Re: A possible new conlang art project
Sai Emrys
the CC list is getting out of hand.
Website: http://groups.google.com/group/conlang-card-game?lnk=gcamv
Email to group: conlang-...@googlegroups.com
>> I would suggest that the game should strictly require people to stay
>> in one mode - be it speech, or writing, or signing - else this sort of
>> calque is all too likely. :-/
>
> Are you serious? I doubt many players have the memory to
> play a game of Glossotechnia without writing things down,
> -- although it would be an interesting challenge to use G'technia
> rules and deck to create a purely written language, still I think
> the current mode of creating a spoken language with an ad-hoc
> orthography (based on IPA or English according to the players'
> knowledge/inclinations) is the easiest to work with, in spite of
> problems like those I mentioned.
What I meant is that the orthography, in a normal game, should have no
status whatsoever as canon - and preferably should be done in IPA.
I.e. one is not simultaneously creating *an orthography* (presumably a
Romanization) of the language together with the phonological form.
>> One plausible way to do chips is to decide on an a sane range of
>> phoneme count, and fix the high end of that count as the number of
>> multi-purpose phonology tokens, which are distributed evenly.
>
> What about the idea of deciding how many chips are distributed
> at the start of a given game with a dice roll, as Alex and I have
> been talking about?
That's fine; just ensure the range is sane.
>> There could be conditions that allow one to reclaim a token - e.g. if
>> another player ousts one of your phonemes via sound change.
>
> ...Or maybe said tokens are garnered according to one's score
> so far? Every N points one accumulates by making scoring
> sentences can be used to get another token? In which case,
> the number of chips distributed at the beginning might should be
> lower than you would otherwise want.
I think that this would overbalance the game in favor of good players
- where we want to ensure that it's fairly accessible to newbs (as is,
it'll be somewhat intimidating just due to content).
> Conculture embellishments on every turn do slow the game down.
> I suppose if you're going to limit them on rounds after the first, you
> would want a higher proportion of culture change cards in the deck,
> most of them low-key and a few revolutionary.
Make the low-key ones wildcards and the revolutionary ones specified?
Though IMO: most of the cultural stuff in our playtest at least was
more or less completely ignored other than as an occasional reference
joke. Is it worth putting a lot of cards into this?
>> We played that syntax cards could be used as secondary word orders in
>> every circumstance, no card required, which seemed to work fine to me,
>> although it meant we never actually lost our initial primary word
>> order completely (it calcified to a morpheme order in the verb at one
>> point). Though see below for a dissenting opinion.
>
> What about allowing players to play syntax cards either additively
> or substitutively on any turn? -- so for instance, one person could
> play VSO as primary word order, then another plays SOV for
> questions, then someone else with a SVO card could either add
> a third conditional word order or substitute it for either of the other
> two orders?
>
> And if you make it easier to add secondary word orders, maybe
> you should increase the number of "discard anything" cards
> in the deck, or add specific "eliminate word order" cards.
That's the exact opposite of Chip's suggestion - namely, that too many
syntax cards is confusing and it should be simplified as possible.
I think that the default case might even be better off as "fix one
syntax, the end, play no more" and make using syntax cards an
advanced-play rule, because it causes complexities (and thus, in
addition to confusion, slowdowns).
> I think I mentioned in earlier messages that in the first couple of
> games with the simplified deck, players sometimes interpreted
> the word "sound" in the sound change cards to refer to
> a syllable rather than a phoneme. (In the third game the players
> asked to leave the sound change cards out of the deck.)
Example of the syllable vs phoneme interpretation?
- Sai
Jim Henry
> >> I would suggest that the game should strictly require people to stay
> >> in one mode - be it speech, or writing, or signing - else this sort of
> >> calque is all too likely. :-/
> >
> > Are you serious? I doubt many players have the memory to
> > play a game of Glossotechnia without writing things down,
> What I meant is that the orthography, in a normal game, should have no
> status whatsoever as canon - and preferably should be done in IPA.
