So sometimes I have a lot of difficulty finding, a rhythm that feels otherworldly enough. Maybe that's not the right adjective. But still sounds good to us. [INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I'm George Corley. And with me today is ZeWei, a YouTube creator, musician, and conlanger out in California. How are you doing? I am doing all right. How are you doing? Good. So I brought you on because I had noticed your channel.
And not all of your stuff is conlang, but it seems like... Increasingly, you've incorporated conlanging into your songs. Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit about, like, how you came to that decision, how you came into conlanging and how it blends into your music. Mhm, mhm. Yeah, yeah. I definitely am increasing the conlang content. I have plans to do that over the next year. Mostly just going to be focusing on the conlang stuff. Obviously. The music on top of it.
Conlang. Music. It's what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah. I had kind of been interested in both conlangs and music for a long time, like, separately. It was only a couple of years ago when I actually found the conlang community and this thing called conlanging. Like, I didn't know it was a thing for ages. That I thought, hey, you know, I have these, like, a bunch of these language projects lying around. And I have, you know, this... I like making music.
And I might as well just slap those things together. Because it gives me something to use these conlangs for. Because I'm not writing a book or anything. Yeah. I mean, so how did you get into conlanging in the first place? Like, where was your path to getting into that? Yeah. It's... I would say it's a bunch of overlapping things that kind of... eventually built up into the path that I have. So when I was... I want to say it was, like, 10 years old.
Me and my friend, we were like, "Oh, well, let's make a language." Like, this was a crazy idea. We're going to make a language so that the adults can't understand what we're saying. And so that was, like, you know, it was just a relex of English in terms of grammar and stuff. And she and I had done it for, like, two days. And then kind of dropped off. But for a while, I would think about it and be like, "Oh, that was a cool idea that we had. Like, I want to do that again at some point."
And then, excuse me, I was playing Splatoon. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Splatoon series. I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it came out in 2015. It's been nine years now, which is crazy. The game features a lot of world building in, like... There's so much language everywhere. There's no functional conlang in there. But there's so much writing around graffiti on the walls and the billboards and ads on the TV screens in there.
Brands for, like, the clothing you can buy all have that writing on it. There's a lot of music in the game in their, like, glorble gibberish squid speak. So that was really inspiring to me, especially as someone who was working on... learning indie game dev. I was like, oh, well, I need to make music and I need to make, you know, this game.
And I have these these conlangs that are lying around so I can incorporate that idea that my friend and I had into a game that I have made to make the world feel like a lot more alive, I guess. So that's that's where the conlanging came in and then eventually the music as well. I think there are a lot of people who come into conlanging having played with language in interesting ways, very young. Yeah, yeah.
It's it's interesting that you it seems like you were doing some conlanging stuff before you were aware of the community, then. Yeah, I didn't know the term conlanging was a thing. Yeah, you were just inventing a language that that's. Yeah. But tell me about your journey with with the game development. Are you still? Working on developing a game or are you shifted mostly just to music? As of about a year ago, I've mostly just shifted to the the music and the and the video stuff.
Previously, I had gone to college for game game development. I worked on Rocket League, if you're familiar with that game. Okay. And it was kind of a passion that I had for for a very long time. And I still do. But making a game. Is complicated and it takes a long, long time. So, you know, I've had a ton of, like, game ideas that I've wanted to do, and I've made a bunch of stuff. And of course, in college, you know, I was working on game projects all the time.
But at the moment, I'm I've kind of realized, like, I I'm a one bird show over here. I can't I can't do it all in a timely manner, at least. So the music and the conlangs was was a way for me to keep making stuff while still like I have an idea. I can finish it in a timely manner. Yeah. Get it out. Yeah. So currently, I'm not doing the game stuff at the moment, but I would I would love to. I would love to go back.
That that that is that is the thing is the it's an entirely different sort of problem. Oh, yeah. I keep I keep telling. David Peterson. David Peterson is making these languages for a board game. I keep asking him, "When is the board game coming out?" "I don't know. These things take years to figure out." Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure a video game is is the same kind of thing. You just have endless work on noodly little rules to to figure out. Right.
Yeah. But but it is interesting to hear that you got this. This pipeline from like game dev to music to conlang music. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about now. I have interviewed other people who do like combine music and conlang. Yours is a different genre than what I have encountered before. So like. Margaret Ransdell Green. She created whole music theory systems for her con cultures. Jasper Charlet did a chamber, a chamber opera. Yeah. And you. You are doing like electronic music.
