Marisol Quaye
A phonetician who spent eleven years documenting languages with very few remaining speakers, and now teaches students to build new ones.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- marisol.quaye@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for anything about the course as a whole. Anything about your language is better asked in the workshop, out loud, with the thing in front of us.
Marisol convenes the course and gives the Monday lectures.
She came to constructed languages sideways, after eleven years of documentary fieldwork on languages with a handful of speakers left — work that involves sitting with people, recording carefully, and being wrong in public about what you heard. That is where the shape of this course comes from. She is unsentimental about the fact that a documented language and an invented one are not the same kind of object, and insistent that the discipline of describing one is the right training for building the other.
Her standing position, which you will hear in week two and again in week twelve, is that a language you cannot say out loud is a notation, not a language. The crit is designed around that view, and she is happy to argue about it.