when will people realize that it’s perfectly normal and natural to speak a foreign language with a foreign accent as long as you are understood

You said that "some phonologists deny the utility of syllables at all"? That seems uh... manifestly absurd. While I understand that syllable boundaries are ambiguous sometimes, it seems crazy to simply discard the concept... like, I don't know whether to analyze "reason" as /ˈɹiː.zən/ or /ˈɹiːz.ən/, but I strongly feel that it has "two beats" even absent the idea of "syllables". What, then, is the argument to "deny the utility of syllables"?

I don't really know, it's not the mainstream position and I haven't really read up on it at all. The thing about syllables is that they're characterized by a bunch of different phonetic factors, often varying by language. In English, for instance, the rules for voicing and aspirations of stops are different in syllable coda and onset, and there's presumably voicing phenomena affecting other consonants as well, etc. There's no nothing inherently distinguishing one syllable from the next, syllables are just clusters of other phonetic features. And there's no way to easily define "syllable" in a language-independent way. However, it is a robust observation that in most (if not all) languages, phonetic features cluster together in such a way as to lead people to perceive speech as a series of beats, as you say. This is probably why the notion of a "syllable" has been invented over and over again across cultures.

But if you're a modern phonologist, you're trying to explain this observation. And you're probably interested in a least gesturing at cognition in your explanation. And there are roughly two ways to do this: one is to built a model where syllables are a primitive, and the various phonetic features that cluster around them are induced by phonological processes that reference syllable parsing. The other is to build a model where syllables aren't a primitive, where those various phonetic correlates are induced by other factors, and where the evident beat-like nature of language is just an emergent property. And most people will attempt to argue for their preferred model on the grounds that it accords better with cognition, but these arguments are often bad because people are not rigorous about what it means for a model to "accord with cognition". But you can in principle make an accurate model of the purely linguistic data under either paradigm, so that's why some phonologists do it.

As far as it goes, I think this is one of those questions that will just never be settled on linguistic data alone. I can't imagine a language ever being documented that truly can't be modeled with syllables, or that truly must be modeled with syllables. I'm sure it's always mathematically possible to do either. So the only way to resolve this will be with appeals to cognition. And we actually have a lot of data about cognition, and more is coming in constantly! The problem is that linguists are, as yet, not especially rigorous about how their theories interface with the cognitive data. As a rule, current (generative) theories are falsifiable by pure linguistic data but unfalsifiable by cognitive data. Which isn't a priori surprising—theories about genetics aren't falsifiable by astronomical data, etc., because they make no predictions about astronomy! But if linguists want to appeal to cognition to argue for their theories, then they need to augment their theories with a predictive apparatus about cognition. And right now that's, well, not being done especially well. But my impression is that we only very recently have good enough cognition data for it to matter, so hopefully it will get off the ground in the coming decades.

Any tips for a non-linguist attempting to create a fantasy language?

Hey! So! This is a great question, but not one I'm really equipped to answer. Because I'm not conlanging in the traditional way (by the seat of my pants while drawing on years of linguistics nerdery and advice from internet forums), a lot of the resources I'm using are ones provided to me by a linguistics professor, and therefore, for copyright and doxxing reasons, ones I can't share. What I can do is give you some very basic tips, a non-risky resource or two to help you get started, and a call for other people who dabble in conlangs to supply resources as well.

The first most basic thing I can advise is to figure out exactly what you want your language to do worldbuilding-wise, because that's going to define a lot of where you put your time and effort. For example, I want Dathomiri to recontextualize the awful, ridiculous, deeply misogynistic and cisnormative worldbuilding around the Nightsisters of Dathomir, which means I'm going to need to spend a lot of time thinking about how I want the pronouns and classes to work.

The second thing to do is to figure out which areas of your language you want to be naturalistic (it can be all of them! a lot of conlangs are made that way), and how naturalistic you want them to be. Because languages are incredibly complex, making a conlang as complex as a natural language in natural ways can take years and years and, for people who aren't Tolkien—who btw didn't even end up with a fully usable conlang—usually isn't worth it.

Of course there's room for changing your mind once you've decided on them, and not everything you toss into a language has to work exactly with your goals, but I think it can be really useful to have guidelines to help you decide which things you're going to keep in or throw out.

