Appendix:LangTime Chat Episode 34 Transcript

Below is a transcript of the 34th episode of David and Jessie Peterson's podcast LangTime Chat, entitled Kezhwa Overview. In the episode, they discuss the creation process, sound system and grammar of the Kezhwa language they created for the Amazon Prime Video series Paper Girls.

Transcript

JESSIE: Hello and welcome to LangTime Chat, Episode 34. It's good to have you, David.

DAVID: Thank you, thank you for having me.

JESSIE: Well, we are excited about today—well, this particular episode anyway—because we decided that we wanted to talk about Kezhwa. And so, Kezhwa is a language David and I created, but like, we created it for people, and it got roughly 0.2 seconds of air time and static. And so, we wanted to give it some more attention because, literally, if you sneezed while watching the show, you missed what we did.

DAVID: Or if you were just hard of hearing.

JESSIE: I—That too, that too. And so Kezhwa is a language that we created for a show called Paper Girls. And so we're gonna go through what this whole thing was, what our process was, and why we like the language so much because seriously, both David and I were quite excited about this language.

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSIE: And so, Paper Girls was originally a comic book series, and it was created by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, and it was published in 30 issues. So like, seriously, they're actually—they're really good. I have read them and so go check them out, they're amazing.

DAVID: We chatted with Brian K. Vaughan too. Cliff Chiang was the illustrator, Brian K. Vaughan was the writer.

JESSIE: Right, right. And as far as I know, Brian like came up with the entire storyline. Right, like Cliff was just illustrator-side. But like, the illustrations were really cool because they were really, um, late 80s, early 90s-inspired. And so, a lot of fluorescent colors and designs from the era. It's really, really well done. And the comic books, I thought were really interesting. In case you're wondering, the comic books focus on four newspaper-delivering teenage girls.

DAVID: Yeah, and this—that's why it's "Paper Girls" and not "Paper Girls". And it's like, I think that when I first read it, I thought it was "Paper Girls" and I was like, "Huh? What is a paper girl?" And then it's like, once I realized, you know, what they did, it's like, "Oh, it's 'Paper Girls'." And it's like, isn't that a weird little quirk of English not reflected in our orthography?

JESSIE: It is. But also, apparently, you never had paper dolls and so you weren't like, "Oh sure, it's a paper girl."

DAVID: Yeah. And so, so like, I was like, it's like paper dolls or something and it's like white girls, you know.

JESSIE: Sure, sure. Um, but no, they are newspaper deliverers and they are young teens. And you're probably wondering, "Why in the world did we create a language for—for teenage girls delivering newspapers?" And I think it was in Ohio. It was somewhere like really normal. I think it was Ohio.

DAVID: We should back up slightly for those who haven't seen the series and who are younger than we are. Um, young people used to deliver papers for money. Newspapers. And this was like a regular, like, not only a regular, but like a standard kind of like a job that you just knew about. It's like once you hit around like fourth grade, basically once you could be trusted to ride your bicycle to school on your own, that was when you started, you know? It was a time where people would deliver newspapers. And what would happen is that you would literally wake up at three or four in the morning, and go to a distribution spot, where there would be just a big truck and all of the paper boys or paper girls would come on their bicycles that have like a little basket or something on the front, and they'd be like, "All right," you know, "What's your name? Here are the papers that you're supposed to deliver," and you had a list of houses that you would go by and literally just throw the paper physically onto the property. And this was a very normal thing, so much that I'm sure neither of us really reflected about it. But I think if you were born, say, after 2000, it might sound a little preposterous and it'll sound even more preposterous when you hear what they were paid.

JESSIE: Although, I will say the only reason I knew about this job was through media. Because, of course, where I lived—

DAVID: You lived in a rural area.

JESSIE: Yeah. And there were no that—like our paper was delivered by a car that had to drive down the highway, because, they threw out, and like, they threw, you—you've been to where I grew up and so they would throw, we only got the Sunday paper, that's the only paper we ever got, and they threw it down there right by the highway so we had to walk half a mile to get it.

DAVID: Sure.

JESSIE: And so, like that to me is paper delivery, so I only knew about this, you know, fictitious job through, like, you know, books I read and things I'd seen on TV. But at this point in my life I was like, oh yeah, there they lived in a city in a time where that was normal, so sure.

DAVID: And actually, it's a primarily suburban phenomenon, now that I think about it, because both in rural areas and in highly urban areas, it doesn't really make sense. And in fact, if you see old movies where there were young children, you know, standing on the corner shouting, "Extra, extra!", that's the kind of thing that happened in cities where there would just be, just go to the corner and somebody would be selling a newspaper, yeah.

JESSIE: Watch Newsies if you're wondering what he's talking about.

DAVID: Yeah. So somebody like me who grew up in a suburb where it was very common to be like, things were close enough where it's like you could drive there but not close enough that you would walk there, really. That's where the whole paper delivery phenomenon was very common. And by the way, there was a popular video game, arcade game that was—that came to the Nintendo called Paperboy that was about delivering newspapers, and the arcade cabinet actually had a bicycle handle that you used to control it.

JESSIE: Wow.

DAVID: Yeah, it was really cool.

JESSIE: Another thing I'm not familiar with is most arcade games because again, rural areas. Okay, so, so again, you may be wondering, well, "Why in the world did you create a language for these girls who are delivering newspapers in suburban America, during a time when that would have been a perfectly normal thing to do?" That's because they also featured time travelers. And so, these time travelers were our speakers and in the comic books, um, you can see this is a screenshot from one of the pages and so you can see the four girls on the left if you're looking at—well, if you're watching the video, um, what you see is a screenshot where the four girls are on one side of the pane and they're speaking in English because they're just, you know, in America. And then on the right side, you see these people who are like highly cloaked, so you can really only see their eyes, and their speech bubbles are filled with characters that are definitely not English. And it's, so like, when you look at it, you're like, "Okay, they're speaking another language."

DAVID: Yeah. The characters, by the way, in design, they're very similar to Chinese characters, but a bit too, um...

JESSIE: Straight-line.

DAVID: Yeah, like too straight-line, and too kind of formulaic. So they're clearly not Chinese, but um, but also like, if you look at the top one... Well, I'm looking ahead at the next slide, so maybe I'll let you go to that first and then I'll talk about what we see in the top one. Well, no, I'll just... I'll just say it. If you're looking at the slide, if you look at the top line, you see that there are two characters that are identical right next to each other and that's the type—and two characters that are reversed that are right next to each other. This is the type of thing that is not usual in something like Chinese. In fact, if you go to the lower right panel, you'll also see two identical characters next to each other and that is just something that it's just... It just doesn't... You wouldn't expect that type of thing in Chinese, where most of the characters are standing for full words. You wouldn't expect two identical characters to occur right next to each other and in like such a short amount of dialogue.