I don't know fine genres there, but. I don't know what to classify my stuff as either. Honestly, like some people ask. They're like, oh, what genre is this? I'm like, you tell me. I don't know. I mean, it's it's definitely under the broad category of electronic music. Yeah. It's probably computer music. You're doing some very interesting things with. I saw one of your shorts. You talking about how you built. It seems like it like at the base of it's just like a base. It's a basic arpeggio.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. With all the effects added to it. The pattern does not repeat for the entire three minutes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And that kind of thing. It's some experimental stuff going on. Actually, is that experimental nature in your music at all linked to your interest in including conlangs in it? Especially since like your conlangs seem to be set.
Yeah. In sort of a sci-fi multiverse where you're shifting to other dimensions and meeting aliens and speak these languages, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them are more advanced technologically. I would say I think some of the experimental music stuff and the experimental like conlang stuff, I guess, is intentional. Some of it is kind of just me being drawn to the weird stuff. I've always enjoyed when something's kind of breaking the norm at convention and things.
So I think inherently that's led me to do that kind of thing with a conlang and with music. But of course, I do... If I'm working on conlang music, I will consider that and how that can kind of affect the... the music of the culture and stuff. Do you find... When you are making music with your languages, do you find like different kinds of melodies and different kinds of rhythms fit better with certain languages or others?
Or do you construct features of the languages In order to like fit to particular musical styles? I definitely do the conlang first. So the language and the world are like... That's the first thing that I'm thinking about. And then I'll make music for it. In terms of like the melodies and stuff, it really depends on the language. Like if you have a... If you like have a stress timed language, like that'll totally change how the rhythm works and things.
Or if you had a... A tone registers or contours, like that might change things too. If the culture respects them in music. Because some contour languages just completely throw them out the window if you're writing a melody, right? So it can really be anything. I often find that like, especially when I'm working with languages with like a stress timed system or a long vowels, that really changes how the melody needs to go, really.
And so if I have a melody that I've made like beforehand, and then I need to like insert lyrics onto, it's a lot harder if I have like long vowels, because I need to make sure that those longer notes fit in with the longer vowels and the shorter notes fit in with the shorter vowels. And sometimes they don't. And we just have to deal with it. But yeah, definitely influences a lot. Syllable weight is definitely like a thing that gets into it.
Because like, even with like English with the weight variation, you see that happen in melodies in English. And if you see translations, there's all kinds of things. Other languages might actually add extra beats for extra syllables, where English would have one syllable. And it's just because of the structure. Sure, that is a thing in English as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, you know, I just use English as an example to illustrate your point.
But like, I also find that like, the reason I'm thinking about that is like. .. In real languages, you see this kind of thing. I find that... I always feel like Mandarin Chinese is very versatile, actually, in what it can do. Because you tend... There is actually length variation, but you kind of ignore it and not have a problem. And you will have like, you know, you just have to count the syllables and be good. Right? Yeah. Whereas like, I've listened to Spanish rap.
And Spanish doesn't really work for rap. That's a hot take. No, I mean like... I listen to a lot of Rap Italiano, but also some Spanish too. Yeah. It is different. Like, you know, just the natural rhythm of the language. Yeah, it has to be different. I think that... I don't listen to a whole lot of rap, but it feels like... English language rap is tending to do like an iambic rhythm, like a lot of English poetry. And then other languages are going to have to do something completely different.
Yeah. The same way they do something different with poetry. Do you spend a lot of time, actually, with your languages, developing poetic conventions that you can then take into the songwriting? Because I watched one of your videos explaining your process, and you talked about rhyme. And, you know, you just briefly mentioned that different cultures will define rhyme differently. Yeah. Yeah. Like, do you spend a lot of time on those conventions in order to figure out lyric writing? Yeah, yeah.
I probably don't spend as much time as I should, frankly. That video, I want to redo that whole video because I missed so many things in there, like the stress time and the tones. But, yeah, like the rhyming is one part of it. You know, it depends on what you're writing. It depends on what your, like, vowel system is. Like, if you've got three vowels or whatever, you know, it'll be, it might be easier to find rhymes just because there's less vowels.
