September 8, 2025 • 66 mins
I have a chat with linguistics short-form creator Human1011 about his language, itræχnâħyq̇, or Draconic. We compare it to my dragon language, Ndăkaga, and discuss the challenges of making short form conlanging content. Links and Resources:
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast
about constructed languagesand the people who create them.
(00:21):
I'm George Corley.
And with me, where are you at this moment?
I am currently in America, thoughI was just in Lebanon actually.
Yeah, so from somewhere inAmerica, we have Human1011.
Hello, thank you for having me.
Yeah, so I mean, I think a lot of peoplewill know you better than they know me.
(00:49):
But Human1011 runs aYouTube channel that mostly does
short form content, Ithink, etymology and stuff.
But the reason I wantedto talk to you is you, like
me, had the idea of creatinga language for dragons.
(01:13):
Yes, yeah.
Why don't you introduceyourself a little bit
and also tell me alittle bit about how that
came about, how yougot into KhanLanging?
Yeah, so as you said, Igo by Human1011 online.
For the past a littlebit over two years now,
(01:35):
I've been making sort ofshort form style content.
It's kind of educationalabout linguistics in general.
And when it comes to conlanging, I'd alwaysbeen kind of just interested in it just
because the sorts of videos that would justpop up on my recommended on YouTube.
You know, in fact, some other peoplewho are very well known
in the space, like Biblaridion, Conlang Critic,just random people would pop up.
(01:57):
And it was the sort of thingthat I had this kind of idea
for in passing, butnever really wanted to try.
And then one day, I cameacross another person
who does short formlinguistics content.
His handle is etymologynerd.
And what he ended up doing ishe made a few shorts, not very
(02:18):
in depth, but he essentially made abird language and a dolphin language.
And he tried to very quickly throw togethersome ideas for conlangs for animals.
And I thought that was really cool, butI kind of wanted to take a step further.
And I thought, what would aconlang look like for dragons?
So I decided to put alittle bit of effort into it.
And that first video went super viral.
So I decided that there was a lot of idea
(02:41):
to explore behind that.
So I decided to continue pursuing that.
Yeah, I saw the etymologynerd stuff.
The one I saw was the one that he made forgorillas, which I think he calls MONKE.
And the way that he usedegressive and ingressive
(03:02):
sounds in order to make it soundlike gorilla noises is interesting.
Yeah.
You have these shortsabout the dragon language.
Now, that's only a small part ofwhat your channel is, I understand.
(03:23):
It's a lot of etymologycontent, a lot of Arabic content.
I understand that you are Lebanese.
Yeah, I'm Lebanese-American.
So I try to talk about Arabic a lot.
Lebanese... of Lebanese descent.
And so you have a lotof content about Arabic.
(03:49):
But for this dragon language, it's
been interesting to mebecause I created specifically
a dragon language meant tobe used in Dungeons & Dragons.
And it was interesting to see how youapproach things differently than I did.
(04:12):
And there's a wide diversity.
It's a fictional mythical beast, right?
So you're going to have a lot ofdifferent takes on what it could be.
So it was interesting.
Let me-- so lookingat it, the first thing that
(04:35):
strikes you is you havea whole series of sounds
that are meant to beaccompanied by fire breath, right?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So that was one of the mainideas when I was thinking,
what would be a cool thing thatdragons would do when speaking?
(04:56):
And I thought, at least in my head canon,
I was imagining stereotypicalfire-breathing dragons.
And I thought, in the same waythat we have a voice box, which
is very finely tuned for different productionof vocal sounds, I'm sure they have
whatever the biological equivalentwould be for some sort of magical fire box.
And I wouldn't be surprised at all
(05:17):
to think that they would usethat in encoding their sounds.
So I decided to implementthat if a bunch of the consonants
and vowels requireflame breath of some sort.
Yeah.
And it's interesting that youdecided to notate them as
pharyngeals and say, humanscan produce these as pharyngeals.
(05:40):
But then when in your shorts,you've got a butane lighter.
And you just light it.
I literally have-- wait.
Yeah, I got it right here.
Oh, I have a lighter here.
I light this.
It's like, oh, just imagine thatI'm a dragon breathing fire.
Yeah.
(06:01):
My idea was that, of course,if this was an indigenously
dragon language, they wouldhave this sort of fire breath.
But if, for whateverreason, maybe this is a D&D
campaign and you're doingsome sort of incantation,
or maybe this is just asociety where dragons
and humans are justinteracting a bunch.
If a human needs to speak, they're
going to approximate itto the best of their ability.
And you're probably notgoing to carry a lighter on you.
(06:22):
So the lighter's more of avisual flair for the shorts, I think.
But yeah, I thoughtabout, I feel like
pharyngeals are a decentapproximation for humans.
Yeah, just something that's not alreadyin the language that you could throw in.
And that also lets you write it in IPA,
which you otherwise wouldhave to invent a special symbol for.
(06:44):
Yeah.
But yeah, it's interesting.
And then the reasonthat I didn't go with
that, but some peopleactually suggested that.
For one, I was wantingpeople to use it in game,
and I didn't really think abouthaving a replacement for that.
(07:10):
And another thing was I was explicitlytalking about dragons in Dungeons & Dragons.
And they have a lot of breath weapons.
Their breath weapons have a recharge,
and it just didn't fit forwhat I was imagining.
But then you also actually have ways
that you can imagine thedragons have some other--
(07:32):
use other breathweapon-type things or other
organs to produce asound that humans can't.
That's interesting to me.
I love phonology stuff.
And one of my own first languageswere for creatures that had a syrinx.
(07:58):
And some birds-- so a syrinxis something that birds have.
And some birds can much more easily producetwo different pitches than a human can.
And I was using that.
But yeah.
But usually, nowadays, muchmore conventional than you are.
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But that's a cool idea.
I want to talk about, though-- let'sget further into nuts and bolts here.
When I am looking at yourthing-- so let's put it on the screen.
OK, there's the inventory.
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And then the gender system is part of it.
But throughout here, youhave a huge focus on animacy,
and particularly animacyfrom a dragon's point of view.
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Because dragons and other particularlypowerful beings are at the top.
Humans are a level lower.
And it's thrown in throughout the wholelanguage, not just in the noun class system,
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but also in word order andcase marking and everything.
What was the impetus for that?
Yeah, so I think I first learned about thisanimacy hierarchy thing through Navajo.
I think it's one ofthose linguistic fun facts
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that people hear a lot,if you're into linguistics,
that you hear that Navajohas a sort of animacy hierarchy.
But what's really cool isthat at the top of their animacy
hierarchy, it's reserved forjust humans as well as lightning.
When I first heard that,the idea being that lightning,
at least in their culture, isseen as very highly animate.
And this idea of animacy doesn't necessarilyneed to be a literal animacy thing.
It can be about cultural values.
(10:10):
And the moment I heardabout that, I thought, wow.
There's so much room toexplore in a conlang with that.
Because you can learn so much aboutwhat the speakers of the language think,
depending on where theyclass it in the animacy hierarchy.
So for the dragon language,I thought, oh, for sure,
the dragons are going to viewthemselves as above humans.
So whatever class-- there's going
to be some class that's goingto have dragons and other--
(10:30):
I called it exalted, the exalted class.
And then you have the rational classfor humans, elves, dwarves, et cetera.
And so it was really fun tryingto explore that space of, OK,
if you're a dragon, who elseare you putting as exalted?
Who's in the rational class?
Are people below rational?
Where do different species and differentobjects, as well, line up on the hierarchy?
Yeah.
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It's really interesting.
I had the idea that dragons wouldlook down on humans and humanoids.
But I didn't build outa whole system for it.
I just had one word, likea sort of an insulting term
for humans or humanoids, is ifedu, islittle giant, because they respect giants.
(11:16):
They don't really respect humans.
But you've just built this into organizingeverybody from a dragon's point of view.
I do notice that you have separateclasses for magical and mundane.
(11:38):
Is that a hint that this is usedfor TTRPGs or something?
Yeah, so I haven'texplicitly used it for this.
And when I was makingthis, I wasn't explicitly
trying to think of how Iwould use it for a TTRPG.
But I have played D&D before in the past.
(11:58):
And as I was thinking of, OK, what aresome other distinctions, I thought, one,
it'd be kind of useful tohave this sort of distinction.
But two, I think it alsomakes sense in a universe.
If a universe has dragons, of course,there's going to be magic and stuff.
And I think it makes sense tohave a very separate class of,
here's magical objects, and here'sthe complete non-magical stuff.
And it is, again, in partof that hierarchy where
(12:19):
magical stuff is seen as higher, andmundane stuff is not seen as important.
Yeah, that is interestingto separate that out.
It's sort of-- it's somethingI could go either way on
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with a language, dependingon how magic is viewed,
whether it's viewed as a separate thing oras just a thing that exists in the world.
It's very cool.
And those were the mainthings that stuck out to me as
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interesting themes that werearising out of this language.
And how much worldbuilding has gone behind this?
You do have a specific idea about,these are fire-breathing dragons.
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But beyond that, I'm not sure.
And you have ideas abouthow they relate to other beings.
But I don't know, is there a particular--
you just have a placeholdername for the world.
Do you have other ideasabout the world building,
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ideas about the world, orideas about other creatures
that exist in it?
So yeah, I've had a lot ofideas very much centered
on the dragon culture, and how thedragons view things, that sort of thing.
And I haven't done asmuch world building on
the broader worldsand anything like that.
(14:07):
I haven't really made a world.
Part of that was because,as I was making the
videos, a lot of peopleseemed interested in it.
And I wanted to kind of notgo too much into the world
so that, in theory, ifsomeone wanted to use the
language, they can kindof drop it into their world.
But also, to me, that'salso quite an undertaking.
And so to me, I was kind of focusingon, OK, what is the dragon culture?
And how are they viewing their interactions
(14:29):
with other humans, or otherspecies, other societies?
And I haven't gotteninto any explicit history,
or terrain, or worldbuilding like that.
But there has been alot of consideration mostly on just like
on the culture, and whatvalues dragons have,
and how they viewothers, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
(14:49):
Well, I mean, can youtalk a little bit about that?
We know that they viewthemselves as above humans, right?
What else can you tell, talkabout how your dragons view
themselves, or the world, and howthat's reflected in the language then?
(15:14):
Yeah, so really, I feel like a lot of it
does come back down to theanimacy hierarchy, whereas they
kind of view this world in avery strict hierarchical way,
where there's the non-magicalmaterial stuff, like rocks.
And then as you keep building withanimacy, you kind of build on value.
So magical stuff is morevaluable than mundane stuff.
And they view some sort of magicand energy, they see that as potent.
(15:38):
And they see life asthe next step up, right?
So if a rock is to a magicwand, a magic wand
is to, say, some animal,like a dog or something, right?
That's just the next step up.
And so there is still a distinctionbetween living and non-living, but all this
is kind of the next step.
The next step on the hierarchyis monstrous creatures.
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So they view somethinglike a vampire, or I don't know,
any other monstrouscreature, like a werewolf,
also as being above kind of unintelligentanimals, like sheeps and dogs.
And then again, the nextlevel is intelligent humans.
And so they view themselves assome sort of imbued with magic,
much more powerful,longer living, that sort of thing.
