Don: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Grendhill Chronicles podcast, where we discuss world building and occasionally read aloud to you. While the spotlight is intended for the Grendhill Chronicles, we often go far afield. Today I present to you an interview with science fiction author Martin l Schumaker. We are going to discuss con lang's or constructed invented languages and how language shifts over time.

Before we get to today's contents, let's catch up a little bit. I did not publish a podcast episode in May. Several things hit at [00:01:00] once or in close sequence, pushing this to the back burner, so I couldn't even do one episode, and that's not even recording. This episode was recorded on April 15th, 2023, just over two months ago.

As I speak to you today on June 17th, one thing that's taking up some time is we're trying to remedy the cigarette smell in our old house. We have quotes from ServPro, but since there has been a period of several months with the mortgage draining our savings with no tenant, we're trying to do more of it, more of the work ourselves in order to save some money.

Also in May, my wife left town to tend to some matters in another state, and although I took some time off of work to be with the kids, there was an overlap between me going back to work before Lila returned. So my parents came to town to help cover the gap. Somehow it got worked in there that my sister was coming in, coming with her kids while her husband worked on some certification.[00:02:00] 

Uh, and it sounded like a good idea at the time. But let me tell you now that although I loved seeing my sister and nieces and nephews and my kids and, and her kids are, you know, the cousins loved playing together, it was bad timing. My sister homeschools her children, but my kids were still in school and they were not on summer break.

So I found it, I found myself coming home from work and being the party pooper, calling an end to playtime and stuffing food in faces as fast as possible in order to get my kids in bed. You may recall from another episode how early their school started. So they had an early bedtime while their cousins didn't.

It was very stressful, to say the least. It was. So difficult. Will we have them over again? Of course, but not while I have to go to work. And Lila is out of town and the kids are in school and we're not even fully settled into our new house, and we [00:03:00] still have to turn around our old house because the renters smoked in it.

Yeah. Uh, good idea. Bad timing. Next time will be better. Uh, also my health has been suffering somewhat. A couple of weeks ago I had a fever and chills. Uh, so much so that like I was two evenings in a row, I was shivering uncontrollably. Uh, I could not warm up with a nice blanket on. And, and the only way to get rid of the chills, the only way to stop shivering.

Was a very hot bath. And then after that I do some profuse sweating for a few hours. Turns out it was strep and doctor gave me an antibiotic and the strep calmed right down. Then there's my knee and the doctor says, with the amount of time that it has been without improvement, it may be time to consider surgery to debride the tendon.

And it's kind of scary. Like, uh, I looked up success rates and while it says [00:04:00] 77%, I've also seen some things say that this issue never fully goes away. Uh, so I've got some decisions there. Um, some nice, lovely patellar tendonitis. Uh, now I do have some big news in my life, which is only four days old right now, but I'm gonna sit on that one and not share it.

It has not taken proper shape yet. Sorry. So, uh, one more thing before we get into today's discussion is a sincere apology in advance. I had audio issues. I didn't realize it while recording this interview, but my microphone record level was set much too high. So, um, audio eight has an algorithm to try to fix audio clipping, and maybe I don't know how to use it right, because the output is still not great.

Um, anyway, it's good enough that you can clearly [00:05:00] hear what I'm saying. So I hope you'll forgive me the little, uh, mix up and I'll make up for it in my next episode. I promise it's already recorded, so that's how I know I can promise that I, I've listened to that recording. Now without further ado, today's world building discussion on Conlan.

Okay, so here I am with Martin l Schumaker, author of Blue Collar Space, and some other titles. I don't know if you want to highlight some of the things you've written. 

Martin: Probably what I'm most known for is the last dance, which is a novel in my blue collar space universe. And today I am Carrie, which is not in my blue collar space universe, but was my debut novel.

So those are what I'm probably most known for in the reader community. Okay. 

Don: I have not read [00:06:00] those, but I looked on Amazon really quickly and they are, there's sci-fi. I've enjoyed science fiction in my time, so that that's what I do as well. Science fiction, and I focus more on fantasy is what I'm finding.

I didn't know that in my, about myself before. Diving in, 

Martin: that's probably good because in general it's a bigger market, so you've got a bigger target to aim for. My tendency is the idea is what I'm gonna write next. I don't pick and choose. So Uhhuh, I'm off to fantasy these days, and then I'll be back to my blue collar space somewhere in the next project.

How far 

Don: ahead of time do you have your ideas? Once you have an idea, how long is it before you write that and do you note them down to come back to them later? 

Martin: I have a spreadsheet I call the idea pile, and some of the things that are in there have been in there for more than a decade because once it's in the pile, it's to some extent, it satisfies my urge of, okay, that idea, I don't have to worry [00:07:00] about it.

Now it's recorded. So I tend to honestly work on the fresh ones more than what's in the idea pile. But if I'm bored, I leaf through the pile and pick up something. Okay. My current project, which is fantasy, is one that's been in the idea pile, I wanna say most of a decade now, but it's one that keeps coming back to me and eventually I said, if it keeps coming back to me, I've gotta write this one.

Other times him. Generally by nature of pants are by the seat of my pants. And so there are times where, oh, I have the idea, and two minutes later I'm dictating. So it really varies from one to another. Okay. 

