Create a Language in Just One Hour | David J. Peterson | Talks at Google

thanks ok i've worked on a bunch of stuff i'm

just

going to do a quick laundry list here real real quick

just

so you can see so Game of Thrones was my first i did a bunch of stuff for that challenge on sci-fi star-crossed on cw thor the dark world the second dominion on sci-fi the hundred airing its final season in may we were almost done shooting penny dreadful that was fun i like that the shannara chronicles' warcraft movie Doctor Strange Emerald City shining on Netflix into the Badlands for the last season Christmas Chronicles on Netflix the Mirena Valor was a game a MOBA game another life series on Netflix its second season is coming Witcher has just finished filming its first Season Shadow and Bone is also Netflix and the Dune movie is coming out at the end of the year so anyway since it's the season I thought I'd start with a simple reminder just so you know. please remember to wash your hands w with warm water and now for the rest of the time we're going to translate that phrase into a whole new

language

that we're going to

create

right here on the spot and we're going to use this here to help us so please Please everyone be prepared to say things because if you don't someone else will master it and this will go off the rails real quick just kidding no it'll be fine so um when you're creating a new

language

.

The first thing you need to do before you start anything else is to decide what kind of language you are going to

create

and that usually involves finding out who the speakers are, if the language is going to be spoken, signed or written or are we going to have other means of communication so far, the only thing we know for sure about the language is that it's a way to code the meeting in some sort of way, but that way could take any number of routes, so let's skip that step and say let's practice with a uage spoken language since as you know most languages ​​we know of are over spoken and most people are familiar with them so spoken languages ​​have sounds and sounds actually come in groups so which I'll start by giving you some of these here so these sounds here which are pretty simple so we have PT k sh m and L and they all have the sounds that you would expect these are consonant and then these are vowels and not have their pronunciation in english these sounds the consonants and the vowels here most languages ​​have all of these sounds and all languages ​​have most of these sounds so that's a good place to start but after this you can add stuff you can subtract stuff eg Hawaiian or at least many dialects of Hawaiian don't have a T they don't have an S either I know the dialect of Hawaiian is an S many languages ​​don't have an L many languages ​​don't they have an R so anyway this is a good place to start our sound system but now we are going to add or subtract acts so come on what do we like?

This is a very, very basic sound system. Do you want to add something? Yeah, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, okay. So what's written as Q if you do it in IPA this is a sound that's known as a uvular stop ha ha ha it's like k but further back in the mouth the back of the tongue touches the uvula making a sound which doesn't cut but hey that's why we spell the name of this country with a Q it's not a pier it's adopt it with a nice hollow Q sound in the back anyway so I'm sure you look at Q , it's fun, I like it, I like it, but if you want it, we'll add it, wait for Q, oh my gosh, we'll add Q, okay, okay, let's do it, let's do it, so we'll have our basic basic phonology and add Q uvular. other favourites, yes even nasal velar nasal of course this is the sound at the end of sing and also at the beginning of the vietnamese name win if you pronounce it right but I didn't but at least I pronounced the velar nasal part right, so this is good, okay, anything else we want to add, yeah, give it a B because, oh, he's not Victor, okay, come on.

Let's talk about that, so we have fricatives. These are sounds that kind of sound like we don't have a table here. I don't know if you'll be able to pick this up, but they sound more or less like this. go ahead the difference between let's say these two sounds is if the vocal cords vibrate these are the little things that help keep food from getting into the lungs so if we let them quiet you get a sound like F, if you vibrate them you get this sound they are exactly the same sound the only difference is your vocal cords are vibrating so when we talk about V here when you add sounds to a language the sounds tend to come in groups so that this guy is part of two groups, the voice group. sounds and the group of fricatives this voiceless sounds and fricatives so far we have voiceless stops in a very good series of them ptk and uh, we have a series of nasals although we don't have a you learn asel note that and we only have voiceless fricatives x's and h if we want add V do we want to add F too and do we want to add this boy's brother?

