some questions, excerpted from describing …

some questions, excerpted from describing … Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Ling 98/198: Constructing Languages DE-Cal Spring 2006, UC Berkeley By Sai Emrys, a.k.a. Ilya Starikov – conlangs_decal@saizai.com ~conlangs_decal/info Table of Contents NOTES ON THIS READER ...................................................................................................................................... 7 CXS/IPA CHART.......................................................................................................................................................... 8 CLASS SYLLABUS...................................................................................................................................................... 9 GENESIS 11:1-10 ........................................................................................................................................................ 17 CONLANGER’S MANIFESTO .............................................................................................................................. 19 THE CONSTRUCTION OF LAADAN................................................................................................................. 25 TASTE FOR MAKERS ............................................................................................................................................. 29 EXCERPT FROM DESCRIBING MORPHOSYNTAX: A GUIDE FOR FIELD LINGUISTS........... 39 MODEL LANGUAGES NEWSLETTER............................................................................................................. 51 ON THE DESIGN OF AN IDEAL LANGUAGE .............................................................................................149 GOOD GLOSSES......................................................................................................................................................159 HOW TO MAKE GOOD GLOSSES ...................................................................................................................161 APOLOGIA PRO IMAGINATIONE ..................................................................................................................167 GLOSSOPOEIA FOR FUN AND PROFIT .......................................................................................................171 NOTES ON LANGUAGE CREATION AND ERGATIVITY ......................................................................179 THE LANGUAGE CREATION KIT ..................................................................................................................213 WHAT IS WRITING?..............................................................................................................................................243 HOW TO CREATE A LANGUAGE ....................................................................................................................297 CONLANG ERRORS ..............................................................................................................................................347 - 1 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Detailed table of contents NOTES ON THIS READER ...................................................................................................................................... 7 CXS/IPA CHART.......................................................................................................................................................... 8 CLASS SYLLABUS...................................................................................................................................................... 9 SYNOPSIS:..................................................................................................................................................................... 9 TIMING:....................................................................................................................................................................... 10 GRADING .................................................................................................................................................................... 10 GOALS: WHAT YOU SHOULD GET OUT OF THIS CLASS ......................................................................................... 10 LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND ...................................................................................................................................... 11 COURSE WEBSITE / LJ COMMUNITY ...................................................................................................................... 11 SOME OTHER USEFUL SITES...................................................................................................................................... 11 READER/SYLLABUS: ................................................................................................................................................. 13 TEXTS / READING MATERIALS:................................................................................................................................ 13 THE FINAL PROJECT / RESEARCH PAPER ............................................................................................................... 14 SCHEDULE: ................................................................................................................................................................. 15 GENESIS 11:1-10 ........................................................................................................................................................ 17 CONLANGER’S MANIFESTO .............................................................................................................................. 19 MANIFESTO ................................................................................................................................................................ 19 THE ARTLANGER’S RANT......................................................................................................................................... 20 THE CONSTRUCTION OF LAADAN................................................................................................................. 25 TASTE FOR MAKERS ............................................................................................................................................. 29 EXCERPT FROM DESCRIBING MORPHOSYNTAX: A GUIDE FOR FIELD LINGUISTS........... 39 MODEL LANGUAGES NEWSLETTER............................................................................................................. 51 PREFACE ...................................................................................................................................................................... 51 VOLUME I, ISSUE 1 -- MAY 1, 1995 ........................................................................................................................... 53 An introduction to the hobby of model languages ......................................................................................... 53 Different types of model languages .................................................................................................................. 54 This newsletter's goals........................................................................................................................................ 55 VOLUME I, ISSUE 2 -- JUNE 1, 1995 ......................................................................................................................... 57 Inventing a language for naming people and places .................................................................................... 57 Language change ................................................................................................................................................ 57 An ancestral language -- the grandmother tongue........................................................................................ 58 Sound ..................................................................................................................................................................... 59 Sound change ....................................................................................................................................................... 61 Spelling ................................................................................................................................................................. 64 Words ..................................................................................................................................................................... 65 Grammar .............................................................................................................................................................. 65 Proper names ....................................................................................................................................................... 65 Place names ......................................................................................................................................................... 67 Example - quickly create your own naming languages ................................................................................ 70 GYMNASTICS WITH ONOMASTICS............................................................................................................................... 73 Structure of names............................................................................................................................................... 73 Patronymics: in the name of the father............................................................................................................ 74 Forming first names first ................................................................................................................................... 75 Forming family names........................................................................................................................................ 76 Forming names of nations ................................................................................................................................. 77 Cultural attitudes towards names..................................................................................................................... 78 VOLUME I, ISSUE 3 (2/2) -- JULY 1, 1995 ............................................................................................................... 80 Possibilities and purposes for model languages............................................................................................ 80 - 3 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Classifying by scope ........................................................................................................................................... 81 Classifying by time-frame of speakers............................................................................................................. 81 Classifying model languages............................................................................................................................. 82 Naming languages............................................................................................................................................... 83 Alternate languages ............................................................................................................................................ 83 Future languages................................................................................................................................................. 84 Auxiliary languages ............................................................................................................................................ 84 VOLUME I, ISSUE 4 -- AUGUST 1, 1995 .................................................................................................................. 85 Meaning change .................................................................................................................................................. 86 Categories of semantic change ......................................................................................................................... 90 Meaning change across languages .................................................................................................................. 99 Meaning change through time .......................................................................................................................... 99 VOLUME I, ISSUE 5 -- SEPTEMBER 1, 1995 ..........................................................................................................103 Sen:esepera -- A Reform Of Esperanto .........................................................................................................103 VOLUME I, ISSUE 6 (1/2) -- OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1, 1995...............................................................................111 Meaning ..............................................................................................................................................................111 The bother of brother........................................................................................................................................114 Translations (meanings across languages)...................................................................................................116 Prototypes for the birds ....................................................................................................................................118 Kinship Terms ....................................................................................................................................................120 VOLUME I, ISSUE 6 (2/2) -- OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1, 1995...............................................................................120 ON TOLKIEN ..............................................................................................................................................................130 Chronological development of tolkien's principal model languages .......................................................131 Characteristics of the Middle-Earth languages...........................................................................................133 For further reading ...........................................................................................................................................138 EMULATING TOLKIEN ...............................................................................................................................................140 ON THE DESIGN OF AN IDEAL LANGUAGE .............................................................................................149 PRINCIPLE OF LEAST EFFORT.................................................................................................................................150 PRINCIPLE OF SEMANTIC DENSITY .......................................................................................................................150 PRINCIPLE OF DESIRED CLARITY ..........................................................................................................................151 PRINCIPLE OF DEFAULT SIMPLICITY .....................................................................................................................152 PRINCIPLE OF ICONICITY ........................................................................................................................................152 PRINCIPLE OF CROSS-MODALITY .........................................................................................................................152 PRINCIPLE OF SEMANTIC CONSERVATION ............................................................................................................153 TEMPORAL ORDER ..................................................................................................................................................154 ANALOG VS. QUANTUM DESCRIPTORS ................................................................................................................154 PURPOSELY WASTING SPACE .................................................................................................................................155 COMBINING/UTILIZING INPUT STREAMS .............................................................................................................155 GOOD GLOSSES......................................................................................................................................................159 HOW TO MAKE GOOD GLOSSES ...................................................................................................................161 APOLOGIA PRO IMAGINATIONE ..................................................................................................................167 GLOSSOPOEIA FOR FUN AND PROFIT .......................................................................................................171 NOTES ON LANGUAGE CREATION AND ERGATIVITY ......................................................................179 PREFACE ...................................................................................................................................................................179 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................180 ERGATIVITY..............................................................................................................................................................183 Introducing Terms .............................................................................................................................................183 Introducing Some Test Words ..........................................................................................................................184 The Pristine System...........................................................................................................................................185 A Pristine Nominative-Accusative System ...................................................................................................... 185 A Pristine Ergative-Absolutive System............................................................................................................ 188 Syntactic Ergativity ...........................................................................................................................................190 - 4 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 A Pristine Syntactic Nominative-Accusative System....................................................................................... 190 A Pristine Syntactic Ergative-Absolutive System ............................................................................................ 191 Split-Sensitivity ..................................................................................................................................................192 Tense-Based Split-Ergativity ........................................................................................................................... 192 Pronominally-Based Split-Ergativity .............................................................................................................. 194 Semantically-Based Split-Ergativity ............................................................................................................... 197 Animacy-Based Split-Ergativity ...................................................................................................................... 201 Mixing Systems ..................................................................................................................................................204 Something Else to Consider: Ditransitives ...................................................................................................205 Impossibilities ....................................................................................................................................................207 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................................................210 References and Thanks .....................................................................................................................................210 THE LANGUAGE CREATION KIT ..................................................................................................................213 MODELS ....................................................................................................................................................................213 Natural and unnatural languages ..................................................................................................................213 Non-Western (or at least non-English) models ............................................................................................213 SOUNDS.....................................................................................................................................................................213 Types of consonants ..........................................................................................................................................214 Inventing consonants ........................................................................................................................................215 Vowels .................................................................................................................................................................216 Stress ...................................................................................................................................................................217 Tone .....................................................................................................................................................................218 Phonological constraints .................................................................................................................................218 Alien mouths.......................................................................................................................................................219 ALPHABETS ..............................................................................................................................................................220 Orthography.......................................................................................................................................................220 An example .........................................................................................................................................................220 Diacritics ............................................................................................................................................................222 Fancier writing systems ...................................................................................................................................222 WORD BUILDING......................................................................................................................................................222 How many words do you need? ......................................................................................................................222 Alien or a priori languages .............................................................................................................................224 A few half-recognizable borrowings ..............................................................................................................224 Languages based on existing languages .......................................................................................................225 Sound symbolism ...............................................................................................................................................225 Some guidelines for not reinventing the English vocabulary ....................................................................226 GRAMMAR ................................................................................................................................................................226 Is your language inflecting, agglutinating, or isolating?...........................................................................227 Do you have nouns, verbs, and adjectives? ..................................................................................................227 How do you indicate plural, case, and gender forms of adjectives and nouns? ....................................228 Do nouns have gender?....................................................................................................................................229 Does the verb inflect by person, gender, and/or number? .........................................................................230 What distinctions are made in the verb? .......................................................................................................230 What are the personal pronouns? ..................................................................................................................231 What are the other pronouns? ........................................................................................................................231 What are the numbers? ....................................................................................................................................232 What about adjectives? ....................................................................................................................................233 Are there articles (a, the)?...............................................................................................................................233 What order do the various components of a noun phrase appear in? .....................................................234 What order do the various components of a sentence appear in? ............................................................234 How do you form a relative clause (the man who...)? ................................................................................234 How do you form yes-no questions? ..............................................................................................................236 How about other questions?............................................................................................................................236 How do you negate a sentence?......................................................................................................................236 How do conjunctions work? ............................................................................................................................237 - 5 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 STYLE........................................................................................................................................................................237 Politeness............................................................................................................................................................238 Poetry ..................................................................................................................................................................238 LANGUAGE FAMILIES..............................................................................................................................................239 How do you do it? .............................................................................................................................................240 Dialects ...............................................................................................................................................................241 WHAT IS WRITING?..............................................................................................................................................243 NUMERALS IN MANY DIFFERENT WRITING SYSTEMS..........................................................................................246 ARABIC SCRIPT ........................................................................................................................................................247 SUTTON SIGNWRITING ...........................................................................................................................................251 KOREAN ....................................................................................................................................................................253 MONGOLIAN ALPHABETS .......................................................................................................................................257 DEVANāGARī ALPHABET ........................................................................................................................................262 JAPANESE HIRAGANA .............................................................................................................................................264 JAPANESE KATAKANA .............................................................................................................................................267 CHINESE....................................................................................................................................................................269 HOW THE CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM WORKS .....................................................................................................273 SIMPLIFIED CHINESE CHARACTERS ......................................................................................................................275 BLISSYMBOLICS.......................................................................................................................................................276 TENGWAR .................................................................................................................................................................278 BRAILLE....................................................................................................................................................................282 BRAILLE FOR CHINESE ...........................................................................................................................................284 12480 ALPHANUMERIC SYSTEM ...........................................................................................................................286 BETAMAZE ALPHABET ............................................................................................................................................289 IHATHVÉ SABETHIRED ............................................................................................................................................291 SUNSCRIPT................................................................................................................................................................294 HOW TO CREATE A LANGUAGE ....................................................................................................................297 SOUNDS.....................................................................................................................................................................298 STRESS AND PITCH ..................................................................................................................................................306 TONE .........................................................................................................................................................................307 PHONOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS..............................................................................................................................307 SOUND CHANGE .......................................................................................................................................................308 HARMONY ................................................................................................................................................................311 SANDHI OR MUTATION............................................................................................................................................313 WRITING YOUR LANGUAGE ...................................................................................................................................314 GRAMMAR ................................................................................................................................................................317 NOUNS ......................................................................................................................................................................321 ADJECTIVES..............................................................................................................................................................323 VERBS .......................................................................................................................................................................325 CONJUNCTIONS ........................................................................................................................................................329 ARTICLES..................................................................................................................................................................330 ADPOSITIONS AND PARTICLES ...............................................................................................................................330 SYNTAX ....................................................................................................................................................................331 MORPHOSYNTACTIC TYPOLOGY ...........................................................................................................................335 ANALOGY .................................................................................................................................................................339 GRAMMATICAL DEVICES ........................................................................................................................................340 CREATING WORDS ...................................................................................................................................................341 FINAL WORDS...........................................................................................................................................................343 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...........................................................................................................................................344 CONLANG ERRORS ..............................................................................................................................................347 - 6 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Notes on this reader This reader contains nearly the entire corpus of well-known essays and introductory material worth reading published on the subject of conlangs in general, plus several minor essays (like mine) and related items (like the Omniglot pages). There is, however, a lot more available – serious stuff, even – on newsgroups, mailing lists, and other media. There is hardly any print literature at this point – not including that which is about some ‏‏ük and its offshoots, like Esperanto - and what there is, is particular conlang, mainly Volap (alas) not terribly good nor complimentary. Thus, nearly everything good is online. So here it is, in print. You are responsible for having read and understood the syllabus. I will not go over it in detail except as necessary; I assume that you are all literate people. If you have any questions about the course, the grading requirements, etc., please let me know before they become a problem. Most of this reader is for your benefit, not for ―homework‖. You can skip reading it if you don’t want to (or delay doing so until months from now) – but you’ll be missing out on a lot of good stuff that will seriously help your conlanging. I would advise that you at least page through each of the major entries, and read the shorter ones (e.g. Taste for Makers and Conlang Errors) in their entirety. I will try to refer to reader articles in class, but I won’t be assigning them explicitly. Many sections will be pretty obviously synchronistic with what we are currently covering in class. If you do read something in here that you have questions about or comments on, or that you think is relevant to class discussion, by all means bring it up during class and share. Nearly all of the authors included here have written other works, many of which I strongly recommend you go find and read. Some parts of this reader have been copied directly from their webpages. I have tried to edit them to look decent in print, but I may have missed some parts. Also, I may have edited, deleted, reformatted (to 12 pt black-text Times New Roman), or other revised parts; however, I have not changed anything of substance. Links present in the online version were removed by the transition. As always, look at the originals if you want the up-to-date version. The ones in this reader are current as of 1/21/05. All materials in this reader are (or might be) ?, ? or even ? of their respective authors, and are reprinted with personal permission where applicable. All materials for this class, including those in the reader, to which I (Sai) own copyright are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, version 2.0. , so long as it is for non-commercial use, I get credit (and preferably an email about it), and any derivative works are published under the same license. For all other uses, including ambiguous cases, I reserve all copyright. Contact me if you have any questions about this. - 7 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 CLASS SYLLABUS [Last Modified: 1/24/05 8:24PM PST] Constructing Languages: Applied Seminar DE-Cal - Ling 98/198 SPRING 2006 Units: 0-2 (see below) When: TBD, 1-2 hr/week (see below) Where: TBA Facilitator: saizai - Sai Emrys / Ilya Starikov (just call me Sai) 4th yr. CogSci email: conlangs@saizai.com URL: ~conlangs_decal Office hours: Office? What office? If you want to talk to me in person outside of class, do so before or after class (hopefully I’ll be there early most days). If that doesn’t work, contact me and we’ll arrange something. Sponsoring Professor (second year running!): Leanne Hinton, Chair, Linguistics Dept. Synopsis: Constructed languages (conlangs) - a.k.a. "artificial languages", etc - include a wide variety of languages. Esperanto, Klingon, Quenya, Loglan / Lojban, Signed Exact English, proto-Indo-European, and many many others are all conlangs. Arguably, this list includes Received English, Korean, and Turkish as well. This class will be about designing your own language, mostly from the bottom up. We will work on a class language together, using ideas from various students, as you create (or continue to work on) your own languages at home (and discuss them in class). The class will not cover the history or theory of conlangs, nor formal linguistics, except as necessary. The main focus will be on actually getting ―into it‖ – starting from day one – and learning what you need as you go. If you are interested in these more in-depth