Don: So I've been working on the Greenhill Chronicles on and off. I guess mostly off because it's still not very far into the story written yet, but I started it for NaNoWriMo in 2010.

Oh dear. From Nna Hash, [00:08:00] that's Alexa. Oh, I can't close this other door without moving the camera. I apologize that I'm introducing little delays and things that I'm gonna have to edit it out. That's honestly, I, not a problem. I'm a little nervous. They 

Martin: say that production takes twice as long as recording.

Don: Oh. At least. At least. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I've been working on the Grendhill Chronicles for a long time. But not really much else until last year. I started having a bunch of ideas hit me, and I think last year is when I finally figured out how to ca capture my daydreaming somewhat, at least because I've had ideas like, oh, that'd be cool.

I've had ideas like that all my life pretty much. But it wasn't anything like, I didn't realize. Yeah, that would be a cool thing. I've gotta make it happen. And to help us get to know you better. Like I, I know you did 30 years as a software developer. It 

Martin: actually, that's almost a decade out of date in my bio now.

I probably should [00:09:00] go touch that up. I've been a professional developer at some level since 1981. Okay. And professional full-time since 19 80, 85? I think so. So I am a programmer first, a writer second. And that's okay because both are creative. Both give me things that I really enjoy out of it, but writing is a very different experience, so I'm trying to make sure I keep that in my schedule, keep my time open for that.

Okay. 

Don: And how did you first get into writing? I 

Martin: cannot remember a time when I wasn't a writer for one thing. My memory, I use my memory all day long. It's part of the job, constantly using my memory. But weirdly, I don't have many memories from my childhood. Practically, the only memories I do have are writing stories.

[00:10:00] And my mom used to say that I was telling stories before I could write. And I can vaguely remember those that, that when I had imaginary friends, they had very elaborate adventures that I would tell anybody who would sit and listen. So I've always had this desire to write and probably would have tried valiantly, cuz we all know there's no guarantees in this business.

But I've tried valiantly to make a living of it until in my freshman year of high school when my algebra teacher saw how far ahead of everything I was and how bored I was. And he sat me down and said, this is a computer, this is a program. You should write one of these. And I got sidelined, completely sidelined that.

I am very naturally talented at something that I think is a lot of fun and is a high demand job. Gee, it's fun, it's [00:11:00] creative, and I'm gonna get paid money for it. And so I got sidelined there. Did not pursue writing as a career, just as a sideline. 

Don: Okay? I don't know if many of my listeners, all two of them, I don't know if many of my listeners realize this, but I have some background with computer programming as well.

I've always liked computers. They, they seemed fun. And I remember when I was five or six years old, we got our first computer at home and my dad did something with basic that made the computer print out numbers and he count, he made it count till a thousand, and we were kinda like, whoa, he did that so fast and it's just all an Ms.

Dos. But then later when I was about 10, I checked out a book from the library on programming in basic, and I spent maybe an hour trying to follow the instructions to program a TicTacToe game in basic. And I didn't make it work. [00:12:00] But then I did take, uh, computer science class in high school and the focus of the class was learning principles of computer science, but it used c plus as a tool.

So that was my exposure to c plus. I got to college and I took a couple of programming classes, got some exposure to Java, and then I was a missionary for two years. And after my mission, I did not take any more programming classes because I had been able to decide my focus by that point to be a music major.

But I did however I. Get a programming job on campus. And so I, I learned action script and I was a flash programmer and messed a little bit with XML and a tiny bit with html, a tiny bit with php, excuse me. But most, mostly action script, which is, it's Java, like Yep. But now that's [00:13:00] a dead language. It 

Martin: happens.

Yep. Technology moves 

Don: on. But as far as writing or telling stories at a young age, I think what stopped me were two things. One is that I, like I talked about my daydreams a few minutes ago. I just, I don't make them percolate down into something that I, I talk about. I just enjoy it in my head, has been my historical habit.

And then the other thing could, because I did actually start to write a book, When I was 10 or 11 years old, I called it Pete's Parade, and it was about my oh 11. I got my parakeet when I turned 11, so I wasn't 10. Yeah, it was a story about my parakeet except he could talk and understand human speech, and I don't remember how far I got into it.

I think I got just a couple of scenes into it, but I had imagined all the way to the end very loosely. [00:14:00] So what stopped me from pursuing it was being told that it's really unlikely to make it. Very few authors get published. You send in your query letters or you submit your manuscripts, and very few ever get chosen, so why bother?

Nowadays that's turned on its head. If you wanna publish, you can publish. And if you want to be found, really it's on you to make sure your story is good and to publicize it. Yep. 

Martin: And I have to say as a side note, so you decided that it was going to be really long odds as a writer, so you went into music.

Yeah. Where it's really long odds. I got my 

Don: degree in music education. So true. That's somewhat doable, although a lot of music educators wind up doing something else like me. But for it can be for various different reasons. In my case, I got my music [00:15:00] degree, I got my teaching job in a small town in Kansas.

That's just where I found my job coming outta college. We moved out there, we bought a house, and then after a year of a really frustrating time, because I was the band teacher in town, five through 12, grades five through 12, I didn't feel very supported. And maybe that was just in my mind because I've, I've been learning.