They view that as kindof the top of the hierarchy.
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And so to them, I'm not sure-- Idon't think it's a religious belief,
but maybe it's more like aphilosophical belief of there
is this sort of hierarchyof magic, or sentience,
or sapience, or energy thatkind of goes with the whole world.
And the more you have,the more valuable you are.
Yeah.
And this does really track withcomparing it to human languages, in a way.
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Because when you have somekind of an animacy hierarchy
in human languages, myunderstanding is humans, or
at least adult humans,tend to be placed at the top.
And even if the stystem talks about...
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Even if the systemincludes spirits, or gods, or things,
often gods would be even at humanlevel, or below in the animacy hierarchy.
Which is, if you are an English speaker,you're not familiar with this type of thing,
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and you're thinking of it in a fantasycontext, you would not expect that.
But then the real world comes in and says,
no, humans generally justput themselves at the top.
And so, of course, dragons would also
put themselves at the topof the animacy hierarchy.
And the fact that they don'thave humans along with them,
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that they put humans on a lower rung, sayssomething about how they view themselves.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think-- you bringup the-- it is a good point
that, like in human languages,very often the humans
will put themselves, even ifthey do believe in gods and spirits.
And the fact that the dragons inthis world are doing the same thing--
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and obviously, it'skind of even more crazy,
because, obviously, in a fantasy setting,this is a world in which gods and spirits
are things that areliving among them, right?
Like, gods come down to theplanet, and they interact with people.
And so it's not just like thisephemeral idea of a god that
comes through religion, but alsothey walk and interact with people.
And even then, they're stillbeing put on the same level,
(18:31):
because the dragons are putting themselves--they see themselves as very highly.
And so they'll still equate themselves
with even other very powerfulbeings, even beings that
would be, in theory, morepowerful than a dragon
that they would lose to,like a god, for example.
Yeah.
But I think the reason, like, both of us
have had this thought, Ithink it just kind of shows
(18:54):
that that's a classic view of modernfantasy Western dragons, is that they are--
some would say arrogant.
Some would say they'rejust confident in their abilities
and understand their place in thepower scale of the universe kind of thing.
(19:20):
But it is very interesting, particularly
if you're talking aboutintelligent dragons that
are extremely powerful,that this is the archetype
that you generally seein modern fantasy fiction,
is that they view humansas something under them
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and not worthy ofnotice and things like that.
I don't know if it's that extreme for you,
but you are seeing them put a rung below,
not exactly equivalentto animals or anything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's definitely-- it's aninteresting thought, as well.
And also, you mentionedthat it is sort of very much
(20:07):
a stereotype of an archetypeof Western media, as well.
And I've gotten commentsfrom people in, like, thinking,
like, "OK, does thiswork for other cultures?"
And personally, I'm not as familiar withthe attributes of dragons in other cultures.
But it is very true thatmy depiction of dragons
in this language is very mucha product of my upbringing
and what I'm used to in thestereotypical idea of a dragon.
(20:28):
But there's no objectivetruth in what a dragon has
to look like or how theyinteract with their world.
That would be a good question, actually.
Like, I don't know awhole lot besides stuff
that I've picked upfrom studying Chinese.
(20:50):
But Chinese dragons canbe depicted as a greater being.
But I think it's less--.
in Western fiction, yousee more evil dragons first.
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And you see also dragons that are, like,
their confidence in theirpower goes into arrogance.
I'm not sure if that would be ascommon in depictions of, like, the lóng.
I think it's more seen as,like, a source of wisdom.
(21:41):
And maybe that wouldaffect how that would work.
But, like, yeah, I don't know.
I also-- I'm not going to besuper confident about that
because it's not somethingI'm, like, deeply into,
like, the stories and stuff about.
But it is interesting to, like, betalking about this different perspective.
(22:08):
Are there, like, words in the language
that, like, also exemplify,like, different-- like,
the point of view ofdragons in interesting ways?
Oh, yeah, I'm trying tothink off the top of my head.
There's definitely some words here.
I'll also be scouring thedictionary as we're chatting here.
(22:30):
There's definitely words when it comesto, like, what they relate to humans.
And, like, for example,like, a word that might be
related to a human mightserve as, like, an insult
when attributed to dragonsor something like that,
where they're doing avery clear job of delineating
the different categories of differentcreatures, where the exalteds and the rationals
are very much differentcategories that they're viewing.
(22:52):
And so that kind ofthing definitely comes up.
Oh, I can't think of any examplesoff the top of my head, unfortunately.
I'm just looking at your dictionary.
I don't necessarily see-- I don'tnecessarily see anything like that.
I do see interesting, like,some wild polysemies going on.
(23:15):
Yeah, that's also someof my favorite things
to do is, like, to startwith some very old--
oh, hello, sorry-- startfrom a very old proto word
and then just, like, think ofhow the many different ways
that that's going to diverge togive you very different meanings.
OK, like, "fēltū," a historically common
draconic name, so thisis, like, an opaque name.
(23:39):
For Monstrous, asuccubus or an incubus.
A farm animal-- theseare all in different classes,
so they'll get the different classsuffixes, so that'll distinguish.
Uncontrollable laughter--that's in the magic class.
Cheese.
And then cheeriness,gaiety, luck, good fortune.
(24:03):
Yeah.
OK, so what was-- so you diddo this with the historical method.
Yes.
It sounds like-- so what was the root?
What was the proto root?
What did that mean?
So the proto root-- it hadto do with, I think, it was--
(24:26):
I think it had to dosomething with dairy products.
And I think, if I'm remembering properly--I'll probably have to double-check--
but it was a loan from-- like, I didn'tmake a full fleshed-out humanoid language
in universe, but I came upwith, like, a bunch of sample,
like, root words to come up with.
And so it had to do with, like,dairy products or something.
And that came from a human language,
because dairy products aremuch more important for humans
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than they really care for a dragon.
So a dragon would haveto get that from a loan, right?
Like, because dragonsaren't really doing dairy
since they're not mammals, right?
So it's not a big deal.
So that's where farm animal andcheese come from, because it's a root.
But in the human culture as well,because dairy was such an important thing,
it also had to do withgood luck and fortune.
So that's where the idea ofgood luck and fortune comes from,
(25:07):
which is where the ideaof happiness comes from,
which is, like, where youget gaiety and cheeriness.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because that was--it's related to laughter.
And the very last thingto get to incubus and
succubus is the idea of--actually, the same thing
that happened with kindof the English word "gay,"
which went from meaninghappy to meaning, like, lascivious.
It kind of went throughthat same sort of pejoration.
(25:29):
The idea of being happy meansyou're, like, kind of sexually--
yeah, lascivious, which iswhat the idea of succubus--
actually, the same thing happened.
I think the word rightabove it is the adjective.
Yeah, the adjective "fēltū"also had that same sort of thing
happen, where it means cheeryand lucky, but it also means lascivious in there.
OK, that's super interesting.
(25:51):
I did not expand it out in all these ways,
but I did have the same idea ofloaning a word for, like, "milk" from--
I had them loan it from Sylvan, from thefairies, like the older form of their language.
Because, yeah, dragons don't consume milk.
(26:16):
Right.
They wouldn't have a word for that.
There's no need.
That's definitely something thatyou would want to bring about.
I do actually...
I do actually want to come backand talk about the phonology,
(26:39):
because there was one thingthat hit me when I was looking at it
is, like, comparing it tothe decisions that I made,
beyond having the pyricsounds, which is a cool idea,
it seems like you have an idea of doingadditive things more than, like, subtracting.
(27:07):
Because, like, you havelots of rounded vowels here,
whereas I thought, well, I mean,they wouldn't have flexible lips.
So maybe they wouldn'tbe able to round vowels.
Was there a thought process to that?
Because I see you don't have,like, you don't have bilabial
plosives or anything,except the only labels
(27:30):
you have is /m/ andthe bilabial fricative /ɸ/.
So what was your--was your reasoning
different on, like, whattheir abilities would be there?
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
I was thinking-- Ithink, actually, in my
proto-language, therewere no rounded vowels.
For that exact reason,I was thinking that,
like, the lips wouldn'treally make sense.
(27:52):
Like, any articulationyou would do with the lips
would probably only besomething like a nasal or maybe just,
like, a /ɸ/ sound that youwould just, like, blow out.
I think I ended up decidingto add rounded vowels.
I think my idea was that,like, rounding probably
isn't going to correspond thesame way that, in English, we
(28:12):
can do, like, avery protruded /w/.
So, like, the way dragonsproduce rounded vowels
is not going the same way,because they physically can't.
But my thought processwas that you could still maybe,
like, have an equivalent ofsome sort of biological mechanism
that has a similar-isheffect, in the same way
that, you know, humans can't producefire, but they can do pharyngealization,
(28:32):
which is, like, theclosest thing they can do.
My thought was that, like, dragons aredoing some sort of thing with their lips.
They're probably notrounding to the same degree,
but, like, they're maybejust constricting it.
And that was my thought process there.
But you're right that it was intentional
that there's no /b/, there'sno /p/, there's no /w/,
because I thought that those are muchharder sounds for dragons to produce.
(28:53):
That's super interesting, because youcame to the opposite conclusion to me.
Like, for me, and this wasalso, like, a vote in the stream
chat, too, but, like, I laid out my argument,and people basically agreed with me.
But, like, I thought, OK, bilabial sounds,including bilabial plosives, are cool,
(29:17):
because I actually had just readan article about Tyrannosaurus
Rex, and there were somepeople who were putting
out the idea that theyprobably did have lips that
could seal their mouthshut, so you wouldn't actually
see their teeth all thetime, like you do in movies.
(29:39):
And I was thinking, well, most animals cando that, can, like, seal their mouth shut.
So something, like,definitely, like, a nasal,
like, /m/, if they can do nasals atall, they would do something like that.
And then, well, I mean, Ican get that plosives might
(30:04):
be difficult, because youhave to build up pressure,
and how strong are theirlips to build up pressure?
But my thought was, like, I didn't thinkabout having an equivalent process that
would produce a similar, like, performance.
I was just thinking about, well, their lips
(30:25):
are not flexible enoughto do this, like humans
can do, because theyhave no need for that, right?
That's a specific adaptation formammals in order to drink milk as babies.
That's not a thing thatreptiles are going to have.
(30:45):
But you came to theopposite idea of, like, OK,
they'll have something that'ssimilar to rounding, right?
Something that has a similareffect on the formants, right?
But they can't really build up pressurebehind, is what I'm getting from you.
(31:06):
It's interesting that we-- again, it's afictional creature, and neither one of us
are really biologists.
So it kind of makes sensethat, like, just trying to reason
through it on our own, weended up in opposite places.
Yeah, that is kind of interesting.
(31:27):
I think my approach is a little bit hand-wavy,where it's like, oh, I'm sure there's
some sort of mechanismthey can do to approximate it.
And some biologist isthinking, like, no, there's no way.
Well, I have a friend who is really into--
Logan Kearsley is reallyinto, like, alien languages.
And to him, he wouldsay, like, just the idea
(31:51):
that they are producingsounds that are reasonably
equivalent to sounds that humans can make
is kind of hand-wavy,because their vocal tract, just
because they have an elongated snoutand they have a longer neck and all kinds
of physiological differences,some of which, like, you don't
(32:15):
even know, that, like, they wouldjust sound completely different.
