Week 12: The crit

No screening this week. You read a text aloud in a language that did not exist in February, and somebody who has never seen it reads a sentence back

10 May 2027

There is no film this week. The eleven compulsory screenings end at week eleven, and this week is given over to your own work.

The session is not a presentation about your language; it is a demonstration of the language in use. You read your text aloud, in front of people, at speaking pace — and then a person who has never seen your orthography is handed one sentence of it and asked to read it back. That second part is what the session is really testing, and it is why the course has spent so much time on things that only show up in speech: whether your phonemes stay distinct at speed, whether your script is still legible when written quickly, and whether a stranger can work out how to pronounce it.

After that, questions. Any choice in your grammar may be questioned, and preference on its own is not a sufficient answer. “It sounded better” is not a defence. “The design brief said they were a maritime people who count in twelves, so the numeral system is duodecimal” is.

Bring your week one brief. You will be handed it back and asked whether the language you built is the one you set out to build. For most of you it will be different, which is expected — but you should be able to say where it changed and why.

Outline#

• the order of the day, and how long each of you has
• the stranger’s read-back, and what it is testing
• defending a choice, and what does not count as a defence
• what happens to your language after the semester ends