About myself in the last several years that I don't communicate the way that other people do, that I had imagined that other people do. And anyway, so after that first year, I was really frustrated and I was going to stick around, but then I, a little bird told me that they didn't want me either. I say either I did wanna stick around.

It was difficult, but I was gonna stick it out. I was gonna keep trying and I found out that they didn't really want me, so I went ahead and [00:16:00] resigned rather than letting them non-renew my contract. There's a story to be told there. I'm not giving all the details right now, but that's suffice it to say that it was no longer a, a good place for me to stay.

So I resigned, but I'm like, now what? I'm in a small town. If I'm gonna keep teaching, we need to move somewhere else, but we bought this house. We have student loans, both my wife and I, but we're trying for me to be the sole income cuz that's the family that the family life that we want to have and teaching would not pay enough to move if I went and got another teaching job, wouldn't pay enough for us to move out of the situation we were in.

And so I called a recruiter and spent the next seven-ish years playing my clarinet for the Marine Corps. And after that point I went to the officer's side and, and you go into the [00:17:00] officer's side mo in most cases without already having your job field determined. And so when I was at officer training and they were going to determine my, my, my job field, my os military occupational specialty, I passed a couple of interviews that, that I had.

Gotten myself into voluntarily and became a cyberspace warfare officer, leaning back to my enjoyment of computers and wishing to, to get closer to coding it. My job has no coding in it, unfortunately. But I wanted to ask you more about, about your background, and here I am telling you all about mine. No, but 

Martin: I, I think it's always fascinating how we end up, where we're at and all the steps along the way.

Yeah. 

Don: You're in Michigan. Yep. Is that correct? What brought you to Michigan? For me, the Marine Corps brought me to Virginia, 

Martin: but what I was here by birth. [00:18:00] Okay. At least the last couple of generations of my family here. So I'm mostly here by inertia. Uh, family is around, friends are around. I'm living 20 miles from where I grew up, so it's one of those things where it's what I know and around January I hate it.

And around this time of year I love it because I don't like to drive in the snow. Fortunately, the current job has a lot of work from home because we've just been through two years of teaching us that yes, you can do a lot of work from home. They want us in the office couple days a week, but really we're doing most of our work online these days.

So I could live just about anywhere. I am still living where friends and family are around. 

Don: Okay. Yeah, I wish I were closer to a lot of my family. So I grew up in Texas, but both of my parents grew up in Utah and I went to college in Utah. I love that aspect while I was there, [00:19:00] cuz my extended family gets together once a month and since we moved away, I haven't been able to go to that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's 

Martin: nice that that is such a different world out there that there are a lot of the support networks in a place like that. And you move away and gee, where's the support network? Uhhuh? 

Don: Yeah. So today we're having this, oh my goodness, this is what I'm, okay, so today we are going to talk about Con Langs, and for our listeners, what is a con lang that's a constructed language or an artificial language like Esperanto, which was in invented with the intent of being a universal language.

Now, I don't speak it. I don't know if you speak it, but I don't know if it's achieved that goal of being a universal language, but a lot of people do speak it. And according to my research last night, a lot of people speak it as their first language, which is really interesting. So [00:20:00] if we're talking about languages, why are they relevant to storytelling?

I. I think we could solve that, answer that question pretty quickly by bringing up examples like Lord of the Rings, where there are elves, they have their own language, the, there's a separate language of mortar. Star Trek has these alien races and each one has its own language, and some people have in the real world have actually learned to speak Klingon.

Then there's the Wheel of Time, which is a little bit different because in the wheel of time there's a lot of, there are a lot of references to the old tongue, and that's what it's called. It's it, to my memory, it's never given a name apart from the old tongue, and to my knowledge, it was never formed and codified the same way as Elvish or Klingon was like.

I don't think there's anybody out there who speaks the old tongue. It's just a resource that [00:21:00] Robert Jordan created so he can draw on. And he has to throw in some made up words that belong to the old tongue. But the fact of the matter is that people before spoke a language that they don't speak now, and that's very relevant to the story.

And so, uh, hence the old tongue. So what's your take on this, Martin? What there, 

Martin: there's certainly, there's degrees. I confess, I haven't read wheel of time yet. So your description there is a hundred percent of what I know, but it's represents one extreme of the spectrum because essentially then the book is being told in what is translated into English, but with a reference of, yeah, there has been this other, all the way to the far extreme of the Tolkien and where.

Realistically, he started with the languages. I had a interesting [00:22:00] introduction into this. When I was in college, I was looking for a good elective to take something that would get me some English credit, and there happened to be a course on Tolkien and I'm like, okay, I wanna take that because it's a class where I don't have to worry about reading the writing.

It'll be easy, it'll be fun. I have a stubborn personality that I cannot read assigned reading Uhhuh, I'm really good at skimming and keeping up with notes and pretending like I read the assigned reading, but I can't read assigned reading. So I thought, here's a class where I can read the assigned reading because I already have.

15 times at that point in my life, Uhhuh. And it turns out that even when it's Tolkien, I can't read assigned reading, but I'd read it 15 times already. So I said, yeah, this is a class I can take. And what I discovered in taking the class was the class itself was somewhat [00:23:00] about this topic of con lang, which I don't think we had the term back then, but that was basically what it was.