topics, talk to me. There is plenty of material available, including some videos from the previous year’s class, and books in the library. - 9 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 No linguistic background is necessary for this class, though it will certainly be useful. Likewise, reading through the reader will be very useful (especially for those new to conlanging), as will be reading the recommended text, though these are both optional. This class will be run in a manner fairly different from last year’s Conlangs DE-Cal – less intense, and more hands-on. Last year’s was closer in scope to a full Ling 1 or Ling 101 class. Returning students MAY take this class for credit again, but will need to do a new final project, or an expansion to their previous year’s. Talk to me if this applies to you. Timing: This class will generally meet two hours a week. If the enrollment of students interested in taking 2 units is too low, then this will be reduced to one hour a week. On a side note: I am graduating in May, and obviously won’t be around to teach the class any more after that. If you are interested in taking over from me, please let me know. If you have knowledge of linguistics or conlangs, you are very much welcome to teach some of the classes in my stead – using my notes if you like (and can decipher them). Grading: This is a variable-unit, pass / no pass class. There is no difference between the 98 and 198 versions; choose whichever you prefer. To get 1 unit: Show up most of the time – enough for me to know your name when they ask me whether or not you passed. That’s it. To get 2 units: Attend class regularly, and do the final project (which you’ll be doing the work for over the course of the semester anyway) at a level that shows effort. Again: simple. (How to get a NP grade: don't show up to class a lot; don't turn in the final project, or turn in work that's clearly BS; plagiarize; lie; etc. You know how. Don't. I will give a grade of “incomplete” for honest students who simply haven’t finished the work [or want more time to do it]; I will NP you without compunction if you are dishonest.) If, for whatever reason, you want fewer units than you qualify for – e.g. 1 if you’re doing the final project, or 0 for anyone – we can do that. You do need to decide relatively early on in the semester how many units you want (e.g. before the add deadline); it is difficult to change later on. Goals: What you should get out of this class - 10 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 On finishing this class, you will be well on your way to having your very own language. Obviously, it is not possible to get something that complex ―finished‖ in one semester, but you’ll have started. If you've done the final project, then you will probably have done even more on your language – complete with its own phonology, morphology, syntax, and all the rest. You will have had some experience translating from English to your new language, including the Babel text. Now, what other class can give you that to take away from the experience? Linguistic Background This is not a class on introductory linguistics. However, it *is* a class with no linguistics knowledge prerequisite. If you know nothing about modern formal linguistics, you will probably want to take more time to read up on basics, such as the IPA, the meanings of basic terminology such as phone, phoneme, morpheme, syntax, etc., and anything else you don't understand. We will cover some of this in class, but mainly from a perspective of use and application rather than theory and description. You will probably find an introductory text on linguistics, such as Language Files or Contemporary Linguistics, very useful. If you don’t have one and aren’t already very familiar with introductory linguistics concepts, get one. Course Website / LJ Community This course's website is ~conlangs_decal (same as last year). You will need a LiveJournal (LJ) account; these are free and easy to create - visit community must have your legal name (whatever Cal thinks it is) associated with it. If you already have a LJ account which you don't want to have identified with your legal name, you can post under a different account, or simply identify yourself by legal name only on the (screened) signup form. If you have any problem with this requirement, please talk to me. All course material (inasmuch as possible) will be posted to the LJ community, so it would be in your best interests to monitor it. You might also benefit from it as a discussion forum, and a place to have your work peer-reviewed (and give your own rants/raves to others). Some other useful sites General Conlangs Sites - 11 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , ~conlangs - the general-purpose LJ conlangs community , ;the" conlang mailing list, hosted by Brown U. , - Conlang Profiles at Langmaker. Also has a huge amount of other links and resources. , - Omniglot, a guide to writing systems (natural and onstructed) , Theory & Essays , ~ram/essays.html - Essays on language creation by Rick Morneau, including Lexical Semantics of a Machine Translation Interlingua (most of these are general-audience; LSoaMTI is a bit more diffiuclt, but doesn't require an excessive linguistics background to understand) , ;How to make good glosses", by Paul Hoffman , , by Jeffrey Henning , by myself (saizai) about various design ideas, particularly On the Design of an Ideal Language , ;s Manifesto, by David Peterson , , by Boudewjin Rempt Linguistics Sites , - the Rosetta Project - a free online database of every documented human language , Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) , (PNG image) or (text) - how to write the IPA in plaintext (using CXS, the Conlang-modified X-Sampa method) , , um, glossary of linguistic terms. Pretty straightforward. Specific Conlangs' Sites , (1100+) list of conlangs with links to websites describing them , , probably the best resource on JRR Tolkein's conlangs , - the Klingon Language Institute , - Lojban/Loglan - 12 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , , by John Quijada , , ~srice/solresol/intro.htm - Solresol Language-creation resources , , ;How to create a language", by Pablo David Flores , - Kwet (by Paul Hoffman), a rules-based random word generator A, Reader/Syllabus: I'm a student, and like "poet", that abbreviates to "po'". I can't afford to print out syllabi - or other reading materials - for a classful of people. For that matter, neither can the linguistics department. I will make a reader available at one of the copy stores near campus; buy it if you want hard copies. Everything in it will be available either directly from a library book or online at the URL above. (Presumably, if you're reading this, you already know that.) The online version may will be more current than the printed one, and will always take precedence. I will tell you if I update anything in the reader after its print date, of course. Texts / Reading materials: I strongly recommend that you have at least one good introductory linguistics textbook. thThe one I used for Ling 100 was Contemporary Linguistics, 4 ed. There are others. Get one if you don’t already have it. The reader will have its own table of contents; take a look there. In addition to that, there will be some items I want you to look up online, to read or research or work on. If you’re interested in any of the items we go over briefly during class, I can probably give you some pointers for where to get more. In any case, just Google it. One more text I strongly recommend for this class is Thomas E. Payne’s Describing Morphosyntax. It is very well written and very useful, but does assume at least a rudimentary knowledge of linguistics. If you know basics, or are up for a challenge, buy it and read it. With some simple translation, it’s practically a manual for how to make a conlang grammar, and gives you a good idea of the breadth of options available just from what natural languages are known to do. Assignments There is only one – optional for those taking 1 unit, required for those taking 2. - 13 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Reminder: Don’t plagiarize. Really. The Final Project / Research Paper You have three standard options, the first being strongly recommended. I am very much open to suggestions if you want to do something different that is substantially similar in difficulty and related to the class. Do remember to START EARLY. You can do this very easily if you just do it as we go. If you decide to do a final project, be sure to consult with me *very* early on. Tell me what you intend to do, why, and how. Keep me appraised of how it's going. If you choose something other than Option 1, make sure I approve it FIRST. Option 1: Create your own language You read that right: you will create an entire language, including all parts of grammar that we talk about in class. I realize that this is probably an intimidating concept for you. It's really not as hard as you might think, and the work that we'll be doing over the course of the class will go over all aspects of language design; you will essentially be building it as we go. Of course, your early work will probably be revised several times by the time you are ready to submit the final revision. There are a few boundary criteria for this project. When you are out on your own as a conlanger, even these will disappear, but for now, here are your limits: 1. Your language must be geared towards human use. Any literate person in the world should be able to learn and use your language. (This does NOT mean that it need be an auxlang!) 2. Your language MAY NOT BE like either a) English, or b) your native language, if other than English. I *will* push you to break away from your default assumptions about how a language can or should work. 3. Your language must be a full working language in intended scope (although it need not have a multi-thousand-word vocabulary, etc.), and should NOT be simply a code for another language. (Obviously, it need not be a full working language at the time of writing this paper.) 4. The phonetic inventory should preferably be drawn from within the IPA, and all aspects should be described in ways any linguist would be able to understand. If you want to make it layperson-understandable, that works also. 5. You will have to translate a few sample phrases and short samples from English, most prominently, the Babel Text, from Genesis 11:1-9 - more here. This is NOT a "literal" translation; I will be looking for something that translates the essence of meaning into a form that is more appropriate for your language. - 14 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Within these five criteria, you will have considerable leeway. Do whatever kind of language you want; choose any typology, morphology, etc., as you like. Create a novel orthography. Create a language that uses a primary modality other than speech. BE CREATIVE! Option 2: Modular Systems For this variation, you will create only certain parts of a language - e.g., an orthography. The criteria are the same as above where applicable (minus the translation), however: 1. You will have to compensate for reduced scope by a major increase in the amount of detail, originality, and creativity you give to those parts you do. 2. Since they are not in the context of a full language, you will need to make them modular - provide explicit ways for yourself others to use your systems as part of a full language, how they can be integrated with, etc. 3. Your systems MUST BE ENTIRELY NEW. No rehashes, no slightly-different versions of something you've seen elsewhere. The point of this option for a final project is for use in the case of your thinking up some very new, very original way of doing something. This is a much stronger criteria than for Version 1. Option 3: Research Project If you have an idea for something else you'd like to do that would be equivalent in scope and amount of work to the previous two, come up with a plan and tell me about it. This is a fairly open-ended option, but you will have to convince me that it is indeed equal. Possible ideas could include conducting original, scientific research; writing a major paper on a topic of your choosing; etc. Talk to me. Schedule: The schedule is TENTATIVE, and listed seperately. I may change things around, add new topics or remove them as time and interest dictate, etc. One important side effect of this is that You The Student can change the schedule, if you have input on what you'd prefer we talk about, what not, and when. 15 weeks is a fairly long time, yes, but there can be a *lot* of material to cover. Inevitably, we will have to skip or gloss over some topics. Let's try to make the best use of the time we have. Credits Leanne Hinton, for agreeing to sponsor this class. Yay! David Peterson, for suggesting Leanne Hinton as my advisor, recommending various other resources, and his extensive collaboration and help on the course design, homework, etc. - 15 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 ged, for more resources - 16 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Genesis 11:1-10 From the King James Edition. 1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. - 17 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Conlanger’s Manifesto — Artlanger’s Manifesto ? 2002 Jesse Bangs – jaspax@gmail.com. Conlanger’s Manifesto ? 2002 David Peterson — dedalvs@gmail.com. Comments ? as attributed. Used with permission of JB & DP. MANIFESTO This manifesto was originally written by David Peterson as a defense of the art of Conlanging against those who would degrade the art as frivolous, unimportant, or even dangerous. He posted it to the conlang discussion list, and I liked it so much that I decided to include it on this page until I have time to write my own manifesto. There are a few places where this goes overboard—for example, I don’t seriously see language creation as a path to world peace—but in general this is exactly right: To me, it seems odd to have to defend language creation, and yet it’s been repeatedly attacked, mainly by linguists (which is the most baffling part about the whole business), and decried as a form of frivolity which should not and cannot be taken seriously by anyone, or even wicked (I’ve heard it). To such claims, I say the following things. I would hope that many would agree that doing something that neither harms the doer nor anyone else is not wrong. That said, creating languages, to my knowledge, has never resulted in the harming of another human being, or of the language creator (at least, I’ve heard of no reports of a language creator driven insane). Like any other hobby or activity, the only requirement is a requirement of time, and time management has nothing to do with the activity itself, but only with the one performing it. Thus, it can’t be argued that language creation is ―a waste of time‖, it can only be argued that certain people are wasters of time—how they do it is irrelevant. The other argument—whether language creation can be taken seriously—is a bit stickier. The main problem I see that people have with language creation is that it’s ―weird‖—that is, not usual. As such, anything that is not usual will be regarded with apprehension initially; it’s as old as Copernicus—even older than that. If you point this out to the arguer, s/he will usually counter with the argument that language creation is useless, and therefore, frivolous. And, looking only at the utilitarian end of it, if the creator isn’t going to use his/her language for communication, and since language can be viewed only as a means of communication, language creation is pretty useless. But is this all language is: A method of communication? If so, what is poetry? What is literature? What possible use could James Joyce’s Ulysses have? I suppose if you were on a desert island and needed to smash crabs, it would do the trick—it’s pretty thick, after all. But beyond that? According to them, it would - 19 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 have no use. And why stop there? What good do paintings do anyone? They just sit there, after all, doing nothing for nobody. And along with this goes any other form of visual art: Pottery, jewelry, tapestry, mosaic, sculpture, animationâ?? And what about architecture? You just need a roof over yor head; no reason it needs to look fancy. So out the window it goes, too. And music?! My word! There’s not even any functional value in music! So let’s burn all our musical instruments and albums: Goodbye Tchaikovsky, bye-bye Beatles, see ya’ Enya, aloha Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (that’s the ―aloha‖ that means ―goodbye‖, not ―hello‖). Pretty soon what you’re left with is a world without art. At this point, the argument should come to an end. The frivolity and usefulness of art is an argument that has been argued many times but many people much more articulate than I, and by now (I certainly hope), the whole world should have figured out that art really does pull its weight on Earth. So, let’s continue from here. Any university worth its salt is going to have an art department. Millions of people every year study useless, frivolous art. So why not language creation? Nearly every serious subject has an art associated with it that’s also studied: Literature has poetry and prose; computer science has computer graphics and video games (another under-appreciated form of art); functional architecture has artistic architecture; art history has art; music theory has music. If you take this to its natural conclusion, is not language creation the art most closely associated with linguistics? This is particularly why I find the condemnation of language creation by linguists so befuddling. Aside from art, though, language creation has other uses. First, creating a language allows one to better understand language itself. One who creates an ergative language is far more likely to understand ergativity in natural languages than one who does not, I say. What’s more, this same understanding can ease foreign language learning considerably—not to mention linguistics itself. More importantly, it gets one thinking about the multifariousness and beauty of language, and one who can appreciate this is less likely to misunderstand, deprecate and stereotype those speaking other languages, which is one of the main causes of racism and ethnocentrism. In short, language creation is one of the keys to social harmony and world peace. If one is going to take anything seriously, certainly world peace is it, and if so, shouldn’t language creation be given some credit too? THE ARTLANGER’S RANT David Peterson’s manifesto does a great job of justifying conlanging to the non- conlanging public, and as such serves as a wonderful first step towards the legitimization of conlanging. However, I take conlanging a bit more seriously than that—I think of it as a legitimate form of art, and I would like to see it recognized as such. This thought, combined with some bad tendencies I was seeing on Conlang at the time, prompted the following verbal explosion from me, which I posted to Conlang: - 20 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 From: Jesse Bangs Date: Mon Mar 11, 2002 8:16 pm Subject: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry To All Who Care About Conlanging: The conlang community, both on this list and off, has been growing steadily in the past several years, and it has just gotten another big burst of growth from the release of the LOTR movies in the U.S. We now have a famous, visible patriarch in the person of JRR Tolkien, at least one professional member, Mark Okrand. Quenya and Klingon have entered the common parlance as names of languages, and they have a growing body of L2 speakers, a subculture, and media presence. Add to this the hundreds of conlang websites that may be found in the Internet and the presence of this community itself, and it seems that conlanging may be on the verge of breaking into mainstream awareness and acceptance. The ―secret vice‖ has been out of the closet for a while, and it may soon be into the limelight. Yet there are still major obstacles to conlanging’s acceptance as an art form, both within the community of conlangers and without. The obstacles from without include prejudices against conlangs as real languages, the ―nerdy‖ perception that conlangers have (and often cherish), and distrust from the linguistic community. These problems have been addressed and rebutted before, so I won’t do it again here. Only time may remove all of those problems. However, the obstacles from conlangers themselves are greater, and can be addressed immediately. Of these problems, the one that I wish to address here is the lack of a critical perspective within the conlang community. It should not need to be proved that some art is better than others. If we as conlangers wish to gain acceptance for our art, then we need to acknowledge this and allow for the judgement that some conlangs are better than others. We need a serious body of *conlang criticism*. Currently, this is almost entirely lacking on the Conlang list. When someone posts texts or grammatical sketches, the responses are generally entirely congratulatory, or they are concerned only with correcting technical errors or confusions within the grammar. Often there are no responses at all. While technical accuracy and consistency are important, it’s outrageous that this is where our critique stops. We need to move beyond the foundation of technical accuracy and allow for the artistic analysis of our conlangs. Of course the objection is ―by what criteria?‖ It’s clear that we can’t all agree on one style of phonetic beauty, much less on which syntax, morphology, or vocabulary is best. But this is, in fact, exactly what we expect. The study of the history of art, music, or literature is a long series of redefinitions of what is proper, what is better, and a constant critical re-evaluation of everything that’s gone before. This chronological tension is an essential part of the formation of literatures and arts, and if conlanging is to be an art instead of a hobby, then it must also expect this. The important thing is that conlanging start to have a - 21 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 critical apparatus within which the artistic merits of conlangs can be evaluated and where different schools of thought can define and defend themselves. The thing to do, then, seems to be to start such a school, and simply get down to the business of evaluating conlangs as works of art. I therefore announce the founding of the Naturalist school of conlanging, which regards the following three things as values: Naturalness, as the name implies. We prefer languages that resemble natural languages, that could fool a linguist examining them into thinking that they actually existed somewhere on the globe. Auxlangs and philosophical langs are anathema because their very nature goes against this value. Complexity and completeness. No natural language is completely regular or completely simple, so neither will our languages. Furthermore, we seek to describe and develop our languages as completely as possible. Those who make dozens of half-finished sketches are creating the equivalent of commercial jingles. We seek to create symphonies. Creativity, defined as difference from your native language. If your native language is Chinese, your target should be Ancient Greek. If your native language is English, your target is Dyirbal (tonal, ergative Australian language). Those who speak Italian and are only interested in Romance-style conlangs earn no respect in this area. Those that seek to challenge themselves and their learners are applauded. Of course this won’t be popular with everyone, especially not when I start telling people why their conlangs suck. Why should it? If you disagree with me, form your own school. But by all means, we have to start allowing for the critical analysis of conlangs to make them into an actual art form. As a side effect of this, we also have to start taking each others conlangs seriously—putting in the time to understand and evaluate them. Like everyone else on this list, my time is limited and I can hardly take the time to look at every conlang that comes my way. But I intend to start taking time to look closely at the conlangs of others and myself and seeing how well they hold up to the Naturalist values. I also intend to post my critiques to the list. Hopefully, we’re mature enough (as individuals and as a community) to take and give criticism without resorting to whining and hurt feelings. And once again, if you don’t like it form your own school. Responses, comments, counter-flames? Originally from This was doubtlessly the most controversial thing I have ever posted to Conlang, and it did exactly what I had hoped—generated a huge amount of commentary and opinion, most of it disagreeing with me. The most vehement disagreement that people had was with the suggestion that we form conlanging schools. People found this suggestion - 22 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 worrying, fearing that it would lead to another break-up of the conlang list and would destroy the spirit of camaraderie that makes the list so agreeable now. Jan van Steenbergen had a well-reasoned response typical of the concerns that others raised: The diversity of our languages is enormous. Some of us are deeply into science- fiction and like to create strange, alien languages for strange, alien beings that sound like: ―qipL##53x&p’omn3çyy$fåor/bzzzzz…‖, while others rather enjoy creating a latinoid language with some local flavour from elsewhere in Europe. Or try to create a present-day version of Crimean Gothic or Dalmatian. Not to mention the creators of logical and auxiliary languages. My point is: we have a very small and very diverse community. If we were to follow your ideas, it would soon split up into numerous tiny fractions, part of which would instantly cease to exist. I don’t see what purpose can be served with such developments. Why create tension between those for whom it is art and those for whom it is hobby, or between professional linguists and amateurs? Originally from This objection I completely agreed with, and sort of did agree with all along. I never wished to split up conlang, nor to destroy the positive atmosphere of the list. A little friendly competition wouldn’t hurt anyone, but the serious divisiveness that some people feared was never in my intent. Perhaps, if my rant were fully carried it, it would be inevitable. I don’t think so, but this is still a very valid criticism. Muke Tever had another angle on the question of conlang-as-art, which several people echoed: Me personally, I look at conlangs more as craft than art--the things I think make a good conlang first are standard things like that: the quality and readability of the presentation; whether standard notations including but not limited to phonemic/phonetic brackets, X-SAMPA, unicode, etc. are used; completeness [not necessarily complexity or quantity of data, but at least a workable phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and texts]. A conculture per se is not necessary, although a statement of the purpose of the language is always useful (at the very least something along the lines of "used in the ancient scriptures of Martian ringworms in my new book") Originally from It seems to me that conlang-as-craft is not incompatible with conlang-as-art—Christophe Grandsire raised the analogy of architecture, which requires tremendous technical skill but is still doubtlessly artistic. Nonetheless, it turns out that there are a great many people on conlang who think of themselves more as hobbyists than artists. This baffled me at first—who wouldn’t want to see their creations valued as art? Nonetheless, plenty of self-proclaimed conlang hobbyists supported this distinction, so I retreated just a little bit to allow that not all conlangs are art or need to be viewed as such. Still, craftsmanship is - 23 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 essential to good artistry, and a strong community of non-artist conlangers will still be good for those of us who actually view our creations as art. The final criticism that people had that I agree with was actually one of the strongest— that the entire notion of critical schools is unnecessary and banal. Peter Clark made this wonderful observation: But if you will permit me to be negative for a moment, setting up ―schools‖ is not the way to do it. I was an English major (Planned Poverty, I call it) in college, and had to suffer through the various ―schools.‖ Let’s see if I can remember all five: Marxist, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, Reader-Response, and...darn, I forgot. You know what? It was all a bunch of bull. You know who ends up in literary schools? The ones who can’t write. They can’t write decent literature to save their skins, so they fill up journal after journal with this phony nonsense. I was so happy to get out of that and into the creative writing classes. There, no one ever said one word about ―schools‖. We would read each other’s works, try to understand what the author was trying to communicate, and comment on how well the plot structure and devices aided toward the communication of that idea and how successful we felt the writing to be. _That_ is the only ―school‖ I will ever believe in, because it doesn’t limit me to one set of glasses. Getting genuine feedback from others *who knew that they were talking about* was extremely valuable, infinitely more so than trying to read a classic through a Marxist critique, especially when the author predated Marxism! Ok, enough rant. So, once again, I applaud your instinct, but discourage your solution. If we as a group commit to more in-depth analysis and study of each other’s languages, we would do quite well. If we could figure out a way to dedicate a period of time, say a week, to the detailed examination of one conlang, that would be wonderful, as it would reduce the distraction created by other examinations. Conlanging is an art, but I don’t want it to become ―ART‖ (said with a very nasal tone.) It would suck the life, the fun out of conlanging if we suddenly had to deal with intellectual snobbery. I come from the world of literature, where the snobbery is so thick you can cut it with a knife. That’s not what I want to see happen. We don’t need to be like everybody else. After all, we clearly are not like everyone else. , We are practicers of the domestic art, the quiet hobby, the silent symphony. I don’t want my conlang to become a vehicle of some ―message.‖ It is because it is. Critique it for its success in reaching its desired goals, but let’s not seek to turn conlanging into something that it is not. Originally from - 24 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The Construction of Laadan, from A First Dictionary and ndGrammar of Láadan, 2 ed. ? 1988 Suzette Haden Elgin. Used with permission. Introduction: The Construction of Láadan In the fall of 1981, I was involved in several seemingly unrelated activities. I had been asked to write a scholarly review of the book Women and Men Speaking, by Cheris Kramarae; I was working on a speech for the WisCon science fiction convention scheduled for March 1982, where I was to be Guest of Honor; and I was reading – and re- reading – Douglas Hofstadter’s Göedel, Escher, Bach. I had also been reading a series of papers by Cecil Brown and his associates on the subject of lexicalization – that is, the giving of names (words, in most cases, or parts of words) to units of meaning in human languages. Out of this serendipitous mix came a number of things. (1) I became aware, through Kramarae’s book, of the feminist hypothesis that existing human languages are inadequate to express the perceptions of women. This intrigued me because it had a built-in paradox: if it is true, the only mechanism available to women for discussing the problem is the very same language(s) alleged to be inadequate for the purpose. (2) There occurred to me and interesting possibility within the framework of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (briefly, that language structures perceptions): if women had a language adequate to express their perceptions, it might reflect a quite different reality than that perceived by men. This idea was reinforced for me by the papers of Brown et al., in which there was constant reference to various phenomena of lexicalization as the only natural and self-evident possibilities. I kept thinking that women would have done it differently, and that what was being called the ―natural‖ way to create words seemed to me to be instead the male way to create words. (3) I read in Göedel, Escher, Bach a reformulation of Göedel’s Therorem, in which Hofstdater proposed that for every record player there were records it could not play because they would lead to its indirect self-destruction. And it struck me that if you squared this you would get a hypothesis that for every language there were perceptions it could not express because they would lead to its indirect self-destruction. Furthermore, if you cubed it, you would get a hypothesis that for every culture there are languages it could not use because they would lead to its indirect self-destruction. This made me wonder: what would happen to American culture if women did have and did use a language that expressed their perceptions? Would it self-destruct? (4) I focused my Guest of Honor speech for WisCon on the question of why women portraying new realities in science fiction had, so far as I knew, dealt only with Matriarchy and Androgyny, and never with the third alternative based on the hypothesis that women are not superior to men (Matriarchy) or interchangeable with and equal to men (Androgyny) but rather entirely different from men. I proposed that it was at least possible that this was because the only language available to women excluded the third reality. Either because it was unlexicalized and thus no words existed with which to write - 25 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 about it, or it was lexicalized in so cumbersome a manner that it was useless for the writing of fiction, or the lack of lexical resources literally made it impossible to imagine such a reality. Somewhere along the way, this all fell together for me, and I found myself with a cognitive brew much too fascinating to ignore, The only question was how I was to go about exploring all of this. A scientific experiment and a scholarly monograph would have been nice; but I knew what the prospects of funding would be for an investigation of these matters, and I was without the private income that would have let me ignore that aspect of the problem. I therefore chose as medium the writing of a science fiction novel about a future America in which the woman-language had been constructed and was in use. That book, called Native Tongue, was published by DAW Books in August 1984. Its sequel, Native Tongue II: The Judas Rose, appeared from DAW in February 1987. In order to write the book, I felt obligated to at least try to construct the language. I’m not an engineer, and when I write about engines I make no attempt to pretend that I know how engines are put together or how they function. But I am a linguist, and knowing how languages work is supposed to be my home territory. I didn’t feel that I could ethically just fake the woman-language, or just insert a handful of hypothetical words and phrases to represent it. I needed at least the basic grammar and a modest vocabulary, and I need to experience what such a project would be like. I therefore began, on June 28, 1982, the construction of the language that became Láadan. Because I am a linguist, I have studied many existing languages, from a number of different language families. In the construction of Láadan I have tried to use features of those languages which seemed to me to be valuable and appropriate. This method of construction is often called ―patchwork‖, and is not looked upon with great favor in the Patriarchal Paradigm that dominates contemporary science. I would remind you, nonetheless, that among women the patchwork quilt is recognized as an artform, and the methodology of patchwork is respected. My original goal was to reach a vocabulary of 1,000 words – enough, if well chosen, for ordinary conversation and informal writing. I passed that goal early on, and in the fall of 1982 the journal Women and Language News published the first writing in the language, a Nativity story written from Mary’s point of view. There was one more factor that entered into my decision to construct Láadan, and I saved it for last because it was not there originally but developed out of the work that I was doing. I found myself discussing the idea of the woman-language, proposed need for it, etc., at meetings and conferences and among my friends and colleagues. And I found that it was possible to get the necessary concepts across, if I was patient. (There was, for example, the useful fact that English has no word whatsoever for what a woman does during the sexual act… this generally helps to make some points more clear.) But I got thoroughly tired of one question and its answer. People would ask me, ―Well, if existing human languages are inadequate to express women’s perceptions, why haven’t they ever 1made one up that is adequate?‖ And all I could ever say was that I didn’t know. This 1 At that time I had not yet had the opportunity to read Mary Daly’s book, published in May 1984, called Pure Lust. In that book Daly tells us that St. Hildegarde of Bingen, who lived from 1098-1179, constructed a language consisting of 900 words, with an alphabet of 23 letters. She was a distinguished scholar, with publications to her credit in a number of fields; as Daly says, it is impossible for us to know how much of value was lost to us when this language was lost. And I now have an alternative answer to that persistent - 26 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 became tiresome, and frustrating, and it was a relief to me when I was at last able to say, ―Well, as a matter of fact, a woman did construct such a language, beginning on June 28, 1982, and its name is Láadan.‖ This book is a teaching grammar of Láadan, with an accompanying dictionary. It is only a beginning, and for all I know, the beginning of a failure, something that will never be of interest to anyone but the collector of linguistic exotica. But because this book exists, it will be very hard to ―lose‖ Láadan in the way that other languages have been swallowed up by the History of Mankind. For that, I am most grateful to the 3members of SF, who thought the work was important enough to justify publication. Suzette Haden Elgin near Old Alabam, Arkansas question, although I have no way of knowing whether St. Hildegarde’s motivation for the construction of her language was a sense that no language adequate to express her perceptions was available to her. - 27 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Taste for Makers - ? 2002 Paul Graham — pg@paulgraham.com. Used with permission. February 2002 ―...Copernicus’ aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system....‖ - Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution ―All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way.‖ - Ben Rich, Skunk Works ―Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.‖ - G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. ―A lot of them seem smart,‖ he said. ―What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.