Conlangery #103: Mailbag 2

We're back! This episode we answer your emails on the show. Check the full emails below the fold.

Top of Show Greeting: Fyai Thǔvn



Email#1

Cherry-pick and paraphrase without mercy. Apologies if these have been addressed in the 30 released episodes I’m yet to enjoy.

Over-long Ingratiating Preamble:

I started listening to your podcast 29 days ago. 3d 4h down, 22h to go. I tell myself I’m enjoying it!

You've been an excellent resource and inspiration.

I have been accidentally preparing for conlanging for years, and am only now assembling notes (sporadically) for a highly isolating language geared for orienteering industrialist consumer-encyclopedists. This will be inevitably auxlangy, but it still counts as adventurous because it'll be my first. Also that nursery Cebuano, school Indonesian & French, suppressed introductory Japanese, introductory predicate logic, and ongoing Spanish (all in Australia) won’t do me much good in it.

Item 1: I was excited when I saw #50 "The Technology of Literacy", and I enjoyed it a lot, but I was expecting something much closer to what I heard #66 "Cognitive Metaphors". And I think you've flirted with the topic of cognitive effects of literacy in earlier episodes, so in case it comes up again:

I recommend Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). It’s highly readable, and there is a section of the Dewey decimal system dominated by titles derived from it to prove its influence. It's on JSTOR [and attached to this email, shh]. It describes the change in the economy of thought (and expression) resulting from the technology of writing, of printing, and of electronics. For a print-based cognitive metaphor, consider the linguistics term "left-edge".

The beginning of Orality defines what is different/natural in oral cultures living and ancient: the world-view, the subject and art of storytelling, of history-keeping, of the nature of history itself. Then it describes the transition to and later evolution in each medium. The first writing is in the oral tradition, and the first print has no regard for aesthetics or white space or size=importance. Oh, and the great peculiarity of Abrahamic cultures for their central texts and formal theology. People who have never seen lists or tables or diagrams don’t think in lists or tables or diagrams! Categorical thinking and geometry aren't inborn!

Item 2: Why do Romans speak RP (and other British accents)?

I point the finger at Shakespeare, and then at efficiency. Shakespeare’s stories in Rome, Egypt, Scotland, Denmark, Verona, England, etc., have been consistently performed in accents approximating the Shakespearean stereotype throughout the Anglosphere. By the advent of sound in film, I'm sure it seemed the right thing to do. Variations of British in BBC/HBO’s Rome and in Game of Thrones carry a lot of social information to audiences already familiar with them. Sure, playing on American stereotypes with Harvard vs. California vs. Louisiana vs. Texas could work, but it's convention that American isn’t historical. But why are Vikings so often Scottish?

War and Peace (1956) is a good film with good performances (feat. Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn), but the American accents break that convention and feel absurd. For the same reason, as an Australian playing Mass Effect 2: in a galaxy where even aliens speak with North American accents, encountering an Australian accent is very jarring.

Item 3: Kevin Stroud's History of English Podcast spends 10 riveting 40-min episodes on P.I.E. and how it was determined, then proceeding through more recent influences on English (and the influences on them). This may interest your other listeners.

Item 4: Episode #67’s Melburnian teacher was asking after “tautological place names”. My favourites are “island land island land” and “hill hill hill hill” and of course there’s “Milky Way Galaxy”.

I hope you’re still around in 2 years to play my own Top o...