But from Tolkien's point of view, he was actually a philologist. Mm-hmm. Which one of the things I learned was definition of philologist and the Latin roots of it, which means basically lover of languages. Uhhuh. So filo was language and Lo just is lover or student of and start digging into this. Yeah. I may not have the derivation there.

Exactly. Right. But essentially it's, this is a person who studies the formation of languages. And what his big study was at Oxford. Was he? I think he was, yeah, he was Oxford. His big study there was on the history of language and particularly the English language. He was one of the ones who worked on the [00:24:00] Oxford English dictionary.

So he was all about these histories and how history, how the language reflects the history of the people and how it shapes that and so on, which was a topic that had fascinated me from an entirely different direction In, I wanna say it was 1980 or so. There was a long P b s mini series called The Story of English.

And essentially it was about how the English language came to be and all its different branches and so on. And so I'd been fascinated by that series and now I'm learning that was what Hoki was studying, that the language reflects the history of the people. And the classic example from the PBS series was Words for Food, because in the English language we have cow and pig and chicken, [00:25:00] but then we eat beef and pork, and generally still chicken, but sometimes it's poultry.

And how this turns out to trace back to the Norman invasion. Yep. Where all of a sudden we had a period of time in the. British Isles, which were the source, the wellspring of English as we know it today, where the people raising the food were the serfs, the peasants, the concord. And it was simple gutsy words like cow pig chicken, and the people ruling things were the French nobility imports.

And we had beef, and I'm not a French speaker, so I butchered that, I'm sure, but Biff becomes beef and uhhuh pork and so on, and so it's reflecting a language. And that sort of thing was in Tolkien's mind that originally he started with building the language [00:26:00] and wanted to say, okay, if these languages have this characteristic, how did that happen?

What history led to this? What were the changes of this? Because actually. He invented two different Elvish languages that I can remember off the top of my head now. We had the cinder in and the cuon. The ciran was the low elf. The people of the woods and the cuon were the elves who went off into the west and lived under the valara and then came back.

And so we've got two languages that somewhere deep in the past may have some connections, but they were essentially evolved separately. 

Don: Yeah, I read recently that he, he created that back historical language first. And then asked himself, how will this change over time as these two cultures split and live separately and differently?

And that's how he derived the two elders languages from the historical language or, [00:27:00] yeah. 

Martin: And then a lot of the history that became the stories was how would these changes have happened? I need to write what was happening in the world that led to these linguistic changes. 

Don: And he even leaned on real world linguistic changes or when in, in his writing.

In English, we have the wars and all offense that aren't just let me take a word and change it. But Warg is uh, and I don't know how to pronounce it in another language, but apparently that's wolf in, I don't know. I don't remember. I'm sorry if it's old English or if it's some Norse language. But yeah, he took some words of your.

And included them. 

Martin: Yep. David Farland, also known as Dave Wolverton, he had some interesting books for writing, and I don't remember which one. He talked about this in [00:28:00] about tolkien's development of these languages. I, it may have been in writing Wonder where it's, there's actually, oh no. It was drawing on the power of resonance in writing because he was talking about how rather than trying to escape our influences, which is an impossible task, it's not going to happen.

Use the resonance of our images, of our influences as a tool. For making readers comfortable in our stories. And he's talking about how so many of tolkien's names that seem to us as original inventions, it's here's how they draw to norsen German manic roots. And Gandolph was one that, yeah, it's original, but if you know where to look you can find the antecedents to it.

And there were some others as well mentioned, ex excellent book for trying to embrace your influences and if you're going to have them [00:29:00] anyway, cuz you are, try to have them consciously. And so that was a part of it was the Germanic and Norris and other roots that Tolkien drew upon. 

Don: Do you, do you speak any other languages besides 

Martin: English?

I had four terms of college Russian, and I still am awful about it. How I got out alive. I'm still not sure I can read the Solic alphabet and I can recognize what's being said in some places, but I cannot formulate an idea more complex than preschool language at best. 

Don: Duolingo got me to the point where I can read a little bit of Russian just a little bit.

I don't even recognize all the Solic characters, but you know enough of them. But I can look and sound something out sometimes, but I was gonna say it, I think it's really intriguing how languages change over time, [00:30:00] and I took three years of Spanish in high school, but I don't think I, I really gleaned anything special off that and apart from what anyone else might, I, I do think I was one of the better students.

At it, but nothing really special. But then when I did my mission for two years, I went and taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. But I was assigned to do it in Spanish. And so I went to a missionary training center for two months, which focused heavily on making sure we know the doctrine that we're gonna go out and teach well.

But also on learning the language, like missionaries who were there to learn Russian, stay there for three months. And missionaries who, and maybe it's changed a little bit since then, but at least when I went through, I was there for two months. And missionaries who were gonna go and teach in their own native language, like if you're in English already, you're not going to learn another [00:31:00] language.

You're only there for three weeks. But there was a focus there. And I think really during that time is when I started noticing, started realizing how languages evolve. And I had a five week period where I was pretty committed to making sure that I was gonna speak Spanish, not English. And during those five weeks, I believe I had, so not everybody there speaks Spanish and not everybody there is there to learn Spanish.

And so sometimes I had to talk with people in English cuz they, they weren't there learning Spanish. But for those five weeks, apart from two conversations, I just didn't speak English with people who were also learning Spanish. And I would force them, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna say it in English. If you wanna understand the word I just said, you've gotta look at it in a dictionary.