‖ Taste. You don’t hear that word much now. And yet we still need the underlying concept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant was that he wanted students who were not just good technicians, but who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things. Mathematicians call good work ―beautiful,‖ and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field’s discoveries about beauty to help us in another? For those of us who design things, these are not just theoretical questions. If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let’s try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff? If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that ―taste is subjective.‖ They believe this because it really feels that way to them. When they like something, they - 29 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 have no idea why. It could be because it’s erson c , or because their mother had one, or because they saw a movie star with one in a magazine, or because they know it’s expensive. Their thoughts are a tangle of unexamined impulses. Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle unexamined. If you make fun of your little brother for coloring people green in his coloring book, your mother is likely to tell you something like ―you like to do it your way and he likes to do it his way.‖ Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you important truths about aesthetics. She’s trying to get the two of you to stop bickering. Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one contradicts other things they tell us. After dinning into you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference, they take you to the museum and tell you that you should pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist. What goes through the kid’s head at this point? What does he think ―great artist‖ means? After having been told for years that everyone just likes to do things their own way, he is unlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a great artist is someone whose work is better than the others’. A far more likely theory, in his Ptolemaic model of the universe, is that a great artist is something that’s good for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book. Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it’s not true. You feel this when you start to design things. Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It’s a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone’s is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that’s it. As in any job, as you continue to design things, you’ll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you’ll know you’re getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can’t be wrong. Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail. How has your taste changed? When you made mistakes, what caused you to make them? What have other people learned about design? - 30 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Once you start to examine the question, it’s surprising how much different fields’ ideas of beauty have in common. The same principles of good design crop up again and again. Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. (Ornament is not in itself bad, only when it’s camouflage on insipid form.) Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly erson objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly. It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the ―expressive‖ brush strokes, there is not much going on, and that’s frightening. When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. Good design is timeless. In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake. So what does Hardy mean when he says there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics? He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did: if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone will discover it. Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself. Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they left little room for those who came after. Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow. Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion. Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations. It’s hard to guess what the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions. So if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500. - 31 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Good design solves the right problem. The typical stove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dial to control each. How do you arrange the dials? The simplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is a simple answer to the wrong question. The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row, the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time about which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dials in a square like the burners. A lot of bad design is industrious, but misguided. In the mid twentieth century there was a vogue for setting text in sans-serif fonts. These fonts are closer to the pure, underlying letterforms. But in text that’s not the problem you’re trying to solve. For legibility it’s more important that letters be easy to tell apart. It may look Victorian, but a Times Roman lowercase g is easy to tell from a lowercase y. Problems can be improved as well as solutions. In software, an intractable problem can usually be replaced by an equivalent one that’s easy to solve. Physics progressed faster as the problem became predicting observable behavior, instead of reconciling it with scripture. Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen’s novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself. Likewise, a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa. In architecture and design, this principle means that a building or object should let you use it how you want: a good building, for example, will serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it, instead of making them live as if they were executing a program written by the architect. In software, it means you should give users a few basic elements that they can combine as they wish, like Lego. In math it means a proof that becomes the basis for a lot of new work is preferable to a proof that was difficult, but doesn’t lead to future discoveries; in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit. Good design is often slightly funny. This one may not always be true. But Durer’s engravings and Saarinen’s womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. Godel’s incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke. I think it’s because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one’s sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one’s sense of humor - 32 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 is to be wounded by them. And so the mark—or at least the prerogative—of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings—or Shakespeare, for that matter. Good design may not have to be funny, but it’s hard to imagine something that could be called humorless also being good design. Good design is hard. If you look at the people who’ve done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. If you’re not working hard, you’re probably wasting your time. Hard problems call for great efforts. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and those tend to be interesting. Ditto in engineering. When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he is forced to produce an elegant design. Fashions and flourishes get knocked aside by the difficult business of solving the problem at all. Not every kind of hard is good. There is good pain and bad pain. You want the kind of pain you get from going running, not the kind you get from stepping on a nail. A difficult problem could be good for a designer, but a fickle client or unreliable materials would not be. In art, the highest place has traditionally been given to paintings of people. There is something to this tradition, and not just because pictures of faces get to press buttons in our brains that other pictures don’t. We are so good at looking at faces that we force anyone who draws them to work hard to satisfy us. If you draw a tree and you change the angle of a branch five degrees, no one will know. When you change the angle of someone’s eye five degrees, people notice. When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan’s ―form follows function,‖ what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives. Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite. - 33 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn’t you? Some Leonardo heads are just a few lines. You look at them and you think, all you have to do is get eight or ten lines in the right place and you’ve made this beautiful portrait. Well, yes, but you have to get them in exactly the right place. The slightest error will make the whole thing collapse. Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection. In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successive approximation. One of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they decide to start drawing like grownups, and one of the first things they try is a line drawing of a face. Smack! In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat. When people talk about being in ―the zone,‖ I think what they mean is that the spinal cord has the situation under control. Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. Good design uses symmetry. I think symmetry may just be one way to achieve simplicity, but it’s important enough to be mentioned on its own. Nature uses it a lot, which is a good sign. There are two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion. Recursion means repetition in subelements, like the pattern of veins in a leaf. Symmetry is unfashionable in some fields now, in reaction to excesses in the past. Architects started consciously making buildings asymmetric in Victorian times and by the 1920s asymmetry was an explicit premise of modernist architecture. Even these buildings only tended to be asymmetric about major axes, though; there were hundreds of minor symmetries. In writing you find symmetry at every level, from the phrases in a sentence to the plot of a novel. You find the same in music and art. Mosaics (and some Cezannes) get extra visual punch by making the whole picture out of the same atoms. Compositional symmetry yields some of the most memorable paintings, especially when two halves react to one another, as in the Creation of Adam or American Gothic. - 34 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way. The Eiffel Tower looks striking partly because it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower. The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is that it can be used as a substitute for thought. Good design resembles nature. It’s not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time to work on the problem. It’s a good sign when your answer resembles nature’s. It’s not cheating to copy. Few would deny that a story should be like life. Working from life is a valuable tool in painting too, though its role has often been misunderstood. The aim is not simply to make a record. The point of painting from life is that it gives your mind something to chew on: when your eyes are looking at something, your hand will do more interesting work. Imitating nature also works in engineering. Boats have long had spines and ribs like an animal’s ribcage. In some cases we may have to wait for better technology: early aircraft designers were mistaken to design aircraft that looked like birds, because they didn’t have materials or power sources light enough (the Wrights’ engine weighed 152 lbs. and generated only 12 hp.) or control systems sophisticated enough for machines that flew like birds, but I could imagine little unmanned reconnaissance planes flying like birds in fifty years. Now that we have enough computer power, we can imitate nature’s method as well as its results. Genetic algorithms may let us create things too complex to design in the ordinary sense. Good design is redesign. It’s rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change. It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from. When people first start drawing, for example, they’re often reluctant to redo parts that aren’t right; they feel they’ve been lucky to get that far, and if they try to redo something, it will turn out worse. Instead they convince themselves that the drawing is not that bad, really—in fact, maybe they meant it to look that way. Dangerous territory, that; if anything you should cultivate dissatisfaction. In Leonardo’s drawings there are often five or six attempts to get a line right. The distinctive back of the - 35 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Porsche 911 only appeared in the redesign of an awkward prototype. In Wright’s early plans for the Guggenheim, the right half was a ziggurat; he inverted it to get the present shape. Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. Open-source software has fewer bugs because it admits the possibility of bugs. It helps to have a medium that makes change easy. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted. Good design can copy. Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it; next he tries consciously to be original; finally, he decides it’s more important to be right than original. Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don’t know where your ideas are coming from, you’re probably imitating an imitator. Raphael so pervaded mid- nineteenth century taste that almost anyone who tried to draw was imitating him, often at several removes. It was this, more than Raphael’s own work, that bothered the Pre- Raphaelites. The ambitious are not content to imitate. The second phase in the growth of taste is a conscious attempt at originality. I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that’s no reason not to use it. They’re confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process. Good design is often strange. Some of the very best work has an uncanny quality: Euler’s Formula, Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. They’re not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful. I’m not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem uncanny to a dog. Maybe if I were smart enough it would seem the most natural thing in the world that i*pie = -1. It is after all necessarily true. Most of the qualities I’ve mentioned are things that can be cultivated, but I don’t think it works to cultivate strangeness. The best you can do is not squash it if it starts to appear. - 36 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Einstein didn’t try to make relativity strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange. At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try to make good things, you’ll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn’t help painting like Michelangelo. The only style worth having is the one you can’t help. And this is especially true for strangeness. There is no shortcut to it. The Northwest Passage that the Mannerists, the Romantics, and two generations of American high school students have searched for does not seem to exist. The only way to get there is to go through good and come out the other side. Good design happens in chunks. The inhabitants of fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Milan at the time was as big as Florence. How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name? Something was happening in Florence in the fifteenth century. And it can’t have been heredity, because it isn’t happening now. You have to assume that whatever inborn ability Leonardo and Michelangelo had, there were people born in Milan with just as much. What happened to the Milanese Leonardo? There are roughly a thousand times as many people alive in the US right now as lived in Florence during the fifteenth century. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. If DNA ruled, we should be greeted daily by artistic marvels. We aren’t, and the reason is that to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450. Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Xerox Parc. At any given time there are a few hot topics and a few groups doing great work on them, and it’s nearly impossible to do good work yourself if you’re too far removed from one of these centers. You can push or pull these trends to some extent, but you can’t break away from them. (Maybe you can, but the Milanese Leonardo couldn’t.) - 37 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Good design is often daring. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn’t. This problem afflicts not just every era, but in some degree every field. Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work. Einstein’s theory of relativity offended many contemporary physicists, and was not fully accepted for decades—in France, not until the 1950s. Today’s experimental error is tomorrow’s new theory. If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don’t quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them. As a practical matter, I think it’s easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who’ve made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that. Giotto saw traditional Byzantine madonnas painted according to a formula that had satisfied everyone for centuries, and to him they looked wooden and unnatural. Copernicus was so troubled by a hack that all his contemporaries could tolerate that he felt there must be a better solution. Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it. Notes Sullivan actually said ―form ever follows function,‖ but I think the usual misquotation is closer to what modernist architects meant. Stephen G. Brush, ―Why was Relativity Accepted?‖ Phys. Perspect. 1 (1999) 184-214. - 38 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Some questions, excerpted from Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists ? 1997 Thomas E. Payne. Reprinted under ―academic fair use‖ exemption of copyright, US Code 17.1 ?107. Excerpted by pc451@yahoo.com, and found at (via archive.org). Chapter 1: Demographic and ethnographic information Name of the language? 1. What is the language known as to outsiders? 2. What term do the people use to distinguish themselves from other language groups? 3. What is the origin of these terms (if known)? 1.2 Ethnology 1. What is the dominant economic activity of the people? 2. Briefly describe the ecosystem, material culture, and cosmology (these will be intimately related). 1.3 Demography 1. Where is the language spoken, and how are the people distributed in this area? 2. Are there other language groups inhabiting the same area? 3. What is the nature of the interaction with these language groups? Economic? Social? Friendly? Beligerent? 4. In social/economic interactions with other groups, which groups are dominant and which are marginalized? How so? 1.4 Genetic Affiliation 1. What language family does this language belong to? 2. What are its closest relatives? 1.5 Previous Research 1. What published and unpublished linguistic work has been done in this language and/or its closest relatives? 1.6 The sociolinguistic situation 1.6.1 Multilingualism and Language attitudes 1. What percentage of the people are monolingual? (Treat men and women separately.) 2. What language(s) are people multilingual in, and to what degree? 3. As far as you can tell, what is the attitude of the speakers of this language toward their language, as opposed to other languages they may know? If possible, give evidence for your claims even though it may be anecdotal. 1.6.2 Contexts of use and language choice 1. In what contexts are multilingual individuals likely to use the language described in this sketch? When do they use other languages? 1.6.3 Viability - 39 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 1. Are children learning the language as their first language? If so, how long do they remain monolingual? 2. What pressures are there on young people to (a) learn another language, and (b) reject their own language? How strong are these pressures? 3. Are there partially competent speakers? 1.6.4 Loan words 1. Does the lexicon of this language contain many words from other languages? If so, in what semantic domains do these tend to occur? Give examples. 1.7 Dialects Is there significant dialect variation? What kinds of differences distinguish the dialects? Give examples. What dialect is represented in the sketch? Chapter 2: Morphological typology 2.1 Traditional morphological typology 2.1.1 Synthesis 2.1.2 Fusion 1. Is the language dominantly isolating or polysynthetic? 2. If the language is at all polysynthetic, is it dominantly agglutinative or fusional? 3. Give examples of its dominant pattern and any secondary patterns. 2.2 Morphological processes 1. If the language us at all agglutinative, is it dominantly prefixing, suffixing, or neither? 2. Illustrate the major and secondary patterns (including infixation, stem modification, reduplication, erson c lly ls modification, and erson c l). 2.3 Head/dependent marking 1. If the language is at all polysynthetic, is it dominantly ―head-marking,‖ ―dependent-marking,‖ or mixed? 2. Give some examples of each type of marking the language exhibits. Chapter 3: Grammatical categories 3.1 Nouns 1. What are the distributional properties of nouns? 2. What are the structural properties of nouns? 3.1.1 Types of Nouns 1. What are the major formally distinct subcategories of nouns? 3.1.2 The structure of the noun word 2. What is the basic structure of the noun word (for polysynthetic languages) and/or noun phrase (for more isolating languages)? 3.1.3 Pronouns and/or anaphoric clitics - 40 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 3. Does the language have free pronouns and/or anaphoric clitics? (these are distinct from grammatical agreement. Agreement will be discussed later. Also, the functions of pronouns and clitics will be discussed later.) 4. Give a chart of the free pronouns and/or anaphoric clitics. 3.2 Verbs 1. What are the distributional properties of verbs? 2. Describe the order of various verbal operators within the verbal word or verb phrase. 3. Give charts of the various paradigms, e.g., person marking, tense/aspect/mode etc. Indicate major allomorphic variants. 4. Are directional and/or locational notions expressed in the verb or verb phrase at all? 5. Questions to answer for all verbal operations: (a) Is this operation obligatory, i.e, does one member of the paradigm have to occur in every finite verb or verb phrase? (b) Is it productive, i.e., can the operation be specified for all the verb stems, and does it have the same meaning with each one? (Nothing is fully productive, but some opertations are more productive than others.) (c) Is this operation primarily coded morphologically, analytically, or lexically? Are there any exceptions to the general case? (d) Where in the verb phrase or verbal word is this operation likely to appear? Can it occur in more than one place? 3.2.0 Semantic roles 3.2.1 Verb classes 1. What are the major subclasses of verbs? 3.2.2 Verb structure 1. What are the structural properties of verbs? 3.3 Modifiers 3.3.1 Descriptive adjectives 2. If you posit a morphosyntactic category of adjectives, give evidence for not grouping these forms with the verbs or nouns. 3. What characterizes a form as being an adjective in this language? 4. How can you characterize semantically the class of concepts coded by this formal category? 5. Do adjectives agree with their heads (e.g., in number, case, and/or noun class)? 3.3.2 Non-numeral quantifiers 3.3.3 Numerals 1. What kind of system does the language employ for counting? Decimal, quintenary? 2. How high can a fluent native speaker count without resorting either to words from another language or to a generic word like many? Exemplify the system up to this point. 3. Do numerals agree with their head nouns (e.g., in number, case, and/or noun class)? 3.4 Adverbs 1. What characterizes a form as being an adverb in this language? - 41 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 2. If you posit a distinct class of adverbs, argue for why these forms should not be treated as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. 3. For each kind of adverb listed in this section, list a few members of the type and specify whether there are any restrictions relative to that type, e.g., where they can come in a clause, any morphemes common to the type, etc. 4. Are any of these classes of adverbs related to older complement-taking (matrix) verbs? 3.4.1 Manner 3.4.2 Time 3.4.3 Direction/location 3.4.4 Evidential/epistemic Chapter 4: Constituent order typology 4.1 Constituent order in main clauses 1. General questions for all units of structure: (a) What is the neutral order of free elements in the unit? (b) Are there variations? (c) How do the variant orders function? 2. What is the pragmatically neutral order of constituents (A/S, P, and V) in basic clauses of the language? 4.2 Verb phrase 1. Where do auxiliaries occur in relation to the semantically ―main‖ verb? 2. Where do verb-phrase adverbs occur with respect to the verb and auxiliaries? 4.3 Noun phrase 1. Describe the order(s) of the elements in the noun phrase. 4.4 Adpositional phrases (prepositions and postpositions) 2. Is the language dominantly prepositional or post-positional? Give examples. 3. Do many adpositions come from nouns or verbs? 4.5 Comparatives 1. Does the language have one or more grammaticalized comparative constructions? 2. If so, what is the order of the standard, the marker, and the quality by which an item is compared to the standard? 4.6 Question particles and question words 1. In yes/no questions, if there is a question particle, where does it occur? 2. In information questions, where does the question word occur? 4.7 Summary 1. How does this language compare in its constituent orders to universal expectations, as represented by Greenberg (1963), Hawkins (1983), or some other well-known typology? Chapter 5: Noun and noun-phrase operations 5.1 Compounding - 42 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 2. Is there noun-noun compounding (e.g., windshield)? 3. How do you know it is compounding? 4. Is there noun-verb (or verb-noun) compounding that results in a noun (e.g., pickpocket, scarecrow)? 5. Are these processes productive (like noun-verb-er in erson can-opener)? 6. How common is compounding? 5.2 Denominalization 1. Are there any processes (productive or not) that form a verb from a noun? 2. An adjective from a noun? 3. An adverb from a noun? 5.3 Number 1. Is number expressed in the noun phrase? 2. Is the distinction between singular and non-singular obligatory, optional, or completely absent in the noun phrase? 3. If number marking is ―optional,‖ when does it tend to occur, and when does it tend not to occur? 4. If number marking is obligatory, is number overtly expressed for all noun phrases or only some subclasses of noun phrases, such as animates? 5. What non-singular distinctions are there? 5.4 Case 1. Do nouns exhibit morphological case? 2. If so, what are the cases? 5.5 Articles, determiners, and demonstratives 1. Do noun phrases have articles? 2. If so, are they obligatory or optional, and under what circumstances do they occur? 3. Are they separate words, or bound morphemes? 4. Is there a class or classes of demonstratives as distinct from articles? 5. How many degrees of distance are there in the system of demonstratives? 6. Are there any other distinctions besides distance? 5.6 Possessors 1. How are possessors expressed in the noun phrase? 2. Do nouns agree with their possessors? Do possessors agree with possessed nouns? Neither, or both? 3. Is there a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession? 4. Are there other types of possessions? 5. When the possessor is a full noun, where does it usually come with respect to the possessed noun? 5.7 Class (including gender) 1. Is there a noun class system? 2. What are the classes, and how are they manifested in the noun phrase? 3. What dimension of reality is most central to the noun class system (e.g., animacy, shape, function, etc.)? What other dimensions are relevant? 4. Do the classifiers occur with numerals? Adjectives? Verbs? 5. What is their function in these contexts? 5.8 Diminution/augmentation - 43 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 1. Does the language employ diminutive and/or argmentative operators in the noun or noun phrase? 2. Questions to answer for all nominal operations: (a) Is this operation obligatory, i.e., does one member of the paradigm have to occur in every full noun phrase? (b) Is it productive, i.e., can the operation be specified for all full noun phrases and does it have the same meanings with each one? (Nothing is fully productive, but some operations are more so than others.) (c) Is this operation primarily expressed lexically, morphologically, or analytically? Are there exceptions? (d) Where in the noun phrase is this operation likely to be located? Can it occur in more than one place? Chapter 6: Predicate nominals and related constructions 6.1 Predicate nominals 1. How are proper inclusion and equative predicates formed? 2. What restrictions are there, if any, on the TAM (Tense/Aspect/Mode) marking of such clauses? 6.2 Predicate adjectives (attributive clauses) 1. How are predicate adjectives formed? (Include a separate section on predicate adjectives only if they are erson c lly distinct from predicate nominals.) 6.3 Predicate locatives 1. How are locational clauses (or predicate locatives) formed? 6.4 Existentials 1. How are existential clauses formed? (Give examples in different tense/aspects, especially if there is significant variation.) 2. How are negative existentials formed? 3. Are there extended uses of existential morphology? (Provide pointers to other relative sections of the grammar.) 6.5 Possessive clauses 1. How are possessive clauses formed? Chapter 7: Grammatical relations 7.1 Systems for grouping S, A, and P 7.2 Functional explanations for grouping S, A, and P 7.3 Split systems 7.3.1 Split intransitivity 7.3.2 Split ergativity 7.3.2.1 Split ergativity based on topic-worthiness of A and P 7.3.2.2 Split ergativity based on tense-aspect 7.3.2.3 Summary of split systems for organizing grammatical relations 7.4 ―syntactic‖ ergativity - 44 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 7.5 Summary 1. Exemplify some simple intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive clauses. Three- argument clauses may not unequivocally exist. 2. What are the grammatical relations of this language? Give morphosyntactic evidence for each one that you propose. (a) Subject? (b) Ergative? (c) Absolutive? (d) Direct object? (e) Indirect object? 3. There are basically four possible sources of evidence for grammatical relations: (f) morphological case on NPs; (g) person marking on verbs; (h) constituent order; (i) some pragmatic hierarchy. 4. Is the system of grammatical relations in basic (affirmative, declarative) clauses organized according to the nominative/accustative, ergative/absolutive, tripartite, or some other system? 5. Is there a split system for organizing grammatical relations? If so, what determines the split? (j) Is there split intransitivity? If so, what erson c or discourse/pragmatic factor conditions the split? (k) Does the system for pronouns and/or person marking on verbs operate on the same basis as that of full NPs? (l) Are there different grammatical-relation systems depending on the clause type (e.g., main vs. dependent clauses, affirmative vs. negative clauses)? (m) Are there different grammatical-relation assignment systems depending on the tense and/or aspect of the clause? (n) Are there any synthetic processes (e.g., conjunction reduction, relativization that operate on an ergative/absolutive basis? Chapter 8: Voice and valence adjusting operations 8.1 Valence increasing operations 8.1.1 Causatives 1. How are causatives formed in this language? There are basically 3 possible answers to this question: (a) Lexical: kill (b) Morphological: die + cause (c) Analytic/periphrastic: cause to die 2. Give examples of both causatives of intransitive verbs (e.g. He made Shin Jaa wash the dishes). 3. What happens to the erso in each type of causative? 4. Does the causative morphosyntax also serve other functions (e.g. permissive, applicative, benefactive, instrumental, etc.)? - 45 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 5. Are there any interesting or unusual facts about causatives in the language? 8.1.2 Applicatives 1. Are there any operations by which a participant which has a semantic role normally expressed in an ―oblique‖ phrase can ―advance‖ to direct object status? 2. What semantic roles are subject to these operations and how common are these constructions? 8.1.3 Dative shift 1. Is there a dative shift construction? 2. What semantic roles can be dative shifted? 3. Is dative shift obligatory? 8.1.4 Dative of interest 8.1.5 Possessor raising or external possession 8.2 Valence decreasing operations 8.2.1 reflexives and reciprocals 1. How are reflexives expressed? (a) Lexically? (b) Morphologically? (c) Analytically? 2. Are reflexives and reciprocals formally identical? 3. Are there any ―unusual‖ uses of reflexive/reciprocal morphosyntax? For example, does a reflexive marker appear in a noun phrase to indicate that the possessor of the noun phrase is the subject of the clause? 4. Does reflexive/reciprocal morphology ever indicate interclausal coreference? 5. Are there other ―extended‖ uses of reflexive or reciprocal morphosyntax? 8.2.2 Passives 1. Which type(s) of passive construction does the language have? Exemplify each type, and describe its function or functions. (a) Lexical? (b) Morphological? (c) Analytic? 2. Are there ―impersonal‖ passives, i.e., passives of intransitive verbs, or passives where there is not necessarily an Agent implied? 3. Is a passive construction obligatory in any particular environment, e.g., when a Patient outranks an Agent on some pragmatically defined hierarchy? 4. Are there other types of passives? 8.2.3 Inverses 1. Does the language have a grammatically instantiated inverse construction? 2. If so, what type is it? 8.2.4 Middle constructions 1. Are there grammatically instantiated middle constructions? 8.2.5 Antipassives 1. Are there grammatical structures that specifically function as antipassives? 2. Is some other structure used to express transitive concepts when the P is very low in topicality? 8.2.6 Object demotion or omission 8.2.7 Object [noun] incorporation - 46 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 1. Does the language have object demotion or omission constructions (as distinct from antipassives)? Chapter 9: Other verb and verb-phrase operations 9.1 Nominalization 9.1.1 Action nominalization 9.1.2 Participant nominalizations 9.1.2.1 Agent nominalizations 9.1.2.2 Patient nominalizations 9.1.2.3 Instrument nominalizations 9.1.2.4 Location nominalizations 9.1.2.5 Product nominalizations 9.1.2.6 Manner nominalizations 2. Describe the processes (productive or not) that form a noun from a verb. Include at least: (a) action nominalizations (b) agent nominalizations (c) patient nominalizations 3. Is there a distinction between agent nominalizations that refer to characteristic activities (e.g., teacher) and those that refer to specific events (e.g., the one who is teaching)? 4. Describe any other participant nominalization strategies (e.g., instrument, location, prodict, or manner nominalizations). 9.2 Compounding (including incorporation) 1. Can subject erson, and/or other nouns be incorporated into the verb? 2. Are there verb-verb compounding processes that result in a verb? 9.3 Tense/Aspect/Mode (TAM for short) 1. Is there a tense system? How does it operate? Future/non-future, past/non-past, past/present/future, or other? (You may want to treat these separately or group them, depending on how the language works.) 2. How is aspect expressed 3. Is there a clear dividing line between test/aspect and mode (probably not)? 4. What are the modes? 5. Is the case-marking pattern influenced at all by TAM? 9.4 Location/direction 1. Does the language employ verbal affixes, or verb-phrase grammatical functors that specify the spatial orientation or grounding of the situation? 9.5 Participant reference 1. Does the language mark the person and/or number of verbal arguments or speech act participants on the verb? 2. Provide charts of the various paradigms. 9.6 Evidentiality, validationality, and mirativity 1. Are there any grammaticalized indicators of evidentiality, validationality, or mirativity - 47 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 9.7 Misecllaneous (a) lexical time reference (as opposed to tense) e.g., yesterday, tomorrow. (b) Distributive, i.e., ―all over the place,‖ ―with a back-and-forth motion.‖ (c) Environmental, e.g. ―at night,‖ ―over water‖ (on motion verbs). (d) Speaker attitude, e.g. ―complaining,‖ ―frustration,‖ ―disgust.‖ 2. does the language have any other ―miscellaneous‖ verb or verb-phrase operations? 3. For any such miscellaneous operations, argue for why you have not treated them as TAM or location/direction marking. Chapter 10: Pragmatically marked structures 10.0 Pragmatic statuses 10.1 The morphosyntax of focus, contrast, and ―topicalization‖ 1. Are ther special devices for indicating pragmatic statuses in basic clauses, e.g., special constituent orders, left- and/or right-dislocation, affixes, or particles indicating referentiality, specificity, topic, focus, contrast, etc.? 2. Describe cleft constructions. If possible, give a characterization of their discourse functions. 3. What different types of pragmatic status is the grammar of this language sensitive to? 10.2 Negation 1. What is the standard means of forming a negative clause in this language? 2. What secondary strategies are there? When are they used? 3. Is there constituent negation? Derivational negation? 10.3 Non-declarative speech acts 1. How are yes/no questions formed? 2. How are information questions formed? 3. How are imperatives formed? 4. Are there ―polite‖ imperatives that contrast with more direct imperatives? 5. Are there ―first person‖ imperatives (e.g., Let’s eat)? If so, how are they used? Chapter 11: Clause combinations 11.1 Serial verbs 1. Does the language have serial verbs (or ―co-verbs‖ in the East Asian tradition)? 2. Which verbs are most likely to occur in serial constructions? 3. Are there any that are losing their semantic content and becoming more like auxiliaries, adpositions, or tense/aspect/mode markers when they occur in serial constructions? 11.2 Complement clauses 1. What kind of complement clause does the language have? 2. Are particular complement types common for particular classes of complement- taking verbs? - 48 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 3. Does the language allow subject and object complements, or just object complements? 11.3 Adverbial clauses 1. How are adverbial clauses formed? 2. What kinds of adverbial clauses are there, e.g., time, manner, purpose, reason, consequence, sequence, conditional? 3. Can adverbial clauses occur in more than one place in a clause? 4. If so, are there any differences in meaning associated with the various allowable positions for any given adverbial clause type? 5. Among the conditionals, are there any subdivisions, e.g., contrafactual (If I had done it differently, that wouldn’t have happened), hypothetical (If I were you, I’d do it differently)? 6. What restrictions are there on the tense/aspect/mode marking of the conditional clauses? 11.4 Clause chaining, medial clauses, and switch reference 1. Does the language have any grammaticalized device that explicitly indicates whether a participant in one clause is the same as or different than some participant in another clause? 