But if you have, you know, like a whole, you filled up the entire vowel space and that's your phonemic vowels, like, it might be easier to find slant rhymes that are more accepted in the culture, like /i/ and /e/ or something. In terms of, like, the rhythm and the, and the, that kind of thing. Like, that's definitely something I think about. And it's, it's kind of hard. Because it's, it's easy to just lump everything into, oh, well, that kind of sounds Englishy.
Because I'm just so used to something inherently as, like, particularly if it's in 4-4 time, you know, as well. Right. So sometimes I have a lot of difficulty finding, like, a rhythm that feels... otherworldly enough. Maybe that's not the right adjective. But still sounds good to us. Because, you know, I don't want anything, I don't want to make music that would be, like, fit for this culture that, like, we wouldn't like as well. Right. Well, that's, that is a thing. Realistically... Yeah.
If you're talking about alien music... they could, they could definitely have... different instincts that drive them to completely different musical structures that would not sound... maybe we couldn't even hear it. That's what, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's like... they probably have a completely different, you know, range of frequencies that they can hear. So I've kind of, I've kind of... accepted it as, this is an interpretation of what it would sound like to them. Perhaps.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because otherwise, you know, it's just, it's just not going to sound good to us. And frankly, we are the audience. So I want to make sure that it sounds... listenable. By any means. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, your, your music is, is great. It's not always... Oh, thank you. You know, it's not the, it's not the thing that I usually listen to. But it, it, it's really, it's very interesting, very cool to, like, pop on. Thank you. Let's actually listen.
So you sent me, this is, this is a little sneak peek of something that should be coming up. Yeah. And I will, I'm going to jump to a part where we have some, some vocals so we can hear.
(Music) Pahnyeina pabeiden hei Heken hekei chakei Pahvennyaheipe yhngnyem dah krwgennw Dei pechwchem Krwnne Seingwng dah krainyem Krimi ni seinyem ni kragei Kriri nyenisse nifh hwkemen Chwm yeheinahen mw Hen Yahmnye maht Paradais hei pipeyahfen Krairwkh chwm heiken nifavap Krwnne hei dah hen dah seise So that's interesting. I'm going to jump ahead a little bit because there were some things I wanted to talk about that I heard later on here.
(Music) Pahberegafei pahdegrimi ngi, sanye Pepsadeikricha chwv, fi Phfihekkei phpe nyemwn ni Yhng nyepei php pahnyeina pibehre Penyeigi hen hei nyem ya Pepsadeipinirh, nirh ka Pemw phpenye yhng Ni phchw seipekrh sessadeirhkre ka Chav dehchw sa shpiken Chav dah hi krahgei senein hei Nyeigise kri fanivan ka sa php Nirh sahdeki hei pei sahdere Yeah, so I wanted to get that section too, but because like... Me... Just... All I can...
All I can really get is phonology from here, but listening to that, I can see you're not afraid of like going out into more unusual things and things that, you know, might be challenging for you to pronounce. Because like, you know, I hear a lot of the /ɯ/ vowel in there, but I also hear... I hear... It sounds like you have a syllabic uvular fricative. Is that right? Yes. It's like somewhere velar or uvular. Yeah. Depending on the speaker and the context.
But yeah, it's a syllabic velar or uvular fricative. It only occurs between voiceless consonants. Or... /j/, /r/, and /ŋ/ become devoiced. So, to allow that to occur between those as well. Yeah, it's a little strange, but it came from the vocalization of mantises. I was looking at that and they make something that sounds similar to a velar fricative, at least it sounded like it's something... Oh, okay. So, this is for the mantis-like aliens. So, that's interesting.
So, you actually... You actually, like, listened to mantis vocalizations in order to... Yeah. Vocalization. You get it. Singular. They have one vocalization. At least that's what I was able to find, but this was also several years ago, and honestly, I probably should have done a little more research before I made that whole thing. But no, I did do a little bit of research for sure, and like their oral anatomy and whatnot. Yeah. That is... That is... That is interesting.
I kind of assume that you're sort of transcoding, like, their... whatever their physiology for producing sound is into human sounds in a way, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's an approximation. Yeah. It's not... It's not gonna be exactly, but... Or, you know, in a way... Yeah. It's art. You're just... You're just getting a vibe for something, right? Yeah. Honestly. But it is... Yeah. It is... It is interesting to... I just feel like singing with those...
If you don't speak a language that has them, because there are human languages that have these. If you don't speak a language that has those syllabic fricatives like that, I can imagine that being challenging to sing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because you're gonna lose the pitch, and also you have to be very fluid in actually producing it. Do you do a lot of practice before you record, or how do you deal with that? Yeah. I would not consider myself a singer for the... to start off with that one.