Z s and z are the same sound, but one has a vibration of the vocal cords, so whoever suggested the V, what do you think of all of them? we're good with this no actually there aren't many languages ​​that actually have V that don't have F Z without s no you don't find that and we already have s so we would have to remove it remember s is there but we could just add Z and V there are many languages ​​that will have a V and not an F and this is because it's a weak fricative so something like these guys here are strong fricatives these and that there are actually these all weak and then things will happen with you you know they don't happen with these okay so we have Z and V yes a rolled R that's very cool I like that sound I'm going to add it without even consulting anyone everyone can do that and so on that's good actually should have asked what kind of rolled R did you mean rolled R or did you mean the first one ok ok ok so let's see we have PT k SZ v we have M an egg MA we have uh we don't have any fricatives on the back we don't have anything like or yes or or or that too he's one these are thanks yeah yeah yeah hey that's good that's good any quibble to yeah huh yeah like in yellow okay this is the symbol for that's a J AJ yeah we're getting a pretty good set any clicks the clicks too they will come in series if you add clicks so for example you will never find a language that has a bunch of non-click sounds and then just has this which is correct no language has which all languages ​​have so far We know, I think that at least 3 is the minimum, it could be two, I don't have to look for this, I'm very interested right now but generally something like that is that and then what else is there also that which is dental and then I suppose that it is very few languages ​​have this one which looks like the chemical symbol for gold but it's that one and then i'm missing my other click so its lateral aspect no this was the lateral this was the lateral palatal lateral ok anyway these it's the four of us, okay, how do we feel about egar some clicks because if we are adding one we are adding? at least two eh okay okay which one we want here or man I'm sorry okay and then which one is the one with the horse or the one with the clock or that one is okay here we go you have it we have it we have it okay watch and so do I'm sorry, no, I'm sorry, that was that and Clark, okay, okay, let's give ourselves some space here, why don't we have a nice set of consonants?

Why don't we jump on tubes? now the mouths are a little easier because there aren't that many that are distinguished in languages ​​we have come so far ah II ooh and it's not really uh it's more of an ah ah and these these sounds are very common you will find them in many languages ​​English it has a lot of vowels that are on different levels and different what do you call it not if they're in relaxed tense in other words you know typing versus kid typing a car versus you know joking with a car kid in the car so we have things like that the European languages ​​will have the front vowel rounded so instead of e they will have a and E and instead of just a they will have a and I don't think anyone has that sound do you think they have the IPA symbol like this I don't think they even more in the IPA because someone finally realized that no language has that sound so they just cut it out of the IPA but it's there oh yeah very very low and round so no but yeah before delve into the bowels ace, yes, you can bet anyway. you'll never find a language that has one of these songs in this class sounds but no so yeah you're designing yeah are these movies you really don't want?

Because that's a good question, actually, so the question was, when it comes to universal trends in languages, are these things you want to bring or not? It depends on the type of language you're doing, which is kind of I don't know because of what we're doing right now. I guess it's not that important. I always try to do it a bit, I guess. more natural, but you know you don't necessarily have to. Also, these things are always going around in my mind, so every time one comes up, I'm like, well, you can't do that because, really, you can do whatever you want if you just you're designing the language on your own, you can't do absolutely what you want with it, as long as it actually works and someone else understands what you're doing and you don't need to worry a bit about what other languages ​​do sometimes, it may help report so you know when you're breaking the rules on purpose and when you're not okay you know it's okay but yeah we need to move.

This is that there is much more to language than just sounds. The long and short variants of Val in the vowels. just in E oh it's uh E versus I I like that so I'm just going to add this little brother of course well just trust me this means we're going to have long and short variants of all the vowels like this that now we have six vowels in total which is good the fewest vowels you can have in a language as far as we know is two and there are a couple of languages ​​and tripe that are argued to have two vowels two distinctive valves anyway now we have six so we're good we can add more we like for example we don't have any middle vowels like this a u o or this guy that looks like an inverted a that's just an O but we can be good too.