Or maybe I can point, like I'm talking about sleeve, I'm saying sleeve anyway, but I noticed that there were some things [00:32:00] that I, they say that you can't translate directly, but you can, if you recall another way of saying it in English. One example is the word to in Spanish literally means yet if you translate as yet into English, then it will come out making sense every time it may sound archaic because nowadays, a lot of times when you can say, yet, we say still.

And so if you go and learn that they're gonna say it means yet or still, which is true. But if you want to just be able to translate it literally every time, you can translate it as yet and it will work. Now somebody's gonna find a case to disprove what I just said, but basically that's what I noticed and I noticed not cognates, but and cognates are words that are basically the same in two languages, but there are also words that are [00:33:00] almost cognates or that if you look at them and say, if I twisted this vowel sound around.

I can see that comes from the same root, like you were talking about beef or I also don't speak French became beef and there's the word for steak in Spanish is B stick. It's beef steak. At least that's the way I think of it. I think that's where it came from. Maybe not, but languages evolve and they affect each other.

I think it's really intriguing how, how languages do change and you have, so you have kinetic energy, that word kinetic refers to motion, but then you go to the movies and cinema. But the that kin or sin is from the same root back in old Latin or Greek. And it originally probably sounded more like tin. I don't know.

I don't speak ancient Greek or Latin, but it diverged into kin and sin [00:34:00] and that's how language has changed. You have related sounds to each other. Yeah, you have, and some sounds that, that don't carry over into another language, like in Spanish, they don't, most of the Spanish speaking world doesn't have the pH name or the sound that we pronounce for a t.

Like when I say the word with the last pH name is that, and most of the Spanish speaking world doesn't have that sound. And if you tell somebody here, say this, they don't have that pH name either. There, there's, and there's, but they'll have trouble saying this because it's not in their phone name vocabulary.

Just like we in English have trouble learning the Spanish phony, like rolling your Rs. It's difficult for us because we're not practiced at listening and producing that sound. Um, and also the D in Spanish isn't, duh, it's duh. It's. You could say int Interdental Anyway, obviously you can see that. [00:35:00] I think linguistics are fascinating and I agree with you that languages change and that's really intriguing 

Martin: and the whole phony concept, both, both the unique phony but also the phm drift and shift are a big part of this.

There was, oddly enough, another PBS special or series that I grew up was on the Mind, and it actually talked about this one, a famous experiment in language development that they have where they take very young kids and train them to expect a surprise when they hear a particular pH name. I think it was like a clowns going to pop out and do a dance for them or something like that.

Uhhuh. And what they discovered was there is a stage in child development where you can train them with literally any phony on the planet uhhuh. And then there's a [00:36:00] stage later on as they're growing and learning the language, where all of a sudden they literally cannot hear phone eams that are not part of their native language.

I think that that their brains have built up a filter and if that phone eem is not used around them in their day-to-day world, it's not language, it doesn't exist. 

Don: And I think, yeah, like that's the clicks in some African languages to us. It sounds like if you were listening to a recording of speech, you might hear that sound and think, oh, there's a recording artifact there.

It's a random sound that made its way into the recording. But no, it's actually. It's a sound in their language, like mm-hmm. Or awe. 

Martin: Yep. And then we get into the Asian languages, the tonal ones, where we've shifted away from even the concept of pH ees. Now we've got this complex concept where it literally is the tone of your [00:37:00] voice changes the meaning.

Yeah. Which is so far off the wall of what we're used to as a Western European perspective. And it's just that much variety that essentially something in the brain is good at encoding information, but then we've got all these different ways of encoding that have developed in different cultures over time.

Yeah. And some from common roots, some from the Indo-European roots, and some from, oh no. This branch of language developed almost completely off on its own, onto a different path. 

Don: It's crazy like how the language you speak interacts with your brain because it, like I read that there is a higher incidence of people with perfect pitch or absolute pitch among Asian cultures that speak tonal languages.

I believe correlation is not causation. Maybe it's just inborn [00:38:00] that their genes are coding for more people to have perfect pitch. But I believe it's because of the language or in other words, that they get the practice with it at a young age when it's when their brains are developing a lot faster and a lot more, they're a lot more plastic.

They get the practice and they learn to distinguish between different tones. Yep. That we don't learn cuz we don't get that exposure. And it's people of your. I read something that they said, they didn't see the color blue, I think, but it's not that they didn't see it. Their eyes perceived it and their brain processed it, but they didn't separate blue and purple.

It was the same thing. And uh, so I, there's, there's an Easter song that mentions the Purple East, and it's not just Easter, but you hear about Purple East and you look up at the sky and most of the time it's not purple. Most of the [00:39:00] time it's blue. That's what we would call it. But it's just because it, the color palette that they had distinguished purple and blue were the same thing.

And orange and red were the same thing. They didn't separate orange out. That's why it's redhead, because orange was red. We have orange that comes from the fruit, which. The English speaking world to my understanding was exposed to through Spain, through oranges coming up from Spain. And so the color is named after the fruit because the fruit is orange.

And we as a culture learned to distinguish the color orange from the color red by associating it with the fruit orange and thus boom. Now we can all tell the difference between orange and red. 

Martin: Yep. And there's, I think there's an element there where what you must distinguish in your life, you develop these [00:40:00] fine gradations over.