It's a lot of recording the same thing many, many times. And eventually getting something that sounds decent enough. Thankfully with the medium that I use, all I need is one good take, and I can enter things a little bit here and there if I need to. Right. In terms of the pitch of the syllabic fricatives, or the lack of pitch, I should say, yeah, that's another thing that I've had to think about with the melody and such. I can't have a really cool sounding high note on that one.
Because I have to say something like /pxp/, which does not have a tone on it. Yeah, so you do... so it'll figure into the melody a little bit, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I have to think about it, where I place that. Yeah. It is another interesting thing in your process video you were talking about, is like, you were saying... You know, if you don't have the word you need, sometimes you can just coin it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's super convenient. Which is kind of... it's helpful.
I kind of... I have to do a little bit of poetry for my project, where I'm making spell incantations. And you know, for some of the longer ones, I want to do like couplets or like a four -line poem or something. Mm-hmm. Right? If you have a long enough casting time. But I actually try to avoid coining new words just to fit in. Mm-hmm. Just because, like, I feel like I'm cheating. You are! That's because you are, really.
Yeah. Yeah. But I'm also like, I have this word that, you know, I... or I should say this meaning that I want to put in here. And say I'm missing the verb or something. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, well, the melody needs like two syllables. Like, you know, two rhythmic beats or whatever. Like, okay, I'll just try to find a derivation that obviously, of course, makes sense. Like, I prioritize the fact that the derivation makes sense and stuff. And then I will evolve it.
And I'll see how that feels. And I'm like, okay. Well, that sounds... that sounds like it fits. You know, I'm definitely, like, I definitely prioritize it being realistic when I'm coining new words, when I'm making the lyrics over, you know, oh, that sounds good. That sounds good. Yeah. So it'll just work. It'll just work. And, like, how much, like, documentation do you have on these languages? Mm-hmm. And how much development do you have?
I mean, clearly, from what I have seen, you clearly are definitely not... You're not doing relexes here, definitely. No. You're doing full-on grammar stuff. But I just want to know, like, how much do you develop the languages beyond what's needed for a particular song or what you're working on at the moment? Yeah. Honestly, I develop the languages as much as possible. In a sense, the music is a bit of an afterthought because I'm like, wow, I've made this whole thing.
Oh, what am I going to do with it? So I'll just... I'll make music with it. I... The language for the Mantis people that we were just talking about, that was... That's kind of my baby. I've been working on that since, I think, 2021. It was my first, like, big conlang project that I felt was up to at least some standards that I... That I now set for myself. So I have, like, a whole... It's a massive spreadsheet of documentation for me.
I'm currently working on getting, like, actual public documentation that doesn't suck. Like I currently have for the one in my first conlang video. That's really cool. I want to switch tracks really quick. Mm-hmm. Um... Because you, in some of your earlier stuff that was before you leaned into the conlanging aspect a lot You had a lot of songs that were talking about... Well, you had a few songs that were talking about queer identity. Mm-hmm. And how has that been important in your music?
And has that affected how you approached conlanging? And is there... Are there... Are there things about that in the more conlang-centric music as well? Mm-hmm. That's a great question. Probably not intentionally. Um... You know, like, I could probably make some, like, connections of, like, oh, it was because of this and this kind of broad semantic word. But honestly, I mean, they're kind of separate things. I like... I make music to make music a lot of time.
And sometimes, you know, I have an idea of, like, oh, I'll... I'll release some kind of album on Pride Month that's, like, based on the colors of the rainbow. And it's about my experience being LGBT. And I'm like, how can I fit a conlang in there? That wouldn't make sense. So I just... I just didn't. Um... Yeah. No, it's not... It's not really related.
Uh... And I think in a way, like, I kind of like that freedom that I can write music in English or Japanese or something else without having that expectation of, like, oh, their next song is going to be in a conlang. And it better be. Um... Right. Right. But I definitely, like, am now starting to focus on the conlang stuff. Because... One, because I enjoy it. And two, people seem to like it. And that's cool. Well, I mean...
You know, the business of being on YouTube, you got to have a gimmick, too. So... Yeah. I have a bit of a niche. Yeah. I... The reason I asked that question particularly is, like, a lot of my audience is queer. A lot of people in the community are queer. Yeah. Um... You know, I ran... I ran a conlang relay this year. Yeah. On... On YouTube. And... Yeah. I saw that. Like... So... And, like... This... Maybe I'm a little too old. And I didn't think about this beforehand.
