 Thank you all for coming to this ad hoc Tuesday afternoon session. We are very lucky, while David Peterson is in town, that he was taking the opportunity to stop by and chat with us for the next hour or so. Literally stopping by, he's got his bags, he is on route to the airport, so we're very lucky that he could fit in the time to talk with us today. Some of you are probably already familiar with David's work, if you're not, you possibly are and you don't know it. Basically any film that has had a constructed language or TV show that has had a constructed language in the last five years or so, there's a very high likelihood that David has been involved in that project, including Game of Thrones, The 100, the new Emerald City TV show, and a variety of other projects, but he was a language creator long before he became a language creator for film and television. He's been president of the Language Creation Society and is involved in the current documentary about conlang-making called Conlangery. This is an opportunity today for you guys to ask him about conlang-ing in particular, or kind of general questions around linguistic typology that you have. I promised him that you'd all bring your most nerdy linguistic questions if you wanted. He set up his computer so he could show us some of his work as well. Yeah, thanks. Oh, okay. Okay, sorry. So yeah, I asked to do this because I didn't want to prepare anything. Yeah, but it's funny, I do have my keynote on here, so I have presentations that I have done in the past, but anyway. But yeah, I hooked my computer up just in case you wanted to look at anything. I'm going to sit, but I'll move the chair over here so I'm not blocked. In fact, I'm going to move the trash can over here. But wait, it covers up the whole, see? Is that more important? Yeah, it looks all right. There, now I have access to everything. Anyway, but... Can you tell everyone what you studied? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I'll have to be sure to keep that awake. I was born in 1981. It was a good year. Actually, I was born hours before, apparently, the Iran-Contra hostages landed. Because I was born on January 20th, which is always the day that the president is inaugurated. This wasn't a great birthday this past year. My mother and her entire family is from Mexico. So I grew up around Spanish speakers until she married my first stepfather, who was kind of adamant that we shouldn't use Spanish at home and he didn't want us to have contact with her family at all. It wasn't a good situation. And so I kind of lost my Spanish input at that point and became what's known as a heritage speaker. Have you guys talked about that before? Is this a familiar term? All right, cool. So yeah, I was essentially a heritage speaker of Spanish. So then when I came back, when my mother got divorced and we were back with family and everybody, I just couldn't keep up anymore. I couldn't understand anybody anymore. So I really kind of hated the idea of non-English languages. It always bugged me when people spoke Spanish or spoke and I couldn't understand it. When I got to high school, I just took Spanish because it was the easiest option. And then it just all changed one day or one morning when I woke up 17 years old and had a very, very burning desire to learn every single language on the planet. And I just started that day. A friend gave me a French book that she wasn't using and I started trying to learn it. I just started grabbing up any book I could. And I don't really know why it happened. It just happened one day. And I don't know, maybe they thought it would be a passing fad and it might still be. It's just been 18 or so years. So the next year, my last year in high school, it was taking the last level of Spanish but I also took a year of German and I started studying Latin from a book that I had. It wasn't Wheel-Ox. It was actually published by Barnes & Noble. Is there a publisher, I guess. And so then when I got to college, it just made sense to take as many languages as I could. My first semester, just to kind of feel things out, I took a light load. Because I was an English major, a literature major. That was why I went to college, to become an English major and then eventually to go back to high school and teach English because that's all I wanted to do, that and write. So I took a light load which was just a 20th century literature and then another course that was cross-listed. It was called Environmental Science and Policy Management 77 where we were learning environmental science and also reading poems about the earth. It was taught by a poet laureate and also a biologist. It didn't go well. It was a terrible combination. But in our defense, the English majors did a lot better with the science than vice versa. Science guys, I don't know what to do with this. And so I took that and then a class on the doors, the music group. And then I took Arabic. But after that first semester, it went kind of well. All right, all right, that went well. So then I took the second semester of Arabic, the first semester of Russian and the first semester of Esperanto which was a student taught class in addition to my English stuff because I really, really liked it. And so I was really enjoying this and then I also took a semester of French formally because there were just so many language offerings and I thought it was just the best. But then I thought, well, I guess I might as well take linguistics because my mother really encouraged me to do so. She thought I would enjoy it. And I didn't think I would because I thought linguistics was pointless because you never learned the languages, you just studied them. But nevertheless, I took the first linguistics course and it was pretty much after day one when I saw what the homework was, which wasn't an essay, but it's like we literally got a worksheet and we're doing the phonetic features and