal language, X (which, naturally, has no phonology), the same phenomenon can be seen: I put the easiest, most complete, and least-likely-to-change parts online first, and have left everything else off because the prospect of getting all that information together and webifying it is too much.
Ack. And now the NBA Finals are on. My attentions have been diverted…
Okay, modern conlangs might be different here… I guess older conlangs like Esperanto had a reason not to be overly sensitive here. I might have generalized incorrectly from the conlangs I looked at recently (none of yours). It lanja has changed when conlangers became aware of this.
Well, again you make a good point. Still I think it is odd that many people seem to love to use complicated phonologies (/me looks at Sheli) which are really hard to pronounce and which make me wonder if they actually tried to pronounce them but people with a very European/L1ish phonology are chided because the phonology is European/L1ish. While I like complexity for its own sake I fail to understand why ‘I want to be able to speak it on a ‘native’ level’ is such a bad goal.
I have not thought of things like the bias what to publish since most of what I wrote on rejistanian is on the github page you are of course right. I however have experienced people who struggled immensely with their complex phonologies.
Sheli isn’t hard to pronounce. As I think I mentioned somewhere before, the hardest one for me to produce fluently is Kamakawi—by far. The easiest, in fact, is Njaama, which some might find hard due to the clicks, the tones and the long vowels. By comparison, Kamakawi has the smallest phonological inventory and the simplest phonology of any of my conlangs, yet I really have to practice to produce a sentence fluently.
I don’t see why being able to speak a language at a fast rate is at odds with having a complex phonology. I find the phonology of Vietnamese to be very complex, for example, but Vietnamese speakers seem to do just fine with it. In the world of conlanging, John Quijada can pronounce Ithkuil quickly and perfectly (he can’t speak it fluently [creating a sentence takes hours], but once he’s got a sentence, he can speak it with ease), and hearing Henrik Theiling speak his language Qþyn|gài is absolutely a marvel (go here to hear him pronouncing his translation of the Pater Noster).
From the other side, conlangers who tend to criticize (the national pastime of the ZBB) generally find fault with conlangers who reproduce something from their own language simply because they didn’t know any better. If your goal is to employ a phonology that’s close to your own language, then that’s the end of it: No one can criticize the decision. They may not like it, but if it was a conscious decision, then the language is working as intended, and that aspect of it can’t be criticized. That’d be like criticizing someone for having words that look European in origin when the point of the language is to derive words from PIE. The criticism is totally and completely without merit, and can—and should—be ignored.
I know that there are people who need quite a while to proounce words in their conlangs, especially in those with difficult phonologies. But that might be an NSverse problem. I guess many NationStateslers are beginners. It took me quite a few attempts in the beginning to get rejistanian sentences correctly. For JSG, I have pretty much given up getting it correctly in this lifetime.
I tried for realism with JSG since people complained about the rejistanian phonology since 2004. There are reasons for why rejistanian is as it is, but haters will hate.
How long and how do you train to pronounce something like a text in Sheli?
In my conlang, Miresua, there is one pronoun for both he and she. My word for he/she is bän. I have another pronoun for it, for inanimate things and concepts.
My source languages of Basque and Finnish are both gender neutral. They also have no grammatical gender, none of that masculine and feminine nouns stuff. It’s one of the things these unrelated languages agree on. Apparently, from what I’ve read, having a gender neutral language hasn’t necessarily lead to equality between the sexes in Basque Country or in Finland.
I do agree that the linguistic equality will not lead to de-facto equality. I just think that it is harder to reach equality between the sexes in a language which does very overtly distinguish between these things.
I must say, I agree with you in respect to phonology. I myself could never think in the abstract about the phonology prior to actually using it for the language. Therefore I could never understand how one could think of the complete phonology before actually musing a word. I surely can’t. In fact I pronounce all my languages, and sometimes even this pronouncing my languages gives me ideas on how the phonetics should work for it. That’s why I don’t have languages which I can’t pronounce. Even when, say, I create one that has a particular feature or sound that’s not very common I try not to push it too far, not too make it impossible for me to pronounce it or master it. I agree with you that a conlanger should be who best pronounces the given conlang, or at least the standard. Although it is also funny that one could say he pronounces a specific dialectal variant, sometimes I do that too.
But also I see David’s point in that sometimes that’s the whole point of the language. In a language like Ithkuil you are prone to need many different kinds of sounds at the same time, because of how the language works. Personally I prefer a language I can fully pronounce, even one that has rhythm to me or music or flow. I try to do this, even sometimes I incorporate some grammatical function to make the language sound in some way. I try to have an idea of how I want the final language to sound like.
About the gender thing, I must say I agree with David. Although I see your point in many ways. Once, inspired by the Amazons, I imagined how an amazonian conculture would affect a conlang, female would be the “normal” gender and so on. So would the word “queen” be used or would the word “king” shift to mean “queen” and viceversa.
I prefer languages to be gender neutral. Though many have the distinction she/he, but none is derived from the other, for example in Tulvan. In fact, coincidentally enough, in that language I think I listed the female form first. I would appreciate for you to check my language:
http://tulvan.blogspot.com/
And I would like to be included in your blog roll, as I included you and Rejistanian in my fellow conlangers setion, heh.
Also in some other languages I explored such more limited phonetics as not having dentals nor voiced stops.
Ah, now I know who you are. About Tulvan: I had no idea who was behind it, and I pretty much only added links if I had any relation (yjatek) to them. Because there are many conlangers out there. I wanted to ask you what your conlang was but never gotten around to ask.
About the pronunciations: Ithkuil can be pronounced by Quijada. As can Ilaksh. I am not sure about the effort though. I can understand that people have different goals. I can understand that someone like Ulan spends months at least to try to reach the best pataari phonology (someone I know from IRC). I can understand that people go for an exotic aesthetical goal, but if sommeone else goes for the goal of simplicity, pronuncability and ease of use, it should not be an inferior goal.
You are so right about creating phonologies. I cannot do that in any structured manner. Or if I try to, it ends up as hardly pronouncable like JSG. I am also ‘guilty’ of crfeating features for a certain feel.
My goal was not to make the female position superior, the examples I stated were just to make people realize that the way things are currently said is just a convention, to open their eyes to how we see certain priorities for granted. I also would prefer complete neutrality. But until we have this, I will continue to expose the bias to others by subverting it.
I think it’s because most conlangers are male. I’ve no evidence, just a feeling. I’m developing a conlang (Umu) for my writing system that only distinguishes between first, second, and third person, without plurals. Not only does ‘she’ mean ‘he’, but also ‘they’.
I thought about sexism in it’s design. Por exemplo: Umu has a word class system with prefixes that are often silent or elided. It produces many homophones. When I first (randomly) generated the vocabulary, the word ‘woman’, which was ‘oda’, also meant:
mouse, fork, serious, direct, final, loose/baggy, and artificial.
Yikes. Remembering the unlucky number 4 in Chinese, I had to change this. So woman, became ‘mara’, from Arabic… and it’s pretty. There is only one homophone for ‘mara’ (so far) which means ‘to recognize’. That’s benign enough.
What becomes tricky is how to formulate these associations.
Yikes indeed. Good to see that you changed it.
BTW: Is any information about Umu on the internet? It sounds pretty interesting.
So far, only on my pseudoglyphs wordpress. Everything under the conlang category is Umu. Not much is up yet. Once it’s more developed, I’ll give it a more prominent place.
I created the writing system first; Umu was more of a vehicle. But I’m getting there.
Your idea of naming all children before they’re borne is pretty amazing, say I.