What you do after you've decided what you want to do is going to depend a lot on your existing knowledge of not just conlanging but linguistics in general. It's common (and best, in my opinion) practice to start with the phonetics of your language—what sounds it contains—but if you don't know how big most phonetic inventories are, or what patterns show up in them, even that can be rough.

Because I don't know where you're at knowledge-wise, and because I'm about the furthest thing you can get from an expert in linguistics, I'm not going to provide any more advice. We could get lost for days in phonetics, and weeks just on what I know of phonology (my current preferred branch), so instead I'll take this opportunity to list some resources:

First, David Peterson's book The Art of Language Invention. It's an easy read, and oriented towards people who know nothing about linguistics, so it's a really good place to start for a crash course in the basic parts of language.

Second, the World Atlas of Language Structures (https://wals.info/). Peterson's book is good for the basics, but it doesn't supply much in the way of typological information (i.e. what features occur in languages + to what frequency and where). WALS is a great database for looking at where different features of language pop up, and how often they do, which can inform a lot of your decisions about how to implement naturalism (if that's what you're trying to do).

Third—and this one both @mandaloriandy, who knows more about conlanging than me, and my professor recommended—is this word generator (https://zompist.com/gen.html). It can be really helpful for figuring out the phonology of your language—how segments are arranged—as you have to enter your phonological and phonotactic rules for it to generate a wordlist. There's also a sound change applier (https://zompist.com/sca2.html) if you're trying to evolve a language forwards or backwards, though that one I haven't ever used.

I wish I had more to give you, but a lot of what I've done so far has come from my own knowledge of phonology or from a few offhand comments from my professor/his powerpoints. I'll put out a call for resources in the tags so hopefully you'll be able to find some in the reblogs or replies, but beyond that google is probably going to be your best bet.

Sorry I couldn't help more. Good luck!

Hi, sorry if my English is bad. I don't think this is exactly a question about hieroglyphics, but I'm curious. If I'm not mistaken, we don't know how exactly the Egyptian language sounded back then, so then, are we really sure of the way names we know are pronounced, or is it some kind of concensus that was reached at some point? Like, when we talk about Ramses, is that also the way they would have said his name back then?

This is answered several times in my FAQ, and also last night, but no we don't quite know how it was all pronounced. Some parts can be reconstructed, vaguely, using Coptic and other languages we know attempted to phonetically spell Egyptian words (Amarna letters) but a full 'we know how this sounded' is a long way off and likely never will be fully articulated. Anyone claiming to know exactly how it's pronounced isn't telling you the truth. I use Egyptological pronunciation, which means I just insert vowels between the signs we do know, because my area isn't IPA and frankly IPA confuses me and I don't want to touch it. There's still a lot of debate on the Phonology anyway with Linguists and then Egyptologists who are Linguists having many an argument about things. It's not a settled matter, and until it is I'll remain doing what I always have done.

I’m trying to start a series of vocab posts that are just really long lists of Catalan vocab to do with things I enjoy but that are extremely specific like gardens, linguistics, sheep, trains, etc. I’ll hopefully post the first one soon, but the thing is, the only list I’ve started so far is already irrationally long, so it might be a while before I get any of these done. Still, you can look forward to them I guess, and if you have topics to request I’d be down?

did u know that “cerebralizacja” is a polish term for retroflex consonant aka the moment when the tip of your tongue curls while articulating the letter L and that there’s absolutely no logical reason for me to learn this?

Hello, I enjoy your conlang stuff that you post and I myself am interested in conlang but I don't where I could start if I wanted to start making one. Do you have any advice for starting out a conlang or and resources for it?

Honestly, I don't really remember how I started tbh it's been like 15 years lol so I'm not sure how good my advice'll be lol.

