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I am back!

Hello everyone! Welcome to my new language and linguistics blog! This is officially my first post that isn't an archived post that I've written from 2013-2017 on the Koko The Polyglot blog. I was meaning to rebrand in 2018 but I had other priorities and obligations that prevented me from doing so. Unfortunately during the Covid-19 pandemic, I was an essential worker and that kept me quite busy during that time. Including moving on my own in small studio apartment. I've been there ever since. Was I able to continue learning language at that time? Absolutely! Have I been able to meet with native speakers (online or in-person)? Unfortunately, no. So hopefully, I will be able to book more sessions with native speakers to practise my language learning skills.

Which languages am I currently learning?

At the moment I am currently focusing on German, Finnish, Catalan and more recently Dutch. I found a few YouTube channels and Instagram reels that inspired me to start learning it. I am at a high enough level in German (B1) where I can easily distinguish between German and Dutch and not get them mixed up. I initially found the channel Learn Dutch with Alain (which teaches Belgian Dutch or Flemish) then I found Dutchies to Be- Learn Dutch with Kim, JeDutchy and Dutch Today with Martijn. I have been casually learning European Portuguese here and there and have been following Portuguese with Anita on Instagram as well as Talk the Streets and Portuguese with Leo on YouTube. Icelandic has been in the background and I typically only decided random inconsistent 5 minute intervals on the Drops app for Icelandic.

This year has been incredibly challenging for me and it seems like a lot of things went wrong as well as many people in my space losing friends and loved ones suddenly. That has demotivated me from more mindful language learning and a lot of what I have been doing has been mostly taking notes from Katchats Finnish for Finnish and the Dutch youtubers mentioned above. So next year I need to make more of a conscience effort to make progress in the languages I'm learning.

For now (this can and will change later), I am going to focus on Finnish, Dutch and Catalan. German will be more passive but I will still find ways to make it fun so that my motivation doesn't fall off a cliff.

Conlangs and Linguistics

This was not something I had on my previous website because I never gotten around to it and at the time had separate websites/blogs for them. Conlanging was something I discovered around the same time I really got into languages. It also made learning linguistics more enjoyable even though it can be quite the time consuming hobby. I took a long break from conlanging well before I shut down my previous website. I guess I wasn't feeling as inspired to create languages. In 2023, I decided to get back into conlanging after discovering Colin Gorrie's YouTube channel where he did many videos on conlangs he created and his process for doing so.

I ended up creating Kalovanian to start out with then I decided to create distantly related languages Lubenavian and Vasatulokian. These came after starting to world-build where I want these languages to be spoken and how the speakers of these languages interact with each other in their fictitious world. These languages are a priori languages with many influences from natural languages in their vocabulary but most of the vocabulary has been created from scratch.

Kalovanian follows a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) word order like Japanese and has loan words from Japanese, Finnish, Catalan, Czech, Indonesian, Mandarin Chinese (only 1 word), and Portuguese (only 1 word). Some of the words retain their spelling whilst others have been altered to fit into Kalovanian pronunciation.

Lubenavian follows a V-S-O (Verb-Subject-Object) word order and is heavily agglutinative with many loan words from Italian, Japanese, Greek, Polish and a few words from Czech. Many of these loan words had their pronunciation, spellings and sounds added or removed to cater to Lubenavian pronunciation.

Vasatulokian's word order (unlike Kalovanian and Lubenavian) is a lot more free as long as you use the proper case, verb conjugation and noun declension. Vasatulokian has many loan words from Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai but their spelling, pronunciation and sounds added or removed to cater Vasatulokian pronounciation.

Creating a dictionary in Google Sheets has been incredibly useful in making sure I have words to express certain concepts without creating too many synonyms. It also helps me create new words by deriving them from previously created words. I am still not that great at glossing with the International Phonetic Alphabet but I am sure as I get better at conlanging that this process will become much easier.

Conlanging has also help me better understand difficult grammatical concepts that I am currently struggling with in my target languages (ex: Finnish cases and how to effectively use them properly).

So going forward there will also be content being made about linguistic, especially conlangs (Constructed Languages) going forward as well.


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