JESSIE: No, and in fact, that's because in the comic books what they were speaking was actually a cipher. And it was an intentional use of a cipher. This was not, "Oh, we don't have the energy to do something." It was um, the fact that, well, the author, you know, Brian Vaughan, and then also the illustrator did it for him, wanted readers to be able to break it and read the dialogue. So they wanted it to be something that they could, like, if they stared at it long enough, they could treat it as a puzzle and they could figure out what these, you know, time travelers were saying. And so, they really wanted it to be breakable. Therefore, it's really just like a letter-for-letter, glyph-for-letter, I guess I should say, cipher of English. And that was a purposeful thing. And so that is the comic book setup.

JESSIE: That leads us to Amazon's Paper Girls where Amazon—I guess it was Amazon Prime essentially—picked up, um, Paper Girls as an option for one of their TV shows. So for one of their series, um, that they had recorded. And so they contacted us to create a language. And that is why we created the Kezhwa language. Now, the Kezhwa language, in terms of like the actual name, the name we came up with, they just wanted a language for these, you know, time travelers.

DAVID: Yeah, the futuristic ones that were speaking in glyphs in the comic book.

JESSIE: Yes. And so, in terms of the language, the speakers were these time traveling, yeah, speakers. So they're time travelers. And we wanted to maintain, and they also wanted us to maintain, the spirit of the original cipher in novels without actually creating a cipher for English. And so, um, but they wanted that spirit to be there, where if people researched enough and did enough, they could potentially try to break it. Um, and so it's like they wanted that overall feel to be there.

JESSIE: And so that leads us to our vision. And our vision was to create a worldwide creole of sorts. Because, these are time travelers who could pop up any place, anytime. Um, and so we wanted them to take words, essentially, like borrow words into their language from wherever they were, whenever they were, and use them as sort of code words in their language. And we'll talk more about that in a minute.

JESSIE: And so we created a unique phonological and grammatical system as the base of the conlang. So like, there is a base that we were working with, like these are the sounds, so if they borrow a word from another language, it needs to be filtered through the language's sounds, so that way when they borrow it, it's not a perfect, you know, reproduction of that word. It's however they would pronounce it, just like how we borrow words into English or any other language, you know, speakers borrow words. Right now, it's... It gets filtered through your phonological system. But then it also gets filtered through your grammatical system to actually be used in sentences and whatnot.

DAVID: And that part, by the way, was a priori that we just, uh, created that.

JESSIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was our own doing. And then we had borrowings from any language at any time in history. And that was really key, because that led to some of the fun that we had because it's... It's not just, say, borrowing from, you know, like there are some borrowings from Modern English, but we could also borrow from Old English. We could borrow from, you know, Middle Egyptian. We could borrow from, you know, whatever point we wanted. And then we filtered those borrowings, of course, through the conlang's phonological system to make it sound like it belonged to the language. But then we also semantically coded the borrowings. And so we're going to talk more about what that means. But, it's like, we didn't want to just straight up borrow. Like if they needed a word for "train," we didn't just want to borrow a word that meant "train." We instead thought about like what might a train remind them of and like what word could they borrow from another language to kind of match that spirit, instead of just doing a straight semantic borrowing. So, um, I think that's where we had the most fun.

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSIE: So, but first let's talk about the sounds. And so, the Kezhwa sounds, there's a very simple phonological inventory, one that we chose because we thought it could reflect sort of a generic, if there's not a better word, sort of like a, you're gonna sound like a lot of different languages as you speak this. And also like, we wanted a base set of sounds that, as we borrowed from a variety of languages, we could at least approximate a lot of those sounds. Um, and so yeah, like I... It was more of like, 'Hey, we want sort of a really standard base to work with.'

DAVID: Yeah, it was a delicate balancing act. If your phonology was too large, which I think might have been a conlanger's, uh, instinct for a project like this, I mean, you end up with, with all these borrowings. It's just, you know, pronouncing like every single word perfectly in its native language. And so what it just sounds like is it sounds like you're saying words in a bunch of different languages, rather than you're speaking a single language. So, it's like, we wanted it to be large enough that it could accommodate the general phonological spirit of a lot of words from many different languages, but different enough so that almost every single borrowing would be altered in some fashion.

JESSIE: Yeah. And so we ended up with a stops series of, you know, /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, and then the glottal stop, which—pretty, pretty standard across the board. For the fricatives, we did /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and /ʒ/. But then we added in the interdental /θ/ and /ð/ , partially because we knew in advance we would be doing a lot of borrowings from languages that had those sounds, and, we didn't want to turn them all into f's or t's. But also partially because, we wanted, and they had wanted, like something that would clue speakers into the fact that this is close to English but not English, at all. And so, we wanted to to keep those sounds to be sort of reminiscent, um, values, I guess, if you will.

DAVID: Yeah. And uh, and we weren't going to have the, uh, the velar, um, not the velar—we weren't going to have the glottal fricative, which meant that a lot of words were going to be transformed and be a little bit unrecognizable, so, trying to keep something else in there.

JESSIE: And then for approximants, we have the /w/, the /l/, and we did the /r/, instead of an approximant /r/, we did the flap /r/.

DAVID: Yes, more versatile.

JESSIE: Right, right, and then the /j/ from the palatal series, um, and of course with that flap /r/, that meant that we could take any trills and turn them into flaps, you know. So it was like, it was just sort of exactly like you said, more versatile. And then we had the /m/ and the /n/, and then, you know, one of the variants was like, it would show up as an [ŋ], the nasal would show up as an [ŋ] before a velar consonant. But like, it's not a phoneme that you would see like at the beginning of a syllable or something like that.

JESSIE: And so those are our consonants. Our vowels, uh, we sort of started with the classic five vowel system, the /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/, /a/. But then, we also added the schwa in, again, because so many times we were going to have these unstressed vowels, that we wanted to be able to keep the unstressed feel of them, um, as we borrowed from things like English and other languages that do that. But then, we also had like an [e~ɛ], and [o~ɔ] alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables. And so, um, again, sort of like making it feel more like some of the languages we'd be borrowing from. Because we knew in advance we'd be borrowing from a lot of Indo-European languages, and so we wanted to mimic the sound systems without copying them.

DAVID: Yeah, and this vowel system also, it's like, it forces you to push the lax vowels that force you, forces you to tense them. And also to mix up vowels with those mid vowels because of the, um, the quality distinction is tied to stress, and so...

JESSIE: You know, actually, it's not tied to stress, it's tied to open and closed, because it's [kɛʒwə], not [keʒwə].

DAVID: Oh, that's right. And then when it's open it's [e], okay.

JESSIE: Yeah, so it's open and closed, that's right. Sorry, I misrepresented that, oh my goodness. Fire me now, David!

DAVID: Yeah, and then, uh, that—that schwa it was going to pull it back from sounding too much like something like Spanish, um, where there's no unstressed, you know, vowels like that, this is gonna keep that in there, so, it would sound a little bit more familiar.