But there's a certainplace for artistic license
where we got to say, OK, well, Iwant to speak it with my mouth, right?
(32:35):
-Yeah.-Right?
Like, you have to do something.
Yeah, like, you wantto use it in your shorts
and give examples without having touse, like, a synthesizer or something.
I want to write spell incantations
that other people canread while they're playing a
TTRPG, so while they'replaying a D&D or whatever.
(33:01):
So yeah, we have to make it pronounceableby humans for these particular projects.
So we do have to hand wave a little bit.
It's just interesting that we came up
with different limitations going from,like, just completely opposite directions.
We should talk to Biblaridion andask him if he could-- I don't know if he--
(33:29):
Biblaridion knows a lotabout biology, but I don't know
how much specifically he knowsabout, like, sound modeling.
He's working on-- Ithink he's working on--
didn't he say he wasgoing to work on, like,
alien conlangs for his, like,Alien Biospheres project?
I believe that the neotektonswill have languages eventually.
(33:49):
But he may need to, like,consult with other people on that.
What is this--? So this issomething I was reading about.
So different classes of nounshave different case marking.
(34:13):
And I'm a little, like, not clear on,like, what is this directive and recessive?
Yeah.
So directive and recessive-- well,these are not real linguistic terms.
I made them up for this language.
I mean, maybe there's somelanguage out there that has them.
I doubt it.
But because of the waythe animacy hierarchy
(34:33):
works, it's very strictin the word order
that words in a sentence have to comein order of most animate to least animate.
So dragons must comebefore humans in sentences.
Humans have to come beforeobjects in sentences, et cetera.
And of course, that can bereally confusing, because,
you know, if I have asentence like, "The human
loves the dog," I haveto say, "Human loves dog."
(34:53):
But then if I want to say, "The dog lovesthe human," I also have to put human first.
So the directive and recessiveis case marking to mark--
it's to clarify kind of when something's
being moved around becauseof the animacy hierarchy.
So the directive is sortof default, where all nouns
by default are assumedto be in the directive case.
(35:15):
And then the recessive iswhen you mark something
in the recessive to mark thatit is being syntactically moved
in order to satisfy the animacyhierarchy, which is kind of confusing.
I hope that kind of made sense.
Oh, OK.
OK, so in your example,like for the second
example, dog would beput in the recessive case.
(35:37):
Yeah, so if I want to say, the dog lovesthe human, I would say, the human--
sorry, human would be in recessive-- wait.
Yes, human would be in recessive.
So if I want to say, thedog loves the human,
I have to say, the human,recessive, loves the dog.
And the recessive indicates that, hey,now I'm starting with the human, which
is in subject position, butit's not actually the subject.
(35:58):
I'm only putting it here tosatisfy the animacy hierarchy.
Yeah, yeah.
That's interesting.
That's clever.
I don't know if there's alanguage out there that does that.
I believe-- so you said youwere inspired by Navajo.
I think Navajo doeshave this, where word
- order follows animacy, though I don't-- - Yeah.
(36:21):
I think-- I haven't lookedat Navajo in a minute.
Because Navajo was mystarting inspiration for this idea.
And they have the same thing, wherethe word order has to follow the hierarchy.
And I think they do itby marking on the verb
whether or not we'refollowing a hierarchy or not.
So a sentence like, "Thehuman loves the dog,"
on the verb love, Ihave a particle to say,
yes, it's the correctorder, "Human loves dog."
(36:43):
Or there's a different particle tosay, actually, it's the reverse order.
"The dog loves the human."
It's surprising how thorough you are
in following this hierarchy, which
I don't know if this isactually the same as what--
(37:03):
I don't know if Navajo evengoes as far as what you've done.
Because I think even within-- evenwhen you have embedded clauses,
you have to still rearrange the sentencein ways to keep the hierarchy working.
Yeah, I think it's moreextreme than Navajo is.
I think Navajo is clause-specific.
(37:25):
But this is like-- it spansover the entire sentence.
And so if you have to, youmight front an entire subordinate
clause at the beginningjust to satisfy the hierarchy.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
It's cool, but it is also crazy.
- And it must be--- It makes translation hard.
It must be a giant pain totranslate anything in this
(37:46):
language or composeanything in this language for you.
For sure.
And I can't imagine, ifthis was a real language,
how tough it would be for a learner,like a human trying to learn Draconic.
I mean, to think that you'dhave to rethink the way you think
of word order to alwaysbegin your sentences
by talking about thehighest animate things.
It's almost like a topic marker,in a sense, where it's like,
(38:08):
you're talking aboutthe thing that you most
want to refer to, theexalteds and the rationals.
And you always end with the least importantthings, the mundanes and abstract nouns.
Yeah.
It's really interesting to think of.
And I think you have a linehere in your sort of draft grammar
(38:29):
that you shared with me, whereyou're like, oh, dragons can--
dragons are smartenough to track all of these
things in ways thathumans might not be able to.
Which is an interesting way around it.
(38:54):
It is interesting to imagine, for amore extreme example, something like--
I think it's called Fith--.
where the language isstructured with a stack,
(39:14):
like a stack like programminglanguages can have,
where it's last in, firstout order and things.
I don't understand how it works, but I
know it's very alien to howhuman language works.
You'll find some really extremeideas in the conlanging world out there.
(39:35):
But just the fact that you've takensomething that does exist in real languages,
but taking it to anextreme is really interesting.
Yeah.
I think those are major things.
We came to the same idea ofdoing base eight number system.
(39:57):
Yeah, that's funny thatwe converged on that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I thought because I waslooking at pictures of dragons
and it seemed like they hadfour claws on their forelimbs.
But I don't know where youcame up with the same idea.
Yeah, that was the same idea. Four clause {inaudible}
Really?
Yeah.
(40:18):
I mean, it works.
If you count the digits on thehands, it's a good starting point.
That's why the vastmajority of human languages
are base 10 or base20, although there
(40:39):
are other like odderbases that are worth noting.
But yeah, it's interesting.
I do say the way you presentit in shorts is interesting to me.
(41:04):
I've tried to do a little bit ofmy own short form content.
I'm not good atthe loud, fast talking
influencer voice like youand Etymology Nerd do.
I have to do a different style.
But it is interesting.
(41:25):
I see one of yourshorts pop up and I open
it up and it says, "Imade a dragon language."
Yeah, it's a totally different environment.
I don't know, it's like a-- yeah,it's a different medium almost.
Because the short form kindof demands people's attention
(41:47):
if you want to get anywhere,you have to have some big hook.
You have to speak in a certain way.
You grab people's attention.
And you say, "I made a dragon language andhere's this new thing I added" and whatever.
Which doesn't always lenditself the best to if I want to
have a nuanced discussionabout the intricacies of a language.
So it's a little bit limiting in that way.
Yeah, I can see that.
(42:09):
I was going to ask about that.
Does the short form content affect
how you develop the language andhow you present it in particular ways?
Yeah, I think for presentation, definitely.
Because when I'm presenting them in shorts,
(42:29):
I'm thinking of whatin the first five seconds
can I say that's going toget someone's attention.
So I think I started one of my shorts
by saying that I added 2,000pronouns to my dragon language.
And so you listen and you're like, what?
You added 2,000 pronouns?
And it's a little bitmisleading because 2,000
pronouns, just becausethere's seven genders,
there's three grammatical numbers,
there's two grammaticalcases, and there's three persons.
(42:52):
So you just do the multiplicationand it comes out to 2,000 or something.
So it's like, oh, OK.
It's not like there's 2,000individual different words.
It's just 2,000 differentinflections for the pronouns.
But I'm presenting it this way just
to grab someone's attentionright at the beginning.
But I think also it hasinfluenced the development
a little bit because nowit's a lot more fleshed out.
(43:12):
But when I was first thinking of how
I want to develop newfeatures, in the back of my head,
this nagging idea of, OK, Ineed to make sure it's something
presentable, which is goodand bad in certain ways.
It's good in the sense that it provokes
creative thought and differentways of thinking about it.
But it's also a little bit limiting.
And I'm sure there'sother ideas I probably
(43:32):
could have come upwith that maybe wouldn't
have been good for the camera that wouldhave been really interested in the conlang.
So I don't know.
I think there's pros and cons to it.
Yeah.
I think there are certainthings you can share.
The thing that I landed onwas sharing individual words.
and how I came up with themand what they mean and all of that.
(44:00):
It's not something where you can go intogreat detail about what your grammar is.
And I can see how that kind of thing canbe limiting in how you're presenting it.
I'm looking at your dictionary right now.
(44:26):
And we talked about the example withthe cheese and all of the other things.
But I see a lot of words where youtake advantage of the class system
to make a whole bunch of words out of oneroot, which I think is very interesting.
(44:49):
But if you were goingto turn that into a short,
it would be like you could do oneword, one root, and talk about it.
But you couldn't go onto give lots of examples
and lots of explanationof the system and stuff.
Yeah, right.
And that's the thing aboutshorts is that the medium--
(45:10):
it's really good foranecdotes and little stories
and little snippets.
But you really do not have theability to do any depth whatsoever.
And that's why, actually, I'm working.
It's still in the works.
But I want to make abig long-form video where
I kind of go over a lot moreof the intricacies of Draconic.
I don't make that many long-form videos.
(45:30):
But I think it'd be warranted.
And that way, you kind ofget the best of both worlds,
where you can have the shortsfor the kind of flashy pop examples.
"Oh, here's a fun thing."
But then also, I can funnel people intothe longer video if they're really curious.
They can sit down and geta much deeper, more proper
understanding of the language.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think that thatwould be a good idea.
(45:51):
And I would definitely watch itif you made that longer feature.
Just your grammar document and stuff.
is super interesting to me.
(46:12):
And as we're getting on through the thing,
I do want to ask, how hasyour language background
influenced the way that youconstructed this language?
Like, for example, youare an Arabic speaker.
(46:37):
That probably is why you included pharyngealsas the alternate to the pyric, right?
Because you're familiar with that.
But are there other ways in which yourown background influenced this language?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, Arabic had a lotof very different impacts
(47:03):
in a lot of different places.
So the default word order is VSO.
And that's true of Arabic,or at least classical Arabic.
In Arabic, you have subjectprefixes on verbs and object suffixes.
And the same thing happens in Draconic.
Like you said, the pharyngeals,that's kind of a big one.
It kind of goes towardsthe sound of the language
that has lots of veryheavy, breathy sounds.
(47:25):
And it's often very stereotyped of Arabic.
But also just because Ivery much like the pharyngeal
fricative, the /ħ/, andpharyngealization in general.
So that was a huge thing.
I'm trying to think.
I think in other places, too, the dualnumber, that's a thing in classical Arabic.
There's a word for the definite article.
And there's no wordfor the indefinite article.
That's a thing in Arabic.
So it's a lot of very minor thingswhere I kind of like how Arabic did it.
(47:48):
And I wanted to add it into it.
I mean, we all have our differentinspirations as conlangers.
I know Chinese pretty well.
So every language that I do has some things
(48:09):
that are inspired by Chinese insome way, usually just lexical.
Because I've only oncecreated a language that
is syntactically ormorphologically like Chinese.
Because it's such aspecific type that is not--
(48:33):
it's not super popular among conlangers.