But I realized I had to add a pronouns column in my spreadsheet, so I could keep track of everybody's pronouns... Oh, yeah. ...and not make mistakes. But, like, just... It was not, like, totally deliberate. I mean... Not in who I contacted. Mm-hmm. In fact, there were people I didn't realize. But there are quite a few trans people in that playlist. Yeah. And, um, trans and nonbinary people in that playlist. And it's... So, it's just... That's how the community is, and it's, kind of...
And it, kind of... It's, kind of, you know... Algorithm. Because of who gets higher in algorithms, you're not necessarily going to see that on YouTube itself. If you go into, like, Reddit and the Discord communities, you'll find lots of people, of course. But, you know, some of the more prominent voices, including me, are not necessarily representative of the community in that way. So I just wanted to voice that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've definitely seen a lot of queer people in the community.
Honestly, I'm not super involved in the community. Like, I try to keep up. But from what I see, the queer presence is very strong. Right. And if I was smarter, I maybe would try and make some kind of correlation. But I'm... I'm not going to pull something out there that I'm not confident in. But it is really cool to see, like, that community for people who are marginalized in that sense. Yeah. So I'm glad to be a voice in that, I suppose. But, well, anyway, let's...
Moving back into, like, your conlanging, I really... Now, I'm not sure if I... The Cursed Conlang Circus may be completely over by the time I get this out, because we're recording this earlier, folks. But I do not have a whole lot of time to do editing. And I also, like, want to give space to some other things. But this should come out, like, first of the year. But I saw your entry in particular. Mm-hmm. And it was really... It was really interesting.
It was one thing that... I was already, like, checking out your music and being interested in interviewing you. But, like, that particular idea with the, like, very amped up, like, over-the-top politeness system... Yeah. With so many different layers, like, historical layers to it. ...was very impressive to me. Oh, thank you. Could you tell me, like, where did you get the idea for that? Mm-hmm.
And, like, the whole story for it, and also, like, the way that you developed with the history of the language and the differing levels of formality and 600 pronouns. Yeah. Yeah. I actually don't know what the real number is. It's definitely over 600. And that's, like, not counting the case forms of each of them. Yeah. So, I had the idea for that language, I want to say, like, a year and a half beforehand. And by that, I mean I had a shell of it.
Like, it was, like, I had the idea of, oh, I would like to make a language with a Polynesian -style-type phonology, and it's polysynthetic. And I made... Like, a beta version of the syllabary for it, and then it kind of collected dust for a while. And I wanted to join the Cursed Conlang Circus. So, eventually, that got announced. I was like, okay, well, what am I going to do? I need to figure out what I'm doing. And I had always wanted to do a conlang showcase, but I never really did.
Something about it just didn't feel right. I wanted to do something different, something interesting. So, the theme for... Well, one of the themes was tell a story in there. And I was like, ah, that's how I can do it. Because I wanted to do it somehow diegetically, rather than, like, omnipotent God explaining how the whole region and all the languages work in there. So, I ended up thinking about, like, how can I make something that would work still like a conlang showcase?
But incorporate the language and the world into some kind of plot. "Plot", in quotes. Right. And so, I ended up coming with... I had this shell of a language that I had made before. And I was like, oh, cool. I'll develop that for this. And it turned into the whole formality thing when I was thinking of, oh, well, what if I was given the... The... The... The... Basics of the language. And then, turns out that was the informal version. And I've been rude to them the whole time.
And then that kind of snowballs as it does. Yeah, yeah. As it does. And I kind of kept thinking about, like, how can I take this formality thing, like, to the extreme while still being naturalistic? Naturalism is something that I really enjoy. And I haven't seen a ton of conlangs. It would go in the cursed category. That's, like, inherently naturalistic. So, I wanted to do something like that. So, I thought about formality and, like, relationships and things.
So, that's where I came up with the relationship forms for each of the names. It came from Japanese. Aka-chan, aka-kun, senpai. All of those kind of endings. And I was like, well, how can I push this to the extreme? And... That's when I thought about, oh, I can include that as part of the other things. And that's where the etymology of all of those verb forms and adjectival forms came from. So, I... It really started with the, like, tell a story as something that I wanted to do for a long time.
