Language Construction and "Rightness"

One of my hobbies is inventing languages. I've been doing it on and off since my senior year in high school, but I didn't really get serious about it until I went to graduate school to study linguistics. Working on an invented language is an enjoyable way to spend an evening, though I don't do it as much now as I used to. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, also invented languages as a hobby. In a famous essay called "A Secret Vice" (originally a lecture given at Oxford to the Samuel Johnson Society on 29 November 1931), he talked about the reasons he invented languages, chief among them the pleasure he derived from creating words and thinking about the new relationship between the sounds of the word and the meaning that the word was intended to convey. As he put it: "it is the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion which is a main source of pleasure." (A Secret Vice", p 206)

I think for many of us who invent languages this is a strong motivation. There's definitely a little thrill when you come up with a word that is just Right for its intended meaning. For me, this sense of Rightness can also extend to phonological and grammatical systems themselves. There are many examples of grammatical and phonological phenomena from natural languages that I find enjoyable to think about: Frisian breaking, the Luiseño absolutive, and the auxiliary system of English, to name a few.

My current constructed language project is called Æppl (sounds like "apple"). It's a silly name and I don't remember how I came up with it, but it's too firmly embedded in my imagination to change now. I imagine Æppl being spoken by about 55,000 people who live on an (imaginary) island about 350 miles east of Newfoundland.

I've been taking my time in constructing Æppl. I started thinking about it while taking the bus to and from work in the late 90s, and I'm still thinking about it. I have some things about the language firm in my mind now, but the bulk of the language is still not worked out. In fact, very little of it is even written down. The process of writing something down makes it permanent in a way that I'm not always ready to commit to for Æppl, though there are a few things that have settled in and feel Right. Here are two of them.

1.  Æppl has 24 vowels altogether. There are 12 simple vowels /iː ɪ eː ɛ æ ə ɐ ɑ ɔ oː ʊ uː/, 8 falling diphthongs /iə̯ eə̯ uə̯ oə̯ ai̯ au̯ ɔi̯ eʋ/, and 4 rising diphthongs /i̯ɛ i̯æ u̯ɔ u̯ɑ/. This is the largest set of vowels I've ever worked with in a constructed language. I generally prefer smaller, lopsided vowel sets (/i a o/, /i e a o/, /i ɨ u o a/, etc), so ending up with a set this large is rather out of character for me. The vowels of Æppl have accumulated over the years, but the composition of the set as it is now feels good and I have no plans to change it.

I like playing around with different kinds of vowel charts. I've recently become enamoured of Geoff Lindsey's triangular mapping of the acoustic vowel space; he explains it here. (Go ahead and take a look; it's worth the time, and I'll still be here when you're done. In fact, you can even watch the video he made on the subject.) In fact, I liked it so much that I made a Lindseyan Triangle template in Adobe Illustrator for my own use and filled a copy with the simple vowels of Æppl.

The simple vowels of Æppl

I was engaged in blissful contemplation of the pseudo-analytical object I had just created, when I noticed that a particular set of vowels (/ɪ ə ɐ ʊ/) formed a Y-shape in the center of the chart, with /ǝ/ at the hub. I then realized that these 4 vowels were the only vowels that appeared in unstressed suffixes in Æppl.

Vowels in unstressed suffixes (in red)

The symmetry of this 4 vowel set in the chart coupled with the fact that the same vowels shared a unique (morpho-)phonological property struck me as being profoundly Right in a way that may be difficult for non-linguists to appreciate. I did not plan for those 4 vowels to share that property; that arose spontaneously. Perhaps you say, "Spontaneously? Really? Didn't you choose the vowels for the particular suffixes at hand?" Well, yes; you're right. Certainly I had made decisions about vowels in suffixes, some of them years ago, but I had made those decisions independently of each other and certainly not with an eye to creating larger, deeper connections such as the one I had found on that chart. But now that I've found this connection, I can't imagine Æppl being any other way. The Rightness has become Inevitability.

2.  The main reason that it's taking me so long to get anything done with Æppl is that I want decisions I make about it to have that feeling of Rightness (even Inevitability, if I can manage it). For that to happen, I need to sit with decisions for a while and just let them be. One of the decisions (or set of decisions) that I made early on was the structure of the auxiliary system. Auxiliaries in Æppl are small words that provide information about the sentence's subject, tense, and mood. The auxiliary always follows the first word of the sentence. There are 3 sets of auxiliaries:

PRESENT	Singular	Plural
1	en	et
2	em	ep
3	es

PAST	Singular	Plural
1	ant	att
2	amt	apt
3	ast

FUTURE	Singular	Plural
1	eln	elt
2	elm	elp
3	els

It's an orderly system, with several parallelisms built in:

• First person markers are alveolar /n t/, and second person person markers are labial /m p/.
• Singular number markers are nasals /n m/, and plural number markers are voiceless stops /t p/.
• The third person marker doesn't distinguish number and is a fricative /s/ instead of a stop or nasal. (I suppose I should have used a velar fricative /x/ to distinguish it in place of articulation from first and second persons, but I'm happy with alveolar /s/.)
• Each person and number (PN) combination is phonotactically parallel with all of the others in the same tense — that is, it shows up in the same position in the auxiliary word. So present tense auxiliaries are |e-PN|, past tense auxiliaries are |a-PN-t|, and future tense auxiliaries are |e-l-PN|.