Because if you talk mathematically in computer imaging, which is only a subset of all possible things, you can see mathematically there are 16 million colors. 2 56 by 2 56. 

Don: Yeah. You're saying in a 16 bit Graphics. 

Martin: Environment. In in, in a 24 bit. 

Don: 24 

Martin: bit. Okay, sorry. Yeah. And that's six 16 million colors.

Nobody's going to name 16 million colors. You don't tend to know, need to know the difference between 200, 200, 200 and two hundred, two hundred and two oh one. You don't need a distinction that fine. Yeah. But you might in some cases, need very fine distinctions and that area where you work, you pick up differences by the frequent usage of it and the frequent contrasts.

There's another s I spent a decade working [00:41:00] on computer color vision, so this is a little side specialty for me. There was a classic experiment on optical illusion, which you can do yourself with construction paper, uhhuh. You take and cut out a circle of. Gray construction paper, and then you get some shades of red and some shades of green and some shades of blue.

And you take those gray circles and you surround them with shades of red. And then over here, another gray circle surrounded with shades of green. And over here, another gray circle surrounded with shades of blue. And that gray circle is yellow, and this gray circle is purple. And this gray circle is, actually, I got those wrong.

The red, you've got the cyan, the green, you've got the purple and the blue. You've got the yellow. Because what you are seeing is the contrast. They're gray, but there are, they are yellower than this blue air, these blues [00:42:00] around it. And so the brain sees difference that I, my theory of intelligence is that it is largely about patterns and contrasts that what we are evolved to see is.

What's the different things? Because those different things might eat us or those different things might be things we want to eat. So we are evolved to pick up contrasts. The on entirely different se sense of scent. Most of us, most of the time when exposed to a given scent will become dead to it if we're exposed to it long enough Uhhuh, because it no longer is a difference from the environment to the point where, yeah, if you ask me, I smell the cat box, but as I walk through my day-to-day life, I don't smell the cat box.

On a given day, we develop these points where that's just the normal that's familiar. What I hear is the difference. [00:43:00] And so I think that is part of it is when you start working in an area, you start picking up finer differences. And so I think the actual. Color that they called it in those ancient times.

We translate it today as purple, but it was in some of the metaphors. It's the wine colored sea. And so they're comparing it to color groups that they are familiar with in their environment. Yeah. And, and later on we start seeing more distinction. 

Don: If it's wine colored, that could even be confused as red.

And so you can see it there, there's a shift. Things can be mistranslated or translated the best that it possibly could be and still wind up with a different meaning than was originally intended. Yep. It's crazy. So do you, do you speak any conlan, any invented language? 

Martin: I don't, back when I was in high school, I could speak Quinan pretty well [00:44:00] and I could recognize Ciran and Tolkien didn't give us a whole lot of the din language, but the words he gave us, I could pick out and pick out the pieces.

I built my own Elvis dictionary before there were commercial ones available, and so I was actually pretty good with that for a long time. Today, I doubt I can pick out any of the root words at all, but it's 30 years later. 

Don: Yeah. I actually have it in my plans. Sorry, go ahead. 

Martin: I was going to mention that I once tried to learn Klingon and discovered that I was too busy.

I've got the books. Yeah. I didn't study it. 

Don: Yeah, so I actually, I have it in my plans to create my own con Lang and I don't know how much punishment I'm in for. I was surprised to learn that like you, you can Google and find instructions on wikiHow, how to create your own con laying. Yeah. I [00:45:00] don't know really how much punishment I'm in for, cuz I've never tried it before.

But it, I think the harder task is going to be deciding how it's structured, that the syntax works, what parts of speech I'm going to include or not include, or can I invent a new part of speech. I don't think I have the expertise to do that, but I can. In Russian, they don't have the word the, they don't have the definite article.

Yep. And they don't have the verb to be You don't say I am. I don't know. It's weird. Again, I don't speak Russian, but Yeah. 

Martin: But essentially it's noun condition as opposed to noun is condition. Yeah. I happy and. Because of how they've grown up. There is an implication there that this structure means to be, uh, th this combination of the words.

Yeah. And so implies a, to [00:46:00] be without a two B in there, 

Don: you hear Russian speakers speaking English and they overcorrect and they say, I am to be going to, and they throw in when it, we would not use, I am. And they throw in Jarron's the running, eating, they throw that in where we would say, I'm going to eat.

They might say, I'm going to be eating. Cuz they're trying to, they're trying to come from Russian where they don't have that and they come into English and like, I need to add this in. They do it too much. 

Martin: Yep. But, uh, there was actually, go ahead. So 

Don: I, on my mission there was a missionary from Argentina.

And if you know anything about the Spanish speaking world in Spain, they don't, when they see the letter Z or a soft C, they don't pronounce it, they pronounce it, they actually do have the th pH name in Spain. Now in Argentina, [00:47:00] most of the Spanish speaking world doesn't have the pH name, shh, but Argentina and some parts of Chile do.

And the way they do that, and actually some parts of northern Mexico, but it comes at a, a trade off. So in most of the Spanish speaking world, they don't have sh but they do have ch and so you don't, you won't hear a Spanish speaker. They probably won't say Chevrolet. They'll say they'll pronounce it with Achu In northern Mexico that chu is swapped out for a sha and they have difficulty pronouncing Chu.