So, that's... I guess that's where that kind of came from. What I'm understanding is, like, you had the prompt, tell a story. And the idea was, how can you make the language itself the conflict of the story? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, from there, you decide, oh, we'll do a politeness system. And that becomes, like, a plot point in the thing. Because, you know, you have to actually learn the politeness system in order to interact with people. Right. Right.
And then, you make it cursed by adding layers of historical cruft to it. And, like, way too many forms to memorize. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tons of suppletion. Yeah. All of those things. All with the CV structure. Normal, quote, "normal" phonology. And, yeah, because, like, I had an idea of building on that with, like, oh, you know, what if I've gotten this far, but I've called this person the wrong form of their name.
And then I'm back to square one of, like, well, I don't know anything anymore. Yeah. But that was a great thing about that video, is that it just, like, keeps going. Yeah. Like, at first, it's like, okay, you get these notes from the Chinese researchers. And then you go to that dimension. And you find out, well, the sounds are a little bit different because they're tree people, but we'll just represent it this way.
And then, well, actually, I've been using informal forms the whole time, and I need to learn the correct forms in order to not offend people constantly. Yeah. And then from there, it's like, oh, okay, there's, like, this, like, historical underlayer to the politeness registers. And then there's some words that are always polite, always informal. And then it goes into, oh, and then these cyborg trees have a completely different register that cannot be understood by humans.
Yeah. Yeah. It just keeps going. Yeah. And going and snowballing. Yeah. And I think that that makes the story even better. Yeah. Part of the idea was, I want to make something that you have to keep going through different layers in order to get to the right meaning. And that's where the idioms came from as well. Because I wanted to kind of obscure meaning as much as possible while somehow staying, quote, naturalistic. Yeah. So we had all of the different...
So we had all of the different forms on anything, plus the polysynthesis of everything, plus all the idioms. I go through the steps. That's where that came from in the video. And, like, you say you don't actually know how many pronouns there are. I don't. Like, is there, like, is it an open class of pronouns? And you just, like, haven't made all of them? I just haven't made all of them. Yeah. Yeah. I've counted. I've counted. There has to be at least 600.
I've made... Actually, I don't know how many I've made. You can look on the, Lughati Portals website, slash 78H, in the pronouns section. And I've made all of the pronouns relative to the first and the second person. All the pronouns relative to the third person, I haven't made yet. Because, I mean, we haven't done enough research on those yet to... to... to put them down in the graph yet. Because they take so long.
Because I have to historically evolve each of them and think about their evolution of all those things and add supletion and add those exceptions and things. And I'm like, well, this... Is this a homonym of anything? It's a homonym of this word. Okay, what is this? Lots of... Lots of steps. So, there's at least 600. I have done the math to figure that out, at least. Yeah. Another thing about your work that I find interesting is you have a particular way of going about constructing scripts.
In that you basically... You say that you basically take a font and you just, like, change some things, delete some things, modify some things. Yeah, yeah. Can you talk about, like, how did you come up to that idea for making your scripts? Yeah, yeah. Not all of mine. Two of the languages in my next video are going to be, like, fully, like, I drew that. Stuff like that. But... So, I was doing that for a little bit. I was working... I use Birdfont, which is a font program.
It's free, which is incredible. And, like, that was all fine and good and I was doing that and it was fine. But I found that I'm not a vector artist by any means. I can draw, like, a handwritten font in Photoshop and then, you know, convert it to vectors. But if I wanted something that was a little more techie, per se, like the font in O'EAIĀ, you don't... You know, you can't just, like, write that out in Photoshop. That's not going to look techie enough, at least in my experience.
So, I was like, well, Birdfont allows me to import fonts to just look at and edit and do whatever I want with. So, I, you know, went on Google Fonts, fonts that are free for commercial personal use, commercial and personal use, I should say. And, you know, you look at their license and stuff and they're like, you can modify this font and use it however you want. So, I've been doing that. It's a lot easier for me because I'm, like I said, I'm not a vector artist.
And honestly, like, the fonts are so mangled to a point where, like, I had a couple of people find the original font for O'EAIĀ and they were like, this feels so weird looking at it in English because it just feels so different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, like, I imagine, like, you are finding... You're finding characters that... Oh, yeah. ...are approximate, like, approximately what you want in modifying them. But, like, the underlying system is, like, a fully realized conscript that you.