JESSIE: All right. So, in terms of—so those are the actual sounds we were working with. In terms of stress, um, our basic stress system was the penultimate syllable. However, borrowed words could end up taking different stress depending on what was borrowed, and like, where they would have determined [that] like the highest emphasis would have been placed, when they borrowed the word. And so, it was really like, if you were a non-native speaker, and you heard this, where would you think you would need to put the most stress, and we tried to follow that. But if all else was equal, then the—the basic stress was penultimate. And, we'll talk about this later, uh, in the—in the podcast here, but, when we created grammatical words to sort of fill in the—the gaps, it was always penultimate stress, because, it was like, that's their native stress system. But, we did have, again, some—some words that fell outside of this basic penultimate stress, including examples like shoyá, which means "to follow" and it's shoyá with á, not shoya, because it's stressed. If it were stressed in the opposite way, it would have been shóya, but it's shoyá, because, that means "to follow". We'll talk about where that came from later, by the way. Another example is genzhín, which means "to track," where like the stress is on that second syllable, genzhín. Um, and so yeah, borrowed words could differ. When we borrowed words, and they differed in the orthography, we put accent marks where they differ. If they—

DAVID: In the romanization.

JESSIE: Right, in the romanization, thank you, not orthography.

DAVID: We didn't get to create an orthography.

JESSIE: We did not do an orthography for this language. Thank you for correcting me.

DAVID: Even though we pitched it to them and said, "Please let us do this."

JESSIE: Right, right. In the romanization, however, we put accent marks to indicate this unexpected stress pattern. All right. And so, a couple things about Kezhwa stress, is that we made it so that it stays on the root, even when suffixes are added. And so that means, um...

DAVID: That's always fun.

JESSIE: ... that it was sometimes pulled in different directions, but, we also made a rule that it could not fall beyond the antepenultimate syllable. So it's like, yeah, it's going to stay on the root, but if we add too many suffixes, or if the stress is in a place where you add, you know, a multi-syllabic suffix, it's going to move with it. And so, as an example, we have the verb kewi, which means "to help", and then if you turn it into a noun, you have kéwiga, where you stress that first syllable because the root is kewi, and you're only adding one syllable. And so, you can keep it on that antepenultimate kéwiga. Of course, when you write it in the romanization, you then put an accent mark, an acute mark, over the initial e of kéwiga to indicate, like, "Hey, it's not kewiga," which would be the normal way of doing it. Um, and so we have a lot of examples like that. However, a verb like akwat, which is a little bit different, when we add the suffix to make it into a noun, we get akwádega. So it's akwat, initial syllable stress.

DAVID: To know.

JESSIE: Um, "to know," sorry. Thank you. And then to get knowledge, we get, we can't have ákwadega because that's too many syllables. So we have to get akwádega. So we have to move the stress over one.

DAVID: That's fun.

JESSIE: It is fun, isn't it?

DAVID: Yeah, it's a good one.

JESSIE: Akwádega. So good, so good. All right. In terms of actual syllable structures, because I know you're all wondering, uh, we allowed CCVC syllable structures. But, in those consonant clusters that are in the onsets, you could only have an approximant following another consonant. So like, that's the only allowable consonant cluster, is a consonant plus an approximant. No others were allowed. And that allowed us to, like, borrow a lot of words, and sort of, hide them in the borrowings, which was a lot of fun.

DAVID: Yeah.

JESSIE: All right. So when we borrowed words, the first question we asked ourselves was, "How would non-native speakers hear this word?" Because I mean, honestly, that's the most important, right? Because uh, when you borrow words, you're not thinking about how do they write it, you're not thinking about any of those things. You're thinking about how would you hear it, and repeat it, and that's how it would end up getting used by other speakers. And so, what was more important to us than anything else was listening to, um, you know, the phonology of it, saying it out loud, "How would you hear this if you were a non-native speaker?" And then, the follow-up question to that was, "How does that perceived unit shift to fit the Kezhwa phonology?" And so, that was the second very important component to borrowed words.

JESSIE: We're going to go through some examples, but we can't really go through examples without also talking about semantics, yeah, because again, there were no straight borrowings. And so it's like, I don't want to give away examples until we talk about the semantic aspect of it. And so, let's look at an example. So in English, we have this phrase, "It's all good." And so if you were to write that out, [ɪtsalɡʊd], as one unit, you would get a transcription that matches that. And so, all fine and dandy, but like, if you say it fast, you don't necessarily say, [ɪtsalɡʊd]. You oftentimes will only say, [ɪsaɡʊd], [ɪsaɡʊd]. And so notice the "t" and the "l" have pretty much disappeared. [ɪsaɡʊd]. But like, do you even need that initial [ɪ]? Do you? You could, in fact, just say, [sagʊd]. And in fact, that's the basis of the joke for "Saul Goodman." If you've never seen "Breaking Bad" or "Saul Goodman," the follow-up show—

DAVID: No, I didn't know that.

JESSIE: It comes from "It's all good, man."

DAVID: Huh.

JESSIE: And so it's his con name. That's not his real name.

DAVID: Oh, I didn't know that.

JESSIE: And so he came up—he has this con name that's "Saul Goodman." "'S'all good, man." Okay.

DAVID: Oh, wow.

JESSIE: So, there you go. You don't need the initial [ɪ]. You could just say [sagʊd]. But of course, if you're saying it even faster, you may not even hear that final "d": [sagʊ]. [sagʊ]. And so, that's what we went with when we borrowed this expression into Kezhwa. We're like, we're gonna deal with [sagʊ]. Um, but in Kezhwa, unstressed vowels are typically schwas. And so if it's not stressed, it's going to get schwa-ized in most cases. And so [sagʊ] becomes saga [sagə]. And "saga" is what we borrowed as a phonological unit into Kezhwa.

DAVID: Can you, um, repeat for me that word that you said that happens to that last vowel? It gets what?

JESSIE: Schwa-ized. It's a word, because I just said it, and you knew what I meant, and so now it's a word.

DAVID: And you didn't—you had a glottal stop that time before you said "schwa-ized."

JESSIE: Ooh, well, that's even prettier. It's more like "schwaized." You know what? It's a word. Alright. So we borrowed saga into Kezhwa, and we retained the original spirit, because we decided that was going to be like, a response to, like, something. If somebody is talking to you and you just want to be like, "Okay" or "It's okay" or "It's fine" or "It's all right," um, sort of just like that generic "Yeah, yeah, yeah," um, they would say "saga", "saga, saga," "saga, saga." "It's fine." And so, we actually sort of maintain the semantic gist, without necessarily—while, I should say—expanding its borders.

DAVID: Yeah, that's a good way of expressing it.

JESSIE: Yes. Um, and so that's how we borrowed "It's all good" into Kezhwa—"saga".

JESSIE: Another one I really like—the next example, by the way. Um, and so in Kezhwa, we have datep, and datep is from English "duct tape." And that's because, um, "duct tape" [dəktep], when you normally say it, comes out as [dəʔtep] or [dətep], where you can barely hear that "k." And so, we decided that they just, you know, wouldn't really borrow that "k" in, because it's like when you say "duct tape" fast, you don't really hear the "k" very much. And so, they heard "duct tape," and just called it datep. And so, um, one phonological change that we made was that any schwa-like sound in a stressed syllable becomes an [a] in Kezhwa. And so, [dətep], we decided that initial syllable was stressed, because that's where the stress really is when you say "duct tape," became datep [datɛp]. And so, we did change that, so that changed a little bit. Another phonological change is that we have "tape" [tep] in English, but in a closed syllable, all /e/ sounds become [ɛ] in Kezhwa. And so [datɛp] is the final phonological result.