>
> I.e. one is not simultaneously creating *an orthography* (presumably a
> Romanization) of the language together with the phonological form.
By "a normal game" I suppose you mean a game among
conlangers or others who are familiar with IPA. With the
version aimed at non-conlangers, it's unreasonable to
expect players to use IPA. I'd like to figure out some
way to rein in the tendency to use English orthography
with all its chaotic irregularity, but telling players to
use IPA is not, I think, the solution.
> > Conculture embellishments on every turn do slow the game down.
> > I suppose if you're going to limit them on rounds after the first, you
> > would want a higher proportion of culture change cards in the deck,
> > most of them low-key and a few revolutionary.
>
> Make the low-key ones wildcards and the revolutionary ones specified?
>
> Though IMO: most of the cultural stuff in our playtest at least was
> more or less completely ignored other than as an occasional reference
> joke. Is it worth putting a lot of cards into this?
We need more playtest games with a wider variety of
players to be sure. In the first game I played with the
conculture rules, about a third of the turns involved
a language change or a new word coining that was
intimately connected with a conculture embellishment.
> > I think I mentioned in earlier messages that in the first couple of
> > games with the simplified deck, players sometimes interpreted
> > the word "sound" in the sound change cards to refer to
> > a syllable rather than a phoneme. (In the third game the players
> > asked to leave the sound change cards out of the deck.)
>
> Example of the syllable vs phoneme interpretation?
For instance, I think one player used an "Insert sound"
card to coin a suffix /-tSA/ (augmentative or extreme plural);
another used a "Sound shift" card to change /mA/
into /kEl/.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article
Sai Emrys
By "a normal game" I suppose you mean a game among
conlangers or others who are familiar with IPA. With the
version aimed at non-conlangers, it's unreasonable to
expect players to use IPA. I'd like to figure out some
way to rein in the tendency to use English orthography
with all its chaotic irregularity, but telling players to
use IPA is not, I think, the solution.
Quite fair.
What I meant was, the way that it's written down (in case it's spelled out with psuedoEnglish) is *not* part of the canon; only the spoken form is.
We need more playtest games with a wider variety of
players to be sure. In the first game I played with the
conculture rules, about a third of the turns involved
a language change or a new word coining that was
intimately connected with a conculture embellishment.
Agreed. Possibly a different set of conculture rules also?
> > I think I mentioned in earlier messages that in the first couple ofFor instance, I think one player used an "Insert sound"
> > games with the simplified deck, players sometimes interpreted
> > the word "sound" in the sound change cards to refer to
> > a syllable rather than a phoneme. (In the third game the players
> > asked to leave the sound change cards out of the deck.)
>
> Example of the syllable vs phoneme interpretation?
card to coin a suffix /-tSA/ (augmentative or extreme plural);
another used a "Sound shift" card to change /mA/
into /kEl/.
Hmm.
Coining a suffix, in our game, was a very different thing from adding a sound - that's word creation (or morpheme creation in this case) .
mA -> kEI is a pretty radical change. O.o
- Sai
Matthew Haupt
~Matt Haupt
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 17:47:36 -0700
From: s...@saizai.com
To: conlang-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: A possible new conlang art project
Jim Henry
[I wrote:]
> "I'd like to figure out some way to rein in the tendency to use English
> orthography with all its chaotic irregularity, but telling players to use
> IPA is not, I think, the solution."