.. that is built for that language, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I make the script beforehand. Like, I scribble it out in Photoshop. I'm like, okay, this is this syllabic character or whatever, this shape because it came from this logogram or, you know, whatever the history is behind that. And then... I take that shape that I've decided is going to be the letter, the glyph is the correct term. And then I look at the font and all of the glyphs that are available to me in the font.
And I say, okay, which one of these can I modify the easiest to look like what I want it to look like? Generally, I'm able to get it close enough with... Sometimes with a lot of modification. But, yeah, it always starts with, like, this is what I want it to look like because this is where it historically came from. And then I modify stuff to make it look like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, if it's a process, it works. And that... I did not know that piece of it.
So, you are, like, doing the work of even drawing it out and doing the historical development of it. But then you take an existing font and you find something that you can turn into the character you already drew. Yeah. That's an interesting way to go about it. And something that, you know, maybe some other conlangers out there might want to do something similar. This can be an inspiration for people who want to get into making scripts. But are not...
I'm not as confident about free drawing in SVG programs. I know that I have some... First time in a long time doing a script. I did scripts earlier on, but let's not talk about that too much. But, like, for Ndăkaga, like, I intentionally was choosing something where I... where I would have limited, like, strokes that were easy to create in order to make that first script. Next one... Next one is for fae. Yeah. I'm not going to be able to do that kind of thing for myself. That sounds squiggly.
I'm going to have to... I'm going to have to think about what kind of aesthetic I'm going to do for that. But... Yeah. Depending on what you want, that seems like it can be an effective, like, method for doing it. So it's really interesting. And it's a different process than what I have seen other people do. Which is, you know, that's a great thing to highlight. Because there are many different ways to do conlanging. Like, do you... It seems like you do do some historical development.
You do, like... Historical method for conlanging. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, that's, like, probably my favorite part. Is, like, making a proto-language and then trying to see how I can get it to evolve in different ways. It's really fun. Yeah. But... Yeah. So... A lot of people do that. Not everybody. But, yeah. And it's interesting to see different ways of doing things. You did say... You have said... In... Before... That you tend to write your melodies first and then lyrics. Mm-hmm. And...
So, when you are writing the melody, are you still... Are you already thinking about, though, what kinds of melodic structures work best for the language you're going to put to it? Generally, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will think about, like, certain... Word patterns. Like, if I have... I have a language that's... The stress is always at the end of the word. Or the... Yeah. Like, the... The last syllable in the word, I should say.
So, I think about the melody and I'm like, okay, well, if I want this kind of melody to sound like this in this language, I need to make sure that I have words that will fit in that structure. So, it's a little bit of back and forth sometimes. But, for the most part, I do do the melody first. With that, at least broadly in mind. I...
It's a lot easier to get something sounding musical than it is to get something that sounds like... I have a text that I've already written and I need to put it to some kind of melody. At least in my workflow, it's easier to have the melody first. And then... Yeah. Get stuff that fits. Yeah. So... And then you can sort of... Write the lyrics to match it. But... That is interesting.
Sort of... I can imagine you talked earlier about, you know, if you have differences in vowel length, differences in syllable weight. Yeah. That can affect, like, you need to put some longer duration notes into there on those syllables. Or if you've got... I imagine, like, initial stress versus final stress. Mm-hmm. That would affect where you would put an accent in a line. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. Where it would go in the rhythm.
Yeah. If it's an on-beat, then that's going to sound more stressed. Even if the... It's said with equal stress. It being on an on-beat will feel more stressed. Right. Because of how we interpret rhythm and stuff. So... Yeah. Yeah. That's... Music theory. on Conlangery here. Yeah. Music theory. But it is... It is very interesting. Do you... So, I mean, you kind of mentioned, like, you want it to sound nice to humans.
But do you actually think about, like, whether these aliens have any differences in their own conception of music theory that would make it into your music? Yeah. Yeah. So, you were talking earlier about the cyborg register in ʻŌʻiʻeʻa. That video, I talk about the seven-tone pitch system that's in there. So, normally in... Normally in music theory, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 notes per octave. And that's just the standard for Western music. But...
You know, that's... It's not entirely an arbitrary number. Trying to put this back. It's not entirely an arbitrary number, but really, I mean, cultures can come up with any ways to divide the octave. So, 7 just made sense for them. They have base 8. So, all of their music is in this seven -tone system. So, they only have seven tones per octave instead of the 12 that we do. So, it might sound a little weird and wonky to us. So, it's 7 and not 8? Yeah. Okay. Oh.