things like that. I'm like, my God, this is work? It was just so much fun, especially once we got to phonology. I just loved it. It was super easy and I was so jazzed about it. And so then that kind of took over and interrupted my language study. I only ended up ever taking in one other language course which was Middle Egyptian language and hieroglyphs. And that was kind of a bummer because there were so many offerings at Berkeley. I almost took Turkish but it was offered at night in the morning and I swore after my second semester that I would never take a class offered before noon. And I didn't. It's wonderful that way. But in that first semester that I was taking the inter-linguistics course, I had taken Esperanto so I had learned of the existence of created languages but only those, only auxiliary languages created for international communication. Those were the only ones I knew about. And so I hit upon what I thought was an absolutely novel and original idea which was, why don't I create a language for myself but rather than for international communication I'll create it for fun. And I started immediately just in this linguistics course in my notebook I started creating it. And it's a god-awful language. I have an essay about why it's so bad because it really deserved to be teased out. But it was a horrible pastiche of kind of Esperanto regularity and Arabic grammar which is, you know, Arabic is one of the best languages. I love it. So that's why I did it. It was a very poor quality language but I invested a lot of time in it so it grew very large after not long. Eventually I found others that created languages online using Alta Vista which we did at the time. I found the conlang list and for some that are too young to get Alta Vista that was a really hot search engine before Google. It was the best one. Anyway, so I found the constructed language list where language creators got online and discussed their work creating languages and I was first just kind of blown away that there were other people that had done this and that they weren't just creating Esperanto clones but they were actually creating languages for themselves. And I had a sneaking suspicion that they might be better than me so I reacted by saying that they were all probably not as good as me. And I was really kind of a butt about it. All of the messages on the conlang list served. They're all public and they're all up and searchable forever. I can't see my earliest messages. It's really quite shameful. My very first message was just replying to somebody else's thread and making kind of a snarky comment about it. No, hi, my name is David or anything. It was just that was it. That was my first message. Very shameful. Anyway, it was good though because now I know, see, I have a young daughter now and now I know how to teach her. This is how you act on the internet. Don't do what I did. Otherwise you look like this and it's up there forever. But eventually I did realize why my language was so bad. Namely that it was trying to serve a million different purposes at once. It was both trying to do something that I just thought would be fun. Trying to do things that I thought would be linguistically interesting. Trying to do things that when I heard about it in linguistics course I would throw it in and also trying to make it regular but also trying to make it artistic and also trying to make it easy to learn and also trying to make it, you know, difficult at the same time. And so much of these goals were at cross purposes and so the result was absolutely a mess. Just an absolute mess. Something that nobody could find really interesting was not easy to learn, was not easy to use but was far too regular to be considered anything other than a simple auxiliary language. It wasn't good as an auxiliary language and it also didn't please me any longer which was, of course, that's the, you know, of the goals of all goals, that's the top one and if you're not happy with it any longer then it serves no purpose at all. So that was when I started to create new projects and I would come up with a new one every so often. I'd try it out for a while until it got, until I realized I was making some mistakes with it so then I'd pull out a new one and start there and keep going and this way I just kind of learned little by little and I started paying attention to other language creators as well and learning what they did and why and started learning from them and that's how I learned how to be a good language creator as opposed to a bad one in addition to continuing to take linguistics. So eventually I finished with my degrees in English and linguistics. I met a girl there in our linguistics club who I thought was pretty cool and so then when I found out she was going to linguistics graduate school I abandoned the plan that had me to college and decided to go ahead and go to linguistics graduate school as well and so then that's where we both went. We both went to UC San Diego, we both got our masters in linguistics then when she decided she didn't want to be in academia anymore I said, well, fantastic, let's go because I had really only gone because she was going but nevertheless it was useful I was able to teach English for a couple of years at the community college it's just a two-year program that we have in the United States and you just need a high school degree to get in it's not selective so I did that for a little bit, it pays very poorly and it was around that time that the Language Creation Society announced it had gotten the job to create something for a new show so I signed on for that and it was Dothraki for Game of Thrones and so then I competed with about 40 other language creators some of whom are fairly well known many of whom were very well known within the community and very well respected and very good language creators and then there were just a couple of oddballs here and there