This used to bother me a bit, since it seemed too orderly — unnaturally orderly, even.

In Fall Semester 2021, I taught a field methods course in which the language under investigation was Bahasa Indonesia. While doing some background reading to prepare, I came across a table that showed common tense and mood distinctions in Austronesian languages as being the result of the intersection of more basic distinctions: whether an action or activity was started or not started, and whether an activity was finished or not finished. Here is a table that presents the features and their combinations, together with the labels for the "resultant" tense ~ mood categories:

	Finished	Not Finished
Started	Completive	Continuous
Not Started	(not defined)	Contemplative

The derived categories in this table are similar to the distinctions I had been making with the auxiliary system of Æppl, provided that one makes the following correspondences (not really much of a stretch):

Completive ≈ Past Tense

Continuous ≈ Present Tense

Contemplative ≈ Future Tense / Irrealis Mood

I then realized that these same basic distinctions (Started ~ Not Started; Finished ~ Not Finished) were already baked into my set of auxliaries:

Started is unmarked (Ø)

Not Started is marked by /l/

Finished is marked by /a ... t/

Not Finished is marked by /e/

The second person singular from each set of auxiliaries can be broken down as follows (this analysis assumes that the PN subject marker — in this case /m/ '2sg' — is the root of the construction):

amt /a- Ø- m -t/ '2sg.PAST'

em /e- Ø- m/ '2sg.PRES'

elm /e- l- m/ '2sg.FUT'

The other person and number combinations are parallel to the second person singular in formation.

For me, one of the most attractive features of the system is that there are three tenses, but only two basic categories. The intersection of the two categories produces the three-fold tense categorization I had settled on years ago, but as "resultant categories" rather than primitive categories of the system. I didn't plan it that way. But I'm glad now that I left the sets of auxiliaries alone for all those years, even though they seemed too tidy. They are tidy, but in a way that I never realized, and in a way that I now find very appealing — even Right. Maybe in another 20 years they'll feel Inevitable, too. For now I'll settle for Right.

Reading Goals and Big Books

Most years I set myself a reading goal. I keep track of the books I’d like to read in a spreadsheet, where I list the title, the author, the date I finished the book, and my rating (from 1 to 5). At the end of the year the books that I didn’t read roll over to next year’s list, while the books that I finished are removed to make room for new wanna-reads.

This year my goal is to read 24 books from the list of 60 or so on the spreadsheet. It’s a fairly modest goal. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I don’t want it to become a chore. I have a lot of work-related reading that I have to do and which can take up quite a bit of time, and quite often I’d just rather watch TV and let my brain coast for a while. Even though my reading goal is modest, I’ve noticed that as the end of the year approaches I usually have to resort to reading the shorter books on the list in order to achieve it. This means that the longer books on my list tend not to get read. Now I like reading Big Books; Big Books don’t intimidate me. Of my Top 10 Favorite Books of All Time, about half of them are books that I would consider to be Big Books. So it’s a little disheartening that my reading goals would actually work to discourage me from reading them.

One year I didn’t set myself a reading goal. The idea was that I would then be free to read some Big Books that would otherwise remain unread out of worry that I wouldn’t reach my goal. But the result that year was that I actually read quite a bit less than usual, and the Big Books remained unread anyway. Clearly, some sort of accounting must be made for me to see progress.

As of today (10 November 2021), I’ve read 23 books, so I’m on track to achieve my reading goal for the year — as long as I finish a book before 31 December. But again, I’ve neglected the Big Books on my list. I obviously need a different kind of accounting so that the Big Books get some readerly love. So here’s what I’m going to do next year. Last night, I found the page counts of all of the books that I’ve read this year and included them in my spreadsheet. I then totaled up the page counts (9434 pages) and divided that total by the number of books I’ve read so far (23). This gave me an average book length of 410.2 pages. So rounding down a bit, a book typical of the sort that I’m inclined to read is 400 pages long or so, and 25 of them comes to 10,000 pages. So instead of reading 24 (or 25 or 30 or 40) books next year, my goal will be to read 10,000 pages. I think 10,000 pages is an easily achievable goal.

Now you may be thinking that depending on the publisher, genre, layout, etc., a page can have a greatly varying number of words on it, and that page count isn’t really a good guide to how much one has actually read — word count is obviously the count that matters. And you would be right. But the number of pages is a better metric than the number of books; and until publishers start reporting word count as well as page count in the metadata observable on online bookstores and other book-related websites, word count isn’t really a practical metric. I mean, I suppose I could count the number of words on a typical page of a book I want to read (or several pages and take an average) and then do the math myself (number of words per page multiplied by the number of pages). But that’s more work than I want to put into it — I do have my TV shows to keep up with, after all.