2. If so, answer the following questions: (a) What direction does the dependency go? That is, does a marker signal coreferentiality with a yet to be mentioned participant, or an already mentioned participant? (Maybe both, depending on other factors.) (b) What can ―antecede‖ one of these markers? That is, coreferentiality always with respect to a ―subject‖ participant, or can non-subject AGENT, or nominals of other grammatical relations also antecede a coreference form? (c) On what categories of elements can these markers go, e.g., verbs, nouns, conjunctions, etc.? 3. Can one clause be inflected for the erson/number of the subject of some other clause? 4. Do the markers of interclausal coreference also carry other information, e.g., tense/aspect or semantic relations between clauses? 5. How extensive is this phenomenon? 11.5 Relative clauses 1. What kind or kinds of relative clauses does the language have? (a) Prenominal? (b) Postnominal? (c) Internally headed? (d) Headless? (e) Correlative? 2. What positions on the following relativizability hierarchy can be relativized? 3. subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique > possessor 4. What relative clause type or ―case recoverability strategy‖ is used for each postion? 11.6 Coordination 1. How are the following kinds of logical relations between clauses typically expressed? - 49 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 (a) Conjunction (a and b)/(neither a nor b)? (b) Disjunction (a or b)? (c) Exclusion (a and not b)? Chapter 12: Conclusions: the language in use 1. What are the discourse functions of the various referential devices? That is, which code highly continuous referents, and which code highly discontinuous referents? 2. Related questions: how are referents introduced into narrative and/or conversational discourse? 3. Are referents introduced differently depending on whether or not they are ―destined‖ to figure prominently in the following text? (That is, does the language clearly distinguish introductions of ―discourse manipulable‖ referents?) 4. Are there different coding devices used to introduce referents that have some honorific status? 5. How is tense/aspect marking deployed in discourse? (Answer will probably vary according to genre.) 6. What morphosyntactic devices are used to signal the ―events‖ in a narrative discourse? What about ―non-events,‖ i.e., collateral descriptive material? 7. What devices are used to ascribe special prominence to portions of texts? 8. Can you isolate the kinds of prominence that the language is sensitive to? 9. Are there special morphosyntactic devices characteristically used at the climax or peak of a narrative? 10. Is there a recognizable peak in other genres? 11. Are rhetorical questions and/or negation used as ―highlighting‖ devices in discourse? Give examples. 12. What discourse genres are demonstrably distinct in this language? Exemplify and discuss the significant characteristics of each. 13. Does the language make extensive and productive use of sound symbolism? 14. What are some common ideophones? 15. How is the phonological system of ideophones and sound symbolism different than that of the rest of the language? 16. How is the morphology different? How is the syntax different? 17. What are the features of this language that are particularily interesting? 18. What typological surprises does it present? 19. How does this work to contrinute to our understanding of the notion ―possible human language?‖ What directions for further research do you recommend and/or plan to undertake yourself? 20. Can you qualitatively describe the ―character‖ of this language? What are its dominant features? 21. What are the characteristics of a skilled orator in this language? 22. Can you provide some explicit examples that will contribute to the reader’s sense of how this language is used? Some possibilities might be jokes, prayers, metaphorical expressions, or other culturally relevant discourse samples. - 50 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Model Languages newsletter - All ? 1995 Jeffrey Henning - Preface This how-to guide is based on a newsletter I wrote in 1995 and 1996. This is the original introduction. -- Jeffrey, 6/30/01 One of the reasons I've started the newsletter is to increase awareness of the hobby of model languages and to provide a banner for language enthusiasts to rally around. There is little awareness about model languages as a hobby; in fact, no one is quite sure what to call it, with Tolkien referring to it as private languages; and others calling it constructed languages or imaginary languages. I've chosen to call it model languages because models are not intended to be full-scale replicas, but miniaturized versions that provide the essence of something, even if certain details have to be skipped over; in the same way, no one can construct a complete language, but a model of a language can be very useful. Additionally, as much of the joy is in building the languages as in actually using them; one of my colleagues is into model airplanes, and he and his son spend more time building them than flying them, a passion I understand completely. Language modelers do not gather together in local clubs or display the results of their craft. Many look at their model languages as private experiments that they would be too self-conscious to discuss with others. Inventing model languages is an unusual hobby, though really it is no different than hobbies of those who write poems or short stories. The hobby has a disparate group of adherants that do not communicate with one another. Model languagers or language modelers can be found among writers, game players, computer game designers, science-fiction and fantasy fans, professional linguists and teachers. The community of hobbyists is a large one, with approximately 40,000 people in the United States having invented their own languages and some 250,000 having used model languages such as Esperanto, Quenya and Klingon. It is my personal goal to increase public awareness of model languages as a legitimate hobby. One day, when somebody asks me what my interests are, I'd like to be able to say model languages and have them know what I'm talking about. I also have this fantasy where there is enough interest in the topic to be able to publish a small monthly magazine dedicated to it. To help achieve these goals, I encourage you to spread the word about model languages. Please feel free to post sample issues of Model Languages to groups, forums or mailing lists that you think would be interested; myself, I've posted the newsletter to the TOLKLANG and CONLANG Internet mailing lists and to RPGAMES, WRITERS, FLEFO, SFMEDI and SFLIT on Compuserve. Please forward issues to friends, and - 51 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 mention this newsletter to writers, gamers, linguists, science fiction lovers, and anyone else you think might share your interest in model languages. Feel free to drop me a note at any time to discuss questions you might have or issues you might like to see covered, or stories or knowledge you would like to share with other subscribers. If you want to start general discussions for others to join in on, I suggest you join CONLANG (CONstructed LANGuages). Best regards, Jeffrey What range of accomplishment there is among these hidden craftsmen, I can only surmise - and I surmise the range runs, if one only knew, from the crude chalk-scrawl of the village schoolboy to the heights of palaeolithic or bushman art (or beyond). Its development to perfection must none the less certainly be prevented by its solitariness, the lack of interchange, open rivalry, study or imitation of others' technique. from the essay "A Secret Vice", J.R.R. Tolkien We were listening to somebody lecturing on map-reading, or camp-hygeine, or the art of sticking a fellow through without (in defiance of Kipling) bothering who God sent the bill to; rather we were trying to avoid listening, though the Guards' English, and voice, is penetrating. The man next to me said suddenly in a dreamy voice: 'Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!' from the essay "A Secret Vice", J.R.R. Tolkien Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 52 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Introduction Volume I, Issue 1 -- May 1, 1995 An introduction to the hobby of model languages Different types of model languages This newsletter's goals An introduction to the hobby of model languages Some people build model airplanes, some craft model trains and some... well, they invent model languages. Model languages can be everything from a few words of made-up slang to a rigorously developed system of interrelated imaginary tongues. It is not a hobby many people know about, since model languages cannot be flown in the park like a model airplane or displayed in full glory in the basement like a model railroad. Model languages exist on paper or in computer files and may be shared only with a few close friends or may be used to give depth to imaginary worlds read or watched by millions. Millions of people have created model languages of some small scope. Many children invent their own secret vocabularies to share with friends, while teenagers may develop their own private slang to talk about the opposite sex. If few adults seem to create model languages, it is only because schools teach us that language is a formal structure, not a casual, informal world to be explored. The teaching of rigid dictionary definitions, sentence parsing and grammar dry up our interest in the wellspring of language. Model languages demystify and demythologize the study of language. For too often, our desire to learn to express ourselves with language, to create new words, has been suppressed in favor of rigid conformance to the norm. People now regard creating new words as a magical and distant process, yet it is something that we all engage in, though we may not even realize it at the time. While working as a market researcher, my boss once told me to "take the executive summary and bulletize it," offhandedly inventing the word bulletize to describe the act of paring paragraphs down to phrases preceded by bullets. Over breakfast one morning, my wife asked me if I wanted an English, inadvertently inventing a new, shortened form of English muffin. During her pregnancy, we adopted the word soogob (bogus pronounced backwards) to describe how she was feeling. After our twins were born, we used the word mouthies, as in "Alex is making mouthies," to refer to the sucking motion each of the boys would make with their mouths when hungry. Not one of these words will end up in the dictionary, but each serves a purpose and each demonstrates that we are all constantly inventing words, in a more carefree fashion than we might imagine. Lexicographers might decry the creation of many of these barbarisms, but it is from such coinages that the English language adapts to our times and needs. Millions of speakers provide a check and balance to ensure that only the most useful or needed of these coinages gains wide currency. - 53 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Different types of model languages Why invent a model language? Someone might craft a language as a personal code, shared with a few compatriots. A fiction writer might want to add depth to an imaginary place or world, creating a language for inventing character names and place names or even for translating a few key proverbs or poems. A person who designs their own setting for a role-playing game might create a language for the same reason, or a person might invent a language to gain a better understanding of how true languages are structured and evolve. For a few, creating a language can be an almost spiritual effort, intended to close the gap that separates man from the Word of God. People create model languages for a myriad of other reasons -- to create a universal language, to create a language for programming computers, or to simply learn more about how real languages work. Even as a model railroad can vary in complexity from a simple loop to a switching yard to a railroad empire, a model language can be small or large. At its smallest, a model language might consist of a few coined words used in a short story. For instance, a science-fiction story I once wrote used the words reconsat, moby and etlang to describe a reconnaissance satellite, a cetacean alien and an extraterrestrial language, respectively. A larger model language might be an entire dialect or slang, based on English. In "A Clockwork Orange", Anthony Burgess writes the entire book in Nadsat, a slang used by teenagers in a post- modern Britain. A sample: Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cutthroat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right. The reader finds herself learning the language as she reads each page -- learning by immersion. Nadsat has about 300 words. Even more ambitious is the creation of a unique language, to add verisimilitude to a world. Harry Harrison in his book "West of Eden" had a linguist, T.A. Shippey, create a language for his saurians, the ruling race of an alternative earth where the dinosaurs evolved into sentient beings. An example: Enge hantèhei, agatè embokèka lirubushei kakshèsei, hèawahei; hevai'ihei, kaksheintè, enpelei asahen enge. To leave father's love and enter the embrace of the sea is the first pain of life -- the first joy is the comrades who join you there. Shippey did not create an entire language, of course, but outlined a structure and then created a simple grammar and skeletal lexicon to give the impression of a full language. More ambitious still is a model language that is actually meant to be used to communicate. Such a language requires a vocabulary of at least 1,000 to 2,000 words and - 54 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 a detailed grammar. The most famous such language is Esperanto. Dr. Zamenhof invented Esperanto as a universal language to enable everyone to communicate with having to use any one social group's language. Esperanto was seen as perfect for a country like India, which has over 150 languages, with speakers of different languages separated by centuries-old hatreds. Finally, the most ambitious language involves the creation of an entire diachronic language system -- an imaginary language descended from other real or imaginary languages, based on principles of sound change and semantic shift. J.R.R. Tolkien, in "The Silmarillion", created an entire language system with two primary languages and five secondary languages descended from a common root tongue. Thus primitive galadaa, "tree", became alda in Quenya and galadh in Sindarin. Such a system is so detailed that it can enthrall someone for a lifetime, and Tolkien never finished his system (though completion was not one of his goals). This newsletter's goals The Kings Heath house backed on to a railway line, and life was punctuated by the roar of trains and the shunting of trucks in the nearby coal-yard. Yet the railway cutting had grass slopes, and here he [a young J.R.R. Tolkien] discovered flowers and plants. And something else caught his attention: the curious names on the coal-trucks in the sidings below, the odd names which he did not know how to pronounce but which had a strange appeal to him. So it came about that by pondering over Natyglo, Senghenydd, Blaen- Rhondda, Penrhiwceiber, and Tredegar, he discovered the existence of the Welsh language. Later in childhood he went on a railway journey to Wales, and as the station names flashed past him he knew that here were words more appealing to him than any he had yet encountered, a language that was old and yet alive. "Tolkien: A Biography", p. 28, Humphrey Carpenter If you've read this far, model languages intrigue you, and you might even try your hand at creating your own. Alternatively, perhaps language in general fascinates you, and you want to understand better how languages work. In either case, this newsletter will introduce you to the basic principals that undergird real languages and will show you how to create your own languages, whether of a few words or a complete historic system. The purpose of this newsletter is to teach you just enough about linguistics to be able to create your own model languages. It is not meant as a formal survey of the entire field of linguistics. Linguistics is too often presented in a dry manner, when it can be a source of endless wonder. It is no coincidence that a linguist created one of the most amazing novels of the twentieth century (Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings). This newsletter is meant to evoke the playfulness of linguistics and to give us an opportunity for hands-on training, as it were. Issues of this newsletter will discuss how languages use sound and sound representation, how they form words, shapes meanings, and represent grammar. It will also outline how each of these characteristics of a language change over time. It will provide practical - 55 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 guidance on how to create your own languages, how to coin words and how to use language to add verisimilitude to imagined worlds. Model Languages will also examine published model languages and critique their effectiveness. This newsletter is for those who want to learn more about language. You may have a fascination with words, wondering where they came from and how they ended up in today's most natural sounding forms. This newsletter is intended for writers, for entry-level linguistic students, for word lovers and for role-playing game players. One of the great advantages of model languages as a hobby is that it requires so little investment. Unlike model railroading, which requires costly equipment and paraphernalia, model languages require little more than pen and paper... and imagination. Subscribe to Model Languages, and soon you will be combining sounds into new words, like an engineer hitching up the cars of a train to an engine. Soon you will be laying the track of a linguistic system. Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved - 56 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 A Naming Language Volume I, Issue 2 -- June 1, 1995 Inventing a language for naming people and places "My name is Alice, but-" "It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently; "What does it mean?" "Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. "Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "my name means the shape I am -- and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost." from Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" Despite Humpty Dumpty's comment, Alice could not be just any shape -- her name actually summons forth an image of someone who is simple and proper, according to surveys conducted to determine the impressions people have of different names. All names have perceptions attached to them. Etymologically speaking, Alice's name is from the Greek for "truth". Most American and European names have become simple labels, their original meanings forgotten. How many people realize that a name like Jeffrey Henning, if translated literally, means "Godfriend Meadowlark"? Meanwhile, Indian names like "Dances With Wolves" (to take a bad example) wear their etymologies on their sleeves. If you are fascinated by the origins of names, then you will be happy to learn that a naming language is one of the most useful types of model languages to create -- and one of the easiest, making a great first language for the hobbyist. A naming language can be less complex than other model languages, since it does not need a detailed grammar and since it can get by with a small vocabulary: with just 150 words (revealed below), you can generate millions of names for imaginary people and places. Once you've read this issue, you'll be able to create two or three naming languages in as little as a half hour, though you'll end up fascinated by your creations and will spend many more hours on them. To begin creating any type of model language, you must be able to create words in that language. To create words, you need to understand sounds, meaning, sound change and so forth. This issue will introduce you to the basic aspects of language; subsequent issues of Model Languages will explore each one in more depth. Language change The vocabulary of languages is constantly changing, as technology changes and as our understanding changes. Twenty years ago no one talked of faxes, PCs or being on-line. - 57 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 No one had heard of perestroika. Things were still groovy, nizza, happening. Besides adding and retiring words, languages put new spins on old words: gay now primarily refers to "homosexuality", not "happiness"; liberal now is almost a curse, referring to "favoring governmental power" when it once meant "favoring governmental power to promote social progress". These word changes are not surprising. Any of us can look over the linguistic landscape of our lives and see how the terrain has changed. If you project this forward a thousand years, it is easy to see how the shape of a language's vocabulary will go through major upheaval. It's harder to see that the grammar of the language, the way we put words together, will change too. While saying hopefully is still frowned upon, it is no longer viewed as completely ungrammatical. The pronoun them is often used to refer to one person, rather than the plural it is formally meant to refer to; in casual conversation and writing, them is now the gender-indifferent alternative to he or she (incidentally, as it was four hundred years ago, before pedantic grammarians -- yes, them -- stepped in). Looking a thousand years out, other grammatical distinctions will have been leveled, revealing new horizons behind them. Finally, it can be hard to realize that the very sounds we use for words change. It's not hard to believe the occasional word changes, such as knowing that cup board is now pronounced cupboard, the [p] sound having assimilated to the following [b]. It is harder to believe that English words that now begin with [p] and date from Indo-European all began with [b] in Indo-European times. Such systemic changes, where a sound changes throughout the entire vocabulary, happen gradually. To imagine how it happens, think of a dialect, such as the Bostonian's "idear about whether the cah is pahked in Hahvahd yahd". Sound changes systematically when these dialectal differences become emulated and become the new accepted pronunciations. Imagine an alternate universe where JFK served out 8 years as the U.S. President, and was succeeded by 8 years of RFK, who was followed by 8 years of Teddy (it had to happen in some universe!). No doubt in that universe the Bostonian accent became American English's new standahd. Basic sound changes do not happen suddenly like earthquakes buckling the landscape, but gradually like water eroding a shoreline. Language change is for the most part slow, since change is on the whole discouraged. The whole point of language is for people to be able to make themselves understood to each other, and this happens best in an environment where the language changes no faster than the land at the water's edge. Language change is important because it shows the best way for you to invent a model language -- by making changes to an existing language (whether natural or a model). An ancestral language -- the grandmother tongue Every person alive today has or had a mother. Similarly, every mother tongue spoken by all these people had an ancestral language that it evolved out of. Even Proto-Indo- - 58 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 European, the reconstructed ancestor language of hundreds of European and Indian languages, had an ancestral language it evolved out of: Nostratic, which some linguists hypothesize was also the ancestor to five other proto-languages. Since Nostratic itself is most likely descended from another language, records of the first language are no more knowable than records of Adam. The ramifications for the language modeller are that the language he or she creates should not spring fully armed from the head of Zeus like Athena, but should derive from its own parent language. Most model languages are unknown orphans, when a pedigree would not have been hard to provide. Tolkien is one of the few modelers to actually create an ancestor tongue, which he used to derive many different Elvish languages for The Lord of the Rings, of which the best known are Quenya and Sindarin. "Wait a minute," you might be thinking, "are you saying that to create a model language I first have to create another model language? Where does that language come from? When does it end?" Tolkien again provides the best example; he created root words in a proto- language; he imagined that the elves would have reconstructed their ancestral language, much as Europeans reconstructed Indo-European. Proto- languages are elaborate hypothetical constructions and, as hypotheses, are fuzzy around the edges: nothing but the bones of an extinct dinosaur, while the exact color of its flesh can never be known. A proto-language, therefore, can be a simpler form of model language. The benefit of creating a proto-language is that it makes it easier to create sister languages to the model language you are chiefly interested in (what, more languages?!), enabling you to formulate new words based on regularly sound changes (more on this in it a minute). It also makes it easier to coin words in your desired model language, providing a rich system of root words to use to derive new words. So creating a proto- language can save you time. The easiest way to save time on your first model language is to use an existing language as the proto-language. I once worked on a science fiction story set aboard a colony whose original settlers had been 20th- century Italians and Spaniards, who -- through centuries of living together -- had created a new, simpler language. By using Italian as the ancestor language, with many borrowings from Spanish, I not only made it easier to create a new language but I taught myself some Italian and Spanish as well! If you are writing about a story that has taken place in the last 10,000 years and is set in Europe or India, you might even use Proto-Indo- European as the ancestral language for your languages. Check out The Roots Of English by Robert Claiborne for an easily readable discussion of Indo-European roots, or check out the appendix to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, published by Houghton Mifflin; both works are biased in emphasizing those roots from which English words descended, but make good starting points for devising a language. Sound - 59 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 To create your language, you need to decide which sounds you want speakers to distinguish. Basically, while it would be easy to think that the sound [t] is exactly the same, [t] actually describes a range of sounds, all closely approximating one another. The way you position your tongue when saying [t] will vary depending on what other sounds you say before or after it, but we both articulate [t] similarly enough to recognize it as the same thing. There is no objective reference that says a language must have any particular sound. For instance, Old English did not distinguish between the sounds [f] and [v] or [s] and [z]. The plural of [hoof] was pronounced [hoovz] but it was not until later times that speakers treated the \f\ sound in the singular as different from the \f\ sound in the plural. In Old English times, there could be no word [vat] different from [fat] -- such a distinction was just not made. Gradually, the sounds came to be heard as distinct. So when creating the sounds of your language, you need to realize that they will only approximate English sounds, not exactly match them, and might not reflect distinctions currently made in English. The [hw] sound in whale might be regarded by your speakers as the same as the [w] sound in wail (yes, they are different sounds, but you might have to listen closely as you pronounce them to tell the difference). You can certainly include in your language sounds that are not part of English, say the French vowels, typically pronounced with the lips rounded, or the expectorating [kh] of Hebrew and Yiddish, let alone the clicking sounds of the Hottentots and Bushmen. However, you should refrain from having too many unusual sounds in your language; you want your readers to be able to pronounce your words without too much difficulty. Simply having regular sounds combined in unique ways (e.g., sretan, or tsedet) will be enough to convince them it is a unique language anyway. Languages are very strict about how sounds are combined. English, for instance, allows words to begin with [sn-], but never [zn-]. The rules English uses could fill pages, but as a modeler you want to just hint at complexity. You may want to have a combination that is unusual in English and make it frequent in your language: for instance, have some words begin with [sr-], [kn-], [kth-], [tl-], but here again restraint is the order of the day. As you specify how sounds can be combined, you may want to outline valid syllables. Your language might only allow syllables of CVC (Consonant+Vowel+Consonant) or just CV or VC. Some languages, like Japanese or Korean, have very strict limits on how syllables can be formed, making it possible to list all the valid syllables of the language. But where Hawaiian allows just 162 different syllables, Thai has 23,638 syllables. Two languages can have the exact same consonants and vowels and yet sound very different, depending on the syllable patterns and on the frequency of the consonants and vowels. You may want to list the sounds that occur most often. By paying rigorous attention to this when developing the proto-language, you can relax a little more during creation of the descendant language, which will carry on many of the same frequency patterns, though applied to different sounds as the sounds change. - 60 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Many languages have very simple vowel systems. Eskimo-Aleut has just three vowels (the smallest number ever observed), while Spanish and Japanese each has five vowels. The typical language has between 5 and 7 vowels, but Indo-European languages usually have more; English has 12, and German has 14. The African language Khoisan has the record with 24 vowels. Languages have been observed to have anywhere from six consonants (Rotokas) to 95 (Khoisan), with an average of 22.8 consonants. The typical language has twice as many consonants as vowels. The most common consonants include [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g], [gh], [f], [s], [sh], [m], [n], [ng], [gng], [w], [l], [r], [j] and [h]. For a great discussion of the sound structure of languages, check out The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal. Sound change Over time, sounds gradually change in certain circumstances. John F. Kennedy, like many Bostonians, would drop his last [-r] from words like [car], while adding an [-r] to Cuba [cubar] and idea [idear]. As alluded to before, had enough Americans adopted this, it would have been considered a regular sound change and many other words might have undergone this change. Or listen to the dialect of Brooklyn, where [bird] becomes [boyd], for instance; someday all English speakers might pronounce [ir] as [oy]. No doubt, through the rise of one dialect in Old English, the sound [sk] was gradually becoming [sh]. Over great periods of time, these changes become more pronounced. Literally and figuratively. Here are some common ways consonants evolve into one another: b <---> ch <---> d <---> b <---> p b <---> v d <---> g d <---> t f <---> p f <---> v g <---> d gw kw th gu <---> gw <---> gw <---gw <---> gw <---> gw <---> g <---> k g <---> w g <---> y g <---> z gw b > d g gu k gw <---> gw <---> gw <---> gw <---> gw <---> h <---> h <---> hv <---> h <---> s h <---> y ku kw v y zh hy k hw hw <---> hw <---> hw <---> k <---> k <---> kh <---> k <---> g k <---> h k <---> s k <---> th hv kw p gw kw kw ku <---> ku <---> kv <---> kw <---> kw <---> kw <---> kw <---kw <---> kw <---> kw <---> gw kw kw ch gw hw > k kh ku kv kw <---> kw <---> kw <---> p <---> pf <---> l <---> r p <---> *- p <---> b p <---> f p <---> pf p sh t hw p sh <---> th <---> r <---> l s <---> h s <---> k t <---> d t <---> th t <---> z th <---> k th <---> t kw d - 61 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 v <---> y <---> y <---> v <---> b v <---> f v <---> w w <---> g w <---> v y <---> g y <---> h gw *- gw zh <---> y <---> z z <---> g z <---> t z <---> y *- (lost) gw This list is not meant to be all inclusive, just representative of changes that occurred in Indo-European. Likelihood Of Sound Change # Of IE Languages Where IE Initial Consonant Changed gh 12 kw 11 d 4 l 1 gw 12 g 9 s 4 r 1 gwh 12 w 9 p 3 m 0 bh 11 k 7 t 2 n 0 dh 11 b 4 y 2 You can use the above table as a rough guide to determine which consonants are more likely to undergo change. It is not representative of all languages, being an analysis of 12 languages descended from Proto-Indo-European and showing the number of languages where the consonant in the word-initial position changed. The languages analyzed were Armenian, Avestan, Common Germanic, Greek, Hittite, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Church Slavonic, Old Irish, Old Persian, Sanskrit, and Tocharian. The nasals, [n] and [m], are fairly stable, as are the liquids [l] and [r]. The stops [p], [t] and their voiced counterparts [b] and [d] change in only a third of the languages. All aspirated consonants changed in every language analyzed, being markedly unstable; [k] and [g] and their glide forms [kw] and [gw] were also more likely to change than not. Sound changes actually vary by position, with a sound change applying to different places -- the [s] might become [h] at the beginning of a word, [k] in the middle of a word and [z] at the end of a word (though this is an extreme example). For simplicity's sake, you may just want to apply the same changes regardless of position. Besides these phonetic changes, there are often "environmental" changes in words, where sounds change because of the sounds they are near. The following examples illustrate the major types of sound change. Assimilation Regressive or anticipatory, a sound is influenced by the following next sound: English [cupbord] became [cubbord]; the word assimilation is itself an example: Latin adsimula-re became assimula-re, since [ad-] regularly assimilated to [as-] before the [s] sound. - 62 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Progressive, a sound is influenced by a preceding sound Coalescent or reciprocal, when two neighboring sounds influence one another: don't you becomes pronounced [donchu] Dissimulation sound moves away from the pronunciation of neighboring sound: French marbre became English marble as the second [r] became dissimilar from the first. Split a sound becomes regarded as two distinct sounds, such as Old English \s\ compared to Modern English \s\ and \z\ (Old English's failure to distinguish between the sounds is one of the reasons many Modern English words are written with 's' when [z] is pronounced) Metathesis two sounds change places, third from Old English thridda Elision sounds are omitted (elided) in rapid speed, often dropping a consonant from a cluster of consonants: [cubbord] became [cubord]; elision specifically refers to loss of an unstressed vowel or syllable: elementary becomes pronounced [elementry] when the final schaw sound is elided. Loss a sound disappears from the language altogether, as the velar fricative, a variant of /h/ (and the final sound of Scottish loch), did in English, with only a vestige remaining in English spelling: the common silent 'gh' of English words like light, night, sight, which were once pronounced [likht], [nikht] and [sikht]. Haplology the loss of a sequence of sounds because of similarity of neighboring sounds: should this ever be called haplogy it will have undergone haplology itself. Syncope the loss of medial sounds, as boatswain lost the [t] sound as it was shortened to bosun ([bosun] is the correct pronunciation of boatswain, by the way, never [bo- tswa-n]). Apocope the loss of final sounds, as in the silent 'e' in words like love and hate; of course, the silent 'e' used to be pronounced. Liaison introduction of a sound between words, as in French when the silent final consonant of a word is pronounced when the next word begins with a vowel. Prothesis introduction of an extra initial sound, as occurred in Spanish and Old French, which frequently inserted an [e] sound before an initial [sp]: for instance, Latin specia-is became Old French especial. Epenthesis introduction of extra medial sound, as Old English bre-mel became Old English braembel. - 63 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 You can quickly generate more than one language by inventing different sound change rules for each language. So perhaps the Dilbertian [d] becomes [t] in Dogbertian, whereas it becomes [th] in Dinobertian. Or take a look at how the names James, John and Katherine have evolved in seven different languages: Source: Webster's Third New International Dictionary English James John Katherine French Jacques Jean Catherine German Jakob Johann Katharina Italian Giacomo Giovanni Caterina Spanish Jaime Juan Catalina Karin, Swedish Jakob John, Johan Katarina Yiddish Dzheymz Yohan Katerine Names vary idiosyncratically and do not always evolve according to the regular sound changes that affect other words. Thus the English towns of Luton and Leyton are -- despite their differences -- both derived from the same word, Lygetun, "farm by the river Lea" (the river Lea, incidentally, may either mean "bright one" or may represent the name of a river god, Lugus). Names get shortened frequently; for instance, Johann, Giovanni and Yohan all indicate that there used to be an [a] sound after before the [n] in John and that the silent [h] in John used to be pronounced, and still is in German, Swedish and Yiddish. Spelling When inventing your own language, you can go all out -- inventing your own alphabet or even hieroglyphs to accompany it. You can have spellings that represent scholarly thinking about how the word derived, so that the word sounding like [gramilt] is actually spelled 'kramillid', for instance, because lexicographers believe the word [gramilt] used to be pronounced [kramillid]. You can invent new symbols or use old symbols to represent sounds, so that 'pra@t!so>r' is pronounced... oh, never mind. Or, you can spare users of your language a lot of difficulty; you can strive for a system of spelling that is phonetic. Since learning a new language is difficult enough, this is the course I recommend. Yes, I'm hooked on phonics. Be warned, however, that even a phonetic representation can present difficulties, if you yourself are mistaking English spellings and conventions for actual pronunciations. For - 64 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 instance, if you were representing English phonetically, you might think that you could specify that the plural was regularly formed by adding [-s] to the end of a word. While this is true for [cat], it is not true for [dog], whose plural is actually pronounced [dogz]; [church], for its part, has a plural of [churchez]. So make sure your phonetic spelling really describes the sound you want. One problem with phonetic spelling is that words are pronounced differently in different circumstances: the word a can be pronounced [ei] or as [@] (schwa), and can be pronounced [@nd], [@n] or [n], depending on whether or not the speaker is placing emphasis on them. While you can use special characters for sounds, it will be easier on your readers if you transcribe them using conventional letters. The letter 'h' is great for forming digraphs; you might say that 'rh' represents a trilled [r] sound, or that 'mh' might be an aspirated [m] (sounding similar to [v]), or that 'dh' represents the voiced th in then, while 'th' represents the unvoiced th in thin. Your spelling may even reflect a regular sound change of the