Biblaridion

Conlanging Case Study: Part 43 - Coordination and More Converbs

Almost done with this language's grammar. This video will be released to the public later this week.

Progress report

I think it’s time for an update on the various projects I’m juggling at the moment:

The two big series I’m working on are the Domestication series, and a new conlang tutorial series for absolute beginners.

The domestication series will consist of at least three episodes, one for each of the three major pathways to domestication (the commensal pathway, the prey pathway, and the directed pathway), and probably at least one more specifically about agriculture. The main thing I’m still trying to work out is how exactly to incorporate agriculture into the overall structure, since agriculture is fundamentally tied to domestication but also involves very different topics, and the more research I do, the more I want to include topics like sedentism and “cradles of civilization”, which will probably need multiple additional videos to properly dive into. I’m hoping to have the complete plan for the series finalized within the next few weeks, and after that it shouldn’t take me too long to make each episode.

As for the conlang tutorial series, I’m still working out the overall plan; as I mentioned in the last Q&A, I’m aiming to make it as comprehensive as possible while still being as simple and approachable as possible, which I’m pretty sure is going to require me to break the series up into three different levels of complexity, which means the whole series is probably going to have something like 15-20 episodes. I need to have the entire outline finalized before I can start making the episodes, and it’s tricky to say how long that’s going to take, but I’m hoping to get it done within the next few months.

Since both of these projects are quite big and long-term, I thought I’d also make a relatively simple video so I had something to post in the meantime, so I’ve been working on a script about whether or not aliens would be safe for humans to eat. Hopefully I should be able to get it finished and posted sometime in April.

Meanwhile, it should only take two or three more episodes of Conlanging Case Study to finish Taqva-miir’s grammar, and after that the only thing left is to design the writing system, and once that’s done, it will be ready to have a conlang showcase video made for it, which I’d really like to get done before the end of this year.

Along with all of that, I’m also steadily working on making a website as well as a new channel logo and banner.

So, in short, there’s a lot of stuff coming up, and it’s all been very fun to work on so far. I’ll post another update once I have a clearer idea of my upload schedule.   

Conlanging Case Study: Part 42 - More Numbers, Reflexives, and Content Clauses

Just finished another one of these before getting back to work on the Domestication series and the Conlang tutorial series. This will be posted for public viewing next week.

Conlanging Case Study: Part 41 - Numbers

The third and final part of the Lexember speedrun. This episode will go public on the 30th. Happy New Year, everyone.

Conlanging Case Study: Part 40 - More Possessive Classifiers

Part two of the Lexember speedrun. I should be done with editing the final part within the next week or so. This video will be released to the public on the 20th.

Conlanging Case Study: Part 39 - Color Terms

I'm still working on the next big video (which, as promised, will be a Refugium video), as well as the new Conlanging Tutorial series and the agriculture/domestication series, but in the meantime, over on the new second channel, I'm going to be posting at least three Conlanging Case Study episodes this month in which I coin my entries for Lexember. This first one is about color terms, and will be released to the public next week.

Post-Alien Biospheres Q&A

Every time I do a Q&A, I always forget how long they take to edit. This one turned out much longer than I expected, and I really got carried away at several points. I hope it's at least vaguely interesting.

Also, for some reason, the cards that link to the videos I mention at various points aren't showing up. I want to see if I can fix that before the video goes public, which should hopefully be some point in the next week.

Conlanging Case Study: Part 38 - WH words and Demonstratives

We're getting close to finishing Taqva-miir's grammar, so in this video I ask the question: should we spend a few more episodes working on some relatively minor points of grammar, or should we move on to the writing system?

This video will be released for public viewing within the next week or so.

Update and Q&A

After taking a much-needed break, I'm steadily getting ready to return to video-making, and as a way of easing back into things and touching base with you all, I’ve decided to do another Q&A. Patron questions will be prioritized, so if you’d like to ask me anything, or if you have any comments, suggestions, or feedback, leave them below this post. I'll probably release this video to the public within the next few days.

Taking a break

With the final episode of Alien Biospheres finished and uploaded, I hope you don’t mind if I take some much-needed time off. I don’t know exactly how long I’ll be away, but I’ve got lots of plans for more videos once I return, including a new conlang tutorial series, a mini-series on domestication, and some more videos about the Refugium. Also, since I'm going to do everything in my power to avoid making anything as huge as Alien Biospheres ever again, I can hopefully go back to having a more or less monthly upload schedule.

To everyone who’s signed up to have a species named after them, I’ll be in touch once I’ve solidified my plans for future specbio videos.

Thanks again for your support.

Progress report: the end is in sight

We're in the home stretch now. I've just finished editing the audio for Alien Biospheres Part 15. Looks like the episode is going to be just over an hour and 40 minutes. I'm hoping to get the early access version finished and posted here within the week, and then get the final version finished a few days after that. Thank you all for your continued support and patience.