I feel like a good place to start is by studying other conlangs and natlangs (natural languages), and getting a feel for what other people have done themselves, or what has developed naturally. Also, try teaching yourself the international phonetic alphabet, if you haven't; it'll make transcription of phonologies a lot easier and less vague than saying things like "this is pronounced like the a in cat"

Also, here's some website

This guy has written a few books, and I'd recommend checking out his book called the Language Construction Kit. The book also has a great many further reading recommendations in it, as well. (Also, David Petersen, who created Dothraki and High Valyrian for the Game of Thrones TV series wrote a book called The Art of Language Invention, if you're interested in checking out other books on the subject as well)

Omniglot has long been one of my favourite sites. It's more for writing systems than phonologies, etc, but it also has resources for studying a great many languages, including other constructed languages.

Really, the best way to get into it is simply to dive right in. You won't be great at it at first, but as they always say, practice makes perfect.

I hope you don't mind me asking, feel free to ignore this, but you mentioned you have synesthesia. I'm curious, how does this work for you? From my understanding (which is limited) everyone experience a bit differently. It just sounds really interesting, so I hope I'm not overstepping 😅

No not at all!! It’s a really interesting topic :D (and I’ll answer your other ask in a bit if you don’t mind once I’ve got some good resources together!)

This is going to be long, because I think it’s really fascinating! So I apologise in advance. It’s also going to get quite linguistics-y, because that’s what I’m here for always. 

So my synesthesia presents itself in a number of ways. Most obviously, I have the ‘normal’ bog-standard colour-grapheme synesthesia, whereby every letter or word is strongly associated with a certain colour and sort of...feel. So for example <k> is a sly orange, sharp and mischievous. Not all letters have very strong impressions; <I> and <i> for instance are both just sort of wishy-washy and pale cloudy lemonade colour. 

Also! I have evidence for the psychological reality of the syllable and the phonological word. Often word- or syllable-initial consonants ‘colour’ the rest of the word, especially with ‘light’ vowels like <e> or <I> or <y>. So for example, even though I’m not sure whether your username is a name or a word or what exactly, it’s ‘split’ into two halves: <karo> with an orange undertone, whilst still being able to see the ‘colour’ of the other letters, and <lincki> which is a pale yellow, despite the presence of the <k>. 

One other interesting thing is that these associations seem to come from quite well-founded generalisations based on place and manner of articulation. We’ve all heard of the Boba-Kiki affect (if not, look it up) where ‘kiki’ is the sharp, pointy object and ‘boba’ is the flat, blobby one, despite them both being non-words. This holds with my synesthesia too, so there are seemingly articulatorily-founded patterns!! For instance, many of my plosives are middle to dark blue; almost all of my voiceless/voiced pairs match up with the voiced version being darker than the voiceless version (except /k/ and /g/, and that’s because of the ‘orange’ pressure from palatals and ‘green’ pressure from velars, I think); many of my palatals are on a spectrum from pale yellow-white to orange, etc. My back vowels are dark, warm, deep colours, and my front vowels are lighter. I’d be interested in knowing if this holds with other people with synesthesia: I can only do so many experiments on myself lmao (and trust me I’ve done a lot).

Each letter also occupies a certain ‘space’ in the air, like the spikes in a line graph. This is how I read quickly; I memorise the ‘shape’ of the word (which doesn’t always map on to the physical shape) and use that. 

One weird thing which happens is that phonemes and graphemes don’t always have the same colour!! Which leads to very interesting results. For instance, <u> is a sort of terracotta brown, so I hate this letter in most words (I have very strong opinions about a lot of this. I hate <p> and <b> with all of my heart). But the sound /u/ is a deep, crystal midnight green! So if I hear the word ‘Undomiel’ (thank you Tolkien), it’s incredibly beautiful. Writing it down, though, I can’t stand it, especially clashing with the pink of <m>.

This is why I dislike some languages so irrationally for no reason I think. 1) I don’t like their colour palette. If it’s all over the place or a mess or a horrible sludge-green, sorry, I’m probably not going to learn it. 2) The colour palette of what I’m hearing and what I’m reading don’t match. This could in theory happen with English, but doesn’t, because I’m so used to it I think. But this is why I dislike French so much (sorry everyone!!), because what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing literally clash in front of my eyes and it’s gross.

Where it gets really interesting is in foreign language acquisition. What happens with tone? Non-Latinate writing systems? 