But in Argentina, They don't say. Yeah, they say, so you'll, the word for I in Spanish is, yo, and there are different ways it's pronounced. Maybe in southern Mexico you'll hear Jo, it's just a really harder dip. Th instead of, yo it's Jo. But in Argentina it's, so this one, Argentine sister, this missionary, she came to the United States cuz we [00:48:00] were on our mission in Arizona.

And so she had to learn English, although she was there to teach in Spanish, she had to learn English to live there while she was there. And one time she overcorrected with my name on, on the mission, I was elder bishop. But one time she overcorrected and she called me elder B because she replaced that sha with a yah.

And it's just an accidental thing. It happened once and it was funny, but, 

Martin: and that sort of linguistic drift is something that. As a hobbyist, as an amateur. I only see it here and there when someone points it out, but apparently it's a huge part of tracing the history of linguistics to watch this drift that you can see that, oh, the drift is geographically separated.

That implies some motion, some division of these peoples in the past. Yeah, 

Don: like the past partisan [00:49:00] in the romance languages. The past partisan is, I have eaten. I have made, I have gone. Okay. The past partisan in Spanish ends with a D. It is. Or a d o or i d O, depending on the verb. I'm not gonna get into that, but let's say practiced.

Okay. And Spanish is in Italian. And I don't speak Italian, so pardon me for butchering. It's, they end it with a T instead of a D instead of d o, it's t o. And in Portuguese they get rid of the constant altogether. Prca, it fell off. Mm-hmm. So it, it's harder over in Italy, it's softer in Spain and it's gone in Portugal.

Martin: Yep. And this is, I was watching or rewatching the story of English, cuz now you had me wanting to go back and you can't find it on D V D anywhere, but you can find it on YouTube. And they were talking about essentially the [00:50:00] discovery of. Indo-European language, the Indo-European roots, and it was surprisingly late in time, I think they said it was 18th century, where this one guy who was well-traveled and doing studies starts picking up on similarities in certain words, it's like the more elementary a concept is, the more you can pick out the similarities.

And so the words for mother in eight different languages, they're not the same word, but you can see how close they are in structure to each other. And father and there, there was like just a bunch of very basic human concepts. You could look and say. These are all similar, that the difference between pater and fab is mostly a drift that we've taken.

The P becomes an F, which is easy, and the [00:51:00] T becomes a thorn, a th. Those are drifts. And he's pointing this out. And this led to the linguistic study of languages, excuse me, languages derived from some common Indo-European route that no one today speaks. Mm-hmm. But you can start to see, Here's these connections that somewhere somebody spoke a common tongue and essentially there was a metaphorical tower of Babel that over enough time and enough separation and enough specialization, other languages have derived from that one common way back when.

Yeah. 

Don: And you have, I don't remember what they call them, but basically ancestral words. You have a few words that remain in common across very different languages. Spit apparently is pretty similar, more or less across a lot of different languages. 

Martin: But, uh, and then what's [00:52:00] fascinating is to watch how they, those lang, those words drift.

And where, when you see similar drift, does that imply some historical connection between those two variant languages? I think 

Don: we should probably wrap it up. I want to keep the podcast at manageable length for listeners. Okay. I also need to go upstairs and help with the kids. They're awake and my wife is fielding them.

Ah. So gotta go do my duty, but, we'll, all right. I think we'll finish up with four more questions. Do you have a favorite language, a favorite foreign language, 

Martin: A real world favorite language? Yeah. I'm partial to Portugal because a lot of my fiction has a connection to Brazil because I love the language and the music and the cuisine even of Brazil.

And so some of my characters reflect that. And although I'm not any [00:53:00] good at it, Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese has a very musical sound to me. Yeah. 

Don: Yeah. That's a good one. I, Ooh, I don't know if I have a favorite one. I like a lot of languages. Now if you could make a wish to speak three more languages, natural or conlan, what 

Martin: would they be?

Brazilian. Portuguese. Cuz I would use that in my fiction. And again, it sounds very beautiful to me, Russian, just because I hate the fact that it beat me, but I've learned I'm not really good at language. I really am not. I am fascinated by it. But to translate it into a way of thinking has always alluded me.

So I can study but I can't really adopt. And so the fact that four, four semesters of Russian, and I still can tell you things like Tigris vu, that Tigers live in Asia, [00:54:00] I can tell you that because it was one of those few sentences took hold in the first month of Russian and anything past that is gone. So I'd like to defeat that.

Okay. And then I'd have to add in a, an Asian language just so that I can see a different perspective there because that's one of the beauties of studying other languages is you learn that there are other ways of thinking about things. They're talking about the, some of the Celtic root languages that went into Welsh and how some of these languages word position almost doesn't matter.

Mm-hmm. That there is decension different from different parts of speech. And so you can take and order the same words in completely different ways and it still has the same meaning because the clench you put on subject versus object and so on. And you get [00:55:00] more of those distinctions in an Asian language.

And so I think just to expand my mind, I would probably, because I. For my day job uses. An awful lot of developers that I work with these days are speaking Hindu or Hi Hindi as part of their regular life. They all speak so much better English than I am ever going to speak of their language, but I would want to pick up Hindi probably to be able to see that culture more.