Progress Report

At this point, you’re all long overdue for an update; the final episode of Alien Biospheres is coming along very well so far. I was originally envisioning this episode to be a relatively short and simple epilogue, but, as seems to be an inescapable problem for me, it’s grown into the longest video I’ve ever made (based on the word count, it should be somewhere around 1 hour and 45 minutes). You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. Right now I’m finishing up the model-making stage and starting to assemble all the visuals. At this rate, we’re still on track for a release in late April or early May. And once this colossal series is finally done, I have plans for many more videos, which I will endeavor to make much shorter and simpler so that I can release them on a much more regular schedule. Thank you all for sticking with me for all these years.

Conlanging Case Study: Part 36 - The Augmentative, Diminutive, and other Derivation

I'm recording another couple of these so I have something to post during the multiple months it's going to take to make Alien Biospheres Part 15. I don't know when I'm actually going to release this (probably not for another month or so), but I'll just leave it here in the meantime. 

Progress Report: The Final Stage Commences

At long bloody last, I have now finished all the models for Alien Biospheres Part 14. Now we can proceed to the final step of compiling all the images and matching them with the audio. I'm hoping to have the whole episode finished within the first half of May. Thank you again for your infinite patience and continued support despite the vast lengths of time that this project takes to complete. It's difficult to overstate how colossal this particular episode is, but I'm very happy with how it's turning out, and I hope it will be worth the wait for all of you.

Progress Report - Finished the Script

I'm thrilled to say that the script for Alien Biospheres Part 14 is finally complete! And at just under 11,000 words, it’s *by far* the longest episode yet (the final video should be at least an hour and fifteen minutes). Thank you all for your limitless patience. I’m also happy to report that I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. Now we can proceed to the model-making stage. To any $15+ patron who's signed up to have a species named after you, I’ll be in touch with you soon.

Progress Report

By now I owe you all an update.

Sorry for not posting anything other than Conlang Case Study for the last few months. Ordinarily, I'd be working on a proper linguistics video at this point, but after Alien Biospheres Part 13 was uploaded, I made the executive decision to get stuck straight into Part 14 in the hopes that I’d be able to finish it reasonably quickly, but yet again, it seems I was being a bit optimistic (you think I would have learned by now).

Part of what spurred me on is that this is the episode that I have been most excited for ever since the series began. In many ways it’s the big climax that everything’s been building up to, and (without spoiling anything) what happens in this episode is going to serve as the foundation for a lot of things going forward.

I’m very pleased with how it’s coming along so far, but the main reason that it’s taking so long is its sheer length: the word count is currently at 6549, and it’s only about halfway done (for comparison, episode 13 was 8696 words in total). At this rate, it looks like it’s not going to be finished until early next year, which is immensely frustrating.

The good news is that, once this series is finally finished, I won’t have to make such enormously, exhaustingly long videos anymore and I can go back to a more or less monthly upload schedule, and I have many *many* plans for what’s going to come afterward. It’s just a matter of getting through this final stretch.

Thanks for all your support in the meantime.

Progress Report - finished the script

At long last, the script for Alien Biospheres Part 13 is done. Genuinely sorry it’s taken so bloody long. Now to start working on the models. To any master-tier patrons who chose to have species named after them, I’ll be in touch with you soon.

Progress report

Given how absurdly long it takes me to make videos these days, I really owe you all more frequent updates. I am currently hard at work on Alien Biospheres Part 13. The script is currently at about 4000 words, which is more or less on schedule, but filling out the word count is usually the easy part. However, as I expected, this episode is proving to be quite difficult to structure; it doesn’t really have a single unifying theme like Part 12, so at the moment it just feels like kind of a hodge-podge of random topics. Also, some of the topics I’m thinking of including are quite specific, and I’m struggling to decide whether I should only discuss them in brief to keep things simple, or if I should cover them in full for the sake of completion. Plus, without spoiling anything, there are certain… things… that need to happen in this episode in order for some stuff in the next episode to make sense, and it’s tricky to integrate them into the episode in a way that doesn’t feel forced. I’m really hoping I can get the whole thing finished by late May or Early June. I’ll aim to post more updates when I can.

Q&A Announcement

I'll probably wait until I finish the next "main" video before I film the Q&A, so I reckon you have at least 2 weeks to get your questions in.

General Update

Just thought I’d let you know how things are going with Alien Biospheres Part 11: a couple of minor real-life things happened earlier this month (don’t worry, nothing major) that pushed production back a little bit, so I’m running a tad behind schedule. I’m about halfway done with the final draft of the script, and should hopefully have the whole thing finished within the next week. As soon as that’s done, I’ll get stuck into making the models, at which point I’ll get in touch with all the master-tier patrons on the list to have species named after them. All going well, the video should be finished sometime in mid-to-late June. Thanks for bearing with me.

It is done.