language. For instance, in German, the final 'b' in a word sounds like [p], the final 'd' like [t], and the final 'g' like [k], so 'Korb' is pronounced [korp], 'Band' [bant] and 'Tag' [tak]. Words Once you have created sounds, you can begin generating words. Words are nothing more than sounds arbitrarily linked to meanings. Onomatopoeia refers to sounds that are imitative, such as arf, bark or bow-wow for the sounds a dog makes. Most words are not onomatopoetic. Tolkien once remarked that he found cellar door to be an incredibly beautiful series of sounds, though the meaning was not worthy of it. So don't slave over matching sounds to words. If you spend all your time thinking about the exact sound each word should have you'll never flesh out your vocabulary. Grammar It can make learning new words somewhat easier if they have to follow specific patterns depending on parts of speech. Your language might require the root form of all verbs to end in [-r] and all nouns might end in a vowel. A naming language does not need a complex grammar. The only grammatical decision you really need to make is how to form compound words: should the modifier proceed or follow the word being modified. Assume you have a language with the word kwan for "dog" and kooz for "house". Does the phrase kwan kooz, then, mean "doghouse" or "house dog"? Proper names Many common names were formed from surprisingly few elements. If you coin just 150 words in a model language, you will be able to generate millions of distinct names. - 65 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 I analyzed about 300 common English and European names to come up with the following tables of common meanings underlying these names. Adjectives for proper names bear-like beloved bitter blessed brave chief compassionate constant desired divine falcon-eagle-like earnest famous flowering like fortunate fox-like free hallowed happy industrious laughing lion-like loyal manly mighty noble northern patriotic peaceful powerful praiseworthy prayerful protecting pure ready sharp shining small strong strong-willed swift valiant victorious war's wealthy wise wolf-like worthy young Nouns for proper names arrow battle bearer brightness counselor crown defender dweller earth farmer father fighter forest gate gift giver God guardian hammer harvester healer helper home horse keeper laurel leader lily lover maid man pearl people protector rock rose ruler runner smith son spear staff steward stranger stronghold sword traveler twin warrior wolf You can use these tables to generate names in the following ways: , adjective1: "Pure" (Katherine) , adjective1 + adjective2: "Noble and Shining" (Alberta) , adjective1 + noun1: "Chief Protector" (Howard) , noun1 + noun2: "Elf Ruler" (Avery) , adjective1 + adjective2 + noun1: "Noble, Brave Warrior" (Gunther) , adjective1 + noun1 + noun2: "Strong Warrior Twin" - 66 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , adjective1 + adjective2 + noun1 + noun2: "Young Bear-like Battle Hammer" You can use these tables to generate almost all the names you need. Theoretically you could use these tables to generate 6.3 million names. Feel free to use a few elements that you like in many different names; for example, "famous" in Anglo-Saxon was represented by hroth and is contained in the following names: Rodney ("famous"), Robert ("famous brightness"), Roland ("most famous of the land"), Roderick ("famous ruler"), Rudolph ("famous wolf") and Roger ("famous spear"). Roger, incidentally, was spelled Hrothgar in Old English, and is the name of the beleaguered king in Beowulf. You can easily flesh out the above tables to better represent the culture of the people who will speak your model language. For instance, islanders would not name people after wolves and foxes, but after predators peculiar to their locale, such as sharks and octopuses. Their names would reflect people's relationship to the sea: sailors, divers, swimmers and beachcombers. The tools they would refer to would not be swords and spears, but tridents and hooks. The adjectives they would use would likewise reflect their environment: unsinkable, seaworthy and foamy. If you want to add additional words to these tables, check out the etymologies of real names; one good source is The Baby Boomer's Name Game by Christopher Andersen, which includes a basic etymological dictionary of 2,500 common names. Place names The names of people and places are intimately related. For instance, Winslow (a town in Buckinghamshire, England) is named after Wine (an Old English name meaning "friend") and means something like "Wine's hill", "Wine's burial mound" or perhaps even "Wine's estate at the burial mound". In turn, Winslow is a man's first name and means "from Winslow". Many place names become first or last names in this way, and these in turn might inspire new place names; some other town of Winslow might be named after a fellow named Winslow -- and so it goes. Most names refer to a natural feature, such as a river, a hill or a forest, or to a man-made construction, such as a fort, a road or a burial mound. Place names are very seldom taken from an event that may have happened there, such as a battle or a coronation, but do sometimes take names from recurring events -- a field where people are regularly executed or married (I'll refrain from comparing these activities!) might have a name like the Hangingfield or the Weddingfield. For instance, the village of "Kingstone" is not likely to be so named because some king drew a sword from a stone there, but rather because many monarchs have been coronated there (or stoned there, depending on the kingdom's traditions!). Place names in the British Isles tend to be formed from 50 basic root meanings, which are given below. These 50 meanings can be combined to give 2450 different names, and can - 67 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 be combined to form millions more when combined with names involving people (e.g., Boston, "Botwulf's stone"; the ending is not -ton, "town", but -ston). Source: Adapted from Dictionary of Place Names in the British Isles, by Adrian Room Meaning English/irish/welsh word element abbey Abbey- bridge Pont-, -bridge castle Castle church Eccle(s)-, Kil(l)-, Kirk-, Llan-, -church cottage -cot dwelling -wich, -wick enclosure Lis-, -wardine, -worth estate -land farm -ton, -by field -field ford -ford fort Caer-, -b(o)rough, -burgh, -bury fort(old fort) -caster, -c(h)ester fort(ring fort) Rath- height Ard- highland Blaen-, -head hill Bryn-, Dun-, -don hilltop Pen- holy place -stead, -stede, -stow home farm -hampton homestead Bally-, -ham(stead), -hampstead island Ennis-, -ey lake Loch- meadow Clon- monastery -minster moor -more, -moor mountain peak Ben- new New- pass -gate - 68 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 people of -ing(s) place Stock-, Stoke- pond -mer(e) port Port-, -port resort -ville river mouth Aber-, Bel(la)-, Inver-, -mouth riverside -side rock Carrick- secondary settlement -stock, -stoke, -thorpe stone -ston(e) stream -b(o)urne, -well town Ballin(a)- tree -tree, -try upper Auchter- valley Glen-, Strath-, -dale valley (narrow) -combe valley (wooded) -den village Tre- wood Rhos-, Ros-, Ross-, -wood wooded angle of land -shot(t) woodland -ley, -le, -leigh Place names can be formed from combinations of the affixes listed above and from other place names and proper names: affix1 + affix2: "New Town" (Newton) affix1 + affix2 + affix3: "New Town on the Moor" (Newtonmore) affix1 + affix2 + placename: "New Town in Mearns [a county]" (Newton Mearns) placename1 + affix1: "Newton-of-the-Abbey" (Newton Abbot) placename + propername: Newton Stewart [after William Stewart] propername + placename: "Hynca's Enclosure" (Hinxworth) Often when you analyze a place name, you will find that a river runs through it: Exeter (from Exchester) means "fortification on the river Exe", Exmoor is "moorland along Exe", Exmouth is at the mouth of Exe, while Exwick is a "farm by the Exe". Exe itself means simply "water", from the British Celtic isca. (This may seem boring, but isca is part of "the water of life" that entered English -- through Scottish Gaelic -- as whiskey!) Many names of rivers, mountains and other features of the landscape come - 69 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 from general words. Imagine an Englishman pointing to a river and asking, "What do you call that?" The native Celt might have simply said teme, "river", since to him or her it was "the river", the prominent river in the area and hence not in need of its actual name in typical conversation. And thereby a noble river such as the Thames would have been christened. To create the name of a city on a river then, you'll have to name the river first -- and that name might derive from another language, as the Thames shows. Place names often incorporated terms from other languages. For instance, the Celtic city of Eborakon -- meaning "place of Eburos (the yew man)" -- had its name Romanicized to Eburacum. This name was meaningless to the invading Saxons, who Anglicized it as Eofor ("boar", which had a similar sound) and appended wi-c ("dwelling place"), to give it the name of Eoforwi-c. When the Vikings invaded, they misconstrued wic as vi-k (which meant "bay" and was inappropriate to the inland city but stuck anyway); since Eofor was meaningless to them, there was no pressure to keep the first syllables recognizable, and the name was gradually shortened to Jarvik. This in turn was later shortened to York, the name as it stands today and as it may stand until the city is invaded again. York's name was not directly affected by the fall of England to the Normans, the only conquerors not to leave their mark on it. If the Normans' ancestors, the Vikings, had had as little effect on the city's name, York's modern name might very well be Everwick. The history of the name York reveals five waves of occupation (Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Viking, English) and so tells a lot about the fortunes of the city. While you do not want to go into as much detail for each name in your own imaginary world, this history is worth creating for the most important place names. To rival the history of York, you'd have to invent five model languages! In the same way you're best prepared to write a poem if you studied a lot of poems, you're best prepared to coin a place name by studying how other people have coined place names. To this end, I definitely recommend reviewing an etymological dictionary like Dictionary of Place Names in the British Isles, which covers over 4,000 place names. Each name tells a story, as the name of York shows. Example - quickly create your own naming languages The following quick sketch of three languages -- Nagada, Makata and Negasi -- will show you how you can quickly create your own naming systems. The consonants of Nagada are [b], [d], [g], [s], [m], [n], [l], [r] and [h]. The vowels are [a], [e] and [u]. The vowels differ greatly in frequency: [a] is used about twice as often as [e], which is used slightly more often than [u]. All syllables in Nagada follow the form CV (Consonant+Vowel). The language of Makata is descended from Nagada and showed the following sound changes: [b] > [p], [d] > [t], [g] > [k], [m] > [n] and [n] > [m]. - 70 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The language of Negasi went through different changes from Nagada. The only consonantal change was that of [d] > [t] > [s]. Vowels changed depending on the syllable they appeared in: Final syllable (if more than Vowel First syllable 1 syllable) [a] [e] [i] [e] [u] [a] [u] [a] [o] For instance, the Nagada word naba became nebi in Negasi. All words in the three languages are spelled phonetically. All three languages put the modifier before the word being modified (e.g., "doghouse" means "the house for dogs"). Here are the root words of Nagada and how those words appear in Makata and Negasi. Nagada Makata Negasi "bearer" ba pa be "beloved" naba mapa nebi "blessed" luma peta* lami "divine" luma luna luna* "giver" ge ke gu "healer" dala tala seli "lily" hama hana heni "pearl" rele rele rula "shining" dube tupe saba "swift" sahu sahu seho There was not room in this short introduction to cover borrowing or meaning change or any of the other factors that can override direct descent from a parent language, and I will give only one example here: Negasi borrowed luna from Makata to distinguish between the meanings of "divine" and "blessed", which were both reflected by the single word luma in Nagada. Makata, for its part, coined the word peta for "blessed" to distinguish between the two concepts. Based on these words, here are some common names in the three languages. - 71 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Nagada Makata Negasi "blessed Lumarele Petarele Lamirula pearl" "divine healer" Lumadala Lunatala Lunaseli "swift healer" Sahudala Sahutala Sehoseli "lily giver" Hamage Hanake Henigu "pearl bearer" Releba Relepa Rulabe The above table assumes the meanings of the names were kept current (like Indian names like "Dances With Wolves") rather than fossilized. If the meanings were instead forgotten, then the Makata and Negasi forms would have been shaped simply by changing the sounds of the words. So Nagada Lumarele would be Makata Lunarele, rather than Petarele. If I was actually going to use these names in a story, I would spend much more time refining them to develop an affinity between the sound of a name and the character I wanted to represent. However, taking the words as they are can provide insights into the imagined people. I think Lumarele is a great name for an island princess, and I can picture Sahudala, the impotent witch doctor who wants her hand in marriage, but the name of her jealous sister Hamage carries with it the stench of lilies, rather than their sweet aroma... Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 72 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Gymnastics with Onomastics Hungarian Translation Where the last issue of Model Languages described in detail how to create model languages for generating names, this issue specifically elaborates on how different languages and cultures form names. Here are some useful terms to describe the study of names: onomastics - the study of names (in general) anthroponomastics - the study of personal names toponomastics - the study of place names. Structure of names There are many different ways a culture can structure a name, and the people who speak your language may use any of the following, or a different way besides: [given name] - Jeffrey [given name] [family name] - Jeffrey Henning (American) [family name] [given name] - Mao Ze-Dong (Chinese) [given name] [home town's name] - John Zamoyski (Polish, from town of Zamosc; toponymic) [given name] [occupation name] - John Smith (English) [given name] [maiden name] [husband's family name] - Karen Flynn Henning American) [given name] [middle name] [family name] - Jeffrey Alan Henning (American) [given name] [middle name] [confirmation name] [family name] - Karen Lee Kristina Flynn (Catholic Irish) [given name] [family name] [occupation name] - Mark Jones-the-petrol (Welsh) [given name] [son of] [father's name] - Bjørnstjerne Bjórnson (Norse) [given name] [daughter of] [father's name] - Vigdís Finnbogadøttir (Norse) [given name] [father's name + "child of"] [family name] - Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian) [given name] [middle name] [maternal grandfather's family name] [paternal grandmother's family name] [paternal grandfather's family name] -- Eliana Marcia Villela Gomes Soares (Brazilian) [given name] [middle name] [maternal grandfather's family name] [paternal grandfather's family name] [husband's mother's name] [husband's father's name] -- Maria Beatriz Villela Soares Veiga de Carualho (Brazilian) [given name] [father's family name] y [mother's family name] - José Aguilar y Fernández (Spanish) [given name] [father's family name] de [husband's father's name] - María Álvarez de Aguilar (Spanish) [given name] ["father of" eldest son] [given name] [father's given name] - Tafari Makonnen (Amharic) This list is in no means exhaustive, with the possibility of variations even within a tradition. My friend Steve and his wife recently named their baby Joshua Patrick Lewis - 73 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 LaFrance Weissman: Joshua Patrick because they liked the Old and New Testament ring, Lewis after Steve's grandfather, LaFrance after his wife's surname, and Weissman because ... well, because! Throughout much of history, when most people never traveled far from home, a given name sufficed, with use of a nickname in case there were two Davids in the village, for instance. As people were exposed to more and more people, the family name was added to differentiate people, then the middle name was added for the same purpose. As mass communications and the Internet expose people to that many more individuals, it would not be surprising if people begin making more prominent use of their middle names and begin adding extra middle names, like my friend Steve did for his son. In Britain and the U.S., the first name, the given name, is the one the person regularly goes by. This is not so in Germany, where many people go by their middle names, so that Helmut Michael Schneid is likely to be called Michael by his friends, not Helmut. Of course, many Oriental languages put the family name before the given name, reversing the regular order of Occidental names. Thus, Mao Ze Dong is known as Chairman Mao, not Chairman Ze Dong. (Hungarian is another language that puts the family name first.) English names are unique in one respect -- no other language has a construct similar to the Sr. ("Senior") that gets appended to the names of fathers who have son with the same names, so that Carl Glenn Henning's eponymous father is known as Carl Glenn Henning, Sr. As for the Jr. appellation, it is used in English, Spanish and Portuguese names, among others, though not the Roman numeral designations II, III, IV and so on. Brazilian names have analogous structures to Jr., where Neto is to "grandson" and Sobrinho is to "nephew" as Júnior is to "son".* Some languages, such as Russian, add gender endings to the family name, so that it is Mr. Molotov, but Mrs. Molotova. The Japanese routinely append an honorific to a person's name, such as -san; or -sama, a superhonorific; or -kun, for someone familiar or subordinate; or -chan, a term of endearment reserved for children. Patronymics: in the name of the father One of the more common elements of names is a patronymic, a reference to a person's father. Language Affix Example English -son Stevenson Greek -poulous Cosmopoulus Irish O'- O'Leary Polish -ski Jaruzelski - 74 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Scots Mac-, Mc- MacDougal Welsh Ap Ap Gwilym Related to this, Fitz- (as in Fitzgerald) is Old French for "son of", though it was typically used to mean "illegitimate son of". (So the next time you're angry with some idiot, but your kids are listening, call him a "son of a Fitz".) Amharic (which is a language of Ethiopia) no longer has a separate word for its patronymic, so a name is simply formed from the child's given name plus the father's given name (as if Robert Stevenson was just Robert Steven). While English has fossilized its patronymic, so that for all we know Robert Louis Stevenson's father may have been named Joe, many languages -- including Arabic, Hebrew and Icelandic -- give a new patronymic to each generation. In such a culture, Robert Louis Stevenson's son Jeffery would be known as Jeffery Robertson and his son Thomas would be known as Thomas Jefferyson, and so on, with each son give a different last name than his father. The Russians use patronymics in such a way that children still have the same family name as their parents. In Russian, the patronymic is the middle name, so Ivan's son has the middle name of Ivanovich, while Ivan's daughter has the middle name of Ivanovna. The Spanish and Portuguese are more fair to the people who carry these children for nine months. Both languages form last names from the family names of both the mother and father. In Brazilian, the name of the mother precedes the father's, so that the mother of Eliana Marcia Villela Gomes Soares has a surname of Villela, while Eliana's father had the surname of Gomes Soares (Gomes being the family name of his mother). Spanish reverses the order, putting the name of the father first. Related to patronymics, but different altogether, is teknonymy or paedonymy, where the parent is named after the child. In Arabic, the parent would be known as "father of" or "mother of" the eldest son. Constructing names Forming first names first The story is told, perhaps apocryphally, of a tribe in Nyassaland, Africa, that took its names from a publisher's book catalog that had found its way into their hands. The chief christened himself Oxford University Press. Ox, as his friends may have called him, had chosen his name in one of the more unusual ways. Typically, first names are formed from compounds, from saints' names, from places, from personal traits -- in fact, from many things other than publisher's book catalogs. - 75 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 German and Celtic frequently formed compounds (and served as the basis for the naming vocabulary described in the June issue). Examples of this style of first names include Baldwin, "bold friend", and Gilbert, "shining pledge". The first name is often, especially in Britain, called the Christian name, because after the Norman Conquest the first name was frequently taken from that of a Christian saint (Matthew, Mark, Luke and others). Other traditions would name children after places (Norton, "from the northern village"; Glenna, "from the glen"), personal characteristics (Joy; Kent, "handsome"; Kevin, "kind") and even animals (I'm not going to mention "Dances With Wolves" again). Arabic and Semitic, and many other languages, feature theophoric names, names referring to God, such as Arabic Abd Alla-'h, "slave of Allah", or Hebrew Daniel, "God is the judge", and Michael, "God-like". Anglo-Saxon names also referred to God, as in Godfrey referring to "God's peace" (and surviving in the more common name descended from Godfrey, Jeffrey). The Anglo-Saxons had not always been Christian, and older names made frequent use of Alf-, "elf", the elves being divine spirits, so that Alfreda meant "counselled by elves" and Elvira meant "elf-like" (making it a suitable name for the host of a horror-movie theater). Since the elves, if not appeased, might take a baby and leave a changling in its place, it was hoped that a child named after elves would be left alone by them. Other cultures take the fear of evil spirits further. If a mother had already lost a child to disease, she might be likely to name her next child after something vile, to keep evil spirits away. So her baby might be given an apotropaic name like "Ugly" or "Misshapen". A name like "Ugly" would not be accepted in many European countries. France, Germany and Scandinavia all have lists of approved first names; a baby must be given an approved name, or the child will not be legally recognized. (Perhaps a superstitious Norwegian will name his child "Illegal" in the hopes of keeping those modern evil spirits, lawyers, away.) Incidentally, many languages do not have separate names for men and women, as if all names were like the English neuter names of Chris, Alex, Lee and Kelly. Other languages often use regular inflections for grammatical gender to indicate the gender of names, so that John and Jane, for instance, which are both from the same Hebrew name, are represented as Johann and Johanna in German, Giovanna and Giovanni in Italian and Juana and Juan in Spanish. Forming family names In America, melting pot of the world, there are over 1.2 million last names, according to an analysis of the Social Security rolls. In an analysis of my own business address book, consisting of 4,240 U.S. computer professionals, I found 2,936 unique names, ranging from Abate to Zytniak. Choosing any individual at random revealed a 48% chance that no one else in the address book had the same last name as them -- this is simply an amazing - 76 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 diversity, representing the hundreds of cultures who have seen citizens migrate to the United States. Koreans, in contrast, have just a few principal last names, such as Kim, Pak and Yi, though they have different spelling variations (Yi is also spelled Li, Lee, I and Rhee). Because ancestry is so important to Koreans, they have been culturally adverse to changing their last names; in fact, family names are so important that women do not change their family names upon getting married. As a result, Koreans have preserved the last names of the three major families that first settled the present-day Korean peninsula. Like the Koreans, the Welsh also have few family names. So to tell apart all the people named Jones, Price or Evans, the Welsh tend to distinguish people with 'by-names', so that Welsh Mark Jones-the- petrol is distinguished from Mark Jones-the-gardener. Many family names derived from such a casual use of referring to people by their occupations: farmer, weaver (e.g., Webster), baker. One of the most prestigious occupations in ancient times was that of the blacksmith, who forged swords into ploughshares in time of peace, and pikes into pole-arms in time of war. In fact, blacksmiths were among the most influential members of community, which is why the most common family name in many cultures is "Smith": Arabic Haddad English Smith, Smythe, et. al. French La Fèvre, La Forge German Schmidt Hungarian Kovács Portuguese Ferreiro Russian Kuznetsov Spanish Ferrer, Herrera Besides occupations and patronymics, other sources of family names include places (Henning, for instances, means "the meadow filled with larks"), colors (White, Brown, Green) and virtues (Good). Forming names of nations Many groups of people (races and nations) see themselves as "the people" of the world. If they are isolated from other tribes or realms, they are even more likely to name themselves "the people", as the Innuit (Eskimos), the Bantu (an African tribe) and the Illeni Indians (for whom Illinois is named) did. The Chinese were chauvinistic about it; their name is derived from the dynasty of Chin, with Chin being the word for "man". - 77 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The more different realms a group of people are aware of the more likely they are to name themselves after the place where they live: the Canadians live in Canada, the English live in England, the Germans live in Germany. But the Jews live in Israel (the name of one of their greatest ancestors). If your imaginary people are imaginative enough to call themselves something besides "the people" or "the people of [place]", they will nonetheless give themselves a flattering name, something like "the people of God" or "the blessed people" or "the people of [person]", where the person is any suitably noble patriarch or matriarch. So how did the English get to be called the English? Well, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated from northern Germany to southern Britain. The Angles' name was related to their word angel, "hook", and is assumed to refer to hook-shaped stretches of the German coast. By the ninth century, Englaland was used to describe the island all three tribes had settled, and the form of the name was quickly shortened (not by happenstance, but by haplology) to England. Cultural attitudes towards names No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it. In front of other people, they will, like other people, call him by his use-name, his nickname -- such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, and Ogion which means 'fir-cone'. If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. "A Wizard of Earthsea", Ursula K. Le Guin Names are invested with a power. Many cultures have private names, or true names, that are only to be used by family and close friends, with a public name used regularly instead. The fear is that a wizard or witch will learn their true name and so be able to cast a spell over them. In Múharafic, the model language spoken by desert nomads in an exceptionally dry science fiction novel a friend and I once wrote, each person's name exerts power over them. The most powerful person in the clan is the watersinger, who names each child upon ascension to adulthood, and therefore knows the names of everyone in the clan. The watersinger can declare a person outcast by announcing his true name to everyone. Alternatively, a person can gnomifesi, "confide one's true name to another", to give themselves in marriage to their partner. The Todas of India are not afraid to have their names known, but they will not themselves pronounce their own names. When an individual is introduced to someone new, she asks a companion to say her name. - 78 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 As David Crystal writes in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, "People in the 20th century may find it easy to dismiss such attitudes, but things have not greatly changed. It is unlikely that popular opinion would ever allow a new ship to be named Titanic." Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. *Thanks to personal correspondence (January 6, 2005) from Mauro Mello Jr. for clarification on the use of Jr. in South America. - 79 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Possibilities & Purposes Model Languages THE NEWSLETTER DISCUSSING NEWLY IMAGINED WORDS FOR NEWLY IMAGINED WORLDS Volume I, Issue 3 (2/2) -- July 1, 1995 Table of contents Possibilities and purposes for model languages Classifying by scope Classifying by time-frame of speakers Classifying model languages Ideas for model languages Naming languages Alternate languages Future languages Auxiliary languages Possibilities and purposes for model languages Nobody believes me when I say that my long book [The Lord of the Rings] is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what the L.R. was all about, and whether it was an allegory. And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen si-'la lu-'menn omentielmo ['A star shines on the hour of our meeting'], and that the phrase long antedated the book. - 80 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, Feb. 21, 1958 Model languages come in many different sizes and types. You can classify a model language both for its scope and for who is intended to speak it. Classifying by scope Classifying by time-frame of speakers Classifying model languages Classifying by scope For different scales, a model language might be used for jargon, names, proverbs, conversations or literature. Each layer of complexity requires a more detailed lexicon and grammar, ranging from a jargon consisting of a handful of words and a way of forming plurals to a complex language that can be used to carry on a conversation or support a literature. Most of the model languages that have gained recognition have been intended for use as true languages, but many other model languages of smaller scale exist within works of fiction. Few writers can create an entire language, as Tolkien or Anthony Burgess did; few writers need that much detail in the first place. When trying to decide what model language to create, you should not be intimidated by the magnitude of the works accomplished by Tolkien or Burgess -- that would be like fearing to write a short story because you had read War and Peace. Creating a language for jargon simply means you are only interested in having a few words to convey the flavor of another culture. A model jargon is rarely even dignified with a name, since it is so small. A science-fiction author might coin a few words for unusual aliens and new technologies. For instance, I do not recall much linguistically about Larry Niven's Ringworld, other than to remember that he coined the word tang, "there ain't no justice", as the curse word used by his characters; no doubt he had coined other words to reflect the technology and topography of Ringworld and to enhance its ambience. Classifying by time-frame of speakers Besides classifying a model language by its use, you can classify a language by whether the people who speak it are alive today or are an imagined people of the past or future. A model language might be intended to represent the language of a people who lived in the - 81 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 remote past. It might be intended as a linguistic experiment, showing how a language might have evolved if the past had been changed (alternate past). A model language is commonly something intended for use in the present, such as Esperanto. Finally, it might be set in a future world, such as Burgess' Nadsat or Marc Okrand's Klingon. Classifying model languages The following chart illustrates one way of classifying some popular languages. Most of those languages listed under "Present" and "Literature" are meant as auxiliary languages or international languages, designed to be learned as a common second language. Alternate Past Present Future History New Norwegian Esperanto Literature Quenya Basic Nadsat English Volapük et. al. Conversations Klingon Yilane Proverbs Fremen Hobbit Names English Jargon Ideas for model languages What follows are some ideas drawn from across the above classification matrix, to encourage you to create your own model language. Naming languages Alternate languages Future languages Auxiliary languages - 82 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Naming languages A naming language is a model language created primarily for the purpose of naming people, places and things in an imaginary country or world. It is the simplest type of language to create, since it doesn't need a detailed grammar. The last issue provided an overview on how to create such a language. Alternate languages Science fiction contains a sub-genre of literature known as the alternate history, which postulates worlds that never existed, but might have. What if William the Conquerer, instead of Harold, had fallen at Hastings? What if the French Quebecois and their English neighbors had assimilated? What if the Moors had not stopped at Spain but had conquered England? Alternate universes such as these suggest languages that might have emerged but didn't -- these alternate universes are ripe for the creation of model languages. If William the Conqueror and his Norman troops had failed to conquer the Anglo-Saxons, the English language would have taken a different course altogether. English would have retained much more of its vocabulary, which instead was largely displaced by Norman French. Since an Anglo- English would have retained much of its vocabulary, it might have proven more resistant to borrowing foreign terms. Anglo-English syntax would depend more on inflections, for English lost the Anglo-Saxon inflectional endings under pressure from Norman French, which had a different system of inflections all together. Anglo-English would be a fascinating language indeed. (If anyone out there wants to be the Ivar Aasen of English, let me know.) If the French- and English-speaking people of Quebec had been less interested in preserving their own backgrounds and more interested in building a community together, a new Gallic-English might have evolved as the two languages merged. This new language would have an even simpler grammar than English, as speakers concentrated on the distinctions that French and English had in common. The Moors expanded from North Africa to conquer much of the Iberian Peninsula. Had al-Mansur been able to forge a kingdom that would have survived his death (rather than degenerate into quarelling taifas), the Moors might have tried to invade England, giving rise to a Moorish English. Alternative languages are fun to think about, and you should always be able to come up with one moor version of English. - 83 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Future languages The model linguist need not stop at the past or imagined alternate pasts. He can move to the future, postulating languages that might come to exist. For instance, the Roman Empire spread Latin across Europe. As the Empire declined, the farflung local speakers of Latin slowly changed the language they had learned from Rome. As a result, Latin evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Catalan, Rhaetian, Occitan and Dalamation (now extinct). A different type of empire has risen today, the cultural empire of English. English is now spoken as the mother tongue in Britain, the United States, Canada, Guyana, Australia and New Zealand. Over time, the dialects of English spoken in these areas may diverge as much as Italian, Spanish and French diverged from Latin, giving rise to new languages, based on English, but different from it. English has already given rise to new Englishes, such as Krio (an African creole) and Singlish (Singaporean English). The great thing about constructing a future English is that you already know English! You have already mastered its vocabulary and grammar and can postulate how you would like to see those evolve in a future descendant of English. Auxiliary languages Anyone who has traveled extensively through foreign countries wishes there was one language she could learn that people everywhere could speak. English comes close, but carries with it a cultural baggage that many find oppressive or offensive. From Volapu:k to Esperanto to Interlingua, people have struggled to create languages to make it easier to bring people together. Nor are these efforts in the past. For instance, Phil Hunt is creating Eurolang, which he hopes to position as the common language of the European Union. It is easy to think of situations where simplified bridge languages would be beneficial to people -- to Quebec and to the U.S./Mexico border, to give two North American examples. While the practical steps required to see that an auxiliary language establishes a significant community of speakers are daunting, you can always choose to create such a language as simply a fascinating linguistic exercise, rather than a new social movement. The possibilities for model languages are endless. Timothy Miller has been entertaining CONLANG subscribers with his Monkey Language, and he is also developing a Ferengi language for Star Trek fans (the Ferengi are the big-eared aliens, in case you didn't know). The possibilities are endless, so get working on your language today! Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 84 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Meaning Change Model Languages THE NEWSLETTER DISCUSSING NEWLY IMAGINED WORDS FOR NEWLY IMAGINED WORLDS Volume I, Issue 4 -- August 1, 1995 Table of contents Meaning change Pejoration Amelioration Categories of semantic change Generalization Specialization A taxonomy of semantic change Generalization Metonymy Metaphorical extension Radiation Specialization Contextual specialization Shift Amelioration - 85 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Pejoration Semantic reversal Contronyms Meaninglessness Meaning change across languages Meaning change through time Future meaning change The history of meaning change Meaning change Silly are the goddy tawdry maudlin for they shall christgeewhiz bow down before him: bedead old men, priest and prester, babeling a pitterpatternoster: no word is still the word, but, a loafward has become lord. Ronald Suffield, "The Tenth Beatitude" This subtle poem by the English philologist Ronald Suffield is actually written at two levels. For Suffield intends that the reader hold in mind not just the current meanings of these words but the original meanings as well. For the meaning of a word changes over time. The example everyone knows is gay, which originally meant "merry", but because some people are a little too merry came to mean "wanton", and because some people are a little too wanton came to mean "homosexual", which is the sense almost exclusively used now. A model language that you develop will have words that are descended from words with quite different meanings. Some of the words used in Ronald Suffield's poem, The Tenth Beatitude, will be used to demonstrate how words change through time. Pejoration Amelioration PEJORATION - 86 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Pejoration is the process by which a word's meaning worsens or degenerates, coming to represent something less favorable than it originally did. Most of the words in Suffield's poem have undergone pejoration. For instance, the word silly begins Suffield's poem and meant in Old English times "blessed", which is why Suffield calls his poem a beatitude (Christ's beatitudes begin with "blessed are the..."). How did a word meaning "blessed" come to mean "silly"? Well, since people who are blessed are often innocent and guileless, the word gradually came to mean "innocent". And some of those who are innocent might be innocent because they haven't the brains to be anything else. And some of those who are innocent might be innocent because they knowingly reject opportunities for temptation. In either case, since the more worldly-wise would take advantage of their opportunities, the innocents must therefore be foolish, which of course is the current primary meaning of the word silly. The word goddy in the poem is a metaplasmus (artful misspelling) of gaudy. The word gaudy was derived from the Latin word gaudium, "joy", which was applied to praying (as a type of rejoicing). Because the most common prayers in Middle English times were the prayers of the rosary, Middle English gaude came to be associated with the rosary and came to mean "an ornamental rosary bead". Unfortunately, not all who prayed with the rosary were genuinely pious; many were like the Pharisees of old and just wanted to be seen praying -- religion for them was decorative (ornamental) rather than functional. As a result, modern English gaudy gradually acquired its current meaning of tasteless or ostentatious ornamentation. A related word to gaudy, which is not explicitly referenced in Suffield's poem but is implied, is bead (in the poem, bedead is probably an anagrammatic play on beaded). In Middle English times, bead (then spelled 'bede') referred only to a rosary bead. Middle English bede was itself descended from Old English gebed, prayer. The phrase telling one's beads was literally "saying one's prayers", with each rosary bead used to keep count of the number of prayers said. In the days when all English-speaking Christians were Catholics, using the rosary was such a common practice that it was only natural for the word for prayer to become the word for the bead used to say a prayer. In this way, Suffield is arguing, deep spiritual communication has been trivialized into a trinket. Modern English bead has come so far from its original center that its sphere of meaning no longer includes prayer -- but does include other small round objects, such as beads of sweat. The word rosary, incidentally, originally was Latin for "a rose garden", which was applied as a metaphorical description of the prayer cycle, which was "a rose garden of prayers", with the rose garden symbolizing both the Garden of Eden (or paradise, which originally meant, well we could go on forever...) and the rose of the Virgin Mary. A word that has shown similar semantic degeneration to gaudy is tawdry. In the eighth century, AEthelthy/rth, Queen of Northumbria, abdicated her office and renounced the pleasures of the flesh, having her marriage to the King of Northumbria annulled to - 87 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 become abbess of a monastery on the Isle of Ely. This act of sacrifice and her subsequent holiness prompted others to revere her as a saint. Legend has it that she died of a disease of the throat, a disease that she regarded as judgment upon the vanity of her youth, when she loved to wear beautiful necklaces in court. Eventually, AEthelthy/rth was beatified, and -- as by this time phonetic change had simplified her name to Audrey -- she was known as St. Audrey. An annual fair was held in her memory each October 17th, and at the fair were sold cheap souvenirs, including a neck lace called St. Audrey's lace. In England, the initial [s] of saints' names is often elided (for instance, the town of St. Albans in Hertfordshire is locally pronounced as [talbans] by some). As a result of this process, by the 1800s, the necklaces were called tawdry laces. It wasn't long before tawdry was applied to the other cheap souvenirs sold at the annual fair, with the result that tawdry became a general adjective meaning "gaudy and cheap in appearance". The word tawdry is not the only eponymous word to degenerate: the last word in Suffield's first stanza, maudlin, is short for Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was the reformed prostitute who wept at Christ's tomb that first Easter morning; this weeping has been memorialized in innumerable medieval paintings and stain-glass windows. As a result, her name came to be used to describe anyone who was weeping, and from there the meaning radiated out to "excessively sentimental." Magdalene came to be pronounced maudlin through gradual phonetic change; in fact, Magdalen College at Oxford University is locally known as Maudlin. Silly are the goddy tawdry maudlin. Moving on to the next line of Suffield's poem (for they shall christgeewhiz bow down before him), we find another religious figure, of greater stature than Mary Magdalene or St. Audrey, who has had his name spawn many new words. Of course, this is Jesus Christ, whose name has become an oath. Because swearing is considered inappropriate in polite society, people slightly changed the sound of the invective. Damn it! became darn it!, shit! became shoot!, Jesus! became gee, gee whiz and geez and Jesus Christ! became Jiminy Crickets, among others. These euphemistic changes are called minced oaths. The final word in Suffield's poem to undergo pejoration is paternoster, which is descended from the Latin pater noster, which represents "Our Father", the first words of the Lord's Prayer. As a result of this relationship, the words came to be known as another name for the Lord's Prayer and came to mean one of the large beads on a rosary on which the Paternoster was recited (those beads again!). As its meaning radiated outward from "large bead", it even came to mean "a weighted fishing line with hooks connected by bead-like swivels". The word paternoster also came to mean any word-formula spoken as a prayer or magic spell. Since the Paternoster was in Latin, and in Medieval times Latin was no longer the native language of any of the reciters, the prayer was often recited quickly and with little regard for the sense of the words. Because of this, paternoster came to mean meaningless chatter, words empty of meaning -- this sense of the word gave rise to the form patter. (The word pitter-patter, though used by Suffield in his poem, is actually etymologically unrelated to the word patter with this meaning.) - 88 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Patter has the sense of meaningless words, and sharp words can become rounded and dull. But although Suffield laments that no word is still the Word [of God], some words do assume a dignity they had not before possessed. AMELIORATION Amelioration is the process by which a word's meaning improves or becomes elevated, coming to represent something more favorable than it originally referred to. Two words that have undergone amelioration are priest and prester. Both words (along with presbyter) are descended from the Greek word presbuteros, "older man, elder", a comparative form of the word presbus, "old man". Because churches of most religions are headed by elders and not youth, and because age is often equated with wisdom, the Greek word gradually acquired the meaning of "church leader, priest". The different forms represent borrowings made at different times, with priest being the oldest English form, followed by prester, followed by the learned borrowing of presbyter. In what for Suffield is the greatest example of amelioration, the early Old English word hláfweard, which if translated using its descendant words would be rendered loafward, meant "the keeper of the bread" and was applied to the head of a household. Although "keeper of the bread" might bear witness to the importance of that most basic of foodstuffs to early Anglo-Saxons, alternatively one might argue that it had no more literal sense than bread- does in the modern word breadwinner. The word hláfweard has been shortened over time, first to hláford and then to lord. Over time, the word has been used of not just any head of household but of princes and nobility; this sense was extended to include the Prince of Light, God. For Suffield, this extension of lord makes a fitting appellation for Christ, given that Christ was the keeper of the bread of communion. The word lord, which ends the poem, stands in start contrast to the demeaning phrase christgeewhiz used earlier in the poem as an example of pejoration. By ending the poem with the word lord, Suffield offers a hope for redemption for all words. Clearly the poet Suffield believes that man has taken the meaning out of God's words, reducing pater noster to patter and God's son's name to a curse. Yet if he is extreme in his view of pejoration as an example of man's trivialization of God and rejection of divine meaning, the process of semantic change is almost universally condemned by teachers, scholars and other concerned language speakers. In fact, semantic drift is as natural as continental drift and almost as inexorable. The meanings of words change, sometimes for the worse, but sometimes providing useful distinctions. Some words, like lord, are even inspired. - 89 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Categories of semantic change As the above discussion shows, many people view semantic change with strong emotions. Some, like Suffield, may even perceive it as an almost diabolical force. The discussion of meaning change is often emotionally charged, with the meanings perceived as "improving" (amelioration) or "worsening" (pejoration) over time. This next section will attempt to provide a more clinical overview of how words change meanings. Try this: flip through the dictionary and look at random for a word with four or more meanings, preferably a word you think you know. Chances are you will find that it has an unlikely hodge-podge of meanings, at least one of which will surprise you. Here's what I found when I tried this myself: daughter has these senses, among others: One's female child. A female descendant. A woman thought of as if in a parent/child relationship: a daughter of Christ. Something personified as a female descendant: the Singer sewing machine is the daughter of the loom. Physics. The immediate product of the radioactive decay of an element. The last sense makes me want to write a short story, The Daughter of Fat Man, in which I could use the word daughter in at least three of its senses. How does a word come to have such broad, often very different, meanings? At the simplest level, words do undergo only two types of meaning change, not amelioration and pejoration, but generalization (a word's meaning widens to include new concepts), and specialization (a word's meaning contracts to focus on fewer concepts). Generalization Specialization A taxonomy of semantic change GENERALIZATION Also known as extension, generalization is the use of a word in a broader realm of meaning than it originally possessed, often referring to all items in a class, rather than one specific item. For instance, place derives from Latin platea, "broad street", but its meaning grew broader than the street, to include "a particular city", "a business office", - 90 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 "an area dedicated to a specific purpose" before broadening even wider to mean "area". In the process, the word place displaced (!) the Old English word stow and became used instead of the Old English word stede (which survives in stead, steadfast, steady and -- of course -- instead). Generalization is a natural process, especially in situations of "language on a shoestring", where the speaker has a limited vocabulary at her disposal, either because she is young and just acquiring language or because she is not fluent in a second language. A first-year Spanish student on her first vacation in Spain might find herself using the word coche, "car", for cars, trucks, jeeps, buses, and so on. When my son Alexander was two, he used the word oinju (from orange juice) to refer to any type of juice, including grape juice and apple juice; wawa (from water) referred to water and hoses, among other things. Some examples of general English words that have undergone generalization include: Word Old Meaning "men's wide breeches pants extending from waist to ankle" place "broad street" SPECIALIZATION The opposite of generalization, specialization is the narrowing of a word to refer to what previously would have been but one example of what it referred to. For instance, the word meat originally referred to "any type of food", but came to mean "the flesh of animals as opposed to the flesh of fish". The original sense of meat survives in terms like mincemeat, "chopped apples and spices used as a pie filling"; sweetmeat, "candy"; and nutmeat, "the edible portion of a nut". When developing your model language, it is meet to leave compounds untouched, even if one of their morphemes has undergone specialization (or any other meaning change). For an example from another language, the Japanese word koto originally referred to "any type of stringed instrument" but came to be used to refer only a specific instrument with 13 strings, which was played horizontally and was popular in the Edo Period. Other examples of specialization, from the development of English, include: Word Old Meaning affection "emotion" deer "animal" forest "countryside" - 91 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 girl "a young person" starve "to die" A TAXONOMY OF SEMANTIC CHANGE All other semantic change can be discussed in either terms of generalization or specialization. The following diagram shows different subtypes of meaning change. Generalization, or extension Metonymy Metaphorical extension Radiation Specialization or narrowing Contextual specialization Shift Amelioration Pejoration Semantic reversal Contronyms Meaninglessness A shift in meaning results from the subsequent action of generalization and specialization over time: a word that has extended into a new area then undergoes narrowing to exclude its original meaning. In the unlikely event that all the senses of place except for "a business office" faded away, then place would be said to have undergone a shift. - 92 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Generalization Metonymy Metonymy is a figure of speech where one word is substituted for a related word; the relationship might be that of cause and effect, container and contained, part and whole. For instance, Shakespeare's comment "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" (from Much Ado About Nothing) uses "sheep's guts" to refer to the music produced by harpstrings. Had guts come to mean "music", then the meaning would have shifted due to metonymy. The Greek word dóma originally meant "roof". In the same way English speakers will metonymically use roof to mean "house" (as in "Now we have a roof over our heads"), the Greeks frequently used dóma to refer to "house", so that that is now the standard meaning of the word. A Russian word will provide a similar example: vinograd, "vineyard", was so frequently used to refer to "grapes", as in "Let's have a taste of the vineyard" that it has come to mean "grapes". Metaphorical extension Grace Murray Hopper, the late Admiral and computer pioneer, told a story of an early computer that kept calculating incorrectly. When technicians opened up its case to examine the wiring, which physically represented the machine's logic, a huge dead moth was found, shorting out one of the circuits and causing the faulty logic. That moth was the first of its kind to achieve immortality. Because of it, software is now frequently plagued with "bugs". The use of bug to refer to an error in computer logic was a metaphorical extension that became so popular that it is now part of the regular meaning of bug. The computer industry has a host of words whose meaning has been extended through such metaphors, including mouse for that now ubiquitous computer input device (so named because the cord connecting it to the computer made it resemble that cutest of rodents). Metaphorical extension is the extension of meaning in a new direction through popular adoption of an originally metaphorical meaning. The crane at a construction site was given its name by comparison to the long-necked bird of the same name. When the meaning of the word daughter was first extended from that of "one's female child" to "a female descendant" (as in daughter of Eve), the listener might not have even noticed that the meaning had been extended. Metaphorical extension is almost a natural process undergone by every word. We don't even think of it as meaning change. In its less obvious instances, we don't even see it as extending the meaning of a word. For example, the word illuminate originally meant "to light up", but has broadened to mean "to clarify", "to edify". These meanings seem so natural as to be integral parts of the words, where senses such as "to celebrate" and "to adorn a page with designs" seem like more obvious additions. - 93 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 A few specific metaphors are common to many different languages, and words can be shown to have undergone similar, if independent, developments. Thus the Welsh word haul and the Gaelic word súil, both meaning "sun", have both come to mean "eye". Nor is this metaphor a stranger to English, where the daisy was in Old English originally a compound meaning "day's eye", from its yellow similarity to the sun. More often, languages will differ in the precise correspondences between words, so that some languages have broad words with many meanings, which must be translated into multiple words in another language. A word like paternoster, discussed earlier, with senses ranging from the "Lord's Prayer" to "a magic spell" to "a large bead" to "a weighted fishing line" will have to be translated into four different words in another language (though I challenge you to find an English-to-language-of-your- choice dictionary that indicates the four meanings of paternoster). Word Old Meaning illuminate "to light up" Radiation Radiation is metaphorical extension on a grander scale, with new meanings radiating from a central semantic core to embrace many related ideas. The word head originally referred to that part of the human body above the rest. Since the top of a nail, pin or screw is, like the human head, the top of a slim outline, that sense has become included in the meaning of head. Since the bulb of a cabbage or lettuce is round like the human head, that sense has become included in the meaning of head. Know where I'm headed with this? The meaning of the word head has radiated out to include the head of a coin (the side picturing the human head), the head of the list (the top item in the list), the head of a table, the head of the family, a head of cattle, $50 a head. But I'll stop while I'm ahead. Other words that have similarly radiated meanings outward from a central core include the words heart, root and sun. Specialization The only specific subtype of specialization that I have identified is contextual specialization. Contextual specialization The word undertaker originally meant "one who undertakes a task, especially one who is an entrepreneur". This illustrates contextual specialization, where the meaning of a word is reshaped under pressure from another word that had frequently co-occured with it: thus - 94 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 undertaker acquired its meaning from constant use of the phrase funeral undertaker; eventually, under the pressure towards euphemism, the word funeral was dropped. Another example of contextual specialization is doctor, which originally meant "a teacher" and then later "an expert", where it came to be used in the phrase medical doctor; now of course this is redundant and medical is omitted, with the primary sense of doctor having become more specialized. Word Old Meaning undertaker "entrepreneur" doctor "teacher" Shift I heard an American student at Cambridge University telling some English friends how he climbed over a locked gate to get into his college and tore his pants, and one of them asked, 'But, how could you tear your pants and not your trousers?' Norman Moss, "British/American Language Dictionary" Shifts occur when the sense of a word expands and contracts, with the final focus of the meaning different from the original. For some reason, words describing clothing tend to shift meanings more frequently than other words, perhaps because fashion trends come and go, leaving words to seem as old fashioned as the clothing they describe. Who today wants to wear bloomers, knickers or pantaloons? The word pants has an interesting history. It's ultimate etymon is Old Italian Pantalone. In the 1600s, Italy developed commedia dell'arte, a style of comedy based on improvisation using stock characters. Pantalone was a stock character who was portrayed as a foolish old man wearing slippers and tight trousers. Through regular metyonmy, speakers of Old French borrowed his name to describe his Italian trousers. Their word was then borrowed into English as pantaloon, which in time was shortened to pants and came to mean trousers in general. British speakers of English have modified the meaning again to the sense of "underpants", resulting in the confusing situation described in Norman Moss' quote above. Cast like discarded laundry along the divide separating British and American English are quite a few words for clothing, as the following table shows. Word Meaning Etymon: English dialect jump jumper Original: "loose jacket" - 95 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 American: "pinafore" British: "a light pullover" Etymon: knickerbockers "breeches banded below Original: knee" knickers "boy's baggy trousers American: banded below knee" "bloomers, old-fashioned British: female underpants" pantaloon, from Old Etymon: French pantalon "men's wide breeches Original: extending from waist to pants ankle" American: "trousers" British: "underpants" Etymon: suspend (unchanged) "straps to Original: support trousers" suspenders American: (unchanged) British: "garter" Etymon: tight, adj. (unchanged) "snug, stretchable apparel worn Original: from neck to toe; tights typically worn by dancers or acrobats" American: (unchanged) British: "pantyhose" Old French veste It. Lat. Etymon: vestis Original: "clothing" vest American: "waistcoat" British: "undershirt" Amelioration Suffield's poem gave many good examples of amelioration, including priest from "old man". A complementary term, pastor, likewise underwent amelioration, originally - 96 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 meaning "shepherd" (a sense surviving in the word pastoral), but coming to mean its current sense of "minister" by the extensive Christian references to "the Lord is my shepherd" as a call to ministry. The following table shows other examples, including pluck in the sense of He has a lot of pluck. Word Old Meaning enthusiasm "abuse" guts ("courage") "entrails" pastor "shepherd" pluck ("spirit") "act of tugging" queen "woman" Pejoration King James II called the just completed St. Paul's Cathedral amusing, awful and artificial. Call the just completed rock and roll museum in Cleveland amusing, awful and artificial, and you may be accurate but you will mean something quite different from King James. When he lived, those words meant that the cathedral was "pleasing, awe-inspiring and artful" respectively. The meaning of each word has grown more negative with time. People seem much more likely to drag words down than to lift them up, to build museums instead of cathedrals, as the following examples may demonstrate. Word Old Meaning crafty "strong" cunning "knowing" "distinguished, standing egregious out from the herd" harlot "a boy" notorious "famous" obsequious "flexible" vulgar "popular" Semantic reversal Occasionally a word will shift so far from its original meaning that its meaning will nearly reverse. Fascinatingly enough, the word manufacture originally meant "to make by hand". Word Old Meaning - 97 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 counterfeit "an original" garble "to sort out" manufacture "to make by hand" Contronyms A contronym is like a word that has undergone semantic reversal, only the tension has not eased: the word still preserves its original meaning, along with a contradictory -- if not exactly counterposed -- meaning. Word Meanings bimonthly "happening every other month", "happening twice monthly" biweekly "happening every other week", "happening twice weekly" "to overwhelm with force, especially rape"*, "to overwhelm ravish with emotion, enrapture" "authoritative measure of approval"*, "coercive measure of sanction disapproval of nation against nation" Brit. "to put on the table for discussion", Amer. "to set aside table a motion rather than discuss it" *The older of the two senses given Interestingly, biannual means only "twice each year", with no recorded sense of "every other year" in Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary. The word cleave (meaning "to split or separate" or "to adhere or cling") is actually two different words, both from the Old English (cle-ofan and cleofian respectively) but by changes in pronunciation, these words have evolved the same current form. Meaninglessness The nadir of semantics is meaninglessness. The final semantic change. The death of meaning. The defeat of sigor. The word sigor is Old English for "victory". It is now meaningless to almost all English speakers, except for those familiar with Old English or with German (where its cognate survives in Seig). Few now know what sigor means. Is this a change in its meaning or a change in the very state of the word? Is death part of life? - 98 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Meaning change across languages Imagine for a moment that sigor had survived. It might have been changed to siyor, and its meaning could have generalized to "success". It would then stand in contrast to the German Seig. Sister languages, or dialects of a language, often have the same basic word with different meanings. These word pairs then become known as "false friends" to speakers trying to learn the other language. For instance, German Lust means "pleasure", which is in fact the original meaning of the English word, which comes from the same common ancestor as Lust. In English, lust underwent specialization and pejoration, as speakers associated it with only one type of pleasure. The British and American English clothing terms also show how related languages can send words off in different directions over time. As you develop your model languages, you should have words in related languages undergo different semantic changes. Situations where a word's meaning changes in two related languages are relatively rare, the example of the Irish and Gaelic words for "sun" evolving into "eye" notwithstanding. When languages borrow words, they frequently change the meanings of those borrowings, typically making generic words more specific, in the same way that one language's place names often grew out of another language's generic words for concepts such as "hill", "river" and "town". Take the history of the Low German word spittal, derived from a generic Romance word for "hospital" but then applied to "a hospital for lepers". Meaning change through time Future meaning change The history of meaning change FUTURE MEANING CHANGE Words are slowly changing in meaning even now, though the changes happen at the speed of continental drift rather than with the sudden jolt of earthquakes. To conclude this issue, and to summarize the types of meaning change discussed here, I have extrapolated how some words might change meanings in the next 25 years. Generalization: entrepreneur, "small-business owner or worker" (because of its favorable connotations, this word was widely adopted as a label, even by those who were not risk takers). - 99 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Metonymy: sun-cell, "electric car" (so called because of the prominent solar cell on the roof of the vehicle). Metaphorical Extension: surfaced, "checked all Internet messages, including e-mail, voice mail and video mail" (originally popularized in the phrase I just surfaced from checking my flood of e-mail; given added cachet under the influence of surf, which see). Radiation: Internet, "Internet, narrowcast television, narrowcast radio, virtual reality, videoconferencing" (because it all was added onto the 'Net). Specialization: surf, "navigate the Internet" (traditional "water surfing" becomes called sea-boarding). Contextual Specialization: candidate, "political candidate" (the word contestant began to be used instead of candidate for non-political contexts). Shift: fax, "point-to-point e-mail" (e-mail gradually superseded fax). post-modern, "modern" (by calling everything modern post- modern, this change was inevitable). Amelioration: temp, "specialist". Pejoration: liberal, "idiot" (this term was used as an insult as early as 1988 and was gradually abandoned as a label by the Democrats it originally described). job, "drudgery". Semantic Reversal: modern, "obsolete" (thanks to the change in meaning of post- modern). putrid, "cool" (slang). Contronym: communism, "communism, capitalism" (courtesy of the Hong Kong communists). Meaninglessness: perestroika (this word was used only by historians interested in how the Russian economy followed that of Sicily). If you want to create a slang or jargon, besides coining new words you should change the meanings of current words, much as these examples did. Just be aware that it is easier for an outsider to pick up new words than old words whose meaning has changed, since the outsider will bring all his assumptions from past experience to bear, so that when he hears a teenager call something putrid, he will assume that it is putrid. THE HISTORY OF MEANING CHANGE To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon- - 100 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Hobbit" If the history of semantic change had to be summed up as one process, it would be that of specialization. The Anglo Saxons 1500 years ago made do with perhaps 30,000 words in their complete vocabulary, while Modern English has anywhere from 500,000 to a million words, depending on whether or not scientific vocabularies are included. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God." It could be argued that originally there was one word, from which all others have sprung. The origins of language will never be known, but the first language probably had a vocabulary of a few hundred words, providing a rich enough vocabulary for a primitive people who had few materials and fewer abstract concepts. Many of the words of the first languages had very broad senses of meaning. For instance, the word inspire is from the Latin inspirare, which literally means "to breathe into". Its archaic meaning is "to breathe life into", with newer meanings like "to be the cause of", "to elicit", "to move to action", "to exalt" and "to guide by divine influence". Now if a minister were to speak of Adam as dust inspired, he might mean by that not just that the dust is having life breathed into it (the original etymological meaning), but also that the dust is being exalted and given form, that it is being moved to action, and that it is being divinely guided (these are the metaphorical or extended meanings). In other words, this minister might not mean just one of the definitions of inspired but all of them simultaneously. The extended meanings are branches that have split off from the trunk, and our hypothetical minister has simply traced them back to the root. If you seek to create a language from an earlier time, you should probably develop a small vocabulary, with it words having much more overlapping of meaning than the vocabularies of modern languages. Imagine a word spiratholmos -- an ancient ancestor to Latin inspirare -- meaning "wind, breath, voice, spirit." A speaker who used the word spiratholmos would regard the wind in the trees as the breath of the earth, the voice of God, the spirit animating each of us. This is different way of looking at words, and prompted Tolkien to write, "There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful." What Tolkien's elves might have expressed in one word, resonant with meaning, Tolkien's diminutive man cannot express at all. Semantic change can be viewed dispassionately as a natural process, but it can also be invested with a spiritual significance, as Tolkien and Suffield have done. A model - 101 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 language is an art form and its crafting can even convey this theme of spiritual isolation. As Ronald Suffield wrote, "no word is still the word, but, a loafward has become lord." Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 102 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sen:esepera Model Languages THE NEWSLETTER DISCUSSING NEWLY IMAGINED WORDS FOR NEWLY IMAGINED WORLDS Volume I, Issue 5 -- September 1, 1995 Sen:esepera -- A Reform Of Esperanto Design goals Phonology Orthography Morphology Borrowings Grammar Sample text Vocabulary This month's issue looks at an actual model language that I have been developing, Sen:esepera. This issue is more technical than most issues of Model Languages but it is hopefully not too difficult to follow. Design goals I designed Sen:esepera as a dramatic reform of Esperanto, which I felt was difficult for speakers of non-European languages (especially Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese) to pronounce. - 103 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The primary design goal was to reduce the complexity of Esperanto's phonology, which -- due to a plethora of consonants and consonant clusters -- is difficult for many native speakers of non- European languages to master. Secondary design goals were to further simplify Esperanto's grammar and vocabulary. When words were phonetically simplified to meet the primary design goal, it became harder to recognize them from their roots, necessitating changes to keep the vocabulary easily learnable. Note that I explicitly am not interested in proposing that Sen:esepera should be adopted as an international language; the creation of this language is purely an intellectual pursuit. It is also not yet complete, with the vocabulary still being simplified. Phonology Sen:esepera contains five vowels: /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/. The language has 14 consonants: /p/ /t/ /k/ /b/ /d/ /g/ /f/ /s/ /h/ /m/ /n/ /l/ /r/ /j/. Where Esperanto has 23 consonants, Sen:esepera has only the 14 most- common consonants, based on Rick Morneau's analysis of a sample of 25 world languages (for further details, refer to ftp.eskimo.com/u/r/ram/conlang). Of the languages he surveyed, 76% contain every sound in Sen:esepera; their speakers will not need to master any new sounds, while speakers of the other 24% of the languages will have to master a few new sounds. Because Sen:esepera makes comparatively few distinctions between consonants, most consonants have allophones, of which only the principal ones will be mentioned here. An allophone is one of at least two alternate pronunciations for a phoneme. The phoneme /f/ has allophones [f] and [v], and /s/ has allophones [s] and [z] (similar to Old English). The phoneme /r/ includes any retroflex or any alveolar flap or trill. The phoneme /h/ has allophones [h] and [x]. As with Esperanto, the accent is always on the penultimate syllable. Orthography Every word is spelled phonemically. The letter 'c' represents the phoneme /k/. The letter 'i' represents either the vowel /i/ or the semivowel /j/; if 'i' follows a vowel, then it represents /j/, otherwise it represents /i/. Thus, 'amica' ("friend") represents /amika/ and 'caim' ("where") represents /kajm/. - 104 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Separate morphemes used in a word (aside from the grammatical marker, covered below) are delimited by use of the colon (e.g., im:amica, "opposite-friend, enemy"). Morphology Every syllable in the language follows this pattern: [C] V [S] [N] Where: [C] - is an optional ordinary consonant: /p/ /t/ /k/ /b/ /d/ /g/ /f/ /s/ /h/ /l/ /r/ V - is a mandatory vowel: /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/ [S] - is an optional semivowel 'i' /j/ [N] - is an optional nasal /n/ or /m/ This provides for a comparatively small range of syllables, with just 360 (12 x 5 x 2 x 3) possible syllables, where Esperanto theoretically has over ten thousand possible syllables. (The exact number is impossible to determine, since Esperanto's vocabulary is not closed and its morphology has not been explicitly defined.) Sen:esepera's morphology is designed to eliminate complex consonant clusters (e.g., /str/, /bl/, /pr/, /sp/), which are difficult for many speakers of Asian and African languages to pronounce. See Rick Morneau's essay on morphology (at ftp.eskimo.com/u/r/ram/conlang) for a full description of optimizing morphology for maximum ease of pronunciation. Every word ends in a class suffix, indicating part of speech (see GRAMMAR below). Borrowings When a word is borrowed into Sen:esepera, it should conform to its phonology, morphology and class suffixes. Thus Esperanto is borrowed as Eseperanta. Sample borrowings: Sen:esepera Esperanto pasinatan pasinta "past" linegefa lingvo "language" - 105 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 secienca scienco "science" (note that Esperanto 'c' /ts/ is borrowed as /k/) seterata strato "street" Esperanto words are nativized according to standard rules, which are too involved to detail here. Grammar For simplicity, the grammar has been designed to eliminate most features that are not universal to fusional (synthetic) languages and even a few features that are not always used in analytic languages. Sen:esepera lacks number, articles, declensions, inflections, and pronouns with gender distinctions. Every word ends in a class suffix, indicating its part of speech: Nouns -a Pronouns -u, -un Adjectives -an, -en, -in, -m Verbs -i Adverbs -e Prepositions -o Numerals -in Correlatives -o, -on NOUNS: -A 1. The language has neither a definite article (the, Esperanto la) or an indefinite article (a, an). 