We like our charts.
We like our morphology charts.
And a Chinese-stylelanguage would not have that.
But we all draw fromlanguages we know and then.
(48:55):
languages we've read about.
You have a lot ofNavajo inspiration in this.
I'm sure there's lotsof other bits and bobs
from other languages thatyou've incorporated as well.
How have you related tothe conlanging community?
You say you started thisby-- it was recommended to
(49:16):
you in your feed by somepeople who are on YouTube.
But how have you broken into-- have youinteracted much with conlanging communities.
on Discord, on Blue Sky, on Facebookthat have already existed on the Internet?
(49:43):
It wasn't-- I wasn't doingthat at all at first, I think.
And I think a lot of that is that it'skind of an intimidating place to start.
Not that people are mean orintimidating, not in that sense.
But just in the sense thatthere's so much to conlanging.
And there's so manypeople who've been in the
space for a while andwho know so much about it.
And when you're new to it, you kindof feel like you don't know anything.
And so it's kind of hardto get your foot in the door.
(50:05):
But since then, I've been gettingit on Reddit and on Discord mainly.
Those are the twoplaces I've been going in.
Whether that be asking foradvice in developing my conlanging
or just helping otherpeople out or giving other
people advice and learningmore from other people.
Yeah, and I think it's really cool.
People have been super kind.
And the conlangingcommunity seems really cool.
(50:26):
It can just be a little bit scary whenyou feel like you don't know anything.
And everyone around you knows so much
and has been around for a while.
I do have to say, I doknow part of the answer.
Because I invited you to be in the YouTubeConlanging Relay, which is interesting.
(50:48):
I'm going to be trying to get thisepisode out early in September.
So that has not come out yet, unlessthis episode gets seriously delayed.
But yeah, it's interesting.
(51:11):
Like, for a long time-- I askthat because for a long time,
the conlanging communityhas been this thing that just--
like, this identifiable community
has been doing on the Internet.
(51:32):
Like, since the '90s,there were particular
spaces that peoplewent for conlanging stuff.
And I have seen, more recently,since I've been doing YouTube
and then observing, peoplehave been coming into it
from the world-buildingspace, like Madeline James,
(51:57):
from general linguistic space,like you and Etymology Nerd.
And it's encouraging to me.
And I'd like to hear how youare encountering the community.
And it sounds good to me that you'rehaving a mostly positive experience.
(52:20):
I want people to havea positive experience.
And mostly, the conlanging community
is a nice place and a welcomingplace for all kinds of people,
especially if you'redoing artlangs like
you're doing, whichis for artistic purposes.
(52:45):
If you get into auxlangs,the auxiliary languages,
a lot of the people who are into Esperantoor Toki Pona or something are nice people.
But there are some people who have a littlebit of the highlander mentality on that.
(53:06):
But mostly, the conlangingcommunity is a nice place.
I'm glad to hear from somebody comingfrom the outside that it's been good.
Yeah, it's been a great experience.
I'm super happy.
And now that I'm not done-- I don'tthink you'd ever be done with a conlang.
But I'm in a place with Draconicwhere it's kind of wrapping up.
I'm pretty happy with it.
(53:27):
And now I'm super excited to whatever
my next project is going to be.
And now that I feel a lot more established,
at least, with my conlang,I'm sure it'll be more fun.
It'll be a lot easier, a lot more to learn.
So I'm super excited.
Is it going to be in the same world?
Or is it going to be insomething different?
What are you thinking about for that?
(53:49):
It's funny because I have two ideas.
And they're totally diametrically opposed.
One is to have something in the same world.
And I was thinking of doing--
I really want to explore the ideaof a hive mind-based conlang.
And I don't know whatthat would look like at all.
I'd have to think about it some more.
But I can't even imaginewhat that would look like.
But what would a hivemind use for language?
(54:10):
What would that look like?
I think that'd be a really coolcreative exercise just to explore that.
And that would probablybe in the same world.
I'm not sure what species it would be.
But come up with some fantasy species
that stereotypically uses ahive mind, some sort of insectoid.
And I think that would be really cool.
So that's one of the ideas.
The other idea, completely opposite, isI want to do a speculative future English
(54:31):
to think about what Englishmight look like in 1,000 years.
I know it's a thingthat's been done before.
But I want to take my own stab at it.
And I think that would also be fun.
So that's where I'm at right now.
Yeah.
It's two completely different ideas.
Future English is interesting.
And so the hive mind, I have to ask,
would it be individuals withinthe hive using the language?
(54:54):
Or would it be the hiveitself as the intelligent entity
using the language tospeak with other hives?
I thought of it primarily as awithin hive mind sort of thing,
which is a little bit weird because Ithink the idea of a hive mind in general
is just like you kind ofjust beam information.
(55:15):
But I think I wouldwant to explore a way in
which I don't think itwould be that situated.
Like, I don't think thehive mind communicating
with other members is yourtraditional sort of like talking
and speaking with someone.
But just like how is informationencoded in that way?
And maybe it's not verbalized, but there'sstill some sort of information encoding.
(55:35):
But in addition, I would also want
to explore how otherhive minds would interact.
Or how does a hive mind communicate with,I don't know, non-hive mind creatures?
Is that the same thing?
Maybe it's a different language entirely.
Like, it's a diglossic situation wherethey kind of code switch between the two.
It's an interesting question because--.
so with a hive mind, Ithink the question is like,
(56:02):
is this the primary waythey're sharing information?
Or are there other waysthey're sharing information?
And what does that say forall of the things in language
that touch on what knowledge thespeaker and the interlocutor share?
(56:22):
Stuff like definiteness, andlike topic and focus marking,
and all of those kinds of thingsthat are about presenting information.
How is that affected bythe idea that you are not just
two individuals speaking, butpart of this larger gestalt organism?
(56:47):
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's really weird to think about
because there isn't the sortof stuff, like you're saying,
that you just kind of take for grantedthat we have these certain categories.
And then when you thinkof it, if you are part of the
same organism, those wallsjust kind of dissolve, right?
Is there a distinctionbetween person marking?
(57:07):
Like, first person versus second person?
Yeah.
I don't know.
That might just disappear entirely.
Is there-- I'm not sure the ideas of--
also, what sort of information doyou even need to communicate?
Like you're saying, if youhave access to the same factual
information, it's possiblethat you're not conveying
any sorts of statements offact and that the language is
strictly performative in the sensethat you use it to issue commands
(57:30):
or to do that sort of thing becauseyou're all sharing the same information.
So I don't know.
I'd have to explore it more.
And maybe-- I don't know if it would work.
Maybe I'd have to have a looser hive mind
because maybe a strict hive mindwouldn't even need a language at all.
But maybe it's-- I don't know.
Something to explore.
I think there is a lotof creative potential.
And I haven't even begun toscratch the surface of what it might be.
(57:52):
I think it would be useful to look atthe different depictions of hive minds
and think about howtheir hive mind stuff works.
(58:13):
My brain goes to the Borg, right?
And they are in constantsubspace contact with each
other, which is going oversome kind of encoding system.
But that's computer stuff.
I think they can see imagesfrom each other and stuff.
(58:35):
But they do have specific commands, right?
There's the first timethat they defeat the Borg,
they send the sleep command to theBorg cube, and they all go to sleep, right?
So I could see there beingsome sort of a language-like thing
(58:56):
that is used for things like that, thatyou wouldn't necessarily be able to convey
by sharing each other'ssenses or something like that,
but that still need to be sent toeverybody as a command thing.
(59:19):
So that does make sense.
But I don't know.
I think it'd be very different.
I think it'd be more like a programminglanguage than it would be a human language.
Yeah.
I think it would be a project where
you have to do a lot of theworld building first to say,
OK, this is the informationthey share through other means,
(59:42):
whether they have telepathy,they have pheromones,
they have things, otherways of sharing information.
And then this is what this particularlanguage system does and go from there.
But I would be interestedin hearing about that.
(01:00:07):
And I know other people who would besuper interested in hive mind language.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe someone's done it before.
I've not heard of it before.
And I think it's definitely awide creative space to play with.
It'd be cool to explore.
Yeah.
Well, it's been great talking to you.
And thank you for being on.
(01:00:31):
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Do you want to do plugs?
Sure.
You guys can follow me on human1011.
Search @human1011.
Or you just search it up onYouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
Yeah, that's about it.
And yeah, as I said, more peopleprobably follow you than follow me anyway.
(01:01:00):
And any final thoughts before we go?
My final thing, actually,if I could say one thing,
is that to maybe yourgeneral audience who maybe
aren't as familiar withthe short form content,
I think that people inthe conlanging space
should be aware of thefact that there's kind of this--
it's a very wide area of short form thatI think is being slept on a little bit.
(01:01:26):
And I'm not sure exactly what that lookslike because short form conlanging, like we
were talking about earlier,it's kind of hard to do short form
conlanging content becauseyou can't go in-depth at all.
And I think a lot of conlangingis about going in-depth.
But I think short form is a space
that can be used to get more eyes on stuffand then bring people over onto long form.
And so I think peopleshould look into that.
(01:01:51):
It's definitely-- yeah, it's definitely
something where we haveto think about what works.
And I think studying whatyou and Etymology Nerd
have done with your videoscan be helpful with that.
(01:02:19):
I really like-- me and I think David andJesse Peterson got this idea from me--
just did a bunch of shorts for LexEmberso that you upload them every day.
And you have one word, and that works.
(01:02:42):
But the little tidbits thatyou share are super useful.
I think we just need tofigure out what works.
It's hard to do that with shorts.
Yeah, and probably going to bedifferent for everybody who does it.
But yeah, I think it's a cool idea.
(01:03:07):
I think it's a cool thing to be trying.
But anyway, thank you somuch, human1011, for coming on
and talking to me about your-- OK, Ihave not tried to pronounce this yet.
(01:03:28):
Oh, I want to hear you give it a spin.
OK, what is-- so what is the--OK, what is the caret again?
- Is that---It's a long pyric vowel.
OK, so it's itræχnâ- itræχnâħyq̇ [itræχnɑˤħyq]
(01:03:51):
The Y is the schwa, actually.
But otherwise, that's good.
Yeah.
Yeah, sorry.
When I see Y, I think /y/.
OK.
That's fair.
itræχnâħyq̇ [itræχnɑˤħʌq]{should be [itraχnɑˤħəʡ] - I tried.}
OK.
Yeah.
I'm not sure.
(01:04:11):
OK, yeah, that shouldhave been-- well, OK.
And you will see him in theConlang Relay this year as one leg.
And with that, I'm going to say thankyou for watching and happy Conlanging.
(01:04:40):
Thank you for listening to Conlangery.
You can find archives andshow notes at conlangery.com.
And if you'd like to support the show,
the best way to do that is togo to our Patreon at patreon.
com/conlangery.
With just $1, you can getaccess to exclusive polls
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And also, for $5, you can get everypodcast episode early and ad-free.
(01:05:06):
And now, to thank our patrons,Mintaka, Kenan Kigunda,
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(01:05:31):
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(01:05:54):
Conlangery's theme music is by Null Device.
Conlangery is distributedunder a Creative Commons
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
(01:06:14):
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast
about constructed languagesand the people who create them.
(00:21):
I'm George Corley.
