The Language
The finished language — description, lexicon, script and a glossed text — plus the crit, where you read it aloud and somebody else reads a sentence back
- Due
- , 5pm
- Weight
- 40% of the course
- Set in
- week 12
- From today
The brief#
A language that works, and twelve lines of evidence that it does.
The crit is marked inside this submission rather than separately, because the two halves are not separable. A document describing a language that cannot be read aloud has not demonstrated a language, and a fluent performance of something with no system behind it has not either.
The second criterion deserves reading twice. Thirty per cent of this assessment turns on somebody else — a person from outside the course, unprepared, handed one sentence of your text in your own script with no gloss and no pronunciation guide. They will make mistakes. What is being marked is whether those mistakes were avoidable: whether two of your letters are confusable, whether your orthography under-specifies a vowel, whether your phonotactics permit a cluster nobody can parse by eye.
This is why the course spends eight weeks on things that only matter out loud.
What you submit#
By the Friday after the crit — a single document containing the full description, the lexicon, the script with a chart of its glyphs, and the text with an interlinear gloss and a free translation.
Attach your week one design brief unchanged. The last criterion asks whether the language you built is the one you set out to build, and you cannot answer that without the original. Divergence is not penalised. Being unable to say where or why it diverged is.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- the full description — inventory, phonotactics, morphology, syntax, lexicon, orthography
- a text of at least twelve lines, with an interlinear gloss
- you read the text aloud at the crit, at speaking pace
- a person who has never seen your language reads one sentence correctly from your script alone
- every choice can be defended against your week one brief without appealing to taste
How it is marked
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| The language as a system, consistent across all eleven subsystems | 30% |
| The crit — reading aloud, and the stranger's read-back | 30% |
| The text and its interlinear gloss | 20% |
| Choices defended against your week one design brief | 20% |