hello everybody my name is Josiah Murphy and I am a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa um I'm in the Linguistics department and I study language documentation and revitalization and I have a guest here with me today so if you'd like to go ahead and introduce yourself hi yeah so um my name is Margaret randel green um I went to uh Manoa um to do my Master's and PhD and I graduated in 2022 and um yeah so I'm just here today to talk a little bit about con legings all right sounds good um and fun fact con Lings are what originally got me into Linguistics so same here awesome Yep it's it's like a gateway drug to Linguistics definitely so I um yeah as a kid I started reading tolkin selan The Hobbit Lord of the Rings found out somebody had put together a lexicon of his languages and was hooked so um which calling did you encounter first um the ones in the San okay yeah it's probably not too uncommon I guess I don't know but yeah probably tolk's languages were the first ones that I encountered um although I did start to make conings as a child without knowing what I was doing or knowing that anyone else did anything like that so really that I guess was kind of the origin for me but I quickly moved on to like fasy and sci-fi and things like that nice um before we go too much further can you tell us what con Langs are yeah so conl is a word that is basically um a shortening of the words constructed language so this would be a language that has a grammar and a sound system phology things like that but instead of developing naturally in the world amongst speakers it is specifically constructed or created usually by a single person but not necessarily it could be created by multiple people but it is in a sense artificial or created in that sense that is um going to distinguish it from natural languages and in the coning communities sometimes natural languages are contrasted with conings by being called nat Lings okay yeah nice that's that's a nice term for it yeah um and I think some of our viewers are going to wonder um are conings just just like a game you make up at home or gibberish or um how serious can a coning be um conings can run the gamut between a game you make up at home to something that's very serious and involved in whole real world communities um like I said the first con Lings that I ever interacted with were ones that I made up as a child so that was in a sense kind of my way of playing but con Lings have been used for all sorts of purposes from fictional languages that are used in different types of media to sort of enhance or flesh out a world setting um in fantasy books movies video games TV series um so that but that's just one way of uh sort of engaging with or using a con line and one of the thing that sets conings apart from something that you would just call gibberish which is making up random sounds to go together would be that a conl does have a fundamental consistent structure to its grammar to its syntax to its phenology and phonetics just like a real world language would have and so so they are going to be internally consistent and have a rule-based system within them that governs how they're used and so they aren't random they aren't gibberish they aren't um just whatever you um whatever kinds of sounds come out of your mouth um but their creation is left up to the discretion of whoever is doing the constructing so they can have all kinds of forms okay very cool yeah um and so you mentioned that most con Lings start with one person and you talked about you even creating your own con Lings um once it has grown to a big enough size where that con line gets shared then uh do other people get to help contribute to the coning or does it depend on the the author of the inventor I think it depends on the inventor um there have been collaborative conding projects that have been done by people um where they each take like potentially a different area of the language like syntax or different parts of the syntax or phology or even just they take part in creating different words in the Lexicon um but these I think are typically more the exception um a lot of conings are made by one person um in my experience at least okay yeah and was there something in particular that inspired you to create multiple coning like what is it about the process that that motivates you or that you find so fun or fascinating um I think for me it's really the crossover between um an analytical activity and um kind of like the creation of a puzzle and also an artistic and creative Endeavor so there's the perfect interaction for me between um kind of um analytical and creative where that sort of comes together and it just is an activity that is just really both intellectually and emotionally appealing to me so for me it is those two kinds of like the art and the science in a sense coming together to create something completely new yeah yeah I can see that and for me the conings that I've studied it definitely hits both of those areas for me the art the Artistry the creativity but then um you can really analyze it and it's it's it has enough content that holds up to that analysis right exactly and a lot of con Lings will hold up as well to um some linguistic principles that we see in natural languages as well so that's always kind of fun to take knowledge of natural languages and use that to incorporate new features into a con Ling but also to see if you can stretch the boundaries of what natural language does and make something that maybe is a little atypical in that response I know this is off the top of your head but can you think of any examples to illustrate that yeah I mean I think that there are um examples of conings that do things that are very rarely or maybe never found in natural language and some of those are um what we would call um OA synthetic languages which is um kind of like um a polysynthetic language but it is taking that idea to the extreme where instead of having many