DAVID: Yeah, [datɛp]. [datɛp]. And so, it doesn't—it sounds like if you squinted, it sounds like it could be what you're saying, like you could be saying "duct tape," but it's distinct.

JESSIE: Exactly. But that's not even like the coolest part. The coolest part is the semantics, because, in Kezhwa, datep means "to repair, to fix, to patch up, to heal, to ameliorate." And why does it mean that? Because duct tape can fix anything. So, this is, by the way—I don't know if you grew up with this phrase. I grew up with this phrase. Because, literally, duct tape fixed everything in the country. I don't know if it does the same in the suburbs, but in the country, it fixes everything. Like to the point where one year—I won't talk about what caused the fender damage, because it was really sad—but my dad had some fender damage to his truck, and so the front was like, you know, like rattling and moving as we drove. And so, he pulled over on the side of the highway and got some duct tape out and duct taped it together, and we kept going. And so, literally, it fixes everything. So, because of that phrase, um, this was actually, I think it must have been one of my suggestions because I don't think you would have thought of duct tape fixing everything. Um, but yeah, that I think is a great example of how we sort of semantically shifted some of our borrowings.

DAVID: Yeah, that's a good one.

JESSIE: That makes me smile. Um, all right. So another example, duma, and this actually came from Swahili, so we're gonna move away from English examples here and talk about some other languages we borrowed from. Just an example of other languages, because we actually borrowed from a lot. Yeah, um, we borrowed from this word from Swahili, duma, meaning "cheetah". And the first shift we of course made was that unstressed [a] becoming a schwa because, again, those unstressed [a] sounds are schwa-ized. Schwa-ized, exactly.

DAVID: Yeah, and so [duma] becomes [dumə].

JESSIE: It's schwa-ized. I'm not gonna stop. Um, and so yeah, we have this Kezhwa duma, and that came out to mean "to hurry, to hustle." And this one was David's idea. I remember having this conversation.

DAVID: Well, yeah, I just thought, you know, cheetahs just move darn fast, and it's like, well, if you could borrow from anything, you know, borrow from Swahili. And it's also—and by the way, the reason—well, of course, "cheetah" ends up being just kind of short in English, but it was like, you want to go to a place where cheetahs are because then the word is likely to be shorter. Um, and yeah, duma was great. It like fit right in.

JESSIE: Not really likely to be shorter, but like I feel like as time travelers, they would be more likely to pull from the more appropriate languages. Because it's like, they're gonna be there anyway. May as well pull from the language where words come from.

DAVID: Or they apparently—they can borrow, uh, "curry" from Danish. Since—

JESSIE: Oh my gosh. So in case you're wondering, okay, like, I don't even know where to start in this story, other than the fact that when we were in Denmark, we asked the people who were there with us to take us to a place that served traditional Danish food. And so they did, and one of the things on the menu was curry, and we were both like, "What? Like, how is this traditional Danish food?" And yet, everybody there said, "Oh yeah, if we go to Grandma's house," like, "Grandma probably made some curry," and we're like, "What?"

DAVID: Yeah. So it's not even like current traditional Danish food, it's like, "Oh yeah, one of those comfort foods that your grandmother makes," always making curry, apparently, like, decades ago.

JESSIE: So bizarre. It's not, anywhere, anywhere as spicy to any curry that any of you are thinking of. If you've never had Danish curry, um, I feel like they may not even use pepper in it, I'm not—it's like, "How can we remove all the spice from any curry ever," and like, "decide that that's our—our national dish now?" It was so bizarre to both of us. So anyway, we, we ordered literally everything on the menu, because we wanted to taste it all. And so we tasted the curry, but I was like, this is not really curry, and they're like, "Yeah, no, it's Danish curry."

DAVID: It was kind of like, um, and I understand why it has this idea of hominess because it, you know, reminded me of like, you know, chicken noodle soup, like the chicken noodle soup of curry.

JESSIE: Yeah, yeah, because it was more of like, uh, just a gravy, with extra spices, but not spices in terms of like, herbs, I should say.

DAVID: And, uh, but in case you're wondering, yes, absolutely 100%, the curry flavor was there, it just wasn't spicy, and it was very homey. Strange.

JESSIE: So who knew? Yeah, there's Danish curry. Uh, well, for anyone who's listening to this who is from Denmark or has visited Denmark, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, Danish curry." Um, but speaking of the Scandinavian world, the next example comes from Finnish. In this example, uh, tika is the word that was borrowed, uh, came from Finnish tikka.

DAVID: Tikka.

JESSIE: Oh, thank you, you do that so much better.

DAVID: And by the way, just a little note here, you'll notice in Finnish, since we're studying Finnish, you know, it has vowel harmony, but the "i" and the "e" are truly neutral, so even though they're front vowels, you would expect tikkä, but you don't get it, you get tikka.

JESSIE: Oh, nice. And you get that geminate "k," in case you can't really hear that coming through, it's the "kk," and this means "dart" in Finnish, like, a thing you throw at a dartboard. And so Kezhwa borrowed it, and in Kezhwa, we decided we would reduce all geminate consonants, and so we don't get tikka, we just get tika. And furthermore, because that a is in an unstressed syllable, we don't get [a], we get [ə], and so [tikə]. And so, that's what we borrowed, and in Kezhwa, that means "to try," because we had decided that, you know, when you try something new, it's kind of like throwing a dart at a dartboard, you hope it lands, you see what happens when you throw. And so we, yeah, we decided to borrow that. I don't know why we chose Finnish of all things. I think honestly this one was an example where we came up with the semantic concept, looked it up on, um, well, we used Wiktionary a whole lot, to get good ideas.

DAVID: Yeah, just see which languages had short words for it, you know.

