(c) 2007-2008 Jim Henry III
Glossotechnia is a card game in which the players collaboratively create a new language, and attempt to translate certain challenge sentences into this game-language. It combines competitive and cooperative elements, and probably has potential for use in teaching certain concepts in linguistics, though this aspect hasn't been tested yet.
There are two separate decks of cards: the main deck and the challenge deck. The main deck consists primarily of Phoneme cards (k, t, p, a, i, u, etc.), Syllable onset and rime cards (onsets describe the consonant or cluster at the beginning of a syllable; rime cards describe the vowel and what consonants are allowed to follow it), and Syntax cards (Subject-Verb-Object, Verb-Subject-Object, Head-Modifier, Modifier-Head, etc.). There are also a few Sound Change, Grammar Change and Meaning Change cards. These allow a player to do things like split one phoneme in two or merge two phonemes into one; replace one phoneme with another; add or drop inflections; or extend or restrict meanings of words. A few Action cards round out the deck, allowing players to do things like look through the deck or the discard pile for a card they want, or discard their translation challenge card and draw another.
Then there is are the translation challenge decks — a Subject deck and a Predicate deck; each player draws one card from each deck to form a randomly generated translation challenge sentence. Hopefully all the subjects and all the predicates are of roughly similar complexity (in terms of number of words and average concreteness or abstractness of the words).
At the beginning of the game, each deck is separately shuffled. Then each player is dealt one Subject card and one Predicate card. A player may discard the challenge dealt and draw another one, if it seems too hard or if they have been dealt the same subject or predicate or both in a recent game or if they just feel like it, but if so they must stick with whatever they draw the second time. Another translation challenge sentence is dealt face up, a common goal for all players to work on together.
Each player is dealt four cards from the main deck, and play begins with the player to the dealer's left, going clockwise. [If there are only two or three players, it would probably be better to deal five or six cards to each player rather than four; and if seven or more players, perhaps each should start with only three cards.]
On each turn, a player draws one card, plays one card if possible, and coins a new word if possible. (However, use of Action or Sound Change cards may modify this procedure on a given turn.)
If you cannot play a card (for instance, if your hand consists entirely of Phoneme cards and the maximum number of phonemes is in play, or if all you have is Sound Change cards and there are no phonemes in play yet), you must discard one card after drawing a card. Alternatively, you could discard your entire hand and draw as many cards again as you had at the start of your turn.
When you play a Phoneme or Syllable card it goes face-up in the middle of the table. The Phoneme cards in play should be arranged in a phoneme table, i.e. with all the plosive consonants in one column, all the nasal consonants in another, etc., with the vowels in two or three columns (front, central and back vowels) a short distance from the consonants; the sounds pronounced toward the front of the mouth (labial, labiodental, dental, etc) should be placed at the top of each column and the sounds pronounced toward the back of the mouth (palatal, velar, glottal) at the bottom. Phonemic Contrast cards are placed near the vowels or the consonants they affect. Syllable onset and rime cards should be arranged in a column or row from simplest to most complex. Unless a Sound Change card is used, any Phoneme or Syllable card played simply adds to the phoneme inventory or phonotactics of the game language; it does not change anything already present.
Syntax cards are also placed face up on the table, some little distance from the Phoneme and Syllable card arrays. Unless a Secondary Word Order card is used, any Syntax card played replaces an existing Syntax card of the same kind, causing the old Syntax card to go into the discard pile. So, for instance, Verb-Subject-Object would replace Subject-Verb-Object, Modifier-Head would replace Head-Modifier, and Postpositional would replace Prepositional. Any Typology card played (Isolating, Fusional, Agglutinative and Polysynthetic) also replaces the existing Typology card, if any. (The default typology at the start of the game is mostly isolating, mildly agglutinative.)
Action, Sound Change, Grammar Change, and Meaning Change cards all go into the discard pile after they are played (unless the instructions on the card specify otherwise). Some Sound Change cards can cause Phoneme, Syllable onset or rime, or Phonemic Contrast cards already in play to go into the discard pile.
If there are Phoneme cards in play, and Syllable onset/rime cards in play which allow these phonemes to be used together, a player can also coin a word on their turn (after drawing and playing a card). They say the word, and demonstrate its meaning to the other players by using charades, miming, pointing out examples, drawing pictures, making nonverbal sounds, or using previously coined words of the game-language. Use of English [or whatever languages the players are fluent in] is allowed as a last resort if the player cannot make the meaning of their new word understood by other means, but carries a penalty: the player to their right draws a card at random from the English-using player's hand, and discards it, reducing the size of the player's hand by one. On the other hand, if a player makes the meaning of their word understood exclusively by using the game language, with no pointing, charades, pictures, etc., they get to draw another card at the end of their turn, increasing the size of their hand.
There is a similar bonus for the player who first translates the group's challenge sentence — they get to draw an extra card, increasing their hand size.
Once the other players have correctly guessed the basic meaning of the current player's new word, that player may further clarify its meaning in English.
Words coined must use only the phonemes in play and the syllable forms in play. So if it's the second round and people have so far played the k, n, i and o Phoneme cards, the C Syllable onset card, and the V and VN Syllable rime cards, you could coin words like "ni", "kino", "nik", "konin", "nonki", etc.
If later on the "e" card is played, and later someone plays a "Phoneme Merge" card to discard the "i" and say that /i/ merges into /e/, then words already coined with "i" in them change it to "e": "keno", "nek", "konen", etc. Most other Sound Change cards also affect the form of existing words. Sound Change cards that substitute one phoneme for another, whether everywhere or in certain contexts, require the two phonemes to match on at least one feature. If you aren't sure what this means, you can look at the featural descriptions found on the phoneme cards. For instance the /m/ card has the description "bilabial nasal"; if you have it in your hand, along with a Sound Shift card, you could substitute it for any phoneme already in play whose descriptive caption contains either the feature "bilabial" (such as /b/ or /p/) or "nasal" (such as /n/ or /ŋ/). Players may wish to require more realistic sound changes by, for instance, insisting that substituted phonemes must match on all features but one (so you couldn't, for instance, change any rounded vowel to any other rounded vowel, regardless of their points of articulation).