Okay. 

Don: Now, if I were to answer my own question, I don't know, I think I would go for breadth. So I'd throw in Mandarin and maybe Russian and uh, what else was I thinking? You know what I'm gonna throw in Chua, an indigenous language in South America, but that 

Martin: one's a new one 

Don: on me. Next, where can our listeners find you online?

Where is your home on the [00:56:00] web? 

Martin: My seldom updated website is really simple, Shoemaker, space, space. Nice. When the space extensions opened up, I said a science fiction writer. I have to have that uhhuh. It has been a curse ever since because no one believes that space can be a web extension. So they keep hacking.com on the end of it, and space.com is a different domain entirely from me.

Yeah, but so I, 

Don: I have Thorn link. Link is my top level domain and I was actually trying to sign up for a, a new service earlier this week and it wanted me to enter my email address, which ends in at Thorn link. And it didn't believe me. It's like that's not a valid email address. Yeah. Yeah. 

Martin: And I'm going to rant and rave about my profession now, which is, I'm going to say it all.

Programmers are no talent hacks. We are [00:57:00] lazy and we are stupid, and we have to constantly have people beat us over the head to make us actually work hard. But this is an odd case where, no, we could get away with this. Without working hard. People go and write their own email address validation routines, and they think they know what the rules are and they aren't.

And every variation of Unix and Windows and Mac os out there, every platform you can name has got a method you can call to say, is this a valid email address or not? And those methods get updated every time there's a new operating system upgrade to be up to date with the latest rules. There's one call you can make to say, is this valid or not?

But no, they write their own code and man, you better have a.com or a.org or a.edu or they're going to tell you you're wrong. 

Don: So when I, yeah, actually I did that once, but it was [00:58:00] probably 2007. Yeah. And there, there wasn't space or link and I, I don't think Action Script had. This, this call to this function to, to find out if something is a valid email address.

If it did well, whoops. But I've thought about that and I imagine that it's, that the tool that I built at that time is no longer in use, but I think about it once in a while. Oh, what if it is and somebody has a valid email address that it's not accepting. Yeah. Although it's probably not in use. And even if it is, they can just use their.edu addresses because all the people using it are professors and students at the university.

Nope. But 

Martin: anyway, uh, I run into this rant probably, it's not too bad now. It's a couple, three times a year I run into somebody where it's like a huge company that should know better and they're still hand validating these 

Don: addresses. Uhhuh. [00:59:00] So that's shoemaker space, S h o e A K E R space. 

Martin: Yep. And more, and also also pretty common on Facebook with at Martin l Shoemaker.

Okay. Pretty easy to find there. 

Don: That's okay. Sorry, I just had an awkward moment, so I'll edit that out. All right. And then one more question. What is your favorite food? 

Martin: Favorites for me are always, always a matter of what my taste is and what my preference is that day, so it drifts. I can, however, give a favorite cuisine.

Okay. I was in Omaha teaching a class one time and I was wandering around looking for something different to try. And in the middle of downtown Omaha, which we think of as boring prairie, middle of nowhere, I discover a Persian restaurant and I have been absolutely enamored of Persian cuisine ever since Persian, Omaha.

[01:00:00] And part of it was the fact that it was. It was almost literally you're walking into these people's home that it is a casual, relaxed thing and they want you to love this meal. And the owner comes by at a certain point and he's like explaining to me how this dish was put together and the proper way to get just enough rice and just enough tomato and just enough meat on the fork to get the perfect flavor blend.

And afterwards, he pours a little special AIF that's supposed to go with this meal. And I don't actually drink as a rule, I don't like the taste, but it was such a wonderful, inviting experience that it's like he is offering me this. I will accept this because I want to be a gracious guest for this gracious host.

And so the experience was wonderful, but the taste was you could practically do this whole show over again. On food instead of language because the taste of Persian, which of course [01:01:00] today is Iranian, the taste of Persian cuisine reflects that. We've got our Indian subcontinent over here, we've got the Middle East over here, and we've got Eastern Europe up here, and we're in the middle of all of that.

And they get a perfect, all the things I like about all of those cuisines seem to intersect perfectly in the Persian cuisine. 

Don: Okay. Yeah, I like that. That look of it, how it's in the middle there and you have this fusion of different things. Yeah. 

Martin: And now I'm gonna have to go have some Persian today because now I can't forget it.

And including 

Don: tomato, which is a new world vegetable, like they didn't have that 500 years ago. 

Martin: Yep, yep. And so I think you could honestly do the exact same topic of drift and infusion and adaptation and so on with food as you are doing with language uhhuh. 

Don: Yeah, that would be fascinating too. Uh, alright.

That's all the time we have today. Thanks [01:02:00] for your time and Yep. We might have to continue this another time. Sounds 

Martin: great. Have fun with the kids. Thanks. Will do.

Don: Thank you for joining us today on the Grendhill Chronicles podcast. Please watch for our next episode guaranteed to massage your eardrums like I hope today, tickled your cerebral cortex. Now you can get notified that the next episode has posted. If you follow or subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast right now, including YouTube, share the Love by leaving us a review so other people can find us.

And you can also connect on social media. Just search for Grendhill on the big platforms. We're there, and again, thank you for listening or watching, and we'll see you next time on the.[01:03:00]