So, it's like less than... So, it hits the octave at the seventh one? It hits the octave at the eighth one. Oh, okay. So, it's like A, B, C, D, E, F... Wait, yeah. E, F, A. Okay. But it's not those notes in the way that we would know them. Okay. But it's different from a diatonic scale. Let me Google diatonic scale. It's different from a major or minor scale. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. In a sense, yes. Because it's just those seven notes. There's no divisions of it.
As you can see, I am very well versed in music theory. No, it's fine. But, yeah, it is different. Yeah. So, that is interesting. Right. So, there's like a little bit of a difference in how they construct a scale. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so, that by itself can work. I was just interested because, yeah, you can have... I mean, there's lots of different scales in the real world, in our own various different cultures. There are different ideas about rhythm.
There tend to be some universals that I think probably would carry over. But there's a lot of variation, right? Yeah. I try to get that balance. Yeah. The song that we were playing earlier is a good example of the rhythm thing. That's in the... it's like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, four. And that pattern continues, which isn't very conventional in this in this dimension. Yeah, I figured that would be another example to pull out real quick.
Right, so one, two, one, two, three, four. It's fifteen. Fifteen. So it's like a 15/16 like thing? It can be interpreted as 15/16 sort of, but it's more like four beats, four beats, three beats, four beats. Okay. But it can also be interpreted as five beats of 3/4, or three beats of 5/4, depending on how the song is kind of structured rhythmically. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that kind of makes it sound at least like that three-four part makes it sound not as odd to us, but then still hits you with like, oh, oh, and you get that little otherworldly feel in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is interesting to just throw that in like a slightly different rhythmic structure that I don't think that's super common to take out that... that particular way. If it is, I've not heard of it. Yeah, but yeah, let's... well it's been interesting talking to you.
And yeah, we're recording this beforehand. I don't know what the result of... the Cursed Conlang Circus is going to be, but good luck on that part. And good luck with your channel. Thank you. It seems like it's... Yeah. It's doing very well right now, but it's, you know, it's a process. It's a process. It takes a while. But it was really great to talk to you about your music and about how you fit conlangs into it. Anything, any last thoughts you have? Anything you want to point people to?
Anything I want to point people to. Let's see, I've, I've got a new video coming. I guess I will. Yeah, I'll talk about this. I got a new video coming out. Probably February. I'm not sure yet. By the time this video comes out, hopefully I will be more sure. But it will be a continuation of the same kind of format that I did in in the Cursed Conlang Circus video. I'm making that into a series and I'm going to have a bunch of music that I'm going to play. That comes out with each episode.
At least that's the plan right now. So keep an eye out for that. I'm working on a lot of stuff, a lot of music, lots of conlang stuff. Are we going to have more of you as as your bird avatar shifting to different dimensions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm hoping that there will be an overarching plot. That is that is kind of the plan right now. On something for that. But the. We'll see, that's currently in the, in the in the works. That's that's great.
Well, any any final thoughts for for for everyone out there? Any advice you have to other colleagues, maybe advice to other musicians who want to write conlang music? Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. If you. Oh, advice. If you want to, if you want to make something, like, Google it, search it up on YouTube or something like chances are there's there's going to be something out there for it.
Because like, I didn't know conlanging was like a thing until I, after like 10 years or whatever, actually searched it up and found so much stuff. And now I'm making stuff that I wouldn't have thought to make before. So there's the whole internet of resources out there as long as you have an internet connection. So if you want to make something, search it up. Someone's probably already taught you how. Yeah, that's, that's definitely my take on things.
Or maybe things, maybe sometimes things come to you. Because like, I like, I started, I started making some of my own music a little bit. I just do instrumental stuff. I haven't done conlang stuff with it. Yeah, I've heard it. Yeah. But that was just from me getting suggested music theory videos on YouTube, and then going down a rabbit hole. And I'm like, I'm just gonna write some stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's fun. I'm always making stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, that's really good advice.
And thank you ZeWei for coming on. Thank you. Go to, go, go to find ZeWei on YouTube. If you're watching this on YouTube, I'll have, have the, the, the channel, like, added there. But, yeah, thank you for coming on. And happy conlanging. Thank you for having me. Happy conlanging. Special thanks to my patrons on Patreon. If you go over there right now, you can get early access to episodes. You can get access to scripts for my solo episodes.
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