Assignments

Assignments	Due Dates
Assignment 1: Phonetic Inventory	Monday before session 4
Assignment 2: Phonology and/or Writing System	Monday before session 6
Assignment 3: Morphology	Monday before session 13
Assignment 4: Syntax	Session 17
Assignment 5: Translation	Session 21
Final Project	Session 26 (last day of class)

Phonetic Inventory

Give me an inventory of sounds for your language. Use the IPA to write them. This part of the assignment can be very simple; if you’ve decided your language has only two consonants and one vowel, for example, you could write:
p t u
(This would be a very odd language, of course.) If your language does not use sounds at all, that’s fine; you will just have to come up with some equivalent. What are the basic units, for your language?
Tell me something suprasegmental about your language. Does it have tone? Which tones? Does it have stress? What are the rules for stress?
Tell me about the syllable structure. What restrictions are there?
Give me a mini-dictionary of twenty words of your language. You can start off with a Swadesh list for inspiration (Wikipedia has one you can use). The words should be uninflected; don’t give me singulars and plurals of nouns, for example, or different tenses of verbs.

Phonology and/or Writing System

Here you have a choice between two assignments. Do either 1 or 2 below.

Create a writing system for your language.
a. Unless it is a logographic system, show me all of the symbols it uses, and tell me what they stand for. If it is a logographic system, show me ten symbols for words which are not in the dictionary from Assignment 1, and tell me what they mean and how they’re pronounced.
b. In what direction is the language written?
c. Does the language mark word boundaries (for example, does it put spaces between words)?
d. Take the dictionary you showed me in Assignment 1 and show me how all the entries would be written in the writing system. You don’t have to be completely consistent; if you’ve decided that you want to change some of the words you wrote there, that’s fine. For this part of the assignment, each of your answers should be in three lines:
გსლწერკბ
t’elφiŋym
‘bowling ball’
Show me a phonological rule of your language. Again, you don’t have to be consistent with what you said in Assignment 1; if you’ve decided that your language would be cooler with a general rule forbidding consonant clusters, or requiring stops to lenite to fricatives between vowels, or whatever, that’s fine, even if you had words that violated that general rule back then. Tell me in prose what the rule does, and show me three examples of the rule at work. One place you could look for inspiration is at this website with lists of many sound changes that various languages have undergone in their histories. If you explore, maybe you’ll find a sound change that appeals to you.

Morphology

For this assignment I’ll be asking you to give your language some morphology. As we’ve seen, languages in the real world vary in how much morphology they have. So you have a choice (and you can choose to do more than one of these, if you want): give your language a case system, give it an agreement system, or tell me something about how compounding works in your language (I’ll discuss compounding below). More briefly: choose at least one of the following three options to do.

Option One: Case

We’ve talked about a variety of case systems in class. Does your language mark case? What kind of system does it have? How many cases does it distinguish? Is there any syncretism? Show me at least one noun in all the different cases that it can take.

Option Two: Agreement

We’ve talked about a variety of agreement systems in class. Does your language have agreement? What gets agreed with? What kind of agreement system is it? Do the agreement morphemes attach to the verb (as in most of the languages we looked at) or somewhere else? Show me all the agreement morphemes; if you are attaching them to verbs, do that by showing me at least one verb with all of the different agreement morphemes it can take.

Option Three: Compounding

We have not talked about this in class. It’s very common, and in fact might be universal, for languages to allow speakers to put words together to create new words, like so:

guitar store (English)

bukang-bibig (Tagalog)
open-mouth
‘proverb’

neko-jita (Japanese)
cat-tongue
‘inability to eat or drink hot things’

There’s an overview article about compounds (PDF) that you can go look at if you want (some parts of it may be incomprehensibly technical; feel free to skip those).

Tell me how compounds work in your language. Some things to think about:

Where does stress go in a compound, if your language has stress? If your language has tone, how is the tone of the compound determined?
Compounds are often said to have a head on one side or the other, which sort of determines what the whole compound refers to, and is where morphology can be added. English compound heads are on the right; a guitar store is a kind of store, not a kind of guitar, and the plural is guitar store-s, not guitar-s store (in fact, there can’t be a guitars store, even though such a store presumably has more than one guitar). Where does the head go in your language?
Languages sometimes have morphemes or phonological processes applying between the members of a compound. The Japanese compound above, for example, applies a process called rendaku that voices the first consonant of the second half of the compound (the word for ‘tongue’ is normally shita, not jita). In the Tagalog compound above, the word for ‘open’ is actually buka; forming a compound involves putting in a morpheme ng between the two words you’re combining (if the first word ends in a vowel¹). Are there any processes like these applying in your language?
Compounds often, but not always, have some kind of idiomatic meaning–that is, the meaning of the compound can’t be predicted straightforwardly from the meanings of the two halves of the compound. The Tagalog and Japanese examples above demonstrate this.