I don’t have as strong associations for sounds which have no representation in the Latin alphabet (so, say, the distinction between Hindi aspirated and non-aspirated stops), because a lot of it is still based on graphemes, but that representation is still there. Sometimes it’s a modified version of the representation of a phoneme I’m familiar with (for example, the heavily aspirated Irish /t/ is a lighter blue than my /t/, and the non-aspirated Hindi /t/ is a darker version), but sometimes it’s a murky new colour based, occasionally, on place of articulation. For example, whilst <ch> should be orange and then terracotta brown in terms of graphemes, the German ach-Laut is a completely different colour to the German ich-Laut!! The ach-Laut <ch> is a dark green (which makes sense, since my velars and uvulars are usually dark green), but the ich-Laut is an orange - because, again, palatals are orange!!! Isn’t that cool? 

Features have psychological reality guys!

Another interesting thing is that I often acquire a colour-based distinction long before I consciously notice a difference even if it’s not phonemic. This is nuts!! So for instance the standard Mandarin /t/ is pronounced slightly differently to the English /t/ (both have aspiration, but slightly different places of articulation); and correspondingly, way before I learnt this or could hear the difference consciously, I noticed the colour of the Chinese /t/ was a different shade of blue!! Similarly, when I was in a Hindi-speaking environment in India I noticed that I was remembering whether words had one of (many) t-like phonemes based on colour alone; I couldn’t tell you if it was aspirated, retroflex or anything, but I could tell you, if I thought to ask, what colour it was, and so produced the correct sound appropriately - because it’s a dark blue word, right? Importantly, I wasn’t making a conscious link between those features and the colour, so if you asked me what it ‘being a dark blue word’ actually meant phonetically, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you until I sat down and worked it out myself after looking at Hindi phonology. It’s just ‘dark blue’, so you pronounce it in a ‘dark blue’ way.

I mean ultimately this is just another way of distinguishing sounds so it’s not actually that exciting, it’s just conceptualised in a different way, and still takes a long time to develop, so it’s only happened with languages where I’ve been immersed for a couple of months or more, rather than say, French or Spanish. But it’s still kind of cool. 

As for tone, tone contours also colour the word!! I don’t know if this is influenced by anything in particular (common words with those tones, maybe?) but it’s fun. The first tone is a sort of yellow; the second tone is a steely blue; the third tone is like /w/ which is a deep green; the fourth tone is a red. 

One exciting thing is also that, the more I read Chinese, the more I ‘see’ the colour of a word. This isn’t just me knowing the pronunciation; if I know the pinyin but it isn't a familiar word, I don’t see any colour. Only if I’m very familiar with that phonetic component (because guess what!! That has an affect), a similar word, or the word itself do I see the colour. Which is just wild. So, can confirm that my brain is processing phonetic components via analogy on a similar level to ‘letters’, which is really interesting. Usually the character is just the colour of the initial, sometimes coloured by the final; it’s not as detailed as the representation in the Latinate alphabet. 

In other non-Latinate writing systems, the more I’m familiar with the system, the more I see the colours. These are usually colours of the phonemes not graphemes where they differ; so for hiragana, for example, /u/ is its phonemic dark green, and not its graphemic rusty brown. 

This colour palette is really useful in conlanging btw: I don’t have to actually think up a phonological system, I just have to think ‘autumnal’, and I get words that look similar. 

Numbers are also highly coloured for me, as well as being gendered (really brain??) in a very predictable way - all even numbers are female and all male numbers are male. This is probably the strongest of all my synesthesia: I genuinely mentioned this to someone when I was about eighteen and just assumed that the rest of the world knew this too, it was so obvious. What this means is that I remember things in ‘colour palettes’ and I have quite a good visual memory because of that - I just remember the ‘shape’ and ‘colour’ of the numbers and then can reconstruct it in my head. Some numbers are also ‘higher’ than others, like if you imagine a graph, so I can map out a sequence of numbers using the ‘peaks’ and ‘dips’ in space. I was doing a psychology test looking into people with synesthesia once actually where you are flashed a sequence of numbers, and then have to type them backwards. I was able to type about 12/13 numbers backwards in after being flashed for one second, compared to an average of 4 or 5. I couldn’t remember the actual numbers; but I knew that there were purple edges, then a yellow spike and a green blob etc, and so could look at the ‘picture’ and work it out from there because the representations were so stable. 