Going to the Library

I like going to the campus library. I like the short walk from my office to the building itself. I like browsing the stacks. I like that little flush of success when I’ve found the book I actually came in to find. I like talking to the library staff, attractive young people who are courteous and pleasant. I like the building itself. It is clean, well-furnished, and spacious, with lots of little corners containing study carrels and potted plants. I especially like the idea of a library. Having a cross-section of the collected knowledge of our civilization all in one place is a great thing.

So why are they trying to keep me from coming? While in the library today, I was reminded no less than twice that I didn’t have to come in – I could have the faculty delivery service bring the book(s) I want directly to my office. What’s the fun in that? I wouldn’t get to leave my office and walk to the library, roam the stacks, and enjoy that little frisson of accomplishment at having found the book myself, or be able to talk to those nice young people in case I need some help.

Maybe they’ll read a book to me over the phone if I ask them to, just as I’m going to sleep tonight. Then I won’t even have to hold it in my hands.

[This entry was originally a Facebook post from 1 September, 2010.]

An Astronomical Moment on my Morning Walk

I was on my daily walk this morning, walking due south along a suburban street in Spanish Fork. It was about 6:30 am. The sun hadn’t come up yet so it was still dark. I happened to look to my left, and I saw Venus rising over the mountains to the east. When I looked to my right, I could see Mars setting. And then I turned my face forward and looked up and and I saw Sirius directly in front of me. In that moment I felt … “triangulated,” like I was attached by strings to those celestial objects and pinned like a photograph on a TV detective’s cosmic cork board. I was moving at a fairly brisk pace, but I may as well have been on a giant treadmill, with the Earth rolling beneath me as I walked in place.

Entrata

When I was a junior in high school I heard this piece on the radio and was captivated by the repeating bass line ||: do _ re | do _ re :|| (I guess I was a minimalist even then). I later transcribed what I could remember of it (a brief stretch beginning around 0:41 in the recording linked below) in a notebook I carried around with me. In that notebook I titled it “Introit (Orff),” not realizing that it was actually an arrangement of William Byrd’s “The Bells.” I’ve thought about the piece off and on over the years. This morning I was thinking about it again and I finally found it — not “Introit” but “Entrata.” And just as wonderful as I remembered it.

Carl Orff, “Entrata”

[This entry was originally a Facebook post from 17 January, 2020.]

The Salt Lake City Public Library

I was struck this morning by a memory of going to the old SLC public library, when it occupied the building that now houses the Leonardo Museum. It was a late morning in the summer, probably a Saturday, and I was on the west side of the 5th floor where the music and art holdings were. I was sitting at a table thumbing through a copy of Steve Reich’s Writings about Music. I had just graduated from high school.

The southwest corner of the 5th floor was devoted to the library’s record collection. I listened to a lot of new music and even some recordings of Balinese gamelan (distributed by outfits like Nonesuch in their Explorer series). The guy at the desk, seeing that I was interested in new music, even made some suggestions: a mix of hits, like Pendercki (the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was a sonic gut punch) and misses, like Xenakis (I still just can’t). That record collection is where I learned about music written after 1900.

Everything felt new, even though it was library-old. Even the dust motes lit by the sun coming in through the windows on the east side where there was a little courtyard with a pool.

Man, I miss that place.

The Day After Coming Home from a Big Trip

Yesterday afternoon we came home from a week-long trip to London, and I’m ready to go back. Or to go to New York. Or Amsterdam. Or Berlin. Or LA. Somewhere. Anywhere. This happens whenever I come back from a big trip: I feel a great need to go travel some more — to go do something somewhere else. And it doesn’t matter how long I’ve been gone. Three years ago, I co-directed our department’s Study Abroad program to the British Isles. It was 7 weeks of pretty stressful travel and teaching and riding herd on a group of students (who were actually really great), and when it was time to leave, I was happy to leave. But when I got home, I wanted to go somewhere else right away.

I don’t think it’s a desire to avoid my regular duties — at least not this time. My courses for Winter Semester are pretty much prepared and I have no big projects that have been on hold while I’ve been away. Speaking more generally, I’m not dissatisfied with how my life usually runs. I’ve got it pretty good. A family who I love and who loves me, a comfortable house, a good job that provides a steady income that meets our needs and allows us the occasional excursion, good friends, etc. All in all, a pretty sweet set-up.

I think I’ve just become accustomed to novelty. I spent a week walking down streets that are unfamiliar, eating food that tastes different, and listening to people who talk funny. Maybe I just want to keep doing and seeing new things. I was talking to Robert (the younger of my two sons) about it as we drove home yesterday, and I asked him what he thought a person from overseas would like to see and do if they came to where we lived. Pretty obviously it’s probably the kinds of things that they can’t see or do where they are from: the novelty of foreign places and people.

So if that’s the case, then maybe the answer for my need for novelty is to start looking for it in my everyday surroundings. I do live in a beautiful state and I should be taking advantage of it — visiting National (and State) Parks, going for hikes, attending cultural events close to home: galleries, concerts, lectures, etc.

Or I could get in the car and go somewhere Right Now. I know I really want to.