Does anyone feel that we should have more vocals? I'm actually seeing a lot of head shaking okay I actually want to put this to a vote more vocal yes raise your hand the vast majority say we're good so we're good we're done with the house okay this is our this is our by So far, it's a very, very nice, stable system that also has two clicks, so there's our tubes, so the next thing is the important part when you're choosing the vowels that are on Constanza or on your system. we are not actually defining the sound of your language the real definition of the sound of your language comes from the syllables that is what it can be at the beginning of a syllable what it can be at the end of a syllable and how syllables are built so there are four different languages ​​here the first is hawaiian followed by japanese followed by english followed by georgian so if you look at hawaiian hawaiian is very distinct because it doesn't allow consonant clusters at the beginning of the word and it doesn't allows no consonants to appear. at the end of a word or the end of a syllable and you end up with words like oponopono, what does that mean that it's not Oh, to improve that makes a lot of sense of course, because that's okay, oh wait, actually, since i'm there i forgot what japanese means 200 study benkyo ok so japanese only have one sound that can come at the end of a syllable however you have certain circumstances where the vowels can disappear making it sound more or less like you could have more of just an N at the end of a syllable, so here's an invisible.

I have all that kind of abandonment. English is just I mean terrible here. Look at this force that is horrible. There's even like it hides a K in there when you pronounce it and we don't write force, but the truth is, most of us just don't pronounce all these things all the time. Have you ever thought of the worst word in English? There is nothing worse than that word. the bottom one is Georgian and the word is as far as I know it's pronounced nee it's kind of it was definitely a made up word for this example it was like it meant you peel us like present tense so like you know if someone was asking a bunch of bananas like what do i do with you bananas would say peel us thats the context but yeah you can get tons of consonants in a row in georgian like that so the question is for our language what do we want? do and let's break it down like this let's start at the beginning of the syllable we want to allow more than one consonant to start a syllable i see multiple yes and if so which which which and this is where it is going to help break things down into classes ok , got stops ok these are our our PT K Q and you know what I'm gonna do these cliques are going to be tough so just remember they ain't gonna play nice with other things so you got noses and that's our M n Emma and fricatives sorry nonon physical just for the fun of it ok here we go everyone is a physical you yes its a non physical you ok so we have your hands part ok always remember to wash so wherever we are doing. just the basic form of the verb for an infinitive what do you think about washing? it is something that is going to be a basic notion that goes back to time immemorial is going to be something that is derived from something else.

I don't agree, but let's continue, let's continue. Make it basic, okay, make someone up. give us a form to wash the language it doesn't have showremember we have the option we don't accept it you know ena ena anyone hold up very well here we go so he doesn't yes and we need the infinitive remember it's to wash your hands so right now we have to wash our hands Inga is in URI Sorry Inga is out Rudy no Sorry inna sangmoo priam gosh this is really hard this would take me a while anyway ok what do we want to do next? remember or with warm water remember not certainly something that is probably not going to be basic how do we want to do that? off it's alright naughty it's alright not alright now how we go from knowing to remembering in my thoughts okay you want to do a full reduplication or shorten it a bit oh i like this actually it's alright so with the reduplication get ma ma T remember I like well too so ma ma T okay so now tail The question is how are we going to indicate this command because it's a command to remember hello yeah as a suffix ooh ooh ma ma Tia. with this polite or rude hawaii it's ok now you're right mom in tia ma mafia inna zhong kui zhangmu audrey ok remember to wash your hands then it's ok last thing we'll do i'll forget please we'll just say it was incorporated into this with warm water, okay, so that will require, since we didn't make the case, it will probably require a preposition, someone wants to throw something away for the preposition for the wide sauce, we can't end anything with a consonant saw, okay? alright and now the water is probably super basic someone wants to throw something into the water i know V with a long short short be smart alright and now we come to this whole thing so if we don't have adjectives it's water that's warm you did it than all of you they did that so it's a verb it's going to b e some kind of a in some kind of form probably present tense or nomic tense and it might agree to something so let's start with warm is it going to start as warm or is it going to build from hot?

Alright? Hello, give me something, wait, I heard a first, okay, how will we take you? wait we don't have that val let's call him oh yeah ok how you gonna take ayah and change it from hot to lukewarm yeah, how are we going to do that? also - what oh my gosh I'm going to accept that though yeah ok that's how it's going to work we'll probably put you here and then I'll probably have something to indicate that I was okay with something as the pronouns are coming after probably is built from the pronouns and is probably built from this pronoun. hands with warm water Mattia Inga's annuity expert tu