> I would agree with this - As a non-linguist who's had to teach himself
> linguistics, I found the strange symbols of IPA and X-Sampa terribly
> cumbersome. However, what I did on my cards was put the IPA symbol, and
> then an example of that sound. Some sounds have no English equivalent, so I
My original deck had pretty much the same layout,
with English examples for most phonemes and
French, German or Spanish examples for a few
others, along with *approximate* English examples
for those that don't occur in English. But what I
might not have said clearly enough is that even
with cards with IPA symbols matched up with
English example words laid out in front of them,
players still had trouble using IPA to write/read
words of the game-language. With the simplified
deck omitting all those phoneme cards, it's even
more unreasonable to expect players to use
IPA in writing or reading the words they're
making up free-form.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Matthew Haupt
~Matt Haupt
> Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:59:31 -0400
> From: jimhen...@gmail.com
Jim Henry
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Jim Henry <jimhen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> For instance, I think one player used an "Insert sound"
>> card to coin a suffix /-tSA/ (augmentative or extreme plural);
>> another used a "Sound shift" card to change /mA/
>> into /kEl/.
> Coining a suffix, in our game, was a very different thing from adding a
> sound - that's word creation (or morpheme creation in this case) .
Yes, I thought so too. At the time, it seemed more prudent to just
watch how the players interpreted the rules-as-explained and the text
on the cards than to interrupt the game too much with explanations and
corrections.
I think the problem was the text on the sound change cards: most of
them mention an optional limiting context. And nearly all players,
when invoking that option, interpreted "context" to mean "semantic
context", not "phonological context".
> mA -> kEI is a pretty radical change. O.o
At the time I told the player making said change that I thought that
could happen gradually, in stages, but was hardly likely to happen all
at once. But I think Alex Fink came up with a similarly radical
example of a whole-syllable all-at-once sound change in a natlang,
earlier in our discussion here.
On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Matthew Haupt <film...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Aha, gotcha. I think the best method is for the players to agree upon a
> symbol, English, IPA or otherwise, for that sound to have, when it is
> picked, so that everyone can write words in a way that everyone recognizes
> and understands. Wherever you write the words down, on one side you might
> have the IPA symbols for sounds that have been added to the phonology, and
> an equal sign next to them, and the symbol agreed upon for writing that
> symbol, for easy reference.
I'm not sure that helps any. It seems to require the players to be
familiar with IPA in order to interpret the chart. If the players
don't know IPA, and aren't all familiar with any language other than
English, then you pretty have to either use an English-derived
orthography, or quickly teach the players a subset of IPA relevant to
the game; either of which has problems. And if you're teaching your
fellow players a relevant subset of IPA, why introduce yet another set
of symbols in addition to the IPA symbols (unless you just want to add
conscript-creation to the conlang and conculture-creation aspects of
the game)?
I suspect this will be less of a problem in games among
Esperanto-speakers, or speakers of any other language
with a much less maggelitous orthography than
English. I'm probably going to play Glossotechnia with
the local Esperanto group this coming Saturday;
I'll let y'all know how it goes. If I have time, I'll rework
parts of the Esperanto deck I made a while ago based
on our recent discussion (e.g. 30 most common
phonemes plus 10 wildcards), but I haven't found time
to do so yet.
Brian Henry
Jim Henry
> At that point, removing as much as possible of the "odd terminology" from
> the "party game" would be a good idea, even if it just means you are using
> other, more common but less precise words, for the same thing. Also, cards
> should be more based on what is happening in game rather than how a scholar
> would describe what is happening to the word/language. an example would be
> the insert sound card play that Jim mentioned. IIRC, that was my play, and
> I did indeed "insert" the sound of an S at the end of a type of word. I
> guess what I'm trying to say is that "insert sound" and "sound change"
> should be either re-worded, re-worked or both so that the gameplay is what
> is focused on/affected by it, rather than how the language is affected by
> it.
If we want to have separate, distinct cards to change the
sounds of the language, and to introduce new suffixes
and prefixes, how would you suggest changing their
wording to be clearer?
In my latest revision of the simplified deck (which hasn't been
used yet) I struck out the "limiting context" verbiage
on the sound change cards.
I'm not sure what you mean by your distinction between
affecting gameplay and affecting the language. Most
things that affect one also affect the other, with a few
exceptions (e.g., the Draw 3 or Replay cards).