It’s actually really helpful sometimes! I remember numbers/words in these ‘colour palettes’, and once forgot the last two digits of my PIN when in China (6 digits, not 4, which I was not used to). But because I had chosen the number myself and the other digits were a sort of gloomy heather-purple/black/grey, I knew that the last two digits had to match that palette and ‘shape’ (how high a number rests in space). So I was able to guess them both within three tries!

Other things: people’s personalities and events sometimes are associated with colours, as well as music and sounds to a limited degree, but I don’t know enough about music theory to know if what is ‘purple’ or ‘lush green’ actually has any impact. It’s not individual notes alas - that would be so useful/cool. 

The personality thing is a bit annoying - I am often terrible at remembering people’s names if they don’t match with their personality in some way. I have two friends called Liam and Adam, and to this day (despite being friends with them for years and years) I still have to stop myself calling Adam ‘Liam’. I think everybody knows the phenomenon of ‘but he just looks like a Liam!’. It’s like that, but so strong I have to correct myself basically every time. I also get names that have the same ‘colour palette’ but nothing alike mixed up: for example Henry and Carl or Mary-Anne and Belinda. 

One other thing that is difficult is that if the orthography and phonology are particularly mismatched, or use letters in ways I’m not used to, this really hinders learning. I learnt some Medieval Welsh a few years ago as part of my degree and couldn’t remember anything because it was all just green. Or I kept writing /b/ instead of, say, /t/ or a dental fricative, because I knew it was a ‘blue’ sound, but couldn’t remember exactly which one. It sometimes leads me to make mistakes that are really stupid and probably don’t make sense to anyone else - /k/ doesn’t sound anything like /j/ but because they’re both orange-coloured, I’ll often mix them up especially if /k/ is next to a high vowel. 

So, that was very long!! Thank you for the ask :D But I hope it was interesting to any fellow linguists or language-lovers out there, and if there are any psycholinguists in the room, I have made a chart of all of this and mapped it out so hmu if you want some data lmao

Do you experience synesthesia too? What’s your experience like?

My mom is all like "wow your pronunciation for the new weird language you are now interested in is rlly good how are you able to do that" and I'm just over here like "it actually isn't good bcuz the intonation is wrong and I'm basically bull*hitting on some the pronunciation bcuz I am literally just learning by ear and am too lazy [read: I have adhd now apparently] to actually study." But then she's like "oh no I've met ppl who spent yrs learning languages and they cant speak half as well as you" I'm like wait this has traction bcuz my mom was army intelligence and knows Czech and some German so. Yeah. Apparently that short spurt of reading up on phonology and phonetics actually helped me a bit.

Below is some stuff I been working on to help y'all understand how sounds are made. Theres more to be done but this is all for now.

31.12.19 - 2:20pm

お久しぶりですね！

It has been a while but I'm finally posting again! It's the last day of 2019 and I'm celebrating it by doing work ;_; such is the life of a student.

Finishing up some notes on phonetics and phonology that I definitely haven't procrastinated on for months and I'm actually so proud of how much work I've done this holiday! My forest is thriving and I hope to continue this trend in the new year ^^

I hope you all have a wonderful New Year's, however you do or don't celebrate, and see you in the new year!

Listening to: Lookalike - Conan Grey

As a deaf person with limited/no context for how words sound, I'm finding the conlang community's fixation on starting with sound to be a huge stumbling block when trying to learn how to make conlangs that aren't signed. Do you have any advice on how to work around that?

Two three actually four things:

(1) “Phonology” doesn’t simply refer to sound. (I mean, etymologically it does, but not in linguistics.) Phonology refers to how a language uses unanalyzable, meaningless units (phonemes) to create larger chunks that do have meaning (words or affixes). In a spoken language, this refers to spoken phonemes (e.g. /p/, /b/, /d/, etc.). In a sign language, this refers to places on the body, motion, and handshape. If you know ASL, compare the sign for APPLE to the sign for ONION. These are almost exactly the same sign. You put your hand in the 1 handshape with the first two segments completed curled under, you put it up to your face and twist a couple times. The difference is whether you put your hand up next to your eye, or up at your cheek. That’s the only difference between those two words. Thus, the difference between APPLE and ONION in ASL is the same difference (quantitatively) as the difference between English “meet” and “mitt”. I share this example to show you how the principle behind the arrangement of both systems—signed and spoken—is the same. They differ in their expressions (i.e. through speech sounds and through movements done with the hands and body in particular places), but the notion is that there are certain things that have no meaning (for example the place next to the eye in ASL), but you can use those things in combination with other bits that have no meaning to form meaningful units.