Answer the questions above, and give at least five examples of compounds in your language, including at least one with an idiomatic meaning.

¹ If it doesn’t, you don’t add ng:

anak-pawis
child-sweat
‘manual laborer’

Syntax

Now it’s time to start thinking about the syntax of your language.

Problem One

What’s the most common order of subject, verb, and object? How free is the word order? Show me at least two sentences with subjects, verbs, and objects.

Problem Two

Pick two parts of the noun phrase (other than the noun) and tell me their order with respect to each other and the noun. Give me an example.

Problem Three

Does your language have prepositions or postpositions? Show me an example, as part of a complete sentence.

Problem Four

Give me an example containing an embedded clause.

Translation

Translate the following sentences into your language (making any culturally necessary changes,
if the sentences mention technology, for example, that differs from that used by the speakers of
your language). Comment on any new pieces of grammar you have to invent.

Whose book are you reading?
I made the children do their homework.
She wrote her sweetheart a poem.
I have a purple car¹.
He criticizes himself constantly.
She is smarter than you.

¹ or spacecraft. or horse. or whatever makes sense for your language.

Final Project due last day of class

1. Write a partial grammar of your language that includes all the previous assignments. If you’ve changed things about your language since you handed in the assignments, that’s fine! Just update the grammar accordingly. For this part, you can basically just give me your previous assignments again, updated as necessary.

2. Make sure to give all of your examples in the following format:

(12) ობსიდიან წინგს

iθ-qarak’u ɮaudχ

3SG-hunger water.buffalo

‘The water buffalo is hungry’

That is, you should have:

an example number on the first line;
one line in the writing system you’ve invented, if you did that;
another line in IPA or a practical orthography;
a third line of morpheme-by-morpheme glosses;
and finally, a translation.

I will count off points for this if you don’t do it.

In the IPA line and the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, if you have separate morphemes that are part of a single word, separate them by a hyphen (my verb above, for example, has a hyphen separating the agreement prefix from the rest of the verb). If you have a single morpheme that you would translate with multiple words in English, use a period to separate the words (that’s what I’ve done with ‘water.buffalo’ above).

Some languages can be quite difficult to gloss this way; for example, if your language had Semitic-style consonantal roots, you could end up with words like θaraθ ‘ate’, where the consonants were the verb ‘eat’ and the vowels indicated that the verb was in the past tense. If you have a system like that, it’s okay to fail to separate all the morphemes in the example (in this case, you’d have a gloss ‘eat.PAST’), and then to explain in the text how the verb is really structured.

As a rule of thumb, you need to do this every time you introduce a new piece of data. After that, you can refer to it in the main text if you need to (“My language uses agreement prefixes, such as the prefix iθ- ‘3SG’ in example (12)”).

3. Add discussion of one other topic. Here are some suggestions, but feel free to write to me if you have other things you want to explore:

discourse particles (like Japanese yo and ne)
kinship terminology
numbers
a language game
an honorific register
a historically related language or protolanguage

4. Translate at least four of the rules from the MIT Code of Hacking Ethics. Here’s one version of them:

The safety of yourself, of others, and of property should have highest priority. Safety is more important than pulling off a hack or getting through a door.
Be subtle; leave no evidence that you were there.
Brute force is the last resort of the incompetent.
Leave things as you found them or better. Cause no permanent damage during hacks and while hacking. If you find something broken, call F-IXIT.
Do not steal anything; if you must borrow something, leave a note saying when it will be returned and remember to return it.
Do not drop things without a ground crew to ensure that no one is underneath.
Sign-ins are not graffiti and shouldn’t be seen by the general public. Sign-ins exhibit one’s pride in having found an interesting location and should be seen only by other hackers. Real hackers are not proud of discovering Lobby 7, random basements, or restrooms. Keep sign-ins small and respect other hackers’ sign-ins.
Never drink and hack.
Never hack alone. Have someone who can get help in an emergency.
Know your limitations and do not surpass them. If you do not know how to open a door, climb a shaft, etc., then learn from someone who knows before trying.
Learn how not to get caught; but if you do get caught, accept gracefully and cooperate fully.
Share your knowledge and experience with other hackers.

As always, your translation doesn’t have to be literal.

Code of Hacking Ethics © unknown. (Source: https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/activity/h/htgamit/text/2005/HackingSection.txt) This content is excluded from our Creative Commons license. For more information, see https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use/.

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ConLangs: How to Construct a Language