Matthew Haupt
~Matt Haupt
Stay up to date on your PC, the Web, and your mobile phone with Windows Live. See Now
Jim Henry
> If we want to keep the weird IPA symbols out, perhaps the best answer is to
> just create simpler English-based graphemes of the sounds. I.E. No t's with
> curliques for th,
I think you mean theta /θ/ ?
>just "th" on the card, with a couple examples of the sound
> in use.
In my latest simplified deck, I left out the phoneme and
syllable structure cards altogether, and that was well-received
by the non-language-geek players who've played
with it so far. In this form, players are allowed
to create words freeform, without limiting themselves
to phonemes or syllable structures that have been
already introduced into the language.
There's a certain tendency there for players
to unreflectively imitate English phonology, but
not as much as I'd feared; several players
introduced phonemes or phonemic distinctions
not found in English.
Brian Henry
Alex Fink
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 5:36 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Point, assuming that being able to create two related words on your
>> turn often is that much of an imbalancing factor, and that it's
>> something inexperienced players wouldn't learn to do (in at least
>> simple cases). We may as well try this variant here, then, unless one
>> of us objects.
>
> It may be more of an imbalancing factor in the version with fixed
> translation challenges than in the version with a variety of goals
> decided on by the players at the beginning.
Translation challenges particular to the players, I suppose you mean.
Fair enough.
> If there are cards that allow coining multiple words, there should
> be enough of them in the deck that all players are likely to
> come up with one at some point. I think I have about 4-5 of
> them in my simplified deck, but they haven't been used yet.
This is one reason I thought of just allowing this always: even with
five cards for this it doesn't seem like it would happen often.
> Maybe 2d6+13 (15 to 25 phonemes), or 3d6+10 (13 to 28) [for a phoneme limit]?
and respective means 20 and 20.5 (and variances 35/6, 35/4). Sure,
either sounds fine.
>>> Yes, we need some way to impose phonotactic constraints;
>>> either with cards or tokens. (Could the same set of tokens be
>>> used for both? That is, if you get 7 tokens at the start of the
> .....
>>> If we stick with cards, maybe you can play a phonotactic constraint
>>> in tandem with a sound change card and draw another card at the
>>> end of your turn...?
>>
>> What would playing a phonotactic constraint consist of? Are you
>> envisioning the chips mechanic?
>
> I said "if we stick with cards"; that is, if we use cards for
> phonotactic constraints (probably some specific like "clusters must have
> same voicing" or "clusters must be at same or neighboring point of
> articulation", and some wildcards). But probably your idea of using
> chips for phonotactic constraints as well as phonemes is a good one.
Ah, I thought you meant if we stick with cards for phonemes. Understood.
Same _or neighbouring_ point of articulation, hm? Does that latter
part happen in the wild (as opposed to say 'as close as possible',
letting allophony cover the rest)? And are you thinking neighbouring
with respect to all the possible POAs, or only those present?
Another idea on the phonology that got mentioned after our Berkeley
game (definitely for advanced players), which I don't recall raising
here before, is to play the game with no phoneme cards, but still
sound changes. The phonology would be established at the start of the
game, which I suppose this would be compatible with a token mechanism,
or some degeneration of that like allowing all players to add a
phoneme or contrast during each of their first several turns (plus
maybe one or two each before the game) but not after some definite
point. After that point the only changes to the phonology that would
occur would be through sound changes, with perhaps an occasional
exception made for enlargement via intensive borrowing or something.
This, of course, is meant to be a closer simulation of naturalism (so
probably no good for engegames unless people just avoid the sound
changes), and it avoids those difficulties with the G'nia phonology
rules that are attributable to the phonology size being roughly linear
with time: not many at the beginning, an overlarge selection at the
end many of which will be poorly represented by virtue of their late
introduction to the game. And it should yield good phonology
balancing as long as the sound changes are well chosen.
>> There could be conditions that allow one to reclaim a token - e.g. if
>> another player ousts one of your phonemes via sound change.