that were also in at it and yeah, it was a month and a half long totally open-ended there was no cap on the amount of material that you could provide so I produced about 300 pages of material and sent that off and I got through round one which was judged by the other language creators and then I got through round two that was judged by the producers and that was when I started creating languages for Game of Thrones and generally started working in Hollywood pretty much every job that I've gotten can be directly linked to Game of Thrones and it's popularity there were certainly other language creators that have done stuff like this like Matt Pearson who is one of the best language creators in the community he created a language for a show called Dark Skies but nobody's heard of it nobody'd even heard of it at the time it was basically just a response to the X-Files and so because of that he never really got another job so it's always important to keep in mind with this that there's a lot of what has happened with my career that is directly predicated upon the enormous success of Game of Thrones and it's something that I always remember that there's, you know, there's skill there but there was a lot of luck involved as well anyway so yeah, FBA in linguistics in English and then a master's in linguistics, is that it? Alright Sounds like a regimen Cool Anyway, loved it too Alright What script do you use? How do you mean? What, you know, writing system sort of Latin, you know, Latin letters for, you know, to create your language so that other people can read it Oh, well first any time that we're doing phonetics we always use IPA because that's the best way to do it it's not perfect but it's the best that we've got but then when I'm giving stuff to the actors I always create a romanization system which is just using roman characters and I create one that is as simple and straightforward as I can possibly make it for English speakers to understand and it's always, it's always phonetic so one-to-one not even phonological, it's always phonetic so that they just look at it and know how it's pronounced because that's the point of it it's a romanization though it's not an orthography and there's a, you know there's a difference between the two the romanization generally needs to be very simple I think the screen is on Don't worry it should do it it should do it I'm just trying to decide which one to pull up here let me see oh still, really? oh dear they just quit unexpectedly why would I do that this is what I want to show let me see if this will work no, it still doesn't, huh? alright, I know what the issue is it's an arrangement thing you have to arrange the windows and I will do it oh, that's funny but you can see that but you can't see that oh, how weird alright where's the thing where you, ah, displays that's it let's do mirroring show mirroring options in the menu bar where they're available well, it should be doing that shouldn't it oh, yeah okay, sorry I don't want to gather the windows I want to get rid of you how do I get rid of him let's do that there we go so here's a language that I created cast with him for the show called Defines alright, you can see let's get a good one a nice good word here oh, this is a good one this is a good one so how well can you see this pretty good so we have this word for liquid, right? no, I guess, that's just an adjective where's the noun form of it oh, you know what? it's probably different alright, whatever, that's alright so, um, what we have here so this is, this will be an IPA because this is about how it's pronounced this is just a convenient romanization for me, this is the etymology of this word and so you can see what happens here is that where is this old word that it used to have two long vowels in it it began with a pre-nasalized labial voice stop and the DH there is actually just a the, you can see them down here it's um a voiced interdental fricative so this is the old form of it and this also reflects how it's spelled so it's spelled with two characters because this is an abugida and the first one is this MB character followed by long ah, the second one is this interdental fricative character followed by long E um, that's how it's spelled but how it's pronounced as bahi with an H um, and then this is the romanization that I use and so um, so romanization is again very simple not necessarily always you know, phonetic, like you can just see a quick example here, this guy is a a flap and then this is just a regular old R in the romanization but um, the orthography is where things are supposed to be interesting this is where you get the irregularities of spelling like you see in English and French and um, and of course Tibetan, the worst of them all um, so in some productions, I create writing systems but not in all of them um, this was a fun one I liked this one this is probably the most difficult spelling system that I've created which I think is more difficult than English but not as difficult as Tibetan um, it would really be hard to create something as difficult as Tibetan um, it's a pretty good little guy so um, so yeah, that's what I that's what I use for the actors um, and then up at the top if you want to see how I do this this is uh you know, this will be the phonology here that I use it's all an IPA um, but but then this is what I send to the actors so all the letters as they're actually used and how they're how they're pronounced in more or less a way that they can understand um, the phonologies never get very difficult because that is what is requested by the producers they always want something super exotic and very easy to pronounce for English speakers um really gets rather difficult at times but um the addition by subtraction is something good to keep in mind um, yeah well, I certainly have it I certainly have favorite natural languages among the Marabek and Hawaiian but um, as far as