Ferrele

Dothraki is where GoT really hooked me, and now I adore the entire series! I'm an undergrad linguistics student at UC Berkeley and one of the current officers of the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS), carrying on your legacy. I've been conlanging a couple of years now and have gotten into it recently with our club too. So I have a few questions:

1) What tips would you give to a conlanger? What about a club hoping to conlang?

2) What's your favourite phoneme?

3) Which is awesomer: Phonology or syntax?

4) Who were your favourite linguistics professors at Berkeley?

5) If you're ever in the Bay Area and feel like visiting your alma mater, SLUgS would be thrilled if you came to talk to us!

Thanks for doing this IAmA, it's really exciting!

Whoooaaa that's so cool!

(4) I (for obvious reasons) have never had Ohala or McWhorter, but Garrett is certainly one of my favourites. So very cool - Keith Johnson told us a lot about Ohala and, of course, we've read him.

(3) :(

(5) I'll message you our email so when you think you might have time! The old name makes more sense. No one ever gets SLUgS right. Hmm...

(2) Sweet, that is a pretty great sound.

(1) That's really useful, thanks. Collaborating is really difficult indeed (especially with a bunch of linguists who all have linguistic features they adore that aren't really natural together), so it's a bit of a struggle for an activity. But for individual, that definitely makes more sense than just getting a list of phonemes and a random phonological rule or two and going for it.

Thanks for answering!

(3) Alright, alright, I can accept M people.

(5) I think some people really want to! Perhaps one day.....