There aren’t a lot of signed conlangs because many conlangers aren’t as familiar with sign languages as they are spoken, and also because they are very difficult to record on paper. Any hearing person who’s studied ASL will be familiar with this: You go to class and learn, but what do you write down? I imagine every learner kind of tries to invent their own notation system to help them remember, but ultimately you just have to memorize it. That doesn’t really work for someone creating the language, though. Video is the best way to capture a sign language, but it’s not super practical (though it’s getting easier). I tried to create a phonetic transcription system for sign languages called SLIPA. I’m not sure if anyone has used it, but I think the principle is sound (or sound enough). Plus, as with the relationship between narrow transcription and romanization, I think it makes sense for the creator of the language to create a more streamlined system for use with their language that can then be explicated in a page with SLIPA.

(2) There are still other conlang types that make no reference to sound but aren’t signed. I made one called X. It’s a purely visual language (think hieroglyphs but with no phonological component whatsoever). There’s a lot to be done in this area of conlanging. You can go the picture/glyph route I did, or you could just do something totally different, as with Sai and Alex’s UNLWS. You could also do something like this:

#$% = cat

#$%* = cats

##$% = big cat

##$%* = big cats

#$$% = small cat

#$$%* = small cats

After all, even letters are just symbols. They can stand for whatever you want, or nothing at all! As long as you can describe what’s going on, that’s all that’s necessary.

(3) To your main concern, saying “the conlang community’s fixation on starting with sound” is, to put it mildly, unfair. I start with the sound system in the spoken conlangs I do, and I mostly do spoken conlangs. If I’m writing a book on how to create a language, that’s where I start, because I’m writing it. But just because I do it that way doesn’t mean most do. Even if you go to a forum or mailing list and you see most people falling into that pattern, that doesn’t mean that’s representative of the community either, because there are any number of people who simply aren’t replying or aren’t volunteering their methods. We’ve had the discussion within the community time and time again about where one starts a conlang, and there’s a significant chunk that start with the syntax. They’ll use English words or just nonce forms to realize the grammatical idea they’re interested in, and only grudgingly turn to the phonology after they’re done. Some don’t even get that far, because their interest wanes when it comes to phonology. This split even exists in linguistics, where we refer to P people (phonetics/phonology) and S people (syntax/semantics). Ask any linguist: these camps don’t always understand one another. The same is true in conlanging. A P person sees an S person’s awesome subordinate clause marking system with a makeshift phonology and says, “Is that your phonology? It’s a little unrealistic.” An S person looks at a P person’s incredible naturalistic vowel harmony system and says, “Why waste your time on that if you’re not even going to speak it? It obscures the morphology. I can’t make heads or tails of it. Just show me the interlinear.” And these are all hearing conlangers! If you’re only finding conlangers who are talking about phonology, then you need to look for other conlangers—like the Jeff Jones and Gary Shannon type of conlangers. This was, admittedly, an easier task when the community was smaller—before social media, ironically. But I swear to you: There are TONS of conlangers who share your interests.

(4) There are also lots of spoken conlangs that don’t bother too much about phonology. There are minimalist conlangs which, by definition, don’t really have a lot of material to work with, so there’s not much to design/learn in the way of phonology (e.g. three vowels, seven or eight consonants, no consonant clusters). There are also a priori auxlangs or otherwise non-natural spoken languages where you don’t find assimilation or dissimilation, or anything like that. If there are five vowels and ten consonants with ©V© syllables, then there are 555 possible syllables (if I counted right), and every syllable is valid and pronounced exactly as it’s supposed to be, and can occur next to any other syllable. Then there are other conlangs with complex but non-natural phonologies, where there are many distinctions to be made (many of which wouldn’t exist in a natural language), and the speaker must make them. I’m thinking of Ithkuil. There, is admittedly, some small amount of variation is allowed, but otherwise the way that sounds are arranged is almost mathematical. There is no concern for how the sounds fit together, or whether two words sound too similar: The grammar says what sounds go where, and that is that. Any type of project like I’ve described above incorporates aural phonology but in a way that I think makes a little more sense to an S person.