And with me, where are you at this moment?
I am currently in America, thoughI was just in Lebanon actually.
Yeah, so from somewhere inAmerica, we have Human1011.
Hello, thank you for having me.
Yeah, so I mean, I think a lot of peoplewill know you better than they know me.
(00:49):
But Human1011 runs aYouTube channel that mostly does
short form content, Ithink, etymology and stuff.
But the reason I wantedto talk to you is you, like
me, had the idea of creatinga language for dragons.
(01:13):
Yes, yeah.
Why don't you introduceyourself a little bit
and also tell me alittle bit about how that
came about, how yougot into KhanLanging?
Yeah, so as you said, Igo by Human1011 online.
For the past a littlebit over two years now,
(01:35):
I've been making sort ofshort form style content.
It's kind of educationalabout linguistics in general.
And when it comes to conlanging, I'd alwaysbeen kind of just interested in it just
because the sorts of videos that would justpop up on my recommended on YouTube.
You know, in fact, some other peoplewho are very well known
in the space, like Biblaridion, Conlang Critic,just random people would pop up.
(01:57):
And it was the sort of thingthat I had this kind of idea
for in passing, butnever really wanted to try.
And then one day, I cameacross another person
who does short formlinguistics content.
His handle is etymologynerd.
And what he ended up doing ishe made a few shorts, not very
(02:18):
in depth, but he essentially made abird language and a dolphin language.
And he tried to very quickly throw togethersome ideas for conlangs for animals.
And I thought that was really cool, butI kind of wanted to take a step further.
And I thought, what would aconlang look like for dragons?
So I decided to put alittle bit of effort into it.
And that first video went super viral.
So I decided that there was a lot of idea
(02:41):
to explore behind that.
So I decided to continue pursuing that.
Yeah, I saw the etymologynerd stuff.
The one I saw was the one that he made forgorillas, which I think he calls MONKE.
And the way that he usedegressive and ingressive
(03:02):
sounds in order to make it soundlike gorilla noises is interesting.
Yeah.
You have these shortsabout the dragon language.
Now, that's only a small part ofwhat your channel is, I understand.
(03:23):
It's a lot of etymologycontent, a lot of Arabic content.
I understand that you are Lebanese.
Yeah, I'm Lebanese-American.
So I try to talk about Arabic a lot.
Lebanese... of Lebanese descent.
And so you have a lotof content about Arabic.
(03:49):
But for this dragon language, it's
been interesting to mebecause I created specifically
a dragon language meant tobe used in Dungeons & Dragons.
And it was interesting to see how youapproach things differently than I did.
(04:12):
And there's a wide diversity.
It's a fictional mythical beast, right?
So you're going to have a lot ofdifferent takes on what it could be.
So it was interesting.
Let me-- so lookingat it, the first thing that
(04:35):
strikes you is you havea whole series of sounds
that are meant to beaccompanied by fire breath, right?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So that was one of the mainideas when I was thinking,
what would be a cool thing thatdragons would do when speaking?
(04:56):
And I thought, at least in my head canon,
I was imagining stereotypicalfire-breathing dragons.
And I thought, in the same waythat we have a voice box, which
is very finely tuned for different productionof vocal sounds, I'm sure they have
whatever the biological equivalentwould be for some sort of magical fire box.
And I wouldn't be surprised at all
(05:17):
to think that they would usethat in encoding their sounds.
So I decided to implementthat if a bunch of the consonants
and vowels requireflame breath of some sort.
Yeah.
And it's interesting that youdecided to notate them as
pharyngeals and say, humanscan produce these as pharyngeals.
(05:40):
But then when in your shorts,you've got a butane lighter.
And you just light it.
I literally have-- wait.
Yeah, I got it right here.
Oh, I have a lighter here.
I light this.
It's like, oh, just imagine thatI'm a dragon breathing fire.
Yeah.
(06:01):
My idea was that, of course,if this was an indigenously
dragon language, they wouldhave this sort of fire breath.
But if, for whateverreason, maybe this is a D&D
campaign and you're doingsome sort of incantation,
or maybe this is just asociety where dragons
and humans are justinteracting a bunch.
If a human needs to speak, they're
going to approximate itto the best of their ability.
And you're probably notgoing to carry a lighter on you.
(06:22):
So the lighter's more of avisual flair for the shorts, I think.
But yeah, I thoughtabout, I feel like
pharyngeals are a decentapproximation for humans.
Yeah, just something that's not alreadyin the language that you could throw in.
And that also lets you write it in IPA,
which you otherwise wouldhave to invent a special symbol for.
(06:44):
Yeah.
But yeah, it's interesting.
And then the reasonthat I didn't go with
that, but some peopleactually suggested that.
For one, I was wantingpeople to use it in game,
and I didn't really think abouthaving a replacement for that.
(07:10):
And another thing was I was explicitlytalking about dragons in Dungeons & Dragons.
And they have a lot of breath weapons.
Their breath weapons have a recharge,
and it just didn't fit forwhat I was imagining.
But then you also actually have ways
that you can imagine thedragons have some other--
(07:32):
use other breathweapon-type things or other
organs to produce asound that humans can't.
That's interesting to me.
I love phonology stuff.
And one of my own first languageswere for creatures that had a syrinx.
(07:58):
And some birds-- so a syrinxis something that birds have.
And some birds can much more easily producetwo different pitches than a human can.
And I was using that.
But yeah.
But usually, nowadays, muchmore conventional than you are.
(08:20):
But that's a cool idea.
I want to talk about, though-- let'sget further into nuts and bolts here.
When I am looking at yourthing-- so let's put it on the screen.
OK, there's the inventory.
(08:44):
And then the gender system is part of it.
But throughout here, youhave a huge focus on animacy,
and particularly animacyfrom a dragon's point of view.
(09:05):
Because dragons and other particularlypowerful beings are at the top.
Humans are a level lower.
And it's thrown in throughout the wholelanguage, not just in the noun class system,
(09:28):
but also in word order andcase marking and everything.
What was the impetus for that?
Yeah, so I think I first learned about thisanimacy hierarchy thing through Navajo.
I think it's one ofthose linguistic fun facts
(09:49):
that people hear a lot,if you're into linguistics,
that you hear that Navajohas a sort of animacy hierarchy.
But what's really cool isthat at the top of their animacy
hierarchy, it's reserved forjust humans as well as lightning.
When I first heard that,the idea being that lightning,
at least in their culture, isseen as very highly animate.
And this idea of animacy doesn't necessarilyneed to be a literal animacy thing.
It can be about cultural values.
(10:10):
And the moment I heardabout that, I thought, wow.
There's so much room toexplore in a conlang with that.
Because you can learn so much aboutwhat the speakers of the language think,
depending on where theyclass it in the animacy hierarchy.
So for the dragon language,I thought, oh, for sure,
the dragons are going to viewthemselves as above humans.
So whatever class-- there's going
to be some class that's goingto have dragons and other--
(10:30):
I called it exalted, the exalted class.
And then you have the rational classfor humans, elves, dwarves, et cetera.
And so it was really fun tryingto explore that space of, OK,
if you're a dragon, who elseare you putting as exalted?
Who's in the rational class?
Are people below rational?
Where do different species and differentobjects, as well, line up on the hierarchy?
Yeah.
(10:51):
It's really interesting.
I had the idea that dragons wouldlook down on humans and humanoids.
But I didn't build outa whole system for it.
I just had one word, likea sort of an insulting term
for humans or humanoids, is ifedu, islittle giant, because they respect giants.
(11:16):
They don't really respect humans.
But you've just built this into organizingeverybody from a dragon's point of view.
I do notice that you have separateclasses for magical and mundane.
(11:38):
Is that a hint that this is usedfor TTRPGs or something?
Yeah, so I haven'texplicitly used it for this.
And when I was makingthis, I wasn't explicitly
trying to think of how Iwould use it for a TTRPG.
But I have played D&D before in the past.
(11:58):
And as I was thinking of, OK, what aresome other distinctions, I thought, one,
it'd be kind of useful tohave this sort of distinction.
But two, I think it alsomakes sense in a universe.
If a universe has dragons, of course,there's going to be magic and stuff.
And I think it makes sense tohave a very separate class of,
here's magical objects, and here'sthe complete non-magical stuff.
And it is, again, in partof that hierarchy where
(12:19):
magical stuff is seen as higher, andmundane stuff is not seen as important.
Yeah, that is interestingto separate that out.
It's sort of-- it's somethingI could go either way on
(12:41):
with a language, dependingon how magic is viewed,
whether it's viewed as a separate thing oras just a thing that exists in the world.
It's very cool.
And those were the mainthings that stuck out to me as
(13:03):
interesting themes that werearising out of this language.
And how much worldbuilding has gone behind this?
You do have a specific idea about,these are fire-breathing dragons.
(13:26):
But beyond that, I'm not sure.
And you have ideas abouthow they relate to other beings.
But I don't know, is there a particular--
you just have a placeholdername for the world.
Do you have other ideasabout the world building,
(13:47):
ideas about the world, orideas about other creatures
that exist in it?
So yeah, I've had a lot ofideas very much centered
on the dragon culture, and how thedragons view things, that sort of thing.
And I haven't done asmuch world building on
the broader worldsand anything like that.
(14:07):
I haven't really made a world.
Part of that was because,as I was making the
videos, a lot of peopleseemed interested in it.
And I wanted to kind of notgo too much into the world
so that, in theory, ifsomeone wanted to use the
language, they can kindof drop it into their world.
But also, to me, that'salso quite an undertaking.
And so to me, I was kind of focusingon, OK, what is the dragon culture?
And how are they viewing their interactions
(14:29):
with other humans, or otherspecies, other societies?
And I haven't gotteninto any explicit history,
or terrain, or worldbuilding like that.
But there has been alot of consideration mostly on just like
on the culture, and whatvalues dragons have,
and how they viewothers, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
(14:49):
Well, I mean, can youtalk a little bit about that?
We know that they viewthemselves as above humans, right?
What else can you tell, talkabout how your dragons view
themselves, or the world, and howthat's reflected in the language then?
(15:14):
Yeah, so really, I feel like a lot of it
does come back down to theanimacy hierarchy, whereas they
kind of view this world in avery strict hierarchical way,
where there's the non-magicalmaterial stuff, like rocks.
And then as you keep building withanimacy, you kind of build on value.
So magical stuff is morevaluable than mundane stuff.
And they view some sort of magicand energy, they see that as potent.
(15:38):
And they see life asthe next step up, right?
So if a rock is to a magicwand, a magic wand
is to, say, some animal,like a dog or something, right?
That's just the next step up.
And so there is still a distinctionbetween living and non-living, but all this
is kind of the next step.
The next step on the hierarchyis monstrous creatures.
(15:59):
So they view somethinglike a vampire, or I don't know,
any other monstrouscreature, like a werewolf,
also as being above kind of unintelligentanimals, like sheeps and dogs.
And then again, the nextlevel is intelligent humans.
And so they view themselves assome sort of imbued with magic,
much more powerful,longer living, that sort of thing.
They view that as kindof the top of the hierarchy.
(16:20):
And so to them, I'm not sure-- Idon't think it's a religious belief,
but maybe it's more like aphilosophical belief of there
is this sort of hierarchyof magic, or sentience,
or sapience, or energy thatkind of goes with the whole world.