>
> ...Or maybe said tokens are garnered according to one's score
> so far? Every N points one accumulates by making scoring
> sentences can be used to get another token? In which case,
> the number of chips distributed at the beginning might should be
> lower than you would otherwise want.
Perhaps, if we want an incentive to spread the things tokens are used
for uniformly across the game. For say sound changes we may want
this; for (independent) constraints we probably don't (because of
having to avoid extant words); for phonemes and syllable structures
it's less clear but I could see not wanting it.
(We should really have another playtest over here some time, paying
proper attention to points, once we have a particular scoring system
that we think stands up.)
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 4:19 AM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> We used free-form typology cards that let the player move the typology
>> one unit on a two-dimensional grid, one dimension running from
>
> How many such were in the deck? How many came up in play?
Four in the deck. Two came out, plus one of them was targeted by Replay.
>> We played that syntax cards could be used as secondary word orders in
>> every circumstance, no card required, which seemed to work fine to me,
[...]
> What about allowing players to play syntax cards either additively
> or substitutively on any turn?
Yes, that's what we did.
> And if you make it easier to add secondary word orders, maybe
> you should increase the number of "discard anything" cards
> in the deck, or add specific "eliminate word order" cards.
Hm, good point. Unless you could also replace a word order and any
secondaries subsidiary to it by a single card.
>> really do want to find some way to trim this. It was suggested that
>> the lexicon might be kept more organisedly -- nouns here, verbs there,
>> etc., and within say the nouns food here, body parts there, etc. But
>
> Some players did that in the second game with the simplified deck.
Did it make a difference?
> I think I mentioned in earlier messages that in the first couple of
> games with the simplified deck, players sometimes interpreted
> the word "sound" in the sound change cards to refer to
> a syllable rather than a phoneme. (In the third game the players
> asked to leave the sound change cards out of the deck.)
Yes. So the simplified rules, if these things are retained (and ditto
for verbal explanations of those cards I guess) should make clear that
sounds are more atomic than that. There must be some classical
phonics-style elementary school name for this concept that would help,
but I'm not recalling it: an indivisible sound, or even the sequence
of letters that spell it (<th> is elementary, <pl> is not).
2008/9/9 Sai Emrys <s...@saizai.com>:
> I.e. one is not simultaneously creating *an orthography* (presumably a
> Romanization) of the language together with the phonological form.
Well, (for the advanceds) why not? The idea of creating the conscript
together with the language would appeal to conlangers, as much as it
adds yet one more layer of things to learn / look up every time if
actually used in-game.
>> ...Or maybe said tokens are garnered according to one's score
>> so far?
[...]
> I think that this would overbalance the game in favor of good players
> - where we want to ensure that it's fairly accessible to newbs (as is,
> it'll be somewhat intimidating just due to content).
This isn't really a question of balance, I think, except balance of
influence on the direction of the gamelang. Which I'm not sure is
necessarily all that bad: if you have linguists and nonlinguists
playing the latter are probably going to have more and more particular
desired phonemes, e.g., for a given lang anyhow.
> Though IMO: most of the cultural stuff in our playtest at least was
> more or less completely ignored other than as an occasional reference
> joke. Is it worth putting a lot of cards into this?
It was fun, and that counts for something (and Jim's crowd agrees, I
get the sense). Plus we could've had goals (not that we did) that
used the culture. So maybe not a lot but a few.
Perhaps, for slimming, all culture cards should be wild, and we can
have two sorts, a plain one that just lets you specify a fact and a
tumultuous one that lets you do something big (war, new tech, etc.)
and specify accordant changes.
>> And if you make it easier to add secondary word orders, maybe
>> you should increase the number of "discard anything" cards
>> in the deck, or add specific "eliminate word order" cards.
>
> That's the exact opposite of Chip's suggestion - namely, that too many
> syntax cards is confusing and it should be simplified as possible.
No, "exact opposite" is wrong; the suggestion misses the point, maybe.