JESSIE: And then, also just which ones have phonologically interesting words as well. And sometimes what we saw was like a lot of them were super similar to what we have in English, and so there were definitely times where we avoided a lot of Germanic languages, and other languages that had words that were really similar to English, because we didn't want it to sound like everything was borrowed from English. And so we also looked for some, some variety in what we were getting. Alright, so these examples have all been single word examples. However, we also did compounds, and we didn't restrict our compounds to one language, and I think that made it super exciting. And so, if you recall earlier in this podcast, I talked about "genzhín." That's actually a compound. And so, the first half of that comes from Mandarin, gén, meaning "to follow," or sorry, I guess that would be gēn, because that's high tone. And then the second half is from Czech stín, meaning "shadow." And so it's "to follow a shadow," essentially, but we borrowed from two completely different languages. Kezhwa, by the way, is SVO word order, so no matter what language they were borrowing from, the verb in a compound would come before the object, like, in "to follow a shadow." And so, in Kezhwa, we get genzhín, where you can see that we did a difference, that Czech stín, we not only, like, dropped the t, because if you recall, there's no consonant clusters that allow stops in that second consonant position, and then we also voiced the st of Czech to zh, because of that n that is at the end of that first syllable from the Mandarin borrowing. And so we get genzhín. And, that—um, oh, we only allow consonant clusters with approximants, right? I forgot, I put that as a whole slide, so if you're listening along, I am just showing on the screen what I already said, um, as well as the n causing the voicing. And in Kezhwa, genzhín means "to track," because if you're tracking, you're kind of following a shadow. And so that one was a really fun one. And so we had a lot of fun coming up with these, because, again, like examples like this, we're borrowing from multiple languages for compounds, which meant we were able to really semantically play with a lot of concepts, and play with a lot of sounds of, like, what would sound good together. In this particular case. Ugh, this language. We did good.

JESSIE: Alright, alright, let's talk about some of the grammar aspects. I've already mentioned that Kezhwa was SVO, and so that meant, you know, as a lot of head-initial languages, we have prepositions. Um, we decided to put the adjectives in front of the nouns they modify, and then we did nouns followed by relative clauses. And so, these are just, you know, some of the features that will come up. David had an amazing idea for Kezhwa nouns, and so you were inspired by Hawaiian for this. Do you want to kind of walk us through the singular and plural definite-indefinite distinctions and why you were inspired—or how Hawaiian inspired you, rather, for us to come up with this system?

DAVID: Uh, well, it looks like the split is exactly like Hawaiian's, in that, for Hawaiian, there is a difference between—there's an indefinite singular marker he, and then there's a definite singular marker, either ka or ke depending on the, well, kind of depending on the consonant of the next—of the word. But then there's only one plural marker for both, and that is na. Um, and they're all separate words, they're not actually affixes. But, um, it's just kind of a nice way to organize things, I think, so there's no like indefinite plural, you just always use na to mark plurals everywhere. Um, and so then we did this, and I don't like 100% remember where everything came from.

JESSIE: That's okay. Um, I feel like my preview doesn't give enough. I wonder if I can slide over without changing the slides.

DAVID: Oh, uh, you can, you just gotta—

JESSIE: Okay, no, I don't have these examples. Doggone it. Um, I wish I remembered. In the verbs, I give the examples of where they came from. I guess in the nouns, I didn't give them the love, but, but that's okay. Um, we have these examples where like, "kid," if you say like "the kid," singular, it's just tamagó. And so that's—nothing is marked, nothing has changed, like that's the root. Um, and then indefinite, we get "i-damagó," where you actually voice that initial t. Um, and that's because I believe this comes from "one", and that the root for "one" is in, I think.

DAVID: Huh. Well, then why didn't, why didn't the n show up?

JESSIE: Because we decided—because it shows up as like, it's not a—it's not a full prefix, it's a clitic. And so, it, it like—no, it can't come from that, because then later it shows up. I'm gonna have to look it up, I am so sorry that I don't have, we should have your laptop right here so we could look it up.

DAVID: I'll put it up, I'll put it up on the phone.

JESSIE: Um, see if you can find the source of the indefinite. Because in the, um, if it's a consonant initial, like "tamagó, you voice it if it's voiced, so i-damagó, but it's like written as, um, you know, like I-hyphen, so it's like a clitic, it's not a full prefix. The plural marker is an, and it shows up as its own word, however, it affects the beginning of any voiceless consonant, where it becomes voiced, so it's not an tamagó, it's an damagó. Because it's kind of treated, it's treated almost like a clitic, except it's its own word in front of it. We don't actually—look under the "i's,"

DAVID: These are the old words.

JESSIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so look under "i," um, to see if we have anything, because I tried...

DAVID: "He," "she," "it," "that," "from its days as an expletive object, where the object is an entire clause. 'That', 'who' used to form relative clauses," so I think it's coming from that.

JESSIE: Um, oh, but our intervocalic, I think, got, got voiced, yeah, I think that's what it was, um, and so it just comes from the, the root i.

DAVID: Yes, and, um, and I think that it's, uh, so that it was basically it was, um, it was a pronoun, so that was what was giving it its definiteness, so it's like—yeah, so that's that one.

JESSIE: And then the plural would be an, um, because that's the same, did we not mark that one?

DAVID: No, we didn't do that one.

JESSIE: That's unfortunate, you know, this is so unlike us, we, we write everything. Um, do we have a glottal stop section? Because it could also be 'an.

DAVID: Let's take a look.

JESSIE: We should have glottal stop section, yes. Well, we have the "not," that doesn't help. Well, if we look enough into it, somewhere I'm sure we have the source of these. I don't know, maybe also you were just like, "We need a source, and we're going to make it sound good and that's going to be that," because some of these are just Kezhwa roots that are so old that, they just are what they are, so it's just a plural marker.

DAVID: Yeah, it's easy enough to just grab that, but it was the form an, so it was going to cause, uh, voicing for, um, for consonant initial ones, which is cool.

JESSIE: Yeah, for vowel initial then you just get, you know, like plural of our word for walkie-talkie is ala, um, and so plural is just an ala. It's just again, an as its own unit in front of ala. No change. But, if you recall, the indefinite singular of "kid," i-damagó, um, when that i- clitic is in front of a vowel, it turns into y-. So, instead of i-ala, we get y-ala. And so, "a walkie-talkie" is y-ala, plural an ala. If the root happened to start with the vowel i, written as the lowercase "i" in IPA, we changed it to zh, which is—if you follow along with the languages David has created, that is one of his favorite sound changes. And so "target," for example, is iga in the definite singular. So "the target" is iga. "A target" is zh-iga, and "targets," whether it's definite or indefinite, is an iga.

DAVID: And ala, I believe, comes from "holler," right? We don't have it written here. Oh, oh, no, wait, no.

JESSIE: No, no, ala does not come—it's actually from Arabic, and from, uh...

DAVID: No, it's 'andi al-asli, and 'andi al-asli comes from—'andi comes from *handi, which comes from German handy.

JESSIE: And then the second half is—

DAVID: The Arabic al-asli, which is "original." A walkie-talkie is, like, it's the original cell phone. That's hilarious. Now, but the word for "child" is just incredible. Just incredible. Comes from, uh, Vietnamese "curious," domo, and then, uh, the Korean, uh, go, which is "nose," and, uh, the expression here is that children have curious little noses,

JESSIE: Indeed.

DAVID: I think that you wrote that.

JESSIE: And don't they, though?

DAVID: I suppose they do. That's what "kid" is.

JESSIE: Yes. Let me tell you, we had so much fun creating words in this language.

DAVID: It's funny, too, because it looks like the word for egg in Japanese, tamago, uh, it was a different, like, intonational pattern. Um, uh, I don't know where iga comes from, do you?