different elements morphological elements stacked into a single word form you get um a lot of different concepts that are embedded in each different small morphine and they can be extremely specific that way in the way that they convey meaning and that's not something that is usually seen in natural language but it is a sort of experimental conlay structure but you don't have to even take it to those extremes like you can come up with linguistic Concepts like um a glutena of morphology and you can draw that out to something that is um really uh complex like you can have many different morphemes in one word beyond what polysynthesis or utenation would normally um would normally um do you can also do that in other areas like phology where you can take um really unusual sound changes that would not necessarily be the automatic predictable sound change in human language but you can apply those just because they are different and off-the-wall so the great thing about coning is is that even if you're using linguistic principles to guide the features of your language you can still be creative and do like idiosyncratic things that maybe are not typical okay yeah nice um and on a maybe related note when you are working with your conings do you mostly focus on word formation and sound and things like that or do you also try to bring in a potential culture that would for a society that might speak that language do you try to include that element as well yeah so for my for me personally all of my conings are based in one fictional World setting and so each language is tied inextricably to a fictional culture and so much in the same way that you would see language and culture inextricably bound to each other in the real world on Earth um that's the case in the way that I do con Lings is that I want to make language and culture two sides of the same coin and I think that they can enrich each other in kind of this um infinite cycle where the language can influence the culture and vice versa and for me that is much more interesting than having a language that exists in a vacuum yeah yeah I agree um and of course like one of the most famous people who's done that has been JRR tolken with his Lord of the Rings World um in which he called Arda um what are some other examples of conings that our viewers might have heard of um so there's a lot of more popular ones that are more recent um so like in Game of Thrones for example there was the dothi um language um there are languages in um in Star Trek most notably Klingon um which was created by Mark oakand and has a pretty extensive grammar in lexicon and is actually learned and spoken by people um in the real world um so those are just a couple that are in science fiction like media like movies and TV shows um there's others like in um the Avatar movies there was the language of the not be um that language was created by Paul frommer um there's a lot of languages out there in terms of conings in movies and TV shows these days most of the time if you see uh people speaking in a show in some other kind of alien or Fantastical language these days there's usually a con linger behind it it was not always the case and certainly not always the case now I mean sometimes it was made up on the fly but I would say that more and more these days it's um more consistently going to be a conding nice okay and then um what about some of the play languages that children and in North America typically use um would those also be considered conings like Pig Latin or um yeah um so languages like Pig Latin are really kind of more like a code CU they're based explicitly on an existing language so like for example Pig Latin is not based on Latin it's based on English although I assume you could apply it to another language if you wanted to it's a specific um kind of formula in a sense where you take um the first consonant off of a word and add it to the end of the word and then add the syllable a so like instead of pig it becomes a p right so really underlyingly it's an English word it's just moving the sounds around a little bit so in a sense that would not be considered strictly speaking a coning because it's just a very routine way of changing English itself okay thank you for clearing that up up for us so I'm sure a few people were wondering yeah um so for any of our viewers who are really fascinated by conings and think they would like to work with them in the future um how can they get more involved and and how could they possibly turn that into work so there is a really wide um conl Community online um there are a lot of different platforms and social media sites where there are con lingers talking about language Linguistics constructed languages everything World building as well um those communities can be found on pretty much any platform that you can think of I know there's a large presence on Discord there's a lot of Discord servers um there's Reddit communities Facebook Instagram there's all sorts of things um one of the ones I would really recommend though is um looking into the LCS or the language creation Society um there is a website at con.org and you can find lots of resources about how to learn more about conings um how to get started making one or if you're already a con linger um there are also resources on how to um get jobs doing con Lings and this is something that I've done in the past before um a number of times and one of the major ways of doing that is actually through the language creation Society where um it kind of functions a little bit as a guild in a sense um where if you are a member of the LCS um you get access to these job postings where people will actually come to us and ask um for to basically be put in contact with a con linger to work with them on whatever the project is so we've done work um through uh various different types of people like authors um filmmakers video game developers um people who are in charge of directing TV series and things