I am now officially a full-time Youtuber. This is a very surreal feeling. Hopefully this should give me a lot more time to dedicate to video production and be a lot less taxing on my health. I'll be closely monitoring my workflow over the next few months to see how things go. 

Thank you all so much for making this possible. You’ve helped fulfill a decade of dreams. I'll try my best to keep up the good work. 

General Update

I thought I'd give you all a quick update to let you know how things are progressing:

At the moment I'm hard at work on the next Alien Biospheres video. I had originally planned for it to be released on the 5th or 6th of July, but a few real-life things have interfered with my work schedule and caused some delays. Apologies for that.

To make up for it, this will be by far the longest episode yet; despite the fact that I've cut out about half the topics I was hoping to cover (don't worry, they can be incorporated into other episodes), it's still over 1500 words longer than the last episode. If all goes well, it should be finished within the next 10 days. 

Conlang Showcase Extra: Ilothwii

Here's five random fun facts about Ilothwii:

1. Possibly my favourite word in Ilothwii, at least from an etymological standpoint, is ithokshangji, “lava”, which breaks downs as Water.INSTR.CLS-Fire.DIR.CLS-go/move-HAB, so something like “the fire that customarily moves like water”, or less literally “liquid fire”. A close second would be ghëëlithyuhlqaji’, “archipelago”, which parses as DIVERS-Water.LOC.Cls-Land-LOC.COP, or “The land that is located here and there in the water”. 

2. Many have pointed out that the language sounds like something out of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. This is no coincidence; the names used in Lovecraft’s mythos were one of the original points of inspiration for the language. In fact, the working title for the language before I settled on “ilothwii” was literally “Lovecraftian”. There are also many lovecraft-related easter eggs in the lexicon, probably the most obvious being the fact that the word for “he/she/it is eating” is kthuulu.

3. For the sake of full disclosure, the writing system featured in the video was basically thrown together at the last minute. Before a few weeks ago, I just had this nebulous idea that ilothwii would be written using a “Romanization” of the Nekāchti script, but while I was making the video, I realized that the Nekāchti would have been in contact with the Nhlogqwa islanders long before the Nekāchti script was actually developed, and so Ilothwii would almost certainly develop its own derivative of the original simplified Edun script. Once I realized this, I had to scramble to put a new script together ASAP. I made it very angular and orthogonal, partly because I wanted it to look vaguely reminiscent of futhark and cuneiform, and partly because doing otherwise would have taken way longer to make. Considering how rushed it was, I think it came out looking alright, but I definitely need to revisit it and touch it up at some point. 

4. It was very early on in Ilothwii Version 3 that I decided that I wanted to get rid of the /e/ vowel, but I wasn’t sure how naturalistic that would be. Luckily, it was around this time when I happened to meet David Peterson at a talk he gave in Edinburgh, and I asked him his thoughts on the matter, and it turns out that in his language Munja’kin, he implemented a sound change in which /e/ became /i/ in stressed syllables and /a/ in unstressed syllables. I loved this idea, and decided to blatantly steal it, except I decided that unstressed /e/ would go to /ә/ not /a/.     

5. When I did the collab with Worldbuilding Notes, the premise for that video was that in Ewa’s conlang Itlu, 3rd person verb forms can be used as agent nouns, and over time the 3rd-person plural verb suffix was reanalyzed as an animate plural marker. This idea came directly from this response that David Peterson gave to a question I asked on his tumblr: https://dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/173779327486/i-have-a-language-in-which-nouns-are-not-marked. This question, as you can probably surmise, was in reference to Ilothwii, where true noun roots don’t have any plural morphology, but deverbal nouns (which most nouns are), take the verbal distributive plural marker. 

50K Q&A

TLDW: we're having another Q&A to celebrate 50,000 subscribers. Questions from patrons will be prioritised. Leave your questions below this post or send me a message if you prefer.  

FREE WORD ORDER in OA | ft Biblaridion

That's right, two collabs in the same month! It was great fun working with Artifexian, as always. And yes, the poll from earlier this month was for this video. 

Next up is Alien Biospheres part 6, which I'm hoping to have out within the first week of May (it's going to be a big one). 

Surprise Collab!

Arvin Ash invited me to appear on his channel to give my thoughts about intelligent alien life.  

Pick a Conlang

Which would you most like to be briefly included in an upcoming video? 

Sneak Peek: Feature Focus - Case-marking

This video will go live tomorrow at 6 pm GMT. As always, let me know if you spot any mistakes. Hope you're all staying safe. 

Conlanging Case Study: Part 6 - Auxiliary Verb Template

Mulling over some stuff pertaining to auxiliary verbs. 

Minor Delays

I was hoping to get the next alien biospheres video up by the end of this month, but it looks like its going to be a couple of days late, partly due to boring real-life reasons, partly because I forgot that February is a short month, and partly for reasons that will hopefully become clear next month. The new video should be out within the first week of March.