If a Fusional, Agglutinative, or Polysynthetic Typology card is played, after that, players may choose (or be obliged) to coin an affix or mutation rather than a new word on their turn. Players demonstrate (or describe in the game language) the use and meaning of the new affix or mutation with two or more existing words. For instance, if /ger/ and /tlim/ have already been defined to mean "cat" and "sword" respectively, a player might draw pictures of several cats and several swords, captioned /liger/ and /litlim/, to demonstrate the use of a new pluralizing prefix.
One player should be designated the Lexicographer, and keep a dictionary of the words and affixes coined so far. If on paper, this lexicon should leave some blank space in each entry for alterations of the sound or meaning of words caused by Sound Change or Meaning Change cards played later on.
When the main deck has been used up, the discard pile is reshuffled and turned over to become the new draw pile.
In a traditional game of charades, one is trying to get one's fellow players to guess at an English word or phrase, or perhaps a proper name. One strategy is to break it up into syllables or other sub-parts which are, or sound like, other words, and do successive charades for each syllable. However, this strategy doesn't fit very well with the spirit of Glossotechnia; here, you are trying to get your fellow players to figure out the meaning of your newly coined word, not the English word or words that could be used to translate it. That is the whole point of using pictures, charades and so forth instead of simply defining your words in English.
A player wins by being the first to translate their translation challenge sentence into the game-language in such a way that the other players understand what is being said. However, no one can win with their private challenge until the group challenge (placed face up at the beginning of the game) has been translated.
Alternatively, after a player has translated their challenge sentence into the game language, they draw another pair of challenge cards and play continues; the winner is the player who has translated the most challenge sentences by the time external circumstances force an end to the game. In this form, the group's challenge sentence is collected by the player who first translates it, and is replaced in the center of the table by another face-up common challenge Subject/Predicate pair.
The purpose of the game, as distinct from the rule for determining the winner, is to have fun exploring the possibilities of language. Try to make the sounds and meanings of words, and the grammatical structure of the language, different from English in interesting ways.
The complexity of language can't be compassed in a few pages of rules and a hundred-odd cards. At points where the cards in play don't specify the structure of the game-language, don't just default to the way English does something; feel free to propose and discuss other possibilities. For instance, the Syntax cards specify the typical way that Subject, Verb, and Object are ordered in a sentence; there are only six ways to order these parts and the cards can enumerate all of them. But what exactly is a Subject, or Object, or Verb, in this language? Are adjectives a kind of verb or a distinct part of speech? Are numbers treated like adjectives or verbs or a separate class of their own? Does the language have articles and if so, how may they/must they be used? What parts of speech, if any, must agree with what others? There are far too many possibilities for a few cards to enumerate them all; devise your own answers in every game.
The Phoneme cards consist of most of the phonemes of English, plus a few which many Americans will have a nodding acquaintance with from high school German, French or Spanish classes. Some of the most common phonemes in the world's languages occur more than once in the deck.
The exact deck composition — what cards occur more than once and how many cards of different kinds there are in the deck — is subject to change after further playtesting, and modification for particular groups of gamers — for instance, a simpler version for children, and a more complex version for linguists and conlangers. The cards currently in my decks are listed and described here.
In quick start mode, one begins a game by shuffling the main deck, going through it and laying out facedown the first two consonants, the first two vowels, the first syllable onset and the first syllable rime cards that appear; then reshuffling the deck before dealing each player their hand. This saves time because players (probably) don't have to wait for Phoneme and Syllable cards to be played before they can start coining words.
In accordance with the apparent linguistic universal that all languages have CV syllables, you could allow coining words with CV syllables even if no Syllable onset or rime cards are in play. Perhaps with this rule you would remove the simple C onset and V rime cards from the deck, and not lay out any syllable cards when doing a quick start. The C and V cards appear in my decks multiple times and it's near inevitable that they will turn up before long, if used.
There can be a phoneme inventory limit: a maximum number of phonemes which can be in play at a given time. If this rule is used, the initial limit is set by rolling three six-sided dice and adding twelve (for a range of 15 to 30 phonemes); the limit can be changed during play by certain Sound Change cards which increase or decrease the limit. If the maximum number of phonemes is already in play and a Decrease Phoneme Limit card is played, one or two phoneme cards in play are discarded, and the player whose turn it is specifies what other existing phonemes they merge with. If this rule isn't used, the Increase/Decrease Phoneme Limit cards are removed from the deck.
If the maximum number of phonemes is already in play, a Phonemic Contrast card may not be played; and if the phoneme inventory is near the limit, a contrast card's effect is limited to a certain subset of phonemes, specified by the player placing it down. E.g., if there are 15 phonemes in play and the current limit is 20, a new voicing contrast might be limited to the nasal consonants instead of affecting all consonants.
A time limit per turn (probably at least one minute, maybe two minutes) can be set. If the word-coining player cannot get the other players to understand the intended meaning of their word via charades, pictures, etc. by the end of their turn, the other players confer and decide what the word is to mean. In this version, no use of English is allowed except with a Free Pass card. This rule variation can also be used without a hard time limit; when the word-coining player gives up trying to make themselves understood or the other players give up trying to understand them, the other players come to a consensus on what the word means, based on their guesses so far.
Main Glossotechnia index page
Glossotechnia deck composition
Main Conlang page
My home page
Last modified March 2008