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Conlang Descriptions English Language

‘Intlis: A Klingon/English Contact Language

Julia Papke and Micha Elsner work at the Ohio State University, where they co-designed Linguistics 3502, “The Linguistics of Constructed Languages”, in 2017. As an instructor for the class, Julia designed Caeb-Human Interlanguage, a signed conlang; Micha designed Keri, a polysynthetic language, and Pal Een, a language designed for multiple people to speak simultaneously. ‘Intlis is their first joint project.

Julia has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Ohio State. Her background is in historical linguistics, Indo-European, and contact linguistics. Micha has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University and specializes in computational linguistics.

We introduce the design and grammar of ‘Intlis, an English-Klingon creole language. ‘Intlis has words of mainly English origin in a structure influenced by Klingon syntax as well as Earth creoles. We present brief descriptions of its phonetics and phonology, lexical development and noun and verb phrase structure, as well as a short example text with gloss. ‘Intlis was created for a class on constructed languages; it has been helpful in teaching students about language contact and showing them the range of possibilities that exist beyond English grammar.

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