And the more you have,the more valuable you are.
Yeah.
And this does really track withcomparing it to human languages, in a way.
(16:46):
Because when you have somekind of an animacy hierarchy
in human languages, myunderstanding is humans, or
at least adult humans,tend to be placed at the top.
And even if the stystem talks about...
(17:07):
Even if the systemincludes spirits, or gods, or things,
often gods would be even at humanlevel, or below in the animacy hierarchy.
Which is, if you are an English speaker,you're not familiar with this type of thing,
(17:29):
and you're thinking of it in a fantasycontext, you would not expect that.
But then the real world comes in and says,
no, humans generally justput themselves at the top.
And so, of course, dragons would also
put themselves at the topof the animacy hierarchy.
And the fact that they don'thave humans along with them,
(17:50):
that they put humans on a lower rung, sayssomething about how they view themselves.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think-- you bringup the-- it is a good point
that, like in human languages,very often the humans
will put themselves, even ifthey do believe in gods and spirits.
And the fact that the dragons inthis world are doing the same thing--
(18:10):
and obviously, it'skind of even more crazy,
because, obviously, in a fantasy setting,this is a world in which gods and spirits
are things that areliving among them, right?
Like, gods come down to theplanet, and they interact with people.
And so it's not just like thisephemeral idea of a god that
comes through religion, but alsothey walk and interact with people.
And even then, they're stillbeing put on the same level,
(18:31):
because the dragons are putting themselves--they see themselves as very highly.
And so they'll still equate themselves
with even other very powerfulbeings, even beings that
would be, in theory, morepowerful than a dragon
that they would lose to,like a god, for example.
Yeah.
But I think the reason, like, both of us
have had this thought, Ithink it just kind of shows
(18:54):
that that's a classic view of modernfantasy Western dragons, is that they are--
some would say arrogant.
Some would say they'rejust confident in their abilities
and understand their place in thepower scale of the universe kind of thing.
(19:20):
But it is very interesting, particularly
if you're talking aboutintelligent dragons that
are extremely powerful,that this is the archetype
that you generally seein modern fantasy fiction,
is that they view humansas something under them
(19:46):
and not worthy ofnotice and things like that.
I don't know if it's that extreme for you,
but you are seeing them put a rung below,
not exactly equivalentto animals or anything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's definitely-- it's aninteresting thought, as well.
And also, you mentionedthat it is sort of very much
(20:07):
a stereotype of an archetypeof Western media, as well.
And I've gotten commentsfrom people in, like, thinking,
like, "OK, does thiswork for other cultures?"
And personally, I'm not as familiar withthe attributes of dragons in other cultures.
But it is very true thatmy depiction of dragons
in this language is very mucha product of my upbringing
and what I'm used to in thestereotypical idea of a dragon.
(20:28):
But there's no objectivetruth in what a dragon has
to look like or how theyinteract with their world.
That would be a good question, actually.
Like, I don't know awhole lot besides stuff
that I've picked upfrom studying Chinese.
(20:50):
But Chinese dragons canbe depicted as a greater being.
But I think it's less--.
in Western fiction, yousee more evil dragons first.
(21:18):
And you see also dragons that are, like,
their confidence in theirpower goes into arrogance.
I'm not sure if that would be ascommon in depictions of, like, the lóng.
I think it's more seen as,like, a source of wisdom.
(21:41):
And maybe that wouldaffect how that would work.
But, like, yeah, I don't know.
I also-- I'm not going to besuper confident about that
because it's not somethingI'm, like, deeply into,
like, the stories and stuff about.
But it is interesting to, like, betalking about this different perspective.
(22:08):
Are there, like, words in the language
that, like, also exemplify,like, different-- like,
the point of view ofdragons in interesting ways?
Oh, yeah, I'm trying tothink off the top of my head.
There's definitely some words here.
I'll also be scouring thedictionary as we're chatting here.
(22:30):
There's definitely words when it comesto, like, what they relate to humans.
And, like, for example,like, a word that might be
related to a human mightserve as, like, an insult
when attributed to dragonsor something like that,
where they're doing avery clear job of delineating
the different categories of differentcreatures, where the exalteds and the rationals
are very much differentcategories that they're viewing.
(22:52):
And so that kind ofthing definitely comes up.
Oh, I can't think of any examplesoff the top of my head, unfortunately.
I'm just looking at your dictionary.
I don't necessarily see-- I don'tnecessarily see anything like that.
I do see interesting, like,some wild polysemies going on.
(23:15):
Yeah, that's also someof my favorite things
to do is, like, to startwith some very old--
oh, hello, sorry-- startfrom a very old proto word
and then just, like, think ofhow the many different ways
that that's going to diverge togive you very different meanings.
OK, like, "fēltū," a historically common
draconic name, so thisis, like, an opaque name.
(23:39):
For Monstrous, asuccubus or an incubus.
A farm animal-- theseare all in different classes,
so they'll get the different classsuffixes, so that'll distinguish.
Uncontrollable laughter--that's in the magic class.
Cheese.
And then cheeriness,gaiety, luck, good fortune.
(24:03):
Yeah.
OK, so what was-- so you diddo this with the historical method.
Yes.
It sounds like-- so what was the root?
What was the proto root?
What did that mean?
So the proto root-- it hadto do with, I think, it was--
(24:26):
I think it had to dosomething with dairy products.
And I think, if I'm remembering properly--I'll probably have to double-check--
but it was a loan from-- like, I didn'tmake a full fleshed-out humanoid language
in universe, but I came upwith, like, a bunch of sample,
like, root words to come up with.
And so it had to do with, like,dairy products or something.
And that came from a human language,
because dairy products aremuch more important for humans
(24:47):
than they really care for a dragon.
So a dragon would haveto get that from a loan, right?
Like, because dragonsaren't really doing dairy
since they're not mammals, right?
So it's not a big deal.
So that's where farm animal andcheese come from, because it's a root.
But in the human culture as well,because dairy was such an important thing,
it also had to do withgood luck and fortune.
So that's where the idea ofgood luck and fortune comes from,
(25:07):
which is where the ideaof happiness comes from,
which is, like, where youget gaiety and cheeriness.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because that was--it's related to laughter.
And the very last thingto get to incubus and
succubus is the idea of--actually, the same thing
that happened with kindof the English word "gay,"
which went from meaninghappy to meaning, like, lascivious.
It kind of went throughthat same sort of pejoration.
(25:29):
The idea of being happy meansyou're, like, kind of sexually--
yeah, lascivious, which iswhat the idea of succubus--
actually, the same thing happened.
I think the word rightabove it is the adjective.
Yeah, the adjective "fēltū"also had that same sort of thing
happen, where it means cheeryand lucky, but it also means lascivious in there.
OK, that's super interesting.
(25:51):
I did not expand it out in all these ways,
but I did have the same idea ofloaning a word for, like, "milk" from--
I had them loan it from Sylvan, from thefairies, like the older form of their language.
Because, yeah, dragons don't consume milk.
(26:16):
Right.
They wouldn't have a word for that.
There's no need.
That's definitely something thatyou would want to bring about.
I do actually...
I do actually want to come backand talk about the phonology,
(26:39):
because there was one thingthat hit me when I was looking at it
is, like, comparing it tothe decisions that I made,
beyond having the pyricsounds, which is a cool idea,
it seems like you have an idea of doingadditive things more than, like, subtracting.
(27:07):
Because, like, you havelots of rounded vowels here,
whereas I thought, well, I mean,they wouldn't have flexible lips.
So maybe they wouldn'tbe able to round vowels.
Was there a thought process to that?
Because I see you don't have,like, you don't have bilabial
plosives or anything,except the only labels
(27:30):
you have is /m/ andthe bilabial fricative /ɸ/.
So what was your--was your reasoning
different on, like, whattheir abilities would be there?
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
I was thinking-- Ithink, actually, in my
proto-language, therewere no rounded vowels.
For that exact reason,I was thinking that,
like, the lips wouldn'treally make sense.
(27:52):
Like, any articulationyou would do with the lips
would probably only besomething like a nasal or maybe just,
like, a /ɸ/ sound that youwould just, like, blow out.
I think I ended up decidingto add rounded vowels.
I think my idea was that,like, rounding probably
isn't going to correspond thesame way that, in English, we
(28:12):
can do, like, avery protruded /w/.
So, like, the way dragonsproduce rounded vowels
is not going the same way,because they physically can't.
But my thought processwas that you could still maybe,
like, have an equivalent ofsome sort of biological mechanism
that has a similar-isheffect, in the same way
that, you know, humans can't producefire, but they can do pharyngealization,
(28:32):
which is, like, theclosest thing they can do.
My thought was that, like, dragons aredoing some sort of thing with their lips.
They're probably notrounding to the same degree,
but, like, they're maybejust constricting it.
And that was my thought process there.
But you're right that it was intentional
that there's no /b/, there'sno /p/, there's no /w/,
because I thought that those are muchharder sounds for dragons to produce.
(28:53):
That's super interesting, because youcame to the opposite conclusion to me.
Like, for me, and this wasalso, like, a vote in the stream
chat, too, but, like, I laid out my argument,and people basically agreed with me.
But, like, I thought, OK, bilabial sounds,including bilabial plosives, are cool,
(29:17):
because I actually had just readan article about Tyrannosaurus
Rex, and there were somepeople who were putting
out the idea that theyprobably did have lips that
could seal their mouthshut, so you wouldn't actually
see their teeth all thetime, like you do in movies.
(29:39):
And I was thinking, well, most animals cando that, can, like, seal their mouth shut.
So something, like,definitely, like, a nasal,
like, /m/, if they can do nasals atall, they would do something like that.
And then, well, I mean, Ican get that plosives might
(30:04):
be difficult, because youhave to build up pressure,
and how strong are theirlips to build up pressure?
But my thought was, like, I didn't thinkabout having an equivalent process that
would produce a similar, like, performance.
I was just thinking about, well, their lips
(30:25):
are not flexible enoughto do this, like humans
can do, because theyhave no need for that, right?
That's a specific adaptation formammals in order to drink milk as babies.
That's not a thing thatreptiles are going to have.
(30:45):
But you came to theopposite idea of, like, OK,
they'll have something that'ssimilar to rounding, right?
Something that has a similareffect on the formants, right?
But they can't really build up pressurebehind, is what I'm getting from you.
(31:06):
It's interesting that we-- again, it's afictional creature, and neither one of us
are really biologists.
So it kind of makes sensethat, like, just trying to reason
through it on our own, weended up in opposite places.
Yeah, that is kind of interesting.
(31:27):
I think my approach is a little bit hand-wavy,where it's like, oh, I'm sure there's
some sort of mechanismthey can do to approximate it.
And some biologist isthinking, like, no, there's no way.
Well, I have a friend who is really into--
Logan Kearsley is reallyinto, like, alien languages.
And to him, he wouldsay, like, just the idea
(31:51):
that they are producingsounds that are reasonably
equivalent to sounds that humans can make
is kind of hand-wavy,because their vocal tract, just
because they have an elongated snoutand they have a longer neck and all kinds
of physiological differences,some of which, like, you don't
(32:15):
even know, that, like, they wouldjust sound completely different.