drawing from something, I don't really need to do it anymore um, this is generally true of a lot of conlangers once you've been at it a while, you just don't need it anymore yeah, you just go straight from the top from, you know, principles and you know, just decide what do you want to be after like with this one, I wanted something that was pronounced very quickly and I also wanted to do have a lot of fun with the etymologies and stuff and I also wanted to do this kind of a thing where I had cases that didn't mean anything um which is um I think it kind of worked out I think it kind of worked out, so essentially all of these, let me pull up a noun here um yeah, here's a noun uh, asshole, yeah, that's a great one ha ha ha ha yeah, gui cha gui cha so um, these all nouns have three forms a form that will end in an o or u a form that ends in an a in an i or an e um and these cases don't really have any specific meaning they actually used to be tied to definiteness um, so like one of them is uh, here it's much simpler because this one has this suffix here where the k never changes so, so yeah, gif ta ka gif ta ka, gif ta ki gif ta k, of course there wouldn't be a long e for that one um, and so what happens with these guys is um if you uh this language developed a series of post positions that you pretty much always need to use if there's a vocative, so this this citation form is the vocative so then you can use it by itself just like that, otherwise all of the post positions simply call for one of these case forms lots of time it's this direct one um, and then sometimes it's the other ones and sometimes the post positions have um alright, this doesn't need to face like that because this doesn't change that I can move this towards me alright, let's see some post positions um is this one uh, yeah, so like here here's an example you can see this one, guo this is a nice example of divergent evolution, so this one that was a post position uh, things lineated a lot more than in the word that actually came to exist from this word which is, it should be guo-ro shouldn't it where is it here we go yeah, same word so here we have guo-ro and it means just foundation basically building word for proof or evidence, that's pretty nice um, so that was the noun that came from it, but then the um the uh, the post position that came from it is just this one um, and so with the the DT there, that refers to the A case it means stuck to the bottom of or directly underneath or hanging from something like that, but with the IT one it just means underneath but not necessarily touching, in fact probably not touching and then you have a separate one like this so um so yeah, so the cases then differ but don't actually have any meaning anymore and can't really be used on their own except for the vocative one um, and so that was like when I was creating this language, I thought this could be really cool um, because I love having these things where you have some bit of morphology that actually isn't tied to any specific meaning um, because it really gives fits to people that try to do morphemic analysis um which is just something I don't really hold with uh, lovely that way anyway, so yeah, it's kind of a rasp very morpheme, but in uh in the cases themselves um, so yeah that's generally how I go about it yeah, this is for a show called Defiance it ran for three seasons on sci-fi, it should be on either Netflix or Amazon streaming at this point it was a show that was not as good as the love that everybody put into it um because everybody really loved it and and gave it their all but the end result I don't think was was as good as it could have been and I lay the blame at the feet of the non of the people that came in to write one-off episodes they were just terrible ah I did, yeah yeah, that's cast-a-thon let's go ahead and I'll just show you briefly the other ones there's one there's one and there's one let's see what comes up first, ah I like this one I like this writing system, I thought it was pretty cool this is one that I created for the the last season um and this one I got to do some fun stuff with how it was pronounced because I finally said you know, we're hoping that it can sound really different, I'm like alright I can make it sound different but it's not necessarily going to be easy to pronounce and he said go for it and so I did um it was spoken only really by two people um one of them just it was her first major television role and she just put as much effort as as she possibly could into getting it right and to really performing her utmost and doing her best she then would text me and asked me to to give her lines that she could add she asked me to translate stuff that they put in English in the script because she says if I do it on camera they'll just have to go with it um it was a dream come true and the other gentlemen um he didn't think it was necessary to rehearse at all and not only that like he kind of made fun of the actress who was just starting out he was a veteran for even putting any effort into it um he would he refused to rehearse with her and refused to really look at the lines um and often what would come out was gibberish so there's a distinct difference in the way that they pronounce the stuff um but yeah this is a fun one there's something that's really evocative of the sound of it well actually I should probably go to the R's or the I didn't do many of these because she was having quite a time with these uvular adjectives here so oh yeah that was a good one because that was a kind of um what do you call those? it was kind of a measure word what's the better word for those? classifier that was a that's a good word ghettin ghettin door, what a terrible word for door ghettin hahaha I love it you can see it where as it's etymology on its sleeve here oh look at that and the K drops out because it used to be got rid of those ah that's a good word