JESSIE: Um, I don't... You can look that up. But one thing I do want to point out is that with these compounds, you may notice that in quite a few of them, we have final stress. And that is because the modifiers come first, so the head word would be last. And so, for example, tamagó means "curious nose," and so "nose" is the head word. Therefore, it's got final stress. So, like, you will see, like, genzhín, final stress, tamagó, final stress, and, yes, it's marked in the orthography. No, not in the orthography, in the romanization. Oh, my gosh, David, you just need to push me off the chair when I say the wrong word.

DAVID: All right, iga comes from "eagle."

JESSIE: Like, "the eagle has landed."

DAVID: Yep.

JESSIE: All right, so one other thing we did with nouns, because we didn't actually do a lot with nouns, we wanted it to be a relatively simple grammar in terms of putting structures together. One other thing we did was we did proximal versus distal demonstratives as suffixes. And so, for example, our word for "foot" is yambwa and then, um, our word for "walkie-talkie" is ala, which we've already seen, and, um, if we have, um, a consonant-final stem... I don't know why—oh, because it's yambwas, is the original—sorry, "foot" is yambwas. Let me say that correctly—

DAVID: Yeah, that's right, with an S.

JESSIE: With an S. Um, we add -agí as a suffix, um, for like "this," and then -ayá for "that".

DAVID: And then the s voices.

JESSIE: Yeah, and the s voices. So, like, "this foot" is yambwazagí, and "that foot" is yambwazayá, where you get the stress on that final syllable of this thing that was added. Um, if it is a vowel-final, you just get -gí and -yá being added. So, alagí, "this walkie-talkie," alayá, "that walkie-talkie."

DAVID: And for those who are wondering, you indeed have it correct, these came from Spanish. Yambwazagí. I love it.

JESSIE: Um, yeah, that's wonderful. Um, all right, so let's talk verbs. These I remembered to mark, why I didn't do the nouns, I don't know.

DAVID: It's all good.

JESSIE: Is it?

DAVID: Saga.

JESSIE: Saga. Saga, saga. Um, all right, so here is a verb chart for the verb "to know," akwat. Now, in case you're wondering, because I don't think I have this in here, akwat comes from "iCloud". That is literally the borrowing, because it's like, if it's knowledge, it's in the cloud. So, um, iCloud came into their language as akwat, and so that means "to know." Um, we're going to kind of focus on some things, but the first thing is like akwat is like sort of the plain form, um, and so it's just like "to know." And that's in the positive. If you want to make it negated, you add a glottal stop. So it's very similar, so it's akwat, "to know," 'akwat, "[to] not know." It's like so similar, but we wanted to play with some of those ambiguities that happen in natural languages.

JESSIE: Um, all right, so let's talk first about a distinction that we did that is kind of unique. This language, again, is for time travelers, and so we had a present and non-present tense form for the verbs. And so, that's not like—normally what you see is like past tense, non-past, if you have like a two-way distinction, maybe future, non-future. Some languages have that. You don't really, in any natural language that I know of—you can help me fill in blanks here if I'm wrong, David—you don't see a present tense versus non-present, so it could be past or future in this non-present tense.

DAVID: Yeah, I mean there is, uh, you will have like, uh, present versus non-present with the understanding that non-present is the past. Um, or you might have like... Gosh, no, I, I can't think of it, but it's like, it's because of the way, of course, we experience time, you know, like it makes sense that you would mark what's going on right this second as special, uh, and then if it's not marked as special, you assume that it's already happened and you need something different to mark the future. But, with this verb system, it's like, yeah, what's happening at this very moment is special because things can be happening before or afterwards and essentially to a time traveler, they all basically already have happened unless they've been affected by, you know, their actions as time travelers. And so they experience time differently from the way that we do.

JESSIE: And so that meant that we marked, um, we marked it, uh, special for like, "I know in this current moment" versus "I knew" or "I will know," because again, like in a time traveler's timeline, my tomorrow could be their yesterday, yeah? And like you don't know. And so it's like, it's essentially a way of saying it's either true in this moment that I'm talking to you, or, it was true or will be true.

DAVID: Yeah, and really, there's not, there's not a huge difference because, you know, to a time traveler, there's just the time I'm at right now or a time that I could get to via time travel, and that could be in the future or the past, doesn't really matter.

JESSIE: Right. And so for the, um, present versus non-present, um, those forms, we have a prefix for both of them. The present tense, the root that it came from is *ima, meaning "now," which is just a Kezhwa root, like nothing—it wasn't borrowed. And so, imakwat means "I know," like, right now, and then *la meant "then," again, just like a basic Kezhwa root, it wasn't borrowed. And so lakwat meant either "I knew" or "I will know." Um, and then the negated forms are those same forms, but with, um, that glottal stop. So, um, the m drops out though. So imakwat "I know" , i'akwat "I don't know," lakwat "I knew" or "I will know," and then la'akwat, "I don't"—"I didn't know" or "I won't know," "I refuse," "I refuse to know."

DAVID: By the way, that's a little personal note. Ima is the same word that you use for like "now" in Kamakawi.

JESSIE: Oh, is that why you suggested it?

DAVID: Yes, it is.

JESSIE: Oh, that is so nice. Good connection. Um, all right. So in verbs where the, um, root begins with a consonant that is voiceless, like kewi, "to help," you end up voicing it, so you get that present tense form igewi, and then lagewi for the non-present. And so it's just like, you do voice intervocalically, um, those roots when you add prefixes like that. Um, kewi, by the way, we had mentioned that before, meaning "help," and that comes from the English "carry."

DAVID: Yes, it does. And so for those that play video games, that's where it comes from. By the way, I'm looking at these imperatives, we didn't remark on them last time. I'm guessing that things are attached with a hyphen so that we didn't have to put any stress marks, right? Because it's kewi-na.

'JESSIE: Oh, with the, we aren't there yet. Don't worry about that part of the chart yet. Don't jump ahead. Let's talk about those negated forms, which I had mentioned were glottal stops. They come from a root *ha, meaning "not," but Kezhwa lost its h, andd all the "h's" became glottal stops. And so that's why the negative forms all have a glottal stop in them, because it's essentially just a, means "not." And so in most cases, um, in a lot of cases, you're only going to see a glottal stop being inserted as the negated form. So that's where those come from. Now, um, and those glottal stops, by the way, show up in front of the, the vowel-initial. If it's a consonant-initial like kewi, then the, the a vowel does show up. And so, kewi is "to help". Agewi means "to not help," where you get the a vowel, but then you also get the voicing of the k because it's now in between a and e. Um, all right, so those are some forms.

JESSIE: So let's look at a few other examples. Kezhwa verbs, more examples. We have inená, means to breathe. Inená, I should get my stress right, which comes from English "in and out."

DAVID: "In and out." Oh my God.

JESSIE: "Breath" is "in and out." And so, here's the thing though. If we were gonna do present tense negation, "don't breathe," we would get, i'inená, and we decided we didn't really like that. And so, we decided to do some dissimilation for verbs that begin with the i-sounding vowel. Um, in the present tense, they would actually become e as a present tense marker. So instead of that i present tense marker from ima, we would get e, when there was that negation where you kind of had to add it. So "don't breathe" is actually e'inená. And so, we were much happier. That was our sigh of relief. "Ah, that's much better."