But there's a certainplace for artistic license
where we got to say, OK, well, Iwant to speak it with my mouth, right?
(32:35):
-Yeah.-Right?
Like, you have to do something.
Yeah, like, you wantto use it in your shorts
and give examples without having touse, like, a synthesizer or something.
I want to write spell incantations
that other people canread while they're playing a
TTRPG, so while they'replaying a D&D or whatever.
(33:01):
So yeah, we have to make it pronounceableby humans for these particular projects.
So we do have to hand wave a little bit.
It's just interesting that we came up
with different limitations going from,like, just completely opposite directions.
We should talk to Biblaridion andask him if he could-- I don't know if he--
(33:29):
Biblaridion knows a lotabout biology, but I don't know
how much specifically he knowsabout, like, sound modeling.
He's working on-- Ithink he's working on--
didn't he say he wasgoing to work on, like,
alien conlangs for his, like,Alien Biospheres project?
I believe that the neotektonswill have languages eventually.
(33:49):
But he may need to, like,consult with other people on that.
What is this--? So this issomething I was reading about.
So different classes of nounshave different case marking.
(34:13):
And I'm a little, like, not clear on,like, what is this directive and recessive?
Yeah.
So directive and recessive-- well,these are not real linguistic terms.
I made them up for this language.
I mean, maybe there's somelanguage out there that has them.
I doubt it.
But because of the waythe animacy hierarchy
(34:33):
works, it's very strictin the word order
that words in a sentence have to comein order of most animate to least animate.
So dragons must comebefore humans in sentences.
Humans have to come beforeobjects in sentences, et cetera.
And of course, that can bereally confusing, because,
you know, if I have asentence like, "The human
loves the dog," I haveto say, "Human loves dog."
(34:53):
But then if I want to say, "The dog lovesthe human," I also have to put human first.
So the directive and recessiveis case marking to mark--
it's to clarify kind of when something's
being moved around becauseof the animacy hierarchy.
So the directive is sortof default, where all nouns
by default are assumedto be in the directive case.
(35:15):
And then the recessive iswhen you mark something
in the recessive to mark thatit is being syntactically moved
in order to satisfy the animacyhierarchy, which is kind of confusing.
I hope that kind of made sense.
Oh, OK.
OK, so in your example,like for the second
example, dog would beput in the recessive case.
(35:37):
Yeah, so if I want to say, the dog lovesthe human, I would say, the human--
sorry, human would be in recessive-- wait.
Yes, human would be in recessive.
So if I want to say, thedog loves the human,
I have to say, the human,recessive, loves the dog.
And the recessive indicates that, hey,now I'm starting with the human, which
is in subject position, butit's not actually the subject.
(35:58):
I'm only putting it here tosatisfy the animacy hierarchy.
Yeah, yeah.
That's interesting.
That's clever.
I don't know if there's alanguage out there that does that.
I believe-- so you said youwere inspired by Navajo.
I think Navajo doeshave this, where word
- order follows animacy, though I don't-- - Yeah.
(36:21):
I think-- I haven't lookedat Navajo in a minute.
Because Navajo was mystarting inspiration for this idea.
And they have the same thing, wherethe word order has to follow the hierarchy.
And I think they do itby marking on the verb
whether or not we'refollowing a hierarchy or not.
So a sentence like, "Thehuman loves the dog,"
on the verb love, Ihave a particle to say,
yes, it's the correctorder, "Human loves dog."
(36:43):
Or there's a different particle tosay, actually, it's the reverse order.
"The dog loves the human."
It's surprising how thorough you are
in following this hierarchy, which
I don't know if this isactually the same as what--
(37:03):
I don't know if Navajo evengoes as far as what you've done.
Because I think even within-- evenwhen you have embedded clauses,
you have to still rearrange the sentencein ways to keep the hierarchy working.
Yeah, I think it's moreextreme than Navajo is.
I think Navajo is clause-specific.
(37:25):
But this is like-- it spansover the entire sentence.
And so if you have to, youmight front an entire subordinate
clause at the beginningjust to satisfy the hierarchy.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
It's cool, but it is also crazy.
- And it must be--- It makes translation hard.
It must be a giant pain totranslate anything in this
(37:46):
language or composeanything in this language for you.
For sure.
And I can't imagine, ifthis was a real language,
how tough it would be for a learner,like a human trying to learn Draconic.
I mean, to think that you'dhave to rethink the way you think
of word order to alwaysbegin your sentences
by talking about thehighest animate things.
It's almost like a topic marker,in a sense, where it's like,
(38:08):
you're talking aboutthe thing that you most
want to refer to, theexalteds and the rationals.
And you always end with the least importantthings, the mundanes and abstract nouns.
Yeah.
It's really interesting to think of.
And I think you have a linehere in your sort of draft grammar
(38:29):
that you shared with me, whereyou're like, oh, dragons can--
dragons are smartenough to track all of these
things in ways thathumans might not be able to.
Which is an interesting way around it.
(38:54):
It is interesting to imagine, for amore extreme example, something like--
I think it's called Fith--.
where the language isstructured with a stack,
(39:14):
like a stack like programminglanguages can have,
where it's last in, firstout order and things.
I don't understand how it works, but I
know it's very alien to howhuman language works.
You'll find some really extremeideas in the conlanging world out there.
(39:35):
But just the fact that you've takensomething that does exist in real languages,
but taking it to anextreme is really interesting.
Yeah.
I think those are major things.
We came to the same idea ofdoing base eight number system.
(39:57):
Yeah, that's funny thatwe converged on that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I thought because I waslooking at pictures of dragons
and it seemed like they hadfour claws on their forelimbs.
But I don't know where youcame up with the same idea.
Yeah, that was the same idea. Four clause {inaudible}
Really?
Yeah.
(40:18):
I mean, it works.
If you count the digits on thehands, it's a good starting point.
That's why the vastmajority of human languages
are base 10 or base20, although there
(40:39):
are other like odderbases that are worth noting.
But yeah, it's interesting.
I do say the way you presentit in shorts is interesting to me.
(41:04):
I've tried to do a little bit ofmy own short form content.
I'm not good atthe loud, fast talking
influencer voice like youand Etymology Nerd do.
I have to do a different style.
But it is interesting.
(41:25):
I see one of yourshorts pop up and I open
it up and it says, "Imade a dragon language."
Yeah, it's a totally different environment.
I don't know, it's like a-- yeah,it's a different medium almost.
Because the short form kindof demands people's attention
(41:47):
if you want to get anywhere,you have to have some big hook.
You have to speak in a certain way.
You grab people's attention.
And you say, "I made a dragon language andhere's this new thing I added" and whatever.
Which doesn't always lenditself the best to if I want to
have a nuanced discussionabout the intricacies of a language.
So it's a little bit limiting in that way.
Yeah, I can see that.
(42:09):
I was going to ask about that.
Does the short form content affect
how you develop the language andhow you present it in particular ways?
Yeah, I think for presentation, definitely.
Because when I'm presenting them in shorts,
(42:29):
I'm thinking of whatin the first five seconds
can I say that's going toget someone's attention.
So I think I started one of my shorts
by saying that I added 2,000pronouns to my dragon language.
And so you listen and you're like, what?
You added 2,000 pronouns?
And it's a little bitmisleading because 2,000
pronouns, just becausethere's seven genders,
there's three grammatical numbers,
there's two grammaticalcases, and there's three persons.
(42:52):
So you just do the multiplicationand it comes out to 2,000 or something.
So it's like, oh, OK.
It's not like there's 2,000individual different words.
It's just 2,000 differentinflections for the pronouns.
But I'm presenting it this way just
to grab someone's attentionright at the beginning.
But I think also it hasinfluenced the development
a little bit because nowit's a lot more fleshed out.
(43:12):
But when I was first thinking of how
I want to develop newfeatures, in the back of my head,
this nagging idea of, OK, Ineed to make sure it's something
presentable, which is goodand bad in certain ways.
It's good in the sense that it provokes
creative thought and differentways of thinking about it.
But it's also a little bit limiting.
And I'm sure there'sother ideas I probably
(43:32):
could have come upwith that maybe wouldn't
have been good for the camera that wouldhave been really interested in the conlang.
So I don't know.
I think there's pros and cons to it.
Yeah.
I think there are certainthings you can share.
The thing that I landed onwas sharing individual words.
and how I came up with themand what they mean and all of that.
(44:00):
It's not something where you can go intogreat detail about what your grammar is.
And I can see how that kind of thing canbe limiting in how you're presenting it.
I'm looking at your dictionary right now.
(44:26):
And we talked about the example withthe cheese and all of the other things.
But I see a lot of words where youtake advantage of the class system
to make a whole bunch of words out of oneroot, which I think is very interesting.
(44:49):
But if you were goingto turn that into a short,
it would be like you could do oneword, one root, and talk about it.
But you couldn't go onto give lots of examples
and lots of explanationof the system and stuff.
Yeah, right.
And that's the thing aboutshorts is that the medium--
(45:10):
it's really good foranecdotes and little stories
and little snippets.
But you really do not have theability to do any depth whatsoever.
And that's why, actually, I'm working.
It's still in the works.
But I want to make abig long-form video where
I kind of go over a lot moreof the intricacies of Draconic.
I don't make that many long-form videos.
(45:30):
But I think it'd be warranted.
And that way, you kind ofget the best of both worlds,
where you can have the shortsfor the kind of flashy pop examples.
"Oh, here's a fun thing."
But then also, I can funnel people intothe longer video if they're really curious.
They can sit down and geta much deeper, more proper
understanding of the language.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think that thatwould be a good idea.
(45:51):
And I would definitely watch itif you made that longer feature.
Just your grammar document and stuff.
is super interesting to me.
(46:12):
And as we're getting on through the thing,
I do want to ask, how hasyour language background
influenced the way that youconstructed this language?
Like, for example, youare an Arabic speaker.
(46:37):
That probably is why you included pharyngealsas the alternate to the pyric, right?
Because you're familiar with that.
But are there other ways in which yourown background influenced this language?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, Arabic had a lotof very different impacts
(47:03):
in a lot of different places.
So the default word order is VSO.
And that's true of Arabic,or at least classical Arabic.
In Arabic, you have subjectprefixes on verbs and object suffixes.
And the same thing happens in Draconic.
Like you said, the pharyngeals,that's kind of a big one.
It kind of goes towardsthe sound of the language
that has lots of veryheavy, breathy sounds.
(47:25):
And it's often very stereotyped of Arabic.
But also just because Ivery much like the pharyngeal
fricative, the /ħ/, andpharyngealization in general.
So that was a huge thing.
I'm trying to think.
I think in other places, too, the dualnumber, that's a thing in classical Arabic.
There's a word for the definite article.
And there's no wordfor the indefinite article.
That's a thing in Arabic.
So it's a lot of very minor thingswhere I kind of like how Arabic did it.
(47:48):
And I wanted to add it into it.
I mean, we all have our differentinspirations as conlangers.
I know Chinese pretty well.
So every language that I do has some things
(48:09):
that are inspired by Chinese insome way, usually just lexical.
Because I've only oncecreated a language that
is syntactically ormorphologically like Chinese.
Because it's such aspecific type that is not--
(48:33):
it's not super popular among conlangers.
We like our charts.
We like our morphology charts.
And a Chinese-stylelanguage would not have that.
