#lcc10 Logan Kearsley - Creativity & Constraint: Conlanging Beyond the IPA

details & slides: https://conlang.org/lcc10/#kearsley
speaker: Twitter @gliese1337, Mastodon @gliese1337@wandering.shop, Facebook @LoganRK, Reddit u/gliese1337, Fiat Lingua papers https://fiatlingua.org/tag/logan-kearsley/

IPA. WALS. Index Diachronica. All of that goes out of the window if you want to make a language in a weird modality, or one not spoken by human(oid)s. So where do you even start?

Logan presents several case studies of developing the phonologies of exotic languages to demonstrate how identifying new constraints can breed creativity. He talks about the variety of alternative ways that humans communicate, and looks at the motivations and structures behind the phonologies of a whistling language, a language communicated by electric fields, a language for dogs, and a language encoded in cephalopod skin patterns.

References:

Joyce, Caneel K. The blank page: Effects of constraint on creativity. University of California, Berkeley, 2009. https://www.proquest.com/openview/c05a2190d679c3a79d9386df2d67d972/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
Magyari, L., et al. "Event-related potentials reveal limited readiness to access phonetic details during word processing in dogs." Royal Society Open Science 7.12 (2020): 200851. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200851
“I was bored of my dissertation and decided to work on dog speech today.” https://col.quora.com/I-was-bored-of-my-dissertation-and-decided-to-work-on-dog-speech-today
Rialland, Annie. "Phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages." Phonology 22.2 (2005): 237-271. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/phonology/article/abs/phonological-and-phonetic-aspects-of-whistled-languages/A2829FE674349AD9A836982A23AA74B7
Worm, M., Landgraf, T. & von der Emde, G. Electric signal synchronization as a behavioural strategy to generate social attention in small groups of mormyrid weakly electric fish and a mobile fish robot. Biol Cybern 115, 599–613 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-021-00892-8
Stoddard, Philip K., and Michael R. Markham. "Signal cloaking by electric fish." Bioscience 58.5 (2008): 415-425. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2832175/
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Biology:Electrocommunication
Hanlon, R., & Messenger, J. (2018). Communication. In Cephalopod Behaviour (pp. 206-220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9780511843600.009 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cephalopod-behaviour/communication/79DE73EA1CC00FC397FD4C700EF984EE
Burford, Benjamin P., and Bruce H. Robison. "Bioluminescent backlighting illuminates the complex visual signals of a social squid in the deep sea." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.15 (2020): 8524-8531. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1920875117
Conlangery podcast, “Whistle Registers with Logan Kearsley”, Nov. 7, 2022 https://conlangery.com/2022/11/whistle-languages-with-logan-kearsley/
slides
Conlangery podcast, "Interview with Kenan Kigunda", May 12, 2021 https://conlangery.com/2021/05/interview-with-kenan-kigunda/ (Features Fysh A introduction)

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Captions by @stenoknight.