for ice ghettin ah that's a great word for ice I like that one anyway so that's that language um let's see oh did you have a question about this one specifically? not I'll just move on this is my favorite language perhaps my favorite language that I've ever created I love this language it's called erathian it's got a nice meaty noun class system that's just look at that damn that's a good ass looking character um takes up a lot of space this writing system does especially when you it's an abu ghettin but um it's not CV it's VC and so that's why something like this is that many characters and looks the way it does um that's a fun one lots of borrowings from English in this one ah shebe shaktu that's a good word oh be shaktu heater I must have needed this for some reason um like it's for in the show or something I noticed with dod raki they are no-handed people that live in some kind of desert terrain with a lot of forces yeah that's a step yeah it seems to reflect um a lot of our forces um and some of the modernism I think are taken from contact language yeah so I wondered because the nomadic when you were creating dod raki did you look at any other nomadic languages natural nomadic languages um for example in um writing there's no word for reason they say things like sitting in or stopping in um and I think that's reflected in domari and other languages these kinds of cultural specific situations to create well I look at um I look at Mongolian because that was Mongolian culture was primarily what inspired George R. R. Martin um but you know everybody's going to have words for what they do um it's just a matter of the lexicon there you know of words for whatever it is that is a part of their life um but it doesn't necessarily mean all that much like dod raki probably doesn't have as many horse words as english does but I don't know if you'd describe english speakers as a horsesh people um oh yeah and there's a lot of words like creating some things that they reported oh yeah well you should see there's like there's like 200 words in that book um then this is how many there are in the language that book because there's like nothing in it it's very it's very short um but uh that one like um for I actually I believe I did get this one directly from um Mongolian um my friend hasn't been able to find anything from it where um uh where you know say how are you doing uh this uh you use the word for writing but the idea is that it doesn't actually mean that anymore that's just how you say it um just like you know how is it going doesn't really refer to motion so much it's just you know you just say it that way um I think that's that's kind of the idea behind it um but yeah no I did I did like this one though where is it yeah these guys where you use like the word the verb for write in conjunction with one of two cases and it's the equivalent of um in French how you know you say you know uh beyond the uh you know I have just done something I've come from it and and you know I'm going to do something kind of the same thing here except with the verb for write and using the all of an oblate of case since they're in opposition in this language um that was a fun one um not really um I mean lexically I picked up some stuff here and there but I hadn't looked at Mongolian when I was creating the language Mongolian is a very different language um and then by the way this is the last defiance language which was um it's a beastly thing it's um it's like uh it's it's polysynthetic very difficult to use and this is obviously not a natural a naturalistic orthography but a post hoc creation that the the beings themselves created you know probably after the digital age or at the start of it anyway so that at least that finishes that okay when it comes to the production or reversal stage and for this show do you how much time spent familiarizing the actors with the with the languages beyond what they have to say in the script oh none so you don't spend time teaching them yeah they haven't got time for that they got so much stuff to do but really it's just you know every single line they just they just get that and repeat it probably very similar to how it's done with uh natural languages I would imagine at least like the last I mean the last movie I worked on I was working with two languages that I created but also working with um at least one of the actors with Spanish it's not like she studied Spanish just I just made sure she pronounced it right um compromised with her when she thought one of the lines was too difficult God it still haunts me um she should have said uh but she was like no that's too much so I and so I changed it to um but it just means something slightly different you know one is like who have you told and the other one was who did you tell and it just in context it doesn't make sense um it's not it's not appropriate but it's like she just she wasn't doing it so it's like alright whatever you can say that one say that one um some of the some of the actors are interested beyond learning the lines um most aren't but like the one who really put a lot of work in the one I was talking about on Defiance um the actress that put a lot lot of work in um and kept asking me for extra stuff as a present to her I I bound up the uh the dictionary and I sent it to her as a wrap gift um and she liked it so um it just varies yeah wasn't it a case of when the actors um they had an accent influence and some had better accents than others yeah that's a that's a tough thing to control for um just in general uh because some people are really good at it and some of them are just really really struggling just to just at the very basic level pronouncing each sound correctly and so going further beyond that and making sure things like intonation or right or that's the precise accent is just too much yeah um it's and as a result the the end of it is quite variable like the the