2. Nouns end in -a. They are not inflected for plural, gender or case. The relationship of case is expressed by prepositions. What Esperanto would express with the accusative case, Sen:esepera expresses with the preposition ano. PRONOUNS: -U, -UN 5. Personal pronouns end in /u/ and are not inflected for number, gender or case. The first person pronoun ("I, me, we, us") is imu; second person ("you") is tu; and third person ("he, him, she, her, they, them, it") is hu. All possessive pronouns (e.g., mine, yours, his) are formed by appending /n/; possessive pronouns are treated as adjectives. ADJECTIVES: -AN, -EN, -IN OR -M - 106 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 3. Adjectives typically end in /-an/ and typically precede the noun they describe. The comparative is made by using the word pelo, the superlative by supelo. With the comparative, the conjunction olo is used. VERBS: -I 6. The verb undergoes no change with regard to person or number or tense, which is instead conveyed as necessary through context. The passive is rendered by preceding a verb with esete. ADVERBS: -E 7. Adverbs end in -e; comparison is as for adjectives. PREPOSITIONS: -O All prepositions end in -o. Each preposition has a definite and constant meaning, but if the direct sense does not indicate what it should be (e.g., if the preposition is used idiomatically), the preposition lo (corresponding to Esperanto je), is used instead. NUMERALS: 4. The first 10 ordinal numerals are, when used as adjectives, unin, duin, tirin, forin, fifin, sesin, sepin, ocin, enin, decin. Tens and hundreds are formed by joining the numerals. The suffix -en indicates fractional numbers. CORRELATIVES: -O, -ON Correlatives end in /-o/ or /-on/. Esperanto's correlatives are concise but hard to remember. Sen:esepera instead uses compound words, which provide greater clues for remembering. Thus Esperanto kiu [< ki-, "which" + u, "one"] equals Sen:esepera's caim:uno. Sample correlatives are tin:obico, "this thing"; dem:sepeco, "that kind of"; sum:loco, "somewhere"; an:emodo, "nohow"; and omin:cuso, "for every reason". A correlative consists of a modifier followed by a context. The six possible modifiers are: caim "which, what" tin "this" dem "that" sum "some" an "no" omin "each, every, all" - 107 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The 9 possible contexts are: uno "one" obico "thing" sepeco "kind" loco "place" emodo "way" cuso "reason" tempo "time" enumo "quantity" unon "one's" Correlatives total 54 different words. The contexts can be inflected like other words in most instances. WORD ORDER: Like Esperanto, Sen:esepera has no fixed word order. Sample text Basic english Sen:esepera 1 And all the earth had one language and O tutan tera eseti codo unin lingifa, o one tongue. codo unin parola. 2 And it came about that in their O tina ocasi, caim:tempo hu foiagi delo wandering from the east, they came to a orienta, demo hu terofi pelatan loca eno stretch of flat country in the land of loca codo Sinara [Shinar]; o hu domi Shinar, and there they made their dem:loca. living-place. 3 And they said one to another, Come, let O hu paroli unin alo omin:una, "Feni, us make bricks, burning them well. And imu posete cusi berica, o pele beruli they had bricks for stone, putting them hu." O hu hafi berica contero setona, o together with sticky earth. cota hafi hu contero unigi berica. 4 And they said, Come, let us make a O hu paroli, "Feni, imu posete conseteri town, and a tower whose top will go up imu ureba, o tura, caim:unon supera as high as heaven; and let us make a ebele atingi alo paradisa; o imu posete great name for ourselves, so that we cusi imu enoma, ro imu ebele may not be wanderers over the face of pere:emeti foran supero:eno fisaga the earth. codo tutan tera." - 108 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 5 And the Lord came down to see the O Dia feni im:supere o fidi ureba o town and the tower which the children tura, caimo dimin:homa codo homa of men were building. conseteri. 6 And the Lord said, See, they are all one O Dia paroli, "Fidi, homa eseti unin, o people and have all one language; and hu hafi tutan unin lingifa; o tino hu this is only the start of what they may comenci o fari: o ene hu ebele inhibici do; and now it will not be possible to delo an:obica, caimo hu ebele emagi o keep them from any purpose of theirs. fari. 7 Come, let us go down and take away Feni, imu posete iri im:supere, o the sense of their language, so that they dem:loca sangi hun lingifa, demo hu will not be able to make themselves im:ebele compereni unin omin:unan clear to one another. parola." 8 So the Lord God sent them away into Dia posete pere:emeti hu foron pano every part of the earth; and they gave fisaga codo tutan tera: o hu cesige up building their town. conseteri ureba. 9 So it was named Babel, because there Hun enoma eseti Babela [Babel]; cuso the Lord took away the sense of all Dia dem:loca sangi lingifa codo tutan languages; and from there the Lord sent tera: o delo dem:loca Dia pere:emeti hu them away over all the face of the foran supero:eno fisaga codo tutan tera. earth. From "The Bible In Basic Translated by Jeffrey Henning, Sep 24th, 1995, author of English", first published by the Syndics of the Cambridge Sen:esepera University Press (London and New York) in 1949 (see also: The Babel Text) Vocabulary Sen:esepera is almost entirely derived from Esperanto and has approximately 1700 words, derived from around 1200 basic morphemes. The final version of the vocabulary will attempt to reduce the number of basic morphemes to 600. As part of this effort, all homonyms will be removed from the vocabulary: e.g., aga [from Esp. ag^o.], "age", and aga [Esp. ago.], "act". Sen:esepera words are typically longer than Esperanto words, due both to Sen:esepera's strict morphology and to its use of mnemonic affixes in place of Esperanto's esoteric affixes. As the vocabulary is reformed, Sen:esepera words will grow even longer. - 109 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 (This is a subtle contribution towards Esperanto's goal of encouraging world peace by offering an easy-to-learn language. Sen:esepera, by offering a long- winded language, hopes to discourage people from talking too much, which will increase the likelihood of world peace...) Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 110 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Meaning Model Languages THE NEWSLETTER DISCUSSING NEWLY IMAGINED WORDS FOR NEWLY IMAGINED WORLDS Volume I, Issue 6 (1/2) -- October/November 1, 1995 Table of contents Meaning The bother of brother Translations (meanings across languages) Prototypes for the birds Conclusion Meaning I won't use words again They don't mean what I meant They don't say what I said They're just the crust of the meaning With realms underneath Never touched Never stirred Never even moved through If language were liquid It would be rushing in Suzanne Vega, "Language" If language were liquid, we could enter a submersible and use sound waves to reveal the subterranean terrain. For each word floats like a buoy, anchored to some unseen spot far - 111 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 below. The meanings of the word brother seem easy to pick out from the waters, but in fact the possible meanings stretch deeper than you might expect, ranging from "full brother" to "any kinsman" to "any fellow human" to "anything related" (as in the brother vices of greed and selfishness). Since we can't use sonar, how can we sound out the meanings of words? It used to be thought that any word could be described in terms of semantic primitives. For instance, M. Bierwisch, writing in 1970, said that semantic features do not differ from language to language, but are rather part of the general human capacity for language, forming a universal inventory used in particular ways in individual languages. According to this theory, every word can be broken up into primitive kernels of meaning, called semantemes (also called semantic features or semantic components). Some sample definitions using semantemes: Word Semantemes father male + parent mother female + parent son male + offspring daughter female + offspring brother male + sibling sister female + sibling The process of breaking words down into semantemes is known as componential analysis and has been most often used to analyze kinship terms across languages. The components are often given in more detail. For instance, kinship terms like those shown above might have three components: sex, generation, lineage. Sex would be male or female; generation would be a number, with 0 = reference point's generation, -1 = previous generation, +1 = next generation; lineage would be either direct, colineal (as in siblings) or ablineal (as in uncles and aunts). This is obviously a highly technical way to define words we all know and use without overdue consideration, but -- by using these components -- you can concisely define a variety of English kinship terms. Word Generation Lineage Sex mother -1 Direct Female father -1 Direct Male aunt -1 Ablineal Female uncle -1 Ablineal Male sister 0 Colineal Female brother 0 Colineal Male daughter 1 Direct Female - 112 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 son 1 Direct Male niece 1 Ablineal Female nephew 1 Ablineal Male This can be the starting point of a more detailed analysis of English terms. One advantage of isolating and identifying each component is that it then becomes possible to identify "holes" in a language's vocabulary, areas for which it lacks a direct term. For instance, English lacks a genderless word for an aunt or uncle; you can't fill in the blank for the statement "parent is to mother and father, as *** is to aunt and uncle". You can still express this concept in English (we typically refer to aunts and uncles but you can more formally refer to parents' siblings), but you will likely express it less often than you would if there was a word for it. Another gap is the lack of words for either "male cousin" or "female cousin". The paradigm parent/mother/father, sibling/sister/brother is just not carried out for cousin. This is unlike other Germanic languages, including Danish (Faetter and Kusine for male and female cousins respectively), Dutch (neef and nicht) and German (der Vetter and die Kusine). Old English probably also made this distinction, but lost it under influence of Norman French, which -- like most, if not all, Romance languages -- does not make this distinction. The following table more fully fleshes out the distinctions English does make in kinship terms. Word Generation Lineage Sex parent -1 Direct x mother -1 Direct Female father -1 Direct Male [parent's sibling] -1 Ablineal x aunt -1 Ablineal Female uncle -1 Ablineal Male sibling 0 Colineal x sister 0 Colineal Female brother 0 Colineal Male cousin 0 Ablineal x [female cousin] 0 Ablineal Female [male cousin] 0 Ablineal Male child, offspring 1 Direct x - 113 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 daughter 1 Direct Female son 1 Direct Male [niece or 1 Ablineal x nephew] niece 1 Ablineal Female nephew 1 Ablineal Male There are many more "holes" or gaps in the vocabulary than those labeled here. What about terms where the generation is not specified? Where the lineage is not specified? Please note that the combination of {Generation 0, Lineage Direct} is meaningless (except for some backwater place -- choose your own to make fun of -- where brothers marry their sisters and people can be their own fathers). Since the sense of {Lineage Colineal} only applies to a generation of 0, it could be thought of as the manifestation of Direct in that area. (The term Ablineal can apply to any generation.) A fuller componential analysis (yes, fuller) of kinship terms is presented in a sidebar below. While componential analysis is useful for some exercises, it is not a representation of how language works; no linguist has ever been able to develop a complete list of semantic primitives. Invariably, some of the primitives identified are actually molecules that can be broken down into new atoms. For instance, parent, offspring and sibling are all interrelated terms; the word parent can be defined as "a person who has offspring" and sibling can be defined as "a person with a parent who has other offspring". If semantic primitives were to exist, they would number in the thousands and would resemble a mathematical logic system more than the mind's loom of language. The bother of brother While Suzanne Vega sings of language being liquid, the rigidity of componential analysis makes language seem like frozen liquid: ice cubes. While semantemes have their place, especially to compare and contrast languages' lexicons, they do not indicate how we actually define terms in our minds. One of the problems with semantemes is that they assume words have a single basic meaning. Take brother, which was defined above first as "male sibling" and then as {Generation 0, Sex Male, Lineage Colineal}. The English word actually has a much broader meaning than either of these definitions, with many degrees of brother-ness radiating out from a core meaning of "male sibling", as shown below in a no-means exhaustive list. - 114 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 brother-german (male sibling) half brother stepbrother kinsman comrade fraternity member co-religionist lay person racial brother fellow man Defining these labels in more detail we have: A male having the same biological parents as another person: a brother-german A male having one biological parent in common with another person: a half brother The son of one's stepparent by a previous spouse or lover: a stepbrother A male with the same ancestor as another person: a kinsman A male friend who is loved as if he were a biological brother: a comrade A male friend who belongs to the same fraternity: fellow fraternity member A man who follows the same religious beliefs: a co-religionist A male lay member of a religious order: a monk or lay person A person of the same race or nation A fellow man Something that closely resembles another in kind Even this radius of meaning is not exhaustive: a brother can mean a "brother-in-law", a brother can be an adopted son raised by your parents, a brother can be used in the strict - 115 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 sense of "a fellow African American". The gender of a brother does not even have to be male -- we must help our brothers in the Fatherland uses brother to include both men and women (as illustrated in meaning #9 above). As this example shows, people think of words not as fixed definitions composed of semantic primitives, but as examples or prototypes. The prototypical brother has the same biological parents as another person and has an emotionally close relationship with his siblings. On a scale of brother-ness from 0 to 100 the prototype is 100. A 90 might be a brother who was twenty years older than another person and as a result was never close to him, or the brother who was abusive and was disliked -- even though these examples are biologically brothers, they do not share in that emotional closeness of true brother-ness. A best friend can be considered a brother on the basis of emotional closeness, rather than kinship. The brother virtues of love and charity are considered brothers only because they resemble one another -- this is a metaphorical use of the primary sense of brother, scoring perhaps a 10 out of 100 on our hypothetical scale of brother-ness. The word brother, then, is defined not in terms of semantic primitives, but in terms of a network of associations with other words. The human brain recursively defines words by words (just like a dictionary). Translations (meanings across languages) When you decide to translate brother into your model language, you will have to decide which of its many meanings you wish to convey. Too often we assume that an English word has exact counterparts in other languages. We say that English brother = Spanish hermano, when in fact hermano has different connotations. For one thing, hermano is the expression of a root form herman- with a masculine ending; give it a feminine ending and you have hermana, "sister"; hermano has less of a distinctively masculine connotation than brother does. Rather than considering the breadth of the meaning of brother, let's take a simpler example. It is tempting to say that casa in Spanish equals house in English, like 1+1=2. casa = house In fact, casa also equals home, since Spanish does not distinguish between house and home with separate words. (Spanish does make a similar distinction, but it does so grammatically, by saying el casa, "the house", contrasted with casa, "home".) casa = home Of course, in English house and home are different. house <> home - 116 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 If this is so, then: casa <> casa. Clearly, semantics can never be reduced to an algebra of translation. As further evidence that words with common meanings are not exactly equivalent, review some double-translations. The story is told of an American in the USSR who received a telegram, Your daughter was hung for juvenile crimes. In fact, the Soviet censor had translated the telegram into Russian, and then back into English. The original English telegram read Your daughter was suspended for delinquency. The words suspended and delinquency had different prototypes (different spheres of meaning) than the Russian words they were paired with. Words in other languages will make different distinctions. Some will encompass a wider range of meanings than corresponding English words. For instance, Rick Harrison's planned language Vorlin has some interesting words: the basic sense of the word bat is "a ball-hitting tool", with its radiated meanings including "bat, hockey stick, and tennis racket", while the word sop means "soup" and "stew". Other Vorlin words cover a smaller range of meanings, so that for, "form, shape", does not include other senses of English form like "a paper document to be filled in", "a molding to be filled with concrete" or "manners or conduct". As you determine what the words in your model language mean, you have to keep in mind that they will not exactly equal English words. But, as a practical matter, you probably don't want to create words for each separate meaning of brother and have each word assigned only to that meaning, like the following English words: brother german ("full brother"), half-brother, stepbrother, brother-in-law, comrade, fellow, kinsman, fraternity member, coreligionist. Doing so loses much of the flexibility of brother. As an example, here's how I translated the different realms of brother into the model language Negasi. A brother, ranging from the meanings of a full biological brother to a distantly related [ Nagada nemi kinsman, but excluding the broader senses nama.] of fellow man, fraternity member, or coreligionist. [ Nagada dunama du + A half-brother, a stepbrother or a brother-in-sanami nama, "near law. brother".] [ Nagada hanama ha + henami A comrade, fellow or kinsman. nama, "far brother".] - 117 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 [ sa + nemi, sanemi A best friend. "near brother".] [ luna + nemi, A coreligionist, though for this imagined lunanemi "divine culture it would refer to a specific religion. brother".] Translating the English word comrade into Negasi henami will result in totally different associations. The Negasi view comrades as close to kin, and their word that would be translated comrade of course has no taint of communism. So the word henami has a stronger familial association than English comrade does. While an English-to-Negasi dictionary might list henami = comrade, this oversimplifies the relationship between the prototypes represented by each word. The words intersect; they are not mutually inclusive. As an aside, please note the difference between sanami and sanemi. The word sanami was coined in the Nagada language, so its literal meaning of "near brother" has been forgotten, since it underwent sound change differently than sa nemi -- "near brother" as two words -- did. This allowed the literal meaning "near brother" to be used to coin a new word in Negasi, in this case referring to "a best friend", a previously absent word meaning. Prototypes for the birds Another useful example to describe semantic prototypes or semantic stereotypes is birds: the prototypical bird has feathers and wings and can fly. Yet penguins, ostriches and Big Bird are considered birds, even though they can't fly. A duck-billed platypus, on the other hand, isn't considered a bird, despite the fact that it lays eggs and has a beak; it is not considered a bird since it has no feathers, no wings and can't fly. Prototypes are also a more useful way to describe meaning than semantic primitives, because prototypes embrace the connotations of a word, rather than just the denotations. The notion of prototypes can be used to show how words overlap. For instance, the following table roughly summarizes different types of body builds: obese Above-average weight fat chubby plump Below-average weight thin skinny - 118 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 scrawny The words skinny and scrawny as meanings are subsets of thin; plump, chubby and obese are subsets of fat. Noticeably absent are any words for average weight. English, like many languages, rarely has words to describe midpoints, only extremes. Words are often grouped together like this in semantic networks. However, these word sets can be exceedingly complicated. For instance, the words used to describe body builds each have complex connotations as part of their prototypes: plump is used more often to describe food such as meat and fruits than fat is; similarly, chubby is more often used for little boys (or girls) than fat is. The word scrawny also suggests bony; there are other words not shown on this list that also have connotations and specific uses, like lean, which suggests "muscular", and slim, which suggests "tall", and slender, which suggests "graceful". Connotations are not specified in dictionaries and are rarely articulated. Besides connotations, there are habits governing what other words to use with a word. The synonyms pursue and chase are almost interchangeable, except that pursue is preferred when the object to be chased is highly desirable - pursue truth, pursue wisdom, pursue happiness, but chase a thief, chase a bus, chase a fox. You could write an essay on the difference between he pursued love and he chased love. Obviously, it is very difficult to translate these prototypes from one language to another. Failure to properly account for the radius of meaning of a word often has comical results, as evidenced by this sign in a Bucharest hotel lobby: The lift is being fixed for the next day. During the time we regret that you will be unbearable. Historically speaking, the word unbearable had began with a strict literal meaning, but over time its radius of meaning had expanded to include a figurative sense as well. The combinations of connotations and detailed usage preferences for any word are not articulated, but mastering them is one of the hallmarks of literary writing. Conclusion Meaning is therefore a combination of prototypical examples. The important thing to keep in mind, when creating your own languages, is that the words you invent will not exactly equal the English words you define them as. While, for practical purposes, you will define most words very straightforwardly in English, you will want to highlight the unique culture of your language's speakers by noting how the range of meanings and the range of possible uses distinguishes your invented lexicon from English words. No wonder Suzanne Vega sang, "I won't use words again. They don't mean what I meant. They don't say what I said." Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 119 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Kinship Terms Model Languages THE NEWSLETTER DISCUSSING NEWLY IMAGINED WORDS FOR NEWLY IMAGINED WORLDS Volume I, Issue 6 (2/2) -- October/November 1, 1995 Table of contents Sidebar: relative terms for relatives Generations Lineage Sex Side of family Maternal/paternal The family's dark side The family's bright side Relative birth order Person Kindeep examples Table of kinship terms Sen:esepera kinship terms - 120 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sidebar: relative terms for relatives Kinship terms have been widely analyzed across languages, which often make quite different distinctions. We broke English kinship terms down into Generation, Sex and Lineage earlier, but to translate terms from other languages we will need to add additional semantic components. We will outline KinDEEP (KINship Distinctive Elements, Exhaustive Profile) here, a detailed framework for defining kinship terms from different languages. KinDEEP has semantic components for Generation, Lineage, Sex, Side Of Family, Relative Birth Order and Person. Generations The value for Generation is any number, with 0 indicating the base or current generation, negative numbers indicating ancestors of the base generation, and positive numbers indicating descendants. One of the more unusual kinship terms in the world is maili, from Njamal, an Australian aborigine language. The word maili means "any relative two generations distant", such as a father's father (two generations before) or a daughter's son's wife's sister (two generations after). KinDEEP expresses this as simply {Generation: +2}{Generation: -2}. Lineage As described in the main article, Lineage can be either Direct, Colineal or Ablineal. Sex Sex is either Male, Female or Corresponding. The atom Corresponding is necessary to analyze some Hawaiian terms. For instance, the Hawaiian word kaikaina means "younger sibling of the same sex as the referent". So a man's kaikaina would be his younger brother; a woman's kaikaina would be her younger sister. - 121 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Side of family Languages often make distinctions between the sides of a family, such as maternal, paternal, step- and half-. The semantic component of Side of Family can take any of these values: {Maternal}, {Paternal}, {Step}, {Half} and {Honorary}. Maternal/paternal The family's dark side The family's bright side MATERNAL/PATERNAL One difference might be as simple as distinguishing between a mother's brother and a father's brother, as Latin and many other European languages do. Latin has two different words for "uncle" depending on the exact relationship, avunculus for "mother's brother" and patruus for "father's brother". Thus Latin lacks one word to collectively describe what we think of as "uncle" (how did schoolchildren cry "surrender!" we wonder?) or -- for that matter -- "aunt". Like Old French, other Romance languages lost this distinction, adopting the maternal terms to refer to either side of the family; thus, Modern French has oncle and tante, which were adopted into English as uncle and aunt respectively, displacing the Old English tradition of referring to this generation as "father's brother", "mother's sister", etc. Just as Latin has no single words for either "uncle" or "aunt", Swedish has no single words equivalent to either "grandmother" or "grandfather", but must specify which side of the family the relationship is through. Swedish does this concisely, using far to mean "father", mor to mean "mother", for: mormor, "mother's mother, maternal grandmother" farmor, "father's mother, paternal grandmother" morfar, "mother's father, maternal grandfather" farfar, "father's father, paternal grandfather" Interestingly, however, Swedish does not use mor and far by themselves for "mother" and "father" respectively, using moder and fader for that instead. No sense taking logic to far in a natural language! (I am not aware of any other European language that distinguishes between maternal and paternal grandparents.) - 122 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 THE FAMILY'S DARK SIDE Besides referring to the maternal or paternal side of a family, it is also possible to refer to other blood distinctions, especially those regarding re-marriage. English uses the prefix step- to refer to relatives related only by re-marriage, not blood, as in the evil stepmother (which is not redundant) and the ungrateful stepdaughter, for instance. English uses the suffix -in-law to refer to relatives related by marriage, as in the evil mother-in-law and the ungrateful daughter-in-law. When all this familial love becomes too much to bear, English uses ex- in front of many or all the other terms, so that you can refer to your ex- husband, your ex-stepdaughter, your ex-mother- in-law, even your ex-great-grandfather- in-law. But you're not likely to hear the terms ex-mother or ex-brother to describe estranged relatives... English also uses the prefix half- to refer to children who share only one parent (half- brother and half-sister) but the term is not used to refer to other relatives (no *half- mother, *half-grandson). THE FAMILY'S BRIGHT SIDE Families often have unofficial members, as English recognizes by encouraging the use of Aunt and Uncle for close family friends of the same generation as a child's parents. I have an Uncle Bill and Aunt Jill, close friends of my parents' from their college days, who were the only honorary parentsibs that I had. To support this almost metaphoric use of Aunt and Uncle, KinDEEP uses the value {Honorary} as part of the semantic component of Side Of Family. Relative birth order Japanese also makes distinctions of another variety, distinguishing between younger and elder siblings. For instance, ane, "older sister"; ani, "older brother"; oto/to, "younger brother"; imo/to, "younger sister". Of course, these words also have first- and second-person forms. In total, therefore, Japanese has six words for "brother", with separate words making the following distinctions: "older brother" "younger brother" "my older brother" - 123 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 "my younger brother" "your older brother" "your younger brother" KinDEEP has the semantic component {Relative Birth Order}, with values for {Older} and {Younger}. In natural languages, this distinction is almost always used for siblings, but KinDEEP extends it for the common siblings of any generation, making it easy to express terms such as "younger uncle", for instance. Person The Japanese are strongly oriented around family and ancestry, and accordingly their language is richer in kinship terms than English. One of the distinctions Japanese makes is that it has separate forms for "my relative" and "your or other's relatives". For instance, mago is "my grandson"; omagosan is "your grandson". Think of this as a combination pronoun/kinship term, with the term specifying either first person ("my") or second person ("your"). All of Japanese' second-person forms end in the -san suffix or a variant of it. The base word may be different, as in haha for "my mother" but oka/san for "your mother" (rather than *hahasan). Therefore, KinDEEP recognizes the semantic component Person, with values of {First} and {Second}. It would be easy to suggest a third-person form -- e.g., "their mother" -- but I am not aware of any language that makes this distinction. Kindeep examples The following table provides a framework to present the kinship terms of many different languages. If you have a term from a language that does not fit, please pass it on! When you create your own model language, you can decide which components you want to include. A typical minimal profile involves just three components, as in English's use of Generation, Lineage and Sex, though it is easy to imagine a language that does not distinguish between terms based on sex. KinDEEP (KINship Distinctive Elements, Exhaustive Profile) is actually exhausting, rather than exhaustive! For instance, it fails to have terms that have been enabled by reproductive science: the womb-mother (she carried the child of another in her womb), the egg-donor (she provided the egg that was fertilized and carried by the womb-mother), - 124 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 the caretaker-mother who actually raised the child but was not biologically related, the sperm donor and caretaker-father! Table of kinship terms Legend L. Language: D = Danish, E = English, H = Hawaiian, J = Japanese, L = Latin, M = Malay, N = Njamal (Australia), P = Pitjanjatjara (Australia), S = Swedish Gen. Generation Ln. Lineage: A = Ablineal, C = Colineal, D = Direct Sx. Sex: F = Female, M = Male, S = Corresponding Sid. Side of Family Per. Person: 1 = First, 2 = Second Relative Birth B. O = Older, Y = Younger Order: L Term, Translation Gen. Ln. Sx. Sid. Per. B. E great great grandparent -4 D E great grandparent -3 D E great aunt -2 A F S mormor, maternal grandmother -2 D F maternal S farmor, paternal grandmother -2 D F paternal E grandmother -2 D F S morfar, maternal grandfather -2 D M maternal S farfar, paternal grandfather -2 D M paternal E grandfather -2 D M E grandparent -2 D L matertera, maternal aunt -1 A F maternal P kurntili, paternal aunt -1 A F paternal L amita, paternal aunt -1 A F paternal E aunt -1 A F J haha, my mother -1 D F 1 J okásan, your mother -1 D F 2 E mother -1 D F P ngunytju, mother or mother's sister -1 D,A F maternal E "uncle", man of father's generation -1 A M honorary P kamura, maternal uncle -1 A M maternal L avunculus, maternal uncle -1 A M maternal L patruus, paternal uncle -1 A M paternal - 125 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 E uncle -1 A M E father -1 D M P mama, father or father's brother -1 D,A M paternal E father or uncle -1 D,A M E parent's sibling -1 A E parent -1 D D kusine, female cousin 0 A F E stepsister 0 C F half E stepsister 0 C F step J [N/A], my sister 0 C F 1 J [N/A], your sister 0 C F 2 J ane, older sister 0 C F O J imóto, younger sister 0 C F Y E sister 0 C F D fætter, male cousin 0 A M E stepbrother 0 C M half E stepbrother 0 C M step J [N/A], my brother 0 C M 1 J [N/A], your brother 0 C M 2 J ani, male older brother 0 C M O J otóto, male younger brother 0 C M Y E brother 0 C M H kaikaina, younger sibling of my gender 0 C S Y E cousin, child of aunt or uncle 0 A E sibling 0 C M [N/A], sibling or cousin 0 E daughter 1 D F E son 1 D M E cousin, first cousin once removed 1 A E offspring 1 D E granddaughter 2 D F J mago, my grandson 2 D M 1 J omagosan, your grandson 2 D M 2 E grandson 2 D M E grandchild 2 D E family, parents and siblings [-1,0] D,C E ancestor [ E descendant [>0] - 126 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 N maili, anyone two generations removed [2,-2] E cousin, relative from common ancestor* A E cousin, member of kindred group honorary E cousin, relative by blood or marriage E relative E kin *English cousin is a relative descended from a common ancestor by two or more divergent steps, so KinDEEP does not offer a perfect translation, sincle it includes uncle and aunt Sen:esepera kinship terms For my model language Sen:esepera, which is designed to fulfill the role of an interlanguage for use by people of all the world's linguistic backgrounds, I chose a maximally expressive way of forming kinship terms. All kinship terms are compounded from roots representing each symantic component and its atoms, as shown in the following table. Person Sex Side Generation Order Lineage English excl. excl. excl. incl. excl. incl. my male paternal -3 older direct your female maternal -2 younger ablineal corres. half- -1 colineal step- 0 unspecified honorary 1 2 3 Sen:esepera imun eman pam intensin tempan pa tun fem fam inten im:tempan ta sim duen in sa tepim u coganta belim dim dimin diminten [afo:] before intensin, diminten means "great-" [afo:] before in, dim means "all" (e.g., "afo:in" means "all ancestors") - 127 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Thus an English speaker can talk about his cousin, u:ta in Sen:esepera, if that is the term he is most comfortable with, while a Dutch speaker can talk about her nicht ("female cousin"), fem:u:ta in Sen:esepera, if that is the term she is most comfortable with. The word fem:u:ta will stand out to the English-speaker reading Sen:esepera, who does not habitually make the distinction of sex for cousin, but he will immediately know the meaning of the word. Sen:esepera Translation Generation Sx Ln Side Pe R afo:intensin:pa great great grandparent -4 D intensin:pa great grandparent -3 D fem:inten:ta great aunt -2 F A fem:fam:inten:pa maternal grandmother -2 F D mater fem:pam:inten:pa paternal grandmother -2 F D pater fem:inten:pa grandmother -2 F D eman:fam:inten:pa maternal grandfather -2 M D mater eman:pam:inten:pa paternal grandfather -2 M D pater eman:inten:pa grandfather -2 M D inten:pa grandparent -2 D fem:fam:in:ta maternal aunt -1 F A mater fem:pam:in:ta paternal aunt -1 F A pater fem:pam:in:ta paternal aunt -1 F A pater fem:in:ta aunt -1 F A imun:fem:in:pa my mother -1 F D 1 tun:fem:in:pa your mother -1 F D 2 fem:in:pa mother -1 F D fem:fam:in:ta:pa mother or mother's sister -1 F D,A mater eman:belim:in:ta man of father's generation -1 M A honor eman:fam:in:ta maternal uncle -1 M A mater eman:fam:in:ta maternal uncle -1 M A mater eman:pam:in:ta paternal uncle -1 M A pater eman:in:ta uncle -1 M A eman:in:pa father -1 M D eman:pam:in:ta:pa father or father's brother -1 M D,A pater eman:in:ta:pa father or uncle -1 M D,A in:ta parent's sibling -1 A in:pa parent -1 D fem:u:ta female cousin 0 F A fem:duen:u:sa stepsister 0 F C half fem:tepim:u:sa stepsister 0 F C step - 128 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 imun:fem:u:sa my sister 0 F C 1 tun:fem:u:sa your sister 0 F C 2 fem:u:tempan:sa older sister 0 F C O fem:u:im:tempan:sa younger sister 0 F C Y fem:u:sa sister 0 F C eman:u:ta male cousin 0 M A eman:duen:u:sa stepbrother 0 M C half eman:tepim:u:sa stepbrother 0 M C step imun:eman:u:sa my brother 0 M C 1 tun:eman:u:sa your brother 0 M C 2 eman:u:tempan:sa male older brother 0 M C O eman:u:im:tempan:sa male younger brother 0 M C Y eman:u:sa brother 0 M C sim:u:im:tempan:sa younger sibling of my gender 0 S C Y u:ta child of aunt or uncle 0 A u:sa sibling 0 C u:coganta sibling or cousin 0 fem:dim:pa daughter 1 F D eman:dim:pa son 1 M D dim:ta first cousin once removed 1 A dim:pa offspring 1 D fem:dimin:pa granddaughter 2 F D imun:eman:dimin:pa my grandson 2 M D 1 tun:eman:dimin:pa your grandson 2 M D 2 eman:dimin:pa grandson 2 M D dimin:pa grandchild 2 D in:ta:o:u:sa parents and siblings [-1,0] D,C afo:in:coganta ancestor [ afo:dim:coganta descendant [>0] inten:dimin:coganta anyone two generations removed [2,-2] ta relative from common ancestor* A belim:coganta member of kindred group or nati honor coganta relative by blood or marriage coganta relative coganta kin Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved. - 129 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 On Tolkien Growing up with language The Shakespeare of model languages is J.R.R. Tolkien. His best-selling fantasy novel, The Lord Of The Rings, now considered a literary classic, achieved much of its believability from the depth of its invented languages: Quenya, Sindarin, Adu^naic and others. The following article provides a broad overview of Tolkien's seminal work with model languages. Tolkien was exposed to languages to a remarkable degree. He learned Latin, German and French from his mother. At school, he learned or taught himself Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, modern Welsh and medieval Welsh. He had an amazing working knowledge of languages, and was familiar with Danish, Dutch, Lombardic, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish and many ancestral Germanic and Slavonic languages. It would have been no surprise to his mother that he became a professional philologist. He even had a part-time job as a lexicographer for the original Oxford English Dictionary -- the New English Dictionary, as it was known then. He worked for the dictionary in 1919-1920 and learned more about language than in any comparable period of his life. For instance, he had to develop the etymologies of words like water, wick and winter, and in so doing had to cite comparable forms in other languages like proto-Teutonic, Old Teutonic, Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Old High German, Middle High German, Middle Low German, Modern German, Old Slavonic, Lithuanian, Russian and Latin. He did this commendably well; the head of the Dictionary, Dr. Henry Bradley, said of Tolkien, "His work gives evidence of an unusually thorough mastery of Anglo-Saxon and of the facts and principles of the comparative grammar of the Germanic languages. Indeed, I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal." These were the natural languages that Tolkien learnt, and they served as an