***

If you have a particular project in mind but the approaches you’ve seen don’t match it, do a little digging and find a similar project, and see how they got going. If you have the start of something and want to know about a similar project, just send another ask, and I’ll see what I can find (most of the early conlangers have websites that are still up. Btw, newer conlangers: Even though no one does websites anymore, we need a way to see your work! Hunting through Tumblr posts/tweets/FB group posts doesn’t work!). But if I can add a tl;dr to this: THERE IS NO RIGHT OR WRONG WAY TO CONLANG! You’re good, I swear! And hey, if no one can approach the way you want, why not invent it yourself and detail it? You may be creating a method/approach that will be a great help to others down the line!

Hi! Firstly, I think your blog is lovely, and I always enjoy seeing it on my dash :) Secondly, I was just wondering about Edinburgh's linguistics program, as I've heard it's very good (although considering I don't leave school for another 4 years, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself) and if you had any tips for preparing for/getting into a university

EDINBURGH LINGUISTICS FIRST YEAR OVERVIEW

hello there! thank you so much, that makes me so happy. 

good for you for already thinking about uni! that’s great. the linguistics program here is amazing- it’s really well organised and the professors are all amazing.

here’s a basic run down of how first year goes:

disclaimer: obviously all of the following information is based off the current (2016-2017) curriculum and on my own personal opinions.

lecture topics:

semester 1-

phonetics and phonology

morphology and syntax

semester 2 -

meaning and text

variation and change

language, cognition and communication:

throughout all of these units are sprinkled language, cognition and communication lectures, which are sort of like windows into possible applications or fields of linguistics that you could go on to study in third and fourth year. each lecture is for a different topic.

weekly schedule & tutorials:

there are 3 lectures per week and one tutorial per week. all contact hours are 50 minutes long. tutorials are basically small group (under 15 students) discussions led by a tutor, who is usually a phd student. obviously the amount of discussion and its quality are based off the tutor and your peers, but these are usually quite useful and a great way to ask questions about the content of the lectures. there are also weekly assignments that, while not marked, should be completed before your tutorial because they provide the basis of the discussion and help your tutor assess whether everyone is on track or not.

langsoc:

there is a society for linguistics, called the langsoc. while i myself have not attended, it seems to be a great source to meet with your peers and older students (2nd or 3rd years) who will be able to help you with assignments or any questions you may have. these sessions are more informal than your tutorials and are issued on a drop-by basis. you are also able to join a familing (my apologies, i do not know much about this).

assessments:

in the first semester, there is only one assessment: the midterm exam in december. this is 100% multiple choice. there is a mock exam in week 6 that is not marked and which is completed in your tutorial. in november, you will be assigned a language analysis project which is to be turned in after the winter break. i found this assignment to be incredibly interesting and fun to work through. that being said,  it is quite time consuming to go through all the language data (it took me roughly 7 hours, broken up over several days), so make sure to keep that in mind when you’re planning how much time you will need to complete the assignment. there is also an essay to be completed in semester 2 (i am actually currently working on it this week and into the following week). you can choose between several different topics for this essay, although i have to assume that they change the topics each year. after that, there is the end of year exam, which is multiple choice and has one essay question.

my general thoughts:

overall, i love linguistics. as with every course, there are some things i would change and some topics that don’t interest me as much as others. i think if you’re thinking about studying linguistics, then it is probably a great fit for you. that is simply because it is extremely interesting to anyone who likes languages and wants to know how they work in correlation to our minds, to society, to psychology, etc. it is a great topic to combine with psychology (as i have done) in my opinion, because the two are closely linked and it’s really great to learn them side by side. 

i hope that helped!! i was thinking of making a separate post about how to prepare for uni (both personally and academically), so look out for that :)