quality is quite variable it's there's a noticeable there's a noticeable difference between different actors and actresses and you know at present you just have to live with it maybe if this if language if created languages and films and television continue on and uh and you know really kind of come into their own and become its own thing that everybody's always considering maybe like a hundred years in the future that just won't be tolerated and they'll look back on all this stuff and laugh they're like oh that one's just terrible I can't believe that they would actually put up with something like that and it's just terrible productions slow but incremental progress hear how this works you invent the language and create a dictionary but do you write the script as well or are you given the script and then you translate it into your language yeah translation is most of what I do um for my job so uh like the bulk of what I'm doing is just translating the translation part yeah um and of course it gets easier as time goes on because the language keeps on building um and I I gain more familiarity with it um it also helps if I keep up with it because if I if I drop in and it's been like a year and it's just you have to kind of get around to it again um the etymologies help when I write them down because then I can remember what I was thinking why I was doing certain things a certain way but uh yeah most of the time translation is what I do oh yeah I mean these are these are my languages this is what I did for fun so I'll just keep adding to them forever um to the extent that I have free time um because of course this was always something I would do with my free time um it's nice that I have a job that requires me to work with um created languages because then uh that becomes my work time so I have to do it um but it's not like I get to choose which language I'm working on uh and free time has been a premium of late because I work on between three and five different projects at once um mixed between television shows and movies and I travel around a lot and do talks and then I have um I have a daughter who's one year old one year old in almost three months three months on March 4th um and so it's hard to just have time to like uh to play with my languages that's why I used to um but you know when all of this when all of this blows over um I absolutely will keep adding to them certain ones first over others um but there was another part of this question oh yes how much do I remember them um it's not as if I'm fluent in them at all if I have to translate into why I have to sit down with them um I have some vocabulary recall for certain languages and there are always going to be words that I just remember and words that I forget but if it was to be like if I was going to put a percentage on it maybe 10% it's just not enough to even have a conversation and yeah well of course the the original reason I was drawn to it was the script and you can see that by some of the languages I studied you know Arabic, Russian, Middle Egyptian um I love the script I thought it was beautiful um I didn't really know you know anything about the language other than that um but then when I started studying it and learned about how uh specifically this this triconstinal root system it absolutely just blew my mind I never imagined that I never imagined that a language could work like that you know if you speak English and then you study you know Spanish, German, French um you you only have certain ideas about how a language could possibly work um and even something that goes like far beyond that and takes it to an extreme like Turkish it's still nothing very new you know Turkish Hungarian where you can get very long words but it's still nothing very new you know so like okay or even Russian or Latin you're like okay so there are more cases okay the words get a little bit longer you add some stuff on but it's like languages like um like Arabic and then when I studied um the various inactitude languages are so different from everything else that it just completely just changed my entire understanding of how language could possibly work and what language could be um and I just found it so beautiful and so satisfying and kind of um you know satisfying to my brain that I just loved it and so I was I was really down to learn it I would have kept on with it but I had to make a decision because you know I was continuing on with English I was now moving on to do linguistics and I was looking at the next Arabic course and it was taught by somebody I knew but didn't really like and it was offered at 10 a.m. and I was just like I don't think I can go back there to that time before noon um especially since I had just taken Russian which was at 10 a.m. every day and then the next Russian course was at 9 a.m. every day can you imagine I was I was obviously not going to do that so um it was um it was a decision I made it's not necessarily when I regret because I took other classes but I really would have loved to have gotten more fluent in Arabic especially because in that first year honestly you're just learning you're just learning al-fusha so it's not like you're learning anything that you can just go over and start speaking you know you gotta learn the language that people actually use um this is uh the the Quranic Arabic is what you start learning I'm not saying you shouldn't teach it that way it's very useful because then you you learn the structure and learn how things are going and then they you know you transition into one of the one of the modern variants that's spoken today but um you know not not super useful yeah yeah no because this is something that takes effort um effort and time and neither of which we really have in much store she hears them all the time because you know I do I do my recordings oh by the way this this hasn't come up before I record every line for every show