DAVID: That was inspired a little bit by Spanish, where the word for "and" in Spanish is y, but if it comes before another i, it lowers to e. The word for "or" in Spanish is o, and if it comes before another word that begins with an o, it raises to u. It's a bizarre little quirk of Spanish, that if you speak any other Romance language, you get to that, and like, "wooooh."

JESSIE: But there it is, because it sounds better. All right, so now let's talk about these imperative forms that you've already remarked on. So the imperative forms, as David noted, we have these suffixes joined with hyphens, and that's because they are sort of enclitics. So they're clitics, but they're suffixes, and they're actually the pronouns for "you" (singular) and "you" (plural). And so, for instance, akwat, if you recall, means "to know," and if you want to say, like, "I'm going to snap and point my fingers and be like, 'You, singular, know this!'" and I'm just, you know, like, pointing my finger like, "No!" Yeah, don't bite it. I'm pointing it because I'm very serious in my command. Um, then you're going to add this clitic -na, but because akwat already ends in a consonant, we don't actually put the n in there. Instead, we just voice the consonant that came before it. So akwat becomes akwad-á. Although I shouldn't stress on the final syllable, because it's still akwád-a. There we go. Um, actually, I don't think... I think it's still stressed on ákwad-a. I think that's how we did it. Gosh, I don't remember.

DAVID: Yeah. I think that... No, I think that's why the hyphen is there. That's what I was saying. So that, um, otherwise, we would need to put an acute accent marker on there...

JESSIE: Right, on there, to, to remind us that the root still carries, because this is just a clitic.

DAVID: Yeah. So it's ákwad-a.

JESSIE: And so, akwad-a, if you want to make that plural, su is the "you" plural pronoun. And so notice it begins with that voiceless s, and so it doesn't voice the t at the beginning of akwat, because originally it would have been akwat-su. And so it's just akwat-u. And so, in this case, this is an example where you have a consonant that doesn't voice intervocalically, but it's because of that historical reason. And then you can, of course, be like, "Don't know. Do not know this." Um, and you just add that glottal stop, like we had already seen, as a prefix, in this case because it begins with a vowel. And then, if you have a verb form like kewi, that ends in a vowel, then you add the n from na, "you" singular. So kewi-na means like, "Hey, you, help!", singular. And then "you" plural is su, but then in this case, that s is actually showing up, and so it voices to a z. So kewi-zu is, "Hey, y'all, help! Now!" Um, and then, of course, the negation shows up as the prefixes we had already seen.

JESSIE: Okay. So now that we've walked through that, let's look at a couple Kezhwa sentences. We are running long already. And so we're gonna fly through these. Are you ready to fly?

DAVID: I'm ready to fly.

JESSIE: Get some wings. Here we go. Kezhwa sentences. Um, so the first example I pulled out was Era idag... Ooh, I said that totally—

DAVID: Era idanagí.

JESSIE: Thank you. I put my "g" and "n" in the wrong places. Era ida... idanagí. I really want to say, idaganí.

DAVID: Hm. Era idanagí.

JESSIE: Era idanagí. "They are coming." So here, era is our pronoun from Kezhwa, and, you know, an old source, meaning "they." And then, uh, "to come" is actually, um, from Swahili, tanga, meaning "wander, to wander," as well as—it's a compound with Spanish "aquí," so it means "to wander here." That means "to come." Isn't that kind of delightful? And then that present tense marker i, which voices that initial t, and so we end up with idanagí, with stress on the final syllable because of that Spanish aquí, and so we get stress there. All right, so that's one example. Another example, go ahead and read this one, David.

DAVID: Let's see. Uh, all right. Ozu lamaba Gami si memesis.

JESSIE: Perfect. That means "We have located the folding to 2019." We'll talk about the folding in a moment, in a minute. My word, my word. All right, first of all, ozu is just a Kezhwa pronoun, meaning "we." That "la-" is the non-present tense suffix—or prefix—rather, that, again, could mean past or future, but it's just like, it's not in this current moment. Maba means "to locate," and that was borrowed from Spanish mapa.

DAVID: Which, of course, is borrowed from Greek. But yeah, my goodness.

JESSIE: How fun is that? Gami is the word that they have for "folding," which was borrowed from Japanese, origami. Yeah, and so in this time traveler universe, where you can travel from one time to another, is called a folding. Because, essentially, it's like this idea that these times have sort of, like, in the timeline, folded up on each other, and you can jump from one to the next, but it only happens at key moments. So it's, you can't time travel just anytime you want. You have to know when the times are gonna, like, hit on each other. And so those are called foldings, and so we decided to borrow that word from Japanese, origami. That was fun. Si is a preposition meaning "to," just from the Kezhwa language.

JESSIE: And then we get to memesis, and that means 2019. And this was really fun, and this was an idea I had that David went with, and thank goodness he went with it, because I was just like, "We gotta do this." I was so excited to present this to you. I decided that for dates, not all numbers, just dates, this is an important distinction here, that we should convert those, the dates, to Roman numerals first, and then convert Roman numerals to sounds. I know, I know, but I'm like, "These are time travelers who do things just, just go with it." And so quite a few of the Roman numerals have really obvious sound counterparts. So like, um, an "I" in Roman numerals could be in, you know, lowercase "i", [i] in IPA. A "V" could be a [v], an "L" [ɫ] (read: [l]), "D" [d], "M" [m], fine.

DAVID: What's-what's that sound that the "L" makes?

JESSIE: [ɫː]

DAVID: [ɫː]? You're gonna do that? Not [la]?

JESSIE: But that adds a vowel. I'm just, "[ɫː]," not making it a whole syllable.

DAVID: Awesome.

JESSIE: Thank you. That left the "X" and the "C," specifically, for our language, because we needed to make it fit, again, the phonology, but we also needed to make sure it didn't overlap any of the other sounds that were already taken for the Roman numerals. And so we decided that "X's" in Roman numerals would be just an s.

DAVID: Basically, the [ks] getting simplified.

JESSIE: Right? And then the "C" would be a [k] sound. Okay, yeah. All right, so now that we've got that, that means you gotta first write the date you want in Roman numerals. Second, convert them all into IPA according to this conversion system. Whoo, all right. We had a few rules on top of that, because it can get quite cumbersome. So we decided that an epenthetic e would break clusters. It couldn't be an i, because that means something, and so we needed it to be something else. We decided that an epenthetic glottal stop would break any [ii] segments, because we didn't have long vowels. And so, if it were like "VII" in Roman numerals, we wouldn't have a way of differentiating "six" from "seven," [vi] from [viː], because we don't have long vowels. So "six" would be [vi], "seven" would be [viʔi]...

DAVID: And "eight" would be...?