I'm sure Chip wouldn't object to having cards that simplify a
complicated syntax. He'd just think it better yet if the syntax
couldn't get complicated.
> I think that the default case might even be better off as "fix one
> syntax, the end, play no more" and make using syntax cards an
> advanced-play rule, because it causes complexities (and thus, in
> addition to confusion, slowdowns).
Well, there are two different kinds of complexities here:
* replacements of syntax, which are confusing in that they break what
players have learned;
* secondary word orders, which are complex in that they introduce more
things to check when casting a sentence.
An argument for eliinating one is not necessarily an argument for
eliminating the other.
2008/9/9 Jim Henry <jimhen...@gmail.com>:
> On 9/9/08, Sai Emrys <s...@saizai.com> wrote:
>> What I meant is that the orthography, in a normal game, should have no
>> status whatsoever as canon - and preferably should be done in IPA.
>>
>> I.e. one is not simultaneously creating *an orthography* (presumably a
>> Romanization) of the language together with the phonological form.
>
> By "a normal game" I suppose you mean a game among
> conlangers or others who are familiar with IPA. With the
> version aimed at non-conlangers, it's unreasonable to
> expect players to use IPA. I'd like to figure out some
> way to rein in the tendency to use English orthography
> with all its chaotic irregularity, but telling players to
> use IPA is not, I think, the solution.
[and]
2008/9/12 Matthew Haupt <film...@hotmail.com>:
> If we want to keep the weird IPA symbols out, perhaps the best answer is to
> just create simpler English-based graphemes of the sounds. I.E. No t's with
> curliques for th, just "th" on the card, with a couple examples of the sound
> in use.
I'm reminded of a certain contingent on Wikipedia who were opposed to
the selection of IPA as the pronunciation guide, finding it too
foreign. A number of them (those who weren't advocating free-for-all
newspaper phonetics which *shudder*) would've preferred something
based on the standard pronunciation guide systems in American
dictionaries (AHD etc.), with the macrons rendering the kindergarten
sense of 'long vowels' and <ch sh ng> with English values and so
forth. If people's problem with the IPA is just the unfamiliarity of
the thetas and wedges and engs this would be a compromise worth
trying. (It won't do it for those who don't realise that things like
<ticcy> are ambiguous, though, I imagine.)
This would be compatible with any of Matt's suggestions for phonology
cards that take players by the hand better.
>> mA -> kEI is a pretty radical change. O.o
>
> At the time I told the player making said change that I thought that
> could happen gradually, in stages, but was hardly likely to happen all
> at once. But I think Alex Fink came up with a similarly radical
> example of a whole-syllable all-at-once sound change in a natlang,
> earlier in our discussion here.
For reference my example was a taboo replacement in Rapa Nui which
extended even to substrings of longer words, [tu:] > [ta?i].
I'd be uneasy about counting that as a Neogrammarian style sound
change, though; it's almost like a reanalysis of the words it
affected. For one it was quite a conscious alteration on the part of
the speakers, which sound changes by and large aren't.
2008/9/12 Brian Henry <jati....@gmail.com>:
> Not sure on the exact wording. What I meant with the "gameplay vs.
> language" was really a comment on how it was worded not how it was played.
> i.e. write the card in such a way that it's focus is on how the word
> changes, not how that change style would be typified... that doesn't make
> any sense, does it?
I'm trying to think of an example but near as I can tell the
instructions are already mostly written that way; it's only the names
that are potentially scary. So we've got a sound change card
"Metathesis", but its instructions (after the preamble) are "these two
sounds swap positions in existing words", pretty concrete. Maybe
"limiting contexts" are troublesome but they've already gotten the axe
in the simplified version, and the trouble with "sound" has been noted
too.
Have I understood? If not, perhaps you could point to a card which
doesn't conform to your style of wording, even if you don't have a
good replacement wording.
> btw, has everyone here watched Dr. Horrible yet?
*adds to the heap*
Alex