and movie I work on so I've said them all but yeah so I record them so she hears stuff but it's hard to even try to remember to use Spanish around her I just just feel like we've been exhausted for a year um but um she loves she loves her sounds though I always we we do sounds we we play with sounds a lot and she finally just in the past couple of weeks um she'd always loved and found hilarious clicks but now she's able to do them so this is a new thing that we do it's a game that we play but um she always would she always loved the clicks you know you know so I you know I'd start out with her you know and she she kind of lap and then I pull out the big gun and she would just die laughing she thinks they're hilarious the lateral clicks she loves them she'll always laugh at them but then it was like yeah one day we were there and she just started and she went and she was smiling I was like good job you did it baby you did it and um she still can't do the lateral one um which you know I hope she can figure it out because then she can just entertain herself for hours but um but yeah so now it's now it's a game we play we she starts clicking and so then I do them back at her and then I do go to a different one she tries that and then you know she patiently waits until I you know and then she just starts laughing loves it um previously she'd always done um her self soothing method was always the bilabial thrill that was how I knew it's like she is reaching the end of her rope and she if you like you know she here in the back seat of the car and it's like brrrrr She's like, all right, this is the indication that she is about to lose it, and we've just got a few minutes. I mean, she's like, she's just trying her best, and she's letting us know, all right, I'm doing this, okay? I'm trying for you people. Poor little thing. She still does that one. She liked that one a lot, but yeah, we play around with sounds like that a lot. I would need to know the languages a lot better in order to be able to do them. I never seem to be able to want to say precisely what I want to say at the moment in any given language that I've created. I mean, I have the vocabulary. I just can't remember it because that's the other thing. Well, it's kind of like the vocabulary to say things in Tibetan exists, but it's not here, so I can't say it. Not the ones you've created, but of the other ones, how many are you fluent in? Just English and Spanish. The other ones that I'm functional in order are probably German, French, American sign language, Arabic, Russian. Then after that, it's just such a low level of functionality that I wouldn't even be able to do anything with it. Yeah. If you've been forced on the interesting features you want to learn with it, I'm pretty sure you would want to just train in and learn to speak one kind of foreign sign. Everybody knows everything about Australian languages and the created languages community, trust me. I guess as a more general kind of spring of that, how does typology of natural language involve languages? First separately, like so completely separating out my life as a language creator, it's not like I've left off with my original goal, so now maybe I'm not going to be learning all of these languages to fluency, but I spend time learning new languages almost every day. I just go through reference grammars or teach yourself guides and I read them all and then when I finish, I start a new one. Since I started my new kind of program of that, I did Akkadian, Attic Greek, Modern Greek, Hindi, Japanese, and I feel like I'm missing one, but Finnish is right now. I'm actually going to Helsinki this summer, so I'm trying to actually learn it to use it. It's been difficult because I want to class in it and I just couldn't manage. But as part of that is like literally every language is on my docket to learn, provided I can get materials on it. Another language creator, one of the best, Sylvia Sotomayor. She's the one who's the real expert in native Australian languages. In particular, she's devoted a lot of her time recently to help me out here, Quechua and also the Australian languages, you know. The what? Which one's in vocabulary? I don't know. No, I'm talking about a phenomenon, a linguistic phenomenon, evidentials, yeah. She's been studying the evidentials of the Australian languages a lot and how they evolve. And so then of course, the rest of us in the language creation community are benefiting from that knowledge because she's going through it. I can vault and dixen those guys. But yeah, it's something that when it comes to me wanting to learn languages, it's not like any of them are off the table. It's just if I can get materials on it. Like recently, I got a book, it's an old book, a terrible book on the Andamanese languages. Amazing. Amazing. It's something I actually saw there was an inspiration to a language that I created for Game of Thrones that ended up not getting used in the show. That was funny. They had me create a whole language for the children in the forest and then just didn't get, didn't use it, but that was a really cool thing. So I guess the answer is yes, but you know, yes in kind of a different way I guess. Yeah. We'll wrap up the formal part, we'll kind of dig some of it up immediately so if you have any questions that you didn't get to ask, let me know. Otherwise, a lot of what he does, I bought my copy of my book Invention, so it has a book which is basically like a really great intro to linguistics book full of Conlang examples. So if you have a family member who's into pop culture and you want to explain to them what you do, it's a great way to do it. And there's a YouTube video that is also called The Art of... Oh yeah, I have a YouTube series. I keep forgetting that. It goes much more into questions if you have them. Otherwise, I think they'll be very much coming along today. Thank you. Thanks for having me.