JESSIE: And "eight"... we had three [iii] segments. We decided to convert that to [iji], which then got converted to David's favorite, [iʒi]. So, "six" is [vi], "seven" is [viʔi], and "eight" is [viʒi]. There we go. And then we also decided that the [s]—which was the "X," right?—would voice if it came before a [v], and so it would sometimes be a [z] sound because that didn't, you know, mess with anything else. Okay, so back to 2019. In Roman numerals, 2019 is "MMXIX." So that leaves us with "M" and then "S-I-S." So, [mmsis]. But we have that [m]—I'm totally missing a syllable. Oh my gosh, but on the next slide, I have it. We had "M-M-S-I-S", was the original. We needed to break up the "M's" and then the "S" after it with the [e] epenthetic. So we have me-me-sis. And so that's how we get 2019. Memesis. We had some more complicated dates than memesis. In fact, one of our dates we had to do was 1988, which in Roman numerals is MCMLXXXVIII. It's a lot. So, converting that into the IPA counterparts, we had "M-K-M-L-S-S-S-V-I-I-I." So, we had to insert a lot of epithetic [e] sounds, so we have mek-mel-se-ses-viii, and then we had to, of course, change the long—the triple-long "I" to [iʒi]. And so, to say 1988 in Kezhwa, you would say mekmelsesezvizhi.

DAVID: So, the thing is, like, I don't think you're gonna show this line, but we had a line, a very long line where it was something like, "We're here in 2019, we came from, you know, 1988, we need to get to the folding in 2019 because we're stuck in 1988," and like, they kept saying them over and over again, and so there's so many of like, you know, mekmesis, mekmelesevezhis, and it's like, "Oh my God, it was so difficult."

JESSIE: I think 1999 was thrown in there too.

DAVID: 1999, sure, yeah.

JESSIE: Why not? But I think it was really a fun way of being like, you know what, they're time travelers, they got time to work this out, and it's kind of a fun nod to like the whole, like, years as dates being written in Roman numerals.

DAVID: It was such a wacky idea, and I loved it. And it also fit very well with the kind of like, this thing was set in the '80s, and for, again, younger people, when you watch older movies—I think it was in the '90s when it finally changed—but if you watched an older movie, and watched the credits and it listed the date at the end, it was always and only and exclusively written in Roman numerals up until like the early '90s, I think.

JESSIE: Yeah, and I mean, even then, like, we still use Roman numerals to keep track of a lot of things, like Super Bowls. We've got a Super Bowl number with the Roman numeral, it's not a year, granted, but the fact that we still keep up with this idea that we can use Roman numerals to like count things, it's still prominent, and it makes it special, like, it's like if you see the Roman numeral, it's like, it's part one, but one is the Roman numeral, it's because it's something special.

DAVID: Yeah. But these are for very small numbers, like, even the Super Bowls, right, we're getting up to like 50-something right now, but it was like when you saw it on movies, like—

JESSIE: Yeah, like, this 1988 one is just great.

DAVID: Yeah, and you'd see it like all the time if you stayed till the end of movies, it'd be like, oh, there's the year, I can't read it, but there it is.

JESSIE: Well, it's optional, obviously. Mekmelselsesezvizhivizhi... Oh, I totally said that wrong, but that's obviously what it is.

DAVID: Mekmelsesezvizhi. Mekmelsesez... Mekmelsesezvizhi.

JESSIE: There we go, we got it. All right. So all that is to say, maybe we hope you have noticed, that we had so much fun creating Kezhwa. It honestly, like, as we were talking about examples from vocabulary, this was actually for like a completely different thing, like, we were coming up with examples for a presentation, and so we were both going through the dictionary and having all these memories and like, it was just so neat, and it was one, it's one of the languages where I have said more than once, if we have time, you know, we're not working on anything else, I would want to return to that language and like, fill it out with more vocabulary. Even though Paper Girls wasn't renewed, therefore we're not going forward with the language, um, unless somebody picks it up. Somebody with a lot of money, pick it up. Season two, hello. Um, like, well, really, we have no plans to actually use the language beyond this, but I would love to expand it because, like, it was just so much fun coming up with those cool semantic borrowings and things that we could do with the language.

DAVID: Yeah. I've worked on, um, you know, a few projects that either didn't go anywhere or like, were up for like, you know, a single season or maybe like one movie, but clearly were not going to get picked up ever again, but of all of those projects, this language is my favorite of those and the one that I really wished could have, you know, seen the light of day, and I really, I, you know, it's so weird because it's like, it's such a short time frame, but if this thing aired in, uh, the summer of 2019, I guarantee you would have gotten a second season. Like, things have changed in streaming just over the past three years, to where they're less willing to take a chance, um, than they were beforehand. Um, and so, man, of course, there were also some behind-the-scenes stuff that happened that played, I think, a bigger role in it, things that had nothing to do with us. Um, in that, you know, when we were brought on, you know, we had a Zoom session with the creator of Paper Girls, as well as the showrunner and one of the other writers, and it was a very, uh, you know, positive meeting, a great conversation, and it was like the next thing that we heard was suddenly that showrunner wasn't working on the show anymore. And honestly, I'm kind of—like at that stage, I'm kind of surprised that it even finished. But basically, I think that when they filmed the whole thing, it wasn't the same crew that started it. And so, I—I especially think in terms of our usage in the show, if they even knew that they were there, the new people didn't care, didn't see the purpose of us being there, so it was like, who knows if it even got a second season with that same crew, maybe we wouldn't even have been back.

JESSIE: Yeah, um, but regardless, we had fun.

DAVID: Yes, we did.

JESSIE: We still love the language, and we want to say a big kope, which means "thank you." And now I can't remember, where does that come from? Kopiko?

DAVID: That probably comes from "Kopiko." No, I have no idea.

JESSIE: You still have it open, right?

DAVID: Yeah, I do.

JESSIE: Okay, okay. Kope.

DAVID: Um, oh, Thai.

JESSIE: Oh, nice.

JESSIE: Yeah, very, um, and it's not how it sounds in Thai, but it's like, you know, filtered through our language. Uh, I think maybe we chose it because it sounds a little bit like "Kopiko."

JESSIE: I think so. I think so. Um, because why wouldn't we want to be reminded of Kopiko every time we say "thank you?" Kope. Kope.

DAVID: That was a good one. So, before we go, or actually, you're—I mean, as we say, you know, thank you and sign off, I—I think that we should invariably say the one thing that I assumed you were going to include in here.

JESSIE: Oh, no, what?

DAVID: Kezhwa.

JESSIE: Oh, Kezhwa! The language name itself actually comes from the English word "casual." And we wanted it to essentially be like, you know, this is casual talk, just casual. Kezhwa. Yeah. I probably should have included that. Yeah, well.

DAVID: That's all right, we got it in there.

JESSIE: You remembered, thank goodness. Well, thank you for being here, um, we hope you enjoyed learning about Kezhwa, the language of ours that could have been but never was. Or it never will be, we don't know, because, you know, non-present tense, you don't know. But we hope you enjoyed hearing about it, and um, until next month, stay grammar!

DAVID: Bye, everybody.