like that so that's probably the number one best way right now to get um jobs um contract work as a con ler essentially um so if you uh want to get more involved in that it's a great place for all sorts of different resources um we actually even have like a lending library where you can borrow books and there's um web website hosting space for members and all kinds of great stuff there so I would definitely recommend that as a resource yeah that sounds fantastic fantastic like they have so much to offer and um yeah you said that you're serving as an officer in that Society right now so yeah so it's pretty fun we're an international organization and we are um run as a not for-profit um organization and we have a lot of members and it's just a really fun Community to be a part of too okay yeah it sounds fun I'm definitely going to go look it up later yeah so um and then would you like to tell us more about one or two of your con lines that you've created um yeah so one of the probably the most um I guess fleshed out languages that I've worked on I've been doing since I think about 2005 and that language is called rein and that's probably the language that I've put the most time and effort into over all the others um um and I first got interested in making it because I wanted to make a language that had that was verb initial so in the word order we get verbs first and I was also really interested in creating what's called a an ergative absolutive system for the verbs which is um a system that I wasn't very familiar with when I started working on it and then over time I learned more and more about it and so that was kind of a fun experiment for me at the time yeah and that language reand now has about 3500 words in its vocabulary so it's probably the largest lexicon so far for my languages and it's kind of just like my baby language so it'll always be special to me um uh but yeah okay um so for your conine reing that you you created um did you also come up with a new orthography or or writing system for that language too yeah so I did come up with a new orthography for reand and it's an alphabet so it has um one essentially one symbol for every phone although there's some inconsistencies um and for this writing system there's actually three modes of writing it you can write it in standard mode um with each glyph having like a combination of you know angles and curves you can also write it as a runic system so runes having all straight angles and no curves which makes them easier to carve into stone or wood and you can also use it in a cursive mode where that emphasizes the curves of the characters and you can write it all in one flowing line yeah yeah it sounds very creative and gives gives the writer more options um for the material they're writing on or maybe register or uh their purpose for expressing in writing yeah definitely okay when you create an orthography it's good to think about what kind of materials the original writers would have um used because that can influence the shape of the letters yeah yeah um are there any other interesting or unusual features to reing um yeah so in addition to being um an ergative absolutive um verbal alignment um it also has a um a system of animacy so basically if you use um the definite article like the word the um you choose different words depending on whether the noun is something that's alive or something that's not alive and and this is usually pretty straightforward and whether you choose the word be which is for an inanimate object or if you choose the word L which is for an animate being like a person or animal um but sometimes it's not exactly predictable like it can there can be exceptions to those rules um and it can also be true that in certain situations you might refer to something that moves but isn't alive as an animate noun like a river okay could be referred to using the word the the article Lou okay but it could also be B depending on how you want to think about it okay yeah okay how about Vehicles like car or bicycle or boat yeah those um would also be some of the borderline categories the society that the reand speakers live in doesn't have motorized vehicles um so I think those would be a little less likely to be referred to as animate but I'm not 100% sure how a car would be classified in that language because it might be something that's perceived to kind of move by itself okay interesting yeah so yeah so you can see even a cing um you can get really down into the nitty-gritty details and um ask these thought questions and analyze the data and and come up with real answers so that's very cool yeah um is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your con Lings or the topic in general um I think that con linging is um a creative activity that also can tie really well into Linguistics and knowing about coning or doing con linging can support um education or career in linguistics and VI VI Versa as well so I think that those two things are often just um intertwined in a lot of different ways okay um and as uh many of you know um I'm very interested in language documentation and supporting minority languages do you see any um any parallels or any ways that somebody who con Lings can also support uh like where one field can support the other um yeah actually I think there has been some types of work like that done in the past um like there's some academic work that was done about comparing communities that come together to learn con Langs and also comparing um communities that are working on supporting or revitalizing or learning an endangered language and I can um give you some resources on that work if you would be interested yeah that would be fantastic so yeah any last thoughts um I think that's it all right um yeah yeah thank you so much um I'm so glad the timing worked out that we could do this in person y me too while you're here visiting Honolulu so thank you again Margaret and um great thanks Josiah sounds good