I've done some stuff in the past. There's not much I can say about my more current projects, because the use I put them to doesn't really call for much in the way of interjections or expletives.

I suppose that Ndăkaga does have a couple of things you could call interjections. There's circumstances where Kacha'e!/Gricha'e! "Stop!" and Katag!/Grĭtag! can be used as interjecitons.

I don't have any expletives, though. I do have something of a mild slur, maybe, in ifedu "humanoid" (lit. "giantling"), though it's one of those things that sometimes will be used in a mean-sprited way and other times be basically normalized, depending on the dragon using it and the situation they're in.

It's not a dumb question at all.

Basically, acquiring your first language is very different from acquiring a language later in life. That structure gets embedded into your subconscious, but you can't just summon that up and describe it.

Think about learning to walk. Almost all humans who are capable of it end up walking pretty much the same way. But can you explain the biomechanics of walking? Unless you've studied it, you can't, and even if you have, you still don't constantly have awareness of which muscles you're flexing, how input from the balance system affects your stride, etc.

When you acquire your first language, you are basically a small animal with an instinct to attempt to communicate with the people around you. You don't have language yet, much less the metalanguage required to describe your language. Your brain just figures out the patterns, attaches it to sensory input, and gradually builds up this system that works behind the scenes as you speak for the rest of your life.

That's also why just asking native speakers how things work isn't sufficient to produce a grammar. You will get speculation, confusion, and sometimes just plain false information if you just ask directly. But asking them "Is this sentence okay," or recording their speech will get data that you can later analyze. Native intuition is data, not analysis, because all of it is them activating a system that was built up when they were still drooling on their bibs.

I had a nice discussion with author Madeline James about how she has just begun learning conlanging to create naming languages and formulaic spells. Join us as we discuss how she focuses on limited conlangs for the needs of her story and about her journey learning the craft.

You can see a continuation of this conversation on Madeline's channel here:

Join me in Faerie in about half an hour as we continue our journey with Sylvan, now working on some syntactic construction and maybe more.

Today is the last day to put in your presentation proposals for the 11th Language Creation Conference! Get them in!

We're live in about 30 minutes to continue our work on Sylvan! Gonna have to work out constructions for passives and... antipassives? We'll see how that works out.

That's kind of interesting. I'd be curious what you see that's similar. I suppose I do have a sort of systematic approach to how I do prepositions, but it's not a fixed table like the correlatives table.

Fun fact, we had an early episode called "Correlatives (mostly Indefinites)", which is where I learned that the correlatives table is a thing that mainly just makes sense in Esperanto. In natural languages the table would be so irregular that it's just not that useful.

We are back in Faerie today, and we're going to start in on creating inflected prepositions! Join me in about 30 minutes! (8 AM Central Time)

I was a guest on the Artifexian Christmas Quiz! Come listen as myself, @dedalvs, @quothalinguist, Biblaridion, Madeline James, and Artifexian himself all ask each other some unique trivia questions. You might just hear me sing! The premiere is tomorrow, January 3, at 1 PM Central Time (1900 UTC)!

Get your Conlang Year Started!

Before the first day is up, I want to give a shoutout to Jessie Peterson's Conlang Year. If you missed it last year, you can jump in right now and start a new conlang this year! Just start with this entry and begin your conlang journey.

I was a guest on the Theory Neutral Podcast talking about Peperkamp and Dupoux (2001), which discusses how speakers of different languages with different stress patterns interact with lexical stress in a foreign language. I'd recommend a lesson and a read of the papers mentioned in here for conlangers, because if you are looking to do any loanwords, this can give you a framework to decide whether the stress pattern from the source language is preserved.

* Peperkamp, Sharon, and Emmanuel Dupoux. “A Typological Study of Stress ‘Deafness.’” In Laboratory Phonology 7, edited by Carlos Gussenhoven and Natasha Warner, 203–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001

It’s the last day of Lexember! I will likely continue to do featured word Shorts in 2025, probably on a weekly basis. But for now, here is a word for knowledge.