But we all draw fromlanguages we know and then.
(48:55):
languages we've read about.
You have a lot ofNavajo inspiration in this.
I'm sure there's lotsof other bits and bobs
from other languages thatyou've incorporated as well.
How have you related tothe conlanging community?
You say you started thisby-- it was recommended to
(49:16):
you in your feed by somepeople who are on YouTube.
But how have you broken into-- have youinteracted much with conlanging communities.
on Discord, on Blue Sky, on Facebookthat have already existed on the Internet?
(49:43):
It wasn't-- I wasn't doingthat at all at first, I think.
And I think a lot of that is that it'skind of an intimidating place to start.
Not that people are mean orintimidating, not in that sense.
But just in the sense thatthere's so much to conlanging.
And there's so manypeople who've been in the
space for a while andwho know so much about it.
And when you're new to it, you kindof feel like you don't know anything.
And so it's kind of hardto get your foot in the door.
(50:05):
But since then, I've been gettingit on Reddit and on Discord mainly.
Those are the twoplaces I've been going in.
Whether that be asking foradvice in developing my conlanging
or just helping otherpeople out or giving other
people advice and learningmore from other people.
Yeah, and I think it's really cool.
People have been super kind.
And the conlangingcommunity seems really cool.
(50:26):
It can just be a little bit scary whenyou feel like you don't know anything.
And everyone around you knows so much
and has been around for a while.
I do have to say, I doknow part of the answer.
Because I invited you to be in the YouTubeConlanging Relay, which is interesting.
(50:48):
I'm going to be trying to get thisepisode out early in September.
So that has not come out yet, unlessthis episode gets seriously delayed.
But yeah, it's interesting.
(51:11):
Like, for a long time-- I askthat because for a long time,
the conlanging communityhas been this thing that just--
like, this identifiable community
has been doing on the Internet.
(51:32):
Like, since the '90s,there were particular
spaces that peoplewent for conlanging stuff.
And I have seen, more recently,since I've been doing YouTube
and then observing, peoplehave been coming into it
from the world-buildingspace, like Madeline James,
(51:57):
from general linguistic space,like you and Etymology Nerd.
And it's encouraging to me.
And I'd like to hear how youare encountering the community.
And it sounds good to me that you'rehaving a mostly positive experience.
(52:20):
I want people to havea positive experience.
And mostly, the conlanging community
is a nice place and a welcomingplace for all kinds of people,
especially if you'redoing artlangs like
you're doing, whichis for artistic purposes.
(52:45):
If you get into auxlangs,the auxiliary languages,
a lot of the people who are into Esperantoor Toki Pona or something are nice people.
But there are some people who have a littlebit of the highlander mentality on that.
(53:06):
But mostly, the conlangingcommunity is a nice place.
I'm glad to hear from somebody comingfrom the outside that it's been good.
Yeah, it's been a great experience.
I'm super happy.
And now that I'm not done-- I don'tthink you'd ever be done with a conlang.
But I'm in a place with Draconicwhere it's kind of wrapping up.
I'm pretty happy with it.
(53:27):
And now I'm super excited to whatever
my next project is going to be.
And now that I feel a lot more established,
at least, with my conlang,I'm sure it'll be more fun.
It'll be a lot easier, a lot more to learn.
So I'm super excited.
Is it going to be in the same world?
Or is it going to be insomething different?
What are you thinking about for that?
(53:49):
It's funny because I have two ideas.
And they're totally diametrically opposed.
One is to have something in the same world.
And I was thinking of doing--
I really want to explore the ideaof a hive mind-based conlang.
And I don't know whatthat would look like at all.
I'd have to think about it some more.
But I can't even imaginewhat that would look like.
But what would a hivemind use for language?
(54:10):
What would that look like?
I think that'd be a really coolcreative exercise just to explore that.
And that would probablybe in the same world.
I'm not sure what species it would be.
But come up with some fantasy species
that stereotypically uses ahive mind, some sort of insectoid.
And I think that would be really cool.
So that's one of the ideas.
The other idea, completely opposite, isI want to do a speculative future English
(54:31):
to think about what Englishmight look like in 1,000 years.
I know it's a thingthat's been done before.
But I want to take my own stab at it.
And I think that would also be fun.
So that's where I'm at right now.
Yeah.
It's two completely different ideas.
Future English is interesting.
And so the hive mind, I have to ask,
would it be individuals withinthe hive using the language?
(54:54):
Or would it be the hiveitself as the intelligent entity
using the language tospeak with other hives?
I thought of it primarily as awithin hive mind sort of thing,
which is a little bit weird because Ithink the idea of a hive mind in general
is just like you kind ofjust beam information.
(55:15):
But I think I wouldwant to explore a way in
which I don't think itwould be that situated.
Like, I don't think thehive mind communicating
with other members is yourtraditional sort of like talking
and speaking with someone.
But just like how is informationencoded in that way?
And maybe it's not verbalized, but there'sstill some sort of information encoding.
(55:35):
But in addition, I would also want
to explore how otherhive minds would interact.
Or how does a hive mind communicate with,I don't know, non-hive mind creatures?
Is that the same thing?
Maybe it's a different language entirely.
Like, it's a diglossic situation wherethey kind of code switch between the two.
It's an interesting question because--.
so with a hive mind, Ithink the question is like,
(56:02):
is this the primary waythey're sharing information?
Or are there other waysthey're sharing information?
And what does that say forall of the things in language
that touch on what knowledge thespeaker and the interlocutor share?
(56:22):
Stuff like definiteness, andlike topic and focus marking,
and all of those kinds of thingsthat are about presenting information.
How is that affected bythe idea that you are not just
two individuals speaking, butpart of this larger gestalt organism?
(56:47):
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's really weird to think about
because there isn't the sortof stuff, like you're saying,
that you just kind of take for grantedthat we have these certain categories.
And then when you thinkof it, if you are part of the
same organism, those wallsjust kind of dissolve, right?
Is there a distinctionbetween person marking?
(57:07):
Like, first person versus second person?
Yeah.
I don't know.
That might just disappear entirely.
Is there-- I'm not sure the ideas of--
also, what sort of information doyou even need to communicate?
Like you're saying, if youhave access to the same factual
information, it's possiblethat you're not conveying
any sorts of statements offact and that the language is
strictly performative in the sensethat you use it to issue commands
(57:30):
or to do that sort of thing becauseyou're all sharing the same information.
So I don't know.
I'd have to explore it more.
And maybe-- I don't know if it would work.
Maybe I'd have to have a looser hive mind
because maybe a strict hive mindwouldn't even need a language at all.
But maybe it's-- I don't know.
Something to explore.
I think there is a lotof creative potential.
And I haven't even begun toscratch the surface of what it might be.
(57:52):
I think it would be useful to look atthe different depictions of hive minds
and think about howtheir hive mind stuff works.
(58:13):
My brain goes to the Borg, right?
And they are in constantsubspace contact with each
other, which is going oversome kind of encoding system.
But that's computer stuff.
I think they can see imagesfrom each other and stuff.
(58:35):
But they do have specific commands, right?
There's the first timethat they defeat the Borg,
they send the sleep command to theBorg cube, and they all go to sleep, right?
So I could see there beingsome sort of a language-like thing
(58:56):
that is used for things like that, thatyou wouldn't necessarily be able to convey
by sharing each other'ssenses or something like that,
but that still need to be sent toeverybody as a command thing.
(59:19):
So that does make sense.
But I don't know.
I think it'd be very different.
I think it'd be more like a programminglanguage than it would be a human language.
Yeah.
I think it would be a project where
you have to do a lot of theworld building first to say,
OK, this is the informationthey share through other means,
(59:42):
whether they have telepathy,they have pheromones,
they have things, otherways of sharing information.
And then this is what this particularlanguage system does and go from there.
But I would be interestedin hearing about that.
(01:00:07):
And I know other people who would besuper interested in hive mind language.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe someone's done it before.
I've not heard of it before.
And I think it's definitely awide creative space to play with.
It'd be cool to explore.
Yeah.
Well, it's been great talking to you.
And thank you for being on.
(01:00:31):
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Do you want to do plugs?
Sure.
You guys can follow me on human1011.
Search @human1011.
Or you just search it up onYouTube, Instagram, TikTok.
Yeah, that's about it.
And yeah, as I said, more peopleprobably follow you than follow me anyway.
(01:01:00):
And any final thoughts before we go?
My final thing, actually,if I could say one thing,
is that to maybe yourgeneral audience who maybe
aren't as familiar withthe short form content,
I think that people inthe conlanging space
should be aware of thefact that there's kind of this--
it's a very wide area of short form thatI think is being slept on a little bit.
(01:01:26):
And I'm not sure exactly what that lookslike because short form conlanging, like we
were talking about earlier,it's kind of hard to do short form
conlanging content becauseyou can't go in-depth at all.
And I think a lot of conlangingis about going in-depth.
But I think short form is a space
that can be used to get more eyes on stuffand then bring people over onto long form.
And so I think peopleshould look into that.
(01:01:51):
It's definitely-- yeah, it's definitely
something where we haveto think about what works.
And I think studying whatyou and Etymology Nerd
have done with your videoscan be helpful with that.
(01:02:19):
I really like-- me and I think David andJesse Peterson got this idea from me--
just did a bunch of shorts for LexEmberso that you upload them every day.
And you have one word, and that works.
(01:02:42):
But the little tidbits thatyou share are super useful.
I think we just need tofigure out what works.
It's hard to do that with shorts.
Yeah, and probably going to bedifferent for everybody who does it.
But yeah, I think it's a cool idea.
(01:03:07):
I think it's a cool thing to be trying.
But anyway, thank you somuch, human1011, for coming on
and talking to me about your-- OK, Ihave not tried to pronounce this yet.
(01:03:28):
Oh, I want to hear you give it a spin.
OK, what is-- so what is the--OK, what is the caret again?
- Is that---It's a long pyric vowel.
OK, so it's itræχnâ- itræχnâħyq̇ [itræχnɑˤħyq]
(01:03:51):
The Y is the schwa, actually.
But otherwise, that's good.
Yeah.
Yeah, sorry.
When I see Y, I think /y/.
OK.
That's fair.
itræχnâħyq̇ [itræχnɑˤħʌq]{should be [itraχnɑˤħəʡ] - I tried.}
OK.
Yeah.
I'm not sure.
(01:04:11):
OK, yeah, that shouldhave been-- well, OK.
And you will see him in theConlang Relay this year as one leg.
And with that, I'm going to say thankyou for watching and happy Conlanging.
(01:04:40):
Thank you for listening to Conlangery.
You can find archives andshow notes at conlangery.com.
And if you'd like to support the show,
the best way to do that is togo to our Patreon at patreon.
com/conlangery.
With just $1, you can getaccess to exclusive polls
for my Tongues and Runes series.
And also, for $5, you can get everypodcast episode early and ad-free.
(01:05:06):
And now, to thank our patrons,Mintaka, Kenan Kigunda,
Connor Stuart Rowe, Leslie R.Waggoner III, Jesse, Kaye, Alex
Rossell Hayes, Vyren Patrick,Sylvia Sotomayor, Tabby, nai,
(01:05:31):
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(01:05:54):
Conlangery's theme music is by Null Device.
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