Brinolia’s Linguistic Learning

The way we created the orthography (writing system) for Bullywug means that a few things need to change about the syntax. I’ve also just plain changed my mind on a few things after looking at more conlanging resources and thinking more about Bullywug culture.  Syllable Structure: In Bullywug, there are base characters for consonants and characters that represent syllables. The base characters are arrangements of dots that the syllabic characters are based off of, and thus much less interesting than the syllabic characters. The previous syllable structure I had of (C)(C)V(C)(ʔ) not only would’ve been impossible because vowels can’t stand on their own, but it also would’ve looked odd with so many dots. When I’m finished with the font for Bullywug I’m creating, I’ll add some examples here. So, the new syllable structure will be (C)CV(C). Vowels In creating the orthography it made the most sense to combine some vowels, (‘a’ and ‘æ’ as well as ‘ʌ’ and ‘ə,’) which left the question of ho...

This video gives some great advice and ideas for conlangs for animals:

After reading the Orthography section of the linguistics book we’re reading, The Art of Language Invention , and letting seeds of possible Bullywug orthography roam around our brains, we’ve begun to actually create one.  The first thing we started with was what Bullywugs were going to write on and with. We decided that it made the most sense for them to write on mud with their fingers, at least for the first stage. So, we got some clay mixed with water to act as mud, placed it on trays, and brainstormed some possible glyphs. Here are some pictures of glyphs from that brainstorm session:  While we drew in “mud”, we decided that the writing system for Bullywug was going to be an abugida.  An abugida is, basically, a writing system where each glyph represents a syllable, instead of a sound, like an alphabet would. Tamil is an example of an abugida.  We also experimented with what some starting positions might look like. We had the idea that maybe each starting posi...

Check out this interesting and informative video about what it's like to be an interpreter . 

  Jabberwocky The Jabberwocky has lots of English words with made-up words interspersed, sometimes even whole sentences in English, which makes it significantly easier to understand than the other two nonsense English pieces. Some of the words seem to come from already existing English words, which helps the guessing of the word, although that could be my incorrect assumption. Most of the made-up words appear to be nouns and adjectives, which contributes to the guessability of the poem and the fantasy feel. It’s easy to imagine that I am in another world that still speaks English, but it just has it’s own creatures, names, and slang.  Skwerl The Skwerl video, similar to the Jabberwocky, included a mix of English and made-up words. However, Skwerl takes it a step further than Jabberwocky, making it just unintelligible. I felt so close to being able to understand it, but I couldn’t, at least not the full story. The video format did help me piece together some of the story, becau...

Read / watch the following links (again, in some cases). Write a reflection in this or another blog post about the similarities and differences of the three pieces. All were seemingly aiming for English-sounding nonsense; what strategies did they use? What did they do differently from each other? Can you think of any strategies that none of them used? Feel free to include anything about your own responses to these pieces.  Jabberwocky  by Lewis Carol Prisencolinensinainciusol  by Adriano Celentano Skwerl  (explicit language), by  Skwerl script  (explicit language)