inspiration for his model languages. As a child, Tolkien was first exposed to model languages when he learned a language his cousins had invented, called Animalic, which primarily consisted of English animal names. For instance, Dog nightingale woodpecker forty meant "You are an ass." Animalic served as an inspiration for Tolkien to create not just words, but his own language. He and one of his cousins created a more involved language than Animalic called Nevbosh (meaning New Nonsense) based on disguised pieces of English, Latin and French. Nevbosh was his first attempt at creating an entire language. Already, when learning Greek, he had made up pseudo-Greek words, but Nevbosh went beyond that. Later, in his adolescence, Tolkien recalled Nevbosh and resolved to invent a serious language, one richly developed to model a natural language. - 130 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 It is not surprising that Tolkien as a teenager attempted such an ambitious undertaking, given Tolkien's already established love of language. As Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, writes, "If he had been interested in music, he very likely would have wanted to compose melodies, so why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be, as it were, a private symphony?" Since Tolkien's education had been intensively centered around language, when he began to create, those creations took a linguistic form. Tolkien's first serious model language was called Naffarin. It was strongly influenced by Spanish, but with its own phonology (sound structure) and grammar. Tolkien chose Spanish because his guardian (he had been orphaned at the age of twelve) was half-Spanish and had lent him books on that language, which Tolkien found attractive. Naffarin was but the first of many model languages that Tolkien would create. His next language began after he had purchased a Gothic primer from a friend and become captivated by that language. Years later, in a letter to W.H. Auden, Tolkien wrote, "I discovered in it [Gothic] not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side [of me], but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the vehicle of a literature." Since little of Gothic's vocabulary survives in its small corpus, Tolkien soon found himself inventing words to fill in the gaps. This in turn inspired him to create a hypothetical historical Germanic language, one hitherto never discovered but with established relationships to Old English, Gothic and other Germanic tongues. From Naffarin and Neo-Gothic, Tolkien went on to create a new model language, inspired by Finnish. He had been studying for exams in the Exeter College library at Oxford when he first encountered Finnish. Years later, he compared the experience to tasting a fine wine: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an unrecorded Germanic language, and my own language -- or series of invented languages -- became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure." This was to become Quenya, his principal Elvish language, but elves had not yet entered the picture. Chronological development of tolkien's principal model languages Nevbosh (inspired by English, French and Latin) Naffarin (inspired by Spanish) Neo-Gothic (filling holes in Gothic's vocabulary) "Unrecorded Germanic" (unnamed language related to Old English, Gothic and other Germanic tongues) - 131 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Quenya (inspired by Finnish, influenced by Latin and Greek) Primitive Eldarin Sindarin (inspired by Welsh) Tolkien had devoted considerable efforts to fleshing out Quenya, when he had begun to realize that he could not continue to create the language without knowing something of the people who spoke it. He had written poems in this language, but now he found himself needing to creating a history for these people, whoever they might be. It so happened, at the age of 21, that he had an epiphany. He read for the first time the Old English religious poem Crist of Cynewulf. In it, he encountered two lines that were to fire his imagination for years: Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middengeard monnum sended. "Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above middle earth sent unto men." The words seemed to hint at something beautiful and remote. While the Old English dictionary recorded Earendel as a ray of light, Tolkien interpreted it literally as the star that heralded the dawn's light (Venus) and figuratively as John the Baptist, presaging Christ. In fact, Earendel heralded the light that would be diffused into the Two Trees, the Silmarils and the vial of Galadrial: all prominent works of light in his fiction. Tolkien wanted to discover the truth behind these two Old English lines, and he began to conceive of a greater story, involving a mariner. From this simple line about Earendel, the line itself "a leaf caught in the wind", Tolkien began to discover the great tree of his mythology, which would pass through many seasons, growing from "The Lay of Earendel" to The Book of Lost Tales to The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien wrote in his allegorical story "Leaf By Niggle", about a painter with a painting too detailed to ever finish: There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. From that first leaf caught in the wind, that first glimpse of Earendel, Tolkien then discovered elves, who were very different from the fairy folk he had once composed poems about. Elves possessed grandeur and dignity, being in fact -- in Tolkien's mind -- Un-Fallen Man. He realized that the language he had created was in fact spoken by these elves. As a result, he began to spend more time composing the stories of this imaginary world, "middle earth" (which was a common name for the world in Old English times, setting earth between heaven and hell). Still, the languages and name-making occupied as much of his time as the actual writing, since the writing of the history was for Tolkien but a subset of the act of language creation (or subcreation, to use his word for it, as he explicitly defined himself in relation to the Creator). - 132 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 By 1917, Tolkien had expanded Quenya to many hundreds of words and had even outlined its ancestral tongue, Primitive Eldarin. Primitive Eldarin then gave rise to another prominent elvish language, Sindarin, which was modelled on the Welsh language that had fascinated Tolkien from boyhood and which he had finally begun to study at Oxford. While Quenya was originally patterned on Finnish, it was later influenced by Latin and Greek. Quenya and Sindarin were both intended to be of a European kind in style and structure (but not in specifics) and both were meant to satisfy Tolkien's aesthetic taste in sound structure. Sindarin, or Grey-elven, resembles Welsh phonologically and has a similar relationship to Quenya, or High-elven, as exists between British (meaning Celtic languages at the time of the Roman invasion) and Latin (both descended from Proto-Indo-European, as both Quenya and Sindarin were descended from Primitive Eldarin). The creation of Primitive Eldarin enabled Tolkien to later outline many other elvish languages, primarily as a backdrop for Quenya and Sindarin. Tolkien had started out to create a language. He was now creating languages, peoples and a world. Tolkien would often create a word by first starting with the needed meaning, then coming up with the forms as they would exist in Quenya and Sindarin. Other times, he would just make up a name in the heat of writing; later, he would either try and determine how the name had reached such a form or he would dismiss the form and come up with a new name. He viewed his languages as real languages that he was discovering, rather than inventing, and in one of his unfinished novels, The Lost Road, he has the protagonist, a philologist, gradually discover the lost words of a previously unknown tongue (Quenya or Sindarin), before being transported back into time towards the source of those words. Characteristics of the Middle-Earth languages Tolkien once said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings simply to create a world in which "A star shines on the hour of our meeting" (Elen síla lumenn' omentielvo) was a common salutation. While this exaggerates Tolkien's motivation (The Lord of the Rings was originally conceived of simply as a sequel to capitalize on the commercial success of The Hobbit), it does highlight how interrelated writing and linguistic invention were for Tolkien. Tolkien developed a very elaborate linguistic background for The Lord of the Rings, for it both as a hypothetically historical document and as an imagined world. He wrote the book as if it were the translation of an ancient manuscript, which he called the Red Book. The Red Book was written in a language called Westron, which was the tongue of the hobbits who narrated the tale. Tolkien decided that languages related to Westron would have to be translated into languages with equivalent relationships to English. The result is two layers of linguistic invention. - 133 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Model language Represented as Westron English Hobbit Westron "Hobbit English" "Rohirrimic" "Rohirrimic Old English" "language of Dale" Old Norse Sindarin Sindarin Quenya Quenya (transliteration reflects Latin) Hobbit English is the imaginary dialect of English that Tolkien chose to translate the hobbits' language into. This language differs somewhat from English, adapting some archaisms to its needs (reflecting the fact that Hobbit Westron was a dialect of Westron): The word mathom is used for a gift of dubious usefulness that one is reluctant to discard; Tolkien adapted it from the Old English mathm, "treasure". Another example is Thane, an inherited title of the leader of the Took clan of hobbits, adapted from the Old English thegn, a title for a noble who served an earl. The word orc is used to describe goblins and is from the Old English word for "demon", a word used in Beowulf. One of the most interesting parts of Hobbit English isn't even used in the text of The Lord of the Rings, but is reserved for the appendices. Tolkien posed a linguistic what-if question: What if the Latin calendar's names for months hadn't supplanted the Anglo-Saxon names? What would the names of months look like in English then? The result is names like Afteryule for January and Blotmath for October, names true to the original forms. The fact that such details had to be crammed into an appendix illustrates how -- even though Tolkien was primarily interested in the languages -- he could subordinate that material to the story when appropriate, including it as notes rather than cluttering the story. Month names in Hobbit English Hobbit English Old English English Afteryule aeftergeola "afteryule" January Solmath solmonath, "mire-month" February Rethe re-the, "fierce, furious" March - 134 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Astron Easter-monath, "Easter-month" April Thrimidge thri-milce May Forelithe lith, "midsummer (June, July)" June Afterlithe aefter-lith July Wedmath weth, "mild, gentle" August Halimath halig-monath, "holy-month" September Winterfilth winter-fylleth, "winter fall" October Blotmath blotmonath, "blood-month" November Foreyule geo-la, "Yule" December J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings In ancient times, the hobbits lived near the riders of Rohan, whose language had changed little from those times. With Hobbit Westron now translated as English, to convey this relationship Tolkien translated the language of the Rohirrim (in the hypothetical manuscript) into words and names that were similar, though not exactly like, Old English words and names. Since Tolkien conceived of the language of Dale and the Long Lake (regions in Middle Earth) as somewhat more removed from the hobbits' language, he represented it as Old Norse in a few names, primarily that of the dwarves. While dwarves had their own language, they considered their names private and adopted outward names that were common among the people they dwelt by. Westron is descended from the human Adu^naic language, but almost all of the names in Gondor are Elvish, as a result of the long alliance between the men of Gondor and the elves in their wars against the dark powers. The Elvish languages were of course the source of most of Tolkien's energies when it came to the creation of model languages. For these languages, Tolkien created a vocabulary of incredible detail. By 1938, he had prepared a base vocabulary of 800 root words of Primitive Eldarin, from which he could derive many other words for many other languages. For instance, the root *bes- meant "wed" and had descendents *besno/, "husband"; *besse/, "wife"; and *besu/, "husband and wife, married pair"; and *besta/, "matrimony". Each of these roots then had different descendants in different languages; the six known descendents of just *besno, "husband" are shown below. Sample cognate Elvish words Language Word Meaning - 135 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Primitive *besnó "husband" Eldarin Quenya verno "husband" Old Noldorin benno "husband" Exilic [Replacing in ordinary use the old benn "man" word di^r (< *der-, "adult male").] Noldorin [< her- (< *kher-, "rule, govern, Exilic hervenn "husband" possess") + benn, counterpart to Noldorin hervess, "wife".] Ilkorin benn "husband" [Blended with *ber(n)o/, "man" (< Danian beorn "man" *ber-, "valiant man").] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings Incidentally, the asterisk is a common philological symbol to indicate that there is no direct extant evidence that such a form existed but it is assumed to exist based on reconstruction from the available descendents. The asterisk is frequently used to indicate Indo-European roots, from which most European languages are descended. Tolkien used it to indicate that the root forms had been reconstructed by Elvish scholars. Tolkien developed a regular system of sound change to govern how words were typically modified from Primitive Eldarin to the descendent languages. Sometimes these regular sound changes were overridden, as in Danian beorn, whose form developed idiosyncratically under the influence of *ber(n)o/, which had come to mean "man" by semantic change, broadening its meaning from "valiant man". Such an instance of semantic change demonstrates how richly Tolkien developed his model languages in order to make them more true to real life linguistic processes. After all, as his son Christopher Tolkien -- close confidant and later editor of many of his father's papers -- was to phrase it: "He did not, after all, invent new words and names arbitrarily: in principle, he devised them from within the historical structure, proceeding from the bases or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds, deciding (or, as he would have said, finding out) when the word came into the language, following through the regular changes of form that it would thus have undergone, and observing the possibilities of formal or semantic influence from other words in the course of its history. Such a word would then exist for him, and he would know it. As the whole system evolved and expanded, the possibilities for word and name became greater and greater." (Christopher Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 342) Or as Tolkien himself put in when writing about Niggle: "He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different." - 136 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 As the cognate terms of besno/ imply, Tolkien had conceived of a complex tree of interrelated languages. Tree of tongues: interrelationship of elvish languages Valarin Valinorian Ingwiquenya Quenya (Elf-latin) Quendian Lembian *many dialects Danian Taliskan tongues of Western men Leikvian (East Danian) *Ossiriandic Eldarin Koreldarin *Lindarin *Kornoldorin (Finrodian) Noldirin (in Beleriand) Telerin *Telerin (in Valinor) Beleriandic *Doriathrin *living language - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 196 This is just one of Tolkien's conceptions (circa 1937) of the interrelationships of the Elvish languages. He often revised it and reconsidered it. However, the two principal languages were always Quenya and Noldirin (the earlier name of Sindarin). Tolkien invented the most elaborate model language system ever published as part of a work of fiction. What had started out quite simple had grown. Yet, again and again, Tolkien failed to prepare a final grammar and lexicon for any of his languages. His goal was not to create a finished language system, but to simply delight in creating words and linguistic shapes in the fabric of an imagined time. The joy was in the finding. Here is the most well known of Tolkien's Elvish poems. This is a hymn to Elbereth that was sung in the house of Elrond in The Fellowship Of The Ring: A Elbereth Gilthoniel "O Star-queen, Star-kindler, silivren penna miriel glittering down and sparkling like jewels o menel aglar elenath! from the firmanent's glory of the host of stars! Na-chaered palan-díriel To remote distance after having gazed o galadhremmin ennorath from tree-woven middle-earth, - 137 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Fanuilos le linnathon Snow-white, to thee I will chant, nef aear, si nef aearon! on this side of the ocean, here on this side of the great ocean!" For Tolkien, inventing model languages was an intellectual exercise of great seriousness, yet he realized how unusual these activities were. While he felt many children created simple languages, as he and his cousins had done, he was not aware of many others who took inventing languages as seriously as he did. Indeed, while he found his "private lang." activities to be a source of constant amusement, he would dismiss these activities when discussing them, calling it "a mad hobby" when talking to friends or "my nonsense fairy language" when talking about it with his wife. Yet for him his model languages were an almost spiritual exercise as he followed his love of language and myth. He viewed his creation of languages as a Christian art, an act of subcreation that assisted the Lord in creating the world, perhaps creating even a part of heaven. Tolkien's Niggle, once he had completed his "long" and "distasteful" journey (an allegory for death), at last found his way to a new country: Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. "It's a gift!" he said. For further reading "Leaf By Niggle", in J.R.R. Tolkien, Poems And Stories, Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1994. Tolkien, Christopher; Ed. The Lost Road And Other Writings: Language And Legend Before 'The Lord Of The Rings'. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1987. --About 50 pages of etymologies for Primitive Eldarin and its daughter tongues, providing a unique behind-the-scenes look at Quenya and Sindarin. Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Ballantine Books: New York, 1978. Carpenter, Humphrey; Ed. The Letters Of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1981. --Tolkien discusses his languages and approach to creating them in some of these letters. One example, from a letter to Naomi Mitchison, 4/25/1954: "Two of the Elvish tongues appear in this book... They are intended (a) to be definitely of a European kind in style and structure (not in detail); and (b) to be specially pleasant. The former is not difficult to achieve; but the latter is more difficult, since individual's personal predilections, especially in the phonetic structure of languages, varies widely, even when modified by the imposed languages (including their so-called native tongue). "I have therefore pleased myself. The archaic language of lore is meant to be a kind of Elven-latin, and by transcribing it into a spelling closely resembling that of Latin (except that y is only used a consonant as y in E. Yes) the similarity to Latin has been increased - 138 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 ocularly. Actually it might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me phonaesthetic pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any of the three. This language is High-elven or in its own terms Quenya (Elvish)." - 139 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Emulating Tolkien Continued from On Tolkien. Emulating Tolkien When learning a craft, whether writing, sculpting or creating model languages, it always helps to begin by purposefully copying a master's style. This enables you to begin creating and gives you time to experiment prior to developing your own style. For instance, my first poetry slavishly followed e.e. cummings. My first attempt at a children's book faithfully echoed the voice of Dr. Seuss. Interestingly, my first attempt at a model language did not emulate Tolkien, but copied Clyde Heaton's Orcish, a language he published in an article called "Even Orcish is logical" (Dragon magazine, July 1983), which started me on this hobby. One of the language families I have tinkered with the longest is meant to be spoken by elves, like Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin; my Alvish and Old Alvish languages date back some 13 years now. My first attempt at Alvish was patterned closely on Anglo-Saxon, and the language existed as little more than a source language for Karkrak, then the principal language I was working on. About five years ago, I revamped Alvish to resemble ancient Greek, which I first thought gave the language a noble sound. When that did not meet my fancy, I revamped the language again and developed a 3000-word vocabulary for it. Some sample vocabulary, from Alvish III: age, n. thufpaxef, neut. (thoofPAHKSef) age, v. thufpaxere, neut. (thoofpahksEre) agree, v. cupfuscrifere, neut. (koopfooskriFEre) agreement, n. cupfuscrifep, neut. (koopfoosKRIfep) agriculture, n. mudolrelep, neut. (moodolRElep) ahem, interj. ixax (IKSahks) ahoy, interj. esathnebis (eSAHTHnebis) aid, v. ethere, neut. (Ethere) air, n. tusef, neut. (TOOSef) alarm, v. esadadere, neut. (esahDAHdere) alas, interj. frithfrith (FRITHfrith) alienate, v. apadere, neut. (ahpahDEre) alignment, n. fadap, f. (FAHdahp) all, adj. quafeth, neut. (QUAHfeth) all, adv. quaferemi, neut. (quahFEremi) all, n. quafep, neut. (QUAHfep) - 140 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 alleluia, interj. ipipneb (Ipipneb) I have no idea what I was aiming for, but the result is undeniably ugly. Ipipneb? Frithfrith? Recently, I have decided to try and pattern Alvish more closely on Quenya and Sindarin, inspired in part by a recent discussion on the CONLANG mailing list, where David Bell discussed his language Amman-lar, originally a Tolkien clone, before Bell found his own voice (you can subscribe to CONLANG by sending an e-mail with the subject text SUBSCRIBE CONLANG to majordomo@diku.dk). Before creating Alvish IV, I closely studied the Quenya and Sindarin words published in The Silmarillion. I decided that what sounded pleasing to me was the emphasis on sounds produced towards the front of the mouth (e.g., /p/, /b/, /f/, /v/, /i/, /e/, /a/). Additionally, syllables in Sindarin and Quenya typically followed the style CV or CVN, where N was a nasal (/m/ or /n/), lateral (/l/) or approximant (/r/). Based on this insight, I then produced the following definition of the phonotactics (sound and syllable structure) for Old Alvish, the ancestor of Alvish: (Con1) Vwl (Con2) where Con1 = p, b, f, v, t, d, c, g, y, w, ch, gh Vwl = i, a, o, u, uu Con2 = m, l, n, r, s The /c/ is pronounced as in cat, /ch/ as in loch, /gh/ is a voiced /ch/ (as /g/ is a voiced /c/). Each of the above lists of phonemes is roughly arranged with those sounds pronounced closest to the front of the mouth listed first. Sounds are listed in declining order of occurrence in actual Old Alvish words. A further restriction to possible combinations of phonemes is that whenever there are two adjacent vowels (e.g., the /i/ and /o/ are in separate syllables in dios, /di-os/) they can only be one of the following: i-o, i-uu, i-a, u-o, u-i, u-a, o-i. So, for example, diis is not a valid Old Alvish word, since /i-i/ is not a valid combination. (The dash - is used to indicate syllable breaks.) Some sample Old Alvish words and phrases: anim basuus buci chi gicuu dafon ghis gibas ogus dian toman vafus - 141 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The sound system for Old Alvish is less flexible than that of Tolkien's languages. Words like Aglarond, Amarth, Bragollach and Minas Tirith could not be formed in Old Alvish, due its different syllable structure, but would be probably be borrowed in forms like Agelaronde, Amarte, Beragolcha and Minas Tirti. But Old Alvish's sole purpose in my design is to provide a source for Alvish. I designed Old Alvish to have an elegant structure, which has become more complicated (and therefore more flexible) in Alvish. I decided that Alvish developed from Old Alvish according to the following steps. First, Middle Alvish was distinguished from Old Alvish by the following sound shifts, designed to give the language even more front sounds: /c/ > /th/ /g/ > /h/ /ch/ > /c/ /gh/ > /g/ /a/ > /e/ /uu/ > /o/ /o/ > /a/ This had the net effect of giving Middle Alvish three sounds that it did not have before (/th/, /h/ and /e/) while eliminating three sounds that it had had (/ch/, /gh/ and /uu/). Some examples: MA buthi < OA buci MA ci hitho < OA chi gicuu MA defan < OA dafon MA gis < OA ghis As this example should illustrate, you can quickly generate your own languages, based on a source language, simply by preparing tables of sound correspondences such as the one above. (Refer to the "Sounds" section of MODLANG 2 for more information on this.) A phoneme can gradually become pronounced as any "neighboring" sound, where a "neighborhood" consists of similar physical positions of articulation. By this measure, the shift of /c/ to /th/ is unlikely, as the physical positions of the two sounds are far apart, but this can be explained away by positing an intermediate step; e.g., the sound /c/ came to be pronounced as /t/ (as in OA buci becoming Early Middle Alvish buti), before the /t/ phonemes so produced came to be pronounced as /th/ (MA buthi). The next series of sound shifts distinguishes Middle Alvish from Alvish and is more complex. In this series, there are no straightforward one- to-one correspondences, where one occurrence of a phoneme always becomes another phoneme. In the transition to - 142 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Alvish, sounds changed only because of their environment (the other sounds they are pronounced near). While the notation used to describe these can grow quite complex, inventing sound changes like the following is not difficult. Basically, I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that Alvish words fit my preconceptions of what words I found aesthetically pleasing, and I then formulated rules to give me a way to get from the strict phonotactics of Old Alvish to something looser. The main changes from Alvish to Old Alvish are in the phonotactics. An Alvish word can begin or end with any consonant, but the consonants in the middle must follow similar patterns to Old Alvish. FIRST SYLLABLE (ConWI) Vwl (ConSF) INTERNAL SYLLABLES (ConSI) Vwl (ConSF) TERMINAL SYLLABLE (ConSI) Vwl (ConWF) ONE-SYLLABLE WORD (ConWI) Vwl (ConWF) where ConWI = p, b, f, v, t, d, c, g, y, w, th, h, m, l, n, r, s, sp, st, sc ConSI = p, b, f, v, t, d, c, g, y, w, th, h, s, sp, st, sc Vwl = i, e, a, u, o ConSF = m, l, n, r ConWF = p, b, f, v, t, d, c, g, y, w, th, h, m, l, n, r, s Clearly, this sort of mapping out of all sound combinations can grow much more complex than you want or need for a model language, but the complexity of Alvish phonotactics pales in comparison to the phonotactics of English, which would take a small book to describe in detail (e.g., the only time an English word can begin with three consonant sounds the first consonant has to be /s/, as in spring, not something like zbring). The rules for deriving Alvish words from Middle Alvish are: /ti/ > /thi/ /a-i/ > /i-a/ (eliminating the only vowel pair to begin with /a/; e.g., /thi-al-fu/ < MA /tha-il-fu/) /s-/ > /-s/ (removing /s/ from being a possible final consonant for internal syllables; e.g., /i-san/ > MA /is-an/) /-sX/ > /-X/ where X<>/a/,/e/,/i/,/o/,/u/,/p/,/t/,/c/ (any /s/ that migrated before an X is omitted; e.g., /pa-fu/ < MA /pas-fu/) /-DVC#/ > /D#/ where D=/t/,/d/; V is a vowel, C is consonant and # indicates the end of a word (this rule indicates that final syllables that begin with /t/ or /d/ move the dental phoneme to the end of the previous syllable and truncate the remaining syllable; e.g., /alt/ > MA /al-ten/) - 143 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 /mD#/ > /nD#/ (any final /md/ or /mt/ formed by the previous rule replaces /m/ with /n/) /#V1T-V2/ > /#TV2/ where T=/m/,/n/,/l/,/r/,/s/ (any word that begins with a vowel and is followed by a syllable-terminating consonant and a following vowel -- starting a new syllable -- drops the initial vowel and moves the consonant to the next syllable; e.g., /nim/ > MA /en- im/). One thing I've ignored when doing sounds shifts is whether a phoneme was in a stressed or unstressed syllable. Contrast English /ob-JECT/ ("I object, your honor") to /OB-ject/ ("the object of the game is this"). In English, the vowel /o/ has become a schwa in the unstressed syllable in /ob-JECT/ but not in the stressed syllable in /OB-ject/. Rather than deal with the issue of stress (which in the Alvish languages always falls on the penultimate -- next-to-last -- syllable), I decided that elves are more fastidious in their pronunciation and blur sounds less in unstressed syllables than mere mortals do... It's a cop out, but this is supposed to be fun, right? I won't formally describe the rules for forming compound words in Alvish. But forming compounds does have a number of twists, mainly designed to make sure that the resulting word matches the phonotactics of Alvish defined above. The rules: For the first of the two words compounded, anytime a vowel immediately follows another vowel (e.g., /e/ in /i-e/), that vowel is dropped. When the first word ends in a vowel and the second word begins with a vowel, those vowels change into an acceptable vowel pair (if they're not already); e.g., i-a, i-o, i-e, u-a, u-i, u-e. When the first word ends in a consonant, that consonant can be only /m/, /n/, /l/ or /r/, otherwise it moves to the front of the second word (if the second word begins with a vowel) or it is deleted. This process is inverted when the second word *begins* with a consonant; since that consonant cannot be /m/, /n/, /l/ or /r/, the consonant moves to the end of the first word, unless the first word ends in a consonant, in which case it is dropped altogether. Whew! Based on all these rules, I derived some sample words for Alvish. These words have no assigned meanings, since I have just been experimenting to make sure that I like the resulting sounds of the words generated. a-hu-di-en [< a-hus di-en < OA o-gus + di-an.] a-pun [< OA o-pun.] alt [< MA al-ten < OA ol-tan.] as [< OA os.] ban-u [< OA bon-u.] be [< OA ba.] be-sos [< MA bes-os < OA bas-uus.] bel [< OA bal.] - 144 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 bet [< MA be-tu < OA ba-tu.] bi-al [< MA ba-il < OA bo-il.] bi-hi-bes [< OA bi + gi-bas.] bi-om [< OA bi-uum.] bo-ses [< MA bos-es < OA buus-as.] bol-i-e-ba [< bol-e e-ba < OA buul-a + a-bo.] bot [< MA bo-thar < OA buu-cor.] bul-a-sim [< bu-el a-sim < MA bu-el as-im < OA bu-al + os-im.] but [< MA bu-thi < OA bu-ci.] ci-hit [< MA ci hi-tho < OA chi + gi-cuu.] de-fan [< OA da-fon.] di-os [< OA di-uus.] di-si [< di-as i < OA di-os + i.] dir-a-bi-en [< di-ar-a bi-en < OA di-or-o + bi-an.] du-an [< OA du-on.] du-ha [< OA du-go.] e [< OA a.] e-bun-bid [< MA e-bun bi-da < OA a-bun + bi-do.] e-pa-tam-en [< OA a-po + tom-an.] em-ho [< OA am-guu.] fa-po [< OA fo-puu.] far [< OA for.] fe-pu [< OA fa-pu.] fe-vin-ve-fus [< OA fa-vin + va-fus.] fel-im-fon-et [< fel-i-am fon-et < MA fel-a-im fon-e-tul < OA fal-o-im + fuun-a- tul.] fes [< OA fas.] fir-o [< OA fir-uu.] fu-en [< OA fu-an.] gi-su [< gis u < OA ghis + u.] hit [< MA hi-tan < OA gi-ton.] i-ba [< OA i-bo.] i-fen-pur [< OA i-fan-pur.] i-san [< MA is-an < OA is-on.] ir-u-se [< MA ir us-e < OA ir + us-a.] ni [< MA on-i < OA uun-i.] nim [< MA en-im < OA an-im.] nur [< MA en-ur < OA an-ur.] o-fam [< OA uu-fom.] pa-fu [< MA pas-fu < OA pos-fu.] pa-fu [< OA po-fu.] (arrived at the same form as the previous word but by a different route) pe-yil [< OA pa-yil.] pi-em-do [< OA pi-am-duu.] pi-fem [< OA pi-fam.] pi-sun-bi-as [< MA pis-un ba-is < OA pis-un + bo-is.] - 145 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 pir-di-fus [< pi-ar di-fus < OA pi-or + di-fus.] po-fu [< OA puu-fu.] po-vi [< OA puu-vi.] pod [< MA po-des < OA puu-das.] pom-i [< OA puum-i.] pu-em [< OA pu-am.] pu-il [< OA.] pul-on [< OA pul-uun.] ran [< MA er-an < OA ar-on.] te [< OA ta.] ter-in [< OA tar-in.] the-wom-o [< OA ca-wuum-uu.] thi [< OA ci.] thi-al-fu [< MA tha-il-fu < OA co-il-fu.] thi-as [< OA ci-os.] thin-o [< thi-on no < MA thi-on an-o < OA ci-uun + on-uu.] tho-pa [< OA cuu-po.] thot [< MA tho-tol < OA cuu-tuul.] ti-po-dom-pi [< OA ti-puu + duum-pi.] ti-vol [< OA ti-vuul.] tim-vul-po-wim [< OA tim-vul + puu-wim.] tin [< OA.] to-por [< OA tuu-puur.] tu-es [< OA tu-as.] u-fi [< OA.] u-va [< OA u-vo.] um [< OA.] urt [< MA ur-thi < OA ur-ci.] ut [< MA u-tho < OA u-cuu.] va [< OA vo.] val-i [< OA vol-i.] vam [< OA vom.] vem [< OA vam.] vi-al [< MA va-il < OA vo-il.] vi-fom-fe-hu [< OA vi-fuum + fa-gu.] vim-u [< OA.] vo-fi [< OA vuu-fi.] vod [< MA vo-di < OA vuu-di.] wil-pe [< OA wil-pa.] ya-wir-os [< OA yo-wir-uus.] yar-o [< OA yor-uu.] ye-bon [< OA ya-buun.] yed [< MA ye-dum < OA ya-dum.] yi-si-pu [< yis i-pu < OA yis + i-pu.] yo [< OA yuu.] - 146 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 yu-es [< OA yu-as.] yu-pi [< OA.] Some sample sentences (really just random sequences of words): Ut ofam tivol pomi fes te pafu firo vial fevinvefus. Bihibes fepu yupi be thopa biom ahudien vali yed puem. Vifomfehu wilpe iba apun iruse piemdo thino duha bulasim fapo. Ut tipodompi dirabien boses bial e terin yebon ufi ni. Vam va dios thewomo thi defan urt bot ifenpur uva. Fuen pofu vem as nur bet pirdifus ebunbid tin bel. Pifem hit isan epatamen tues nim duan bolieba vofi pisunbias. Disi vimu banu cihit pod thialfu pulon yawiros besos yaro. Yo pafu ran peyil timvulpowim puil alt thias topor um. Yisipu be felimfonet thot emho vod povi yues far gisu. So there you have the sounds of Alvish. Volume I, Issue 8 -- Model Languages - January-February, 1996 Contents copyright 1995 Jeffrey Henning. All rights reserved - 147 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 On the Design of an Ideal Language - ? 2002 Sai Emrys / Ilya Starikov – lj@saizai.com. Used with (own) permission. , On the Design of an Ideal Language, Revision 6.6 Comment! Response is appreciated, and helps catalyze thought. Note: this is a document under revision. Even *I* don't agree with myself all the time, and I expect people to disagree with the points I have to make here. As that happens, I'll do what I can to reconcile their opinions into some compromise, or at least list "dissenting opinions" alongside the major points, and give a decent answer as to why I said what I did. Read others' comments! There are a *lot* of interesting ones, and some of the threads serve to explain my meaning a bit better than stated here. Not to mention that there are some excellent points of disagreement. v6.6: changed title from "On Designing the Ideal Language" to "On the Design of an Ideal Language"; better reflects the no-single-answer aspect v6.5: added anchor tags for easier naviagtion, copyright notice, various minor edits v6: added Other Things to Consider: Temporal Order, Analog vs. Quantum Descriptors, and Purposely Wasting Space v5: added Applying the PSD: Writing v4.5: added lj-cut v4: added the section on Combining/Utilizing Input Streams v3: added the Principle of Cross-Modality and the Principle of Semantic Conservation v2: added (per Axiem's reminder) the redundancy vs. corruption clause to the PSD As you may know, I am (was?) attempting to construct my own language (known for now as Saigrok). However, I've run into a stumbling block - namely, my own ambition. I keep learning that I can't make a decision because I haven't yet decided on some higher-order feature of the language. I decided to compile a top-down view of what I want from it; language should not be desinged in a bottom-up piecemeal fashion if one wants the top-down principles to hold. Therefore, I'll try to describe here exactly what the desirable qualities of an ideal language are (or should be), and how exactly one could go about putting those ideals into a more concrete form. First, let's define "language". I'm going to use "a system for transmitting or recording ideas". Is that ambiguous? Damn right. But as you'll see, there's a reason for that. - 149 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Guiding Principles: 1. Principle of Least Effort Slang, as well as general "language evolution", have generally resulted from some more-difficult form being "corrupted" to an easier one. (e.g.: "thee" being removed, "whom" -> "Who", "television" -> "TV", vowel shift, etc.) Therefore, the language should *start* with simplicity in mind. This means that things should be "regular" (linguistic term, meaning "hopefully the rules don't have many exceptions") as much as possible, that vocabulary should be as dense as possible (long words for oft-used concepts, especially when shorter words are not "taken", *will* be broken down with natural use), etc. An example from ASL is that most signs that are physically difficult to make - palm out around chest, below waist, hands together above shoulder, etc. - tend to become simplified into ones that don't involve any strain. 2. Principle of Semantic Density Any medium used - e.g., speech, 2d static visuals ("writing"), 3d static visuals ("sculpture"), 2d moving visuals ("movies"), 3d moving visuals ("live performance" [maybe eventually "movies", when tech evolves]), touch, etc. (I'll have more on this later) - should be used optimally. "Optimally"... This means that a) everything that *can* be done (bounded by the PLE), is done - in speech, for eample, use of all available phonemes, tones, etc. b) simpler things are done first. For example, the nonsense word "aijmapnargath" should be much later on in the vocabulary than "jaf". Or another example would be ICQ numbers: start from 1 and work up. Why assign #9143018 when #1402 isn't taken? c) simpler things are reserved for simpler things. A word for the rotational axis of a particular molecule of some new-age plastic should be implicitly more difficult than a word for "good". d) all available mediums are used to their fullest potential. This is bounded by a few things. First, the capacity of the receiver(s) to interpret - e.g., radio & deaf people don't work well. (Clause: sometimes this is desirable, in that a multi-channel communication is - 150 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 interpreted at different levels by those able to receive it on different levels [e.g., signing "this is a lie" while talking, for the respective benefits of the person in front of you and the person listening to the room's mic].) Second, the capacity of the sender and the medium to *encode* the data in the first place. Does it have to be static, as in a written document or movie? Is it interactive? Do you have the benefit of three dimensions, or four? Can you *produce* it? (e.g.: singing tones, or writing ideographs, or using color, or instruments [music carries data, damn it!]) Third, the density of the medium as used. How many WPM of English can native users do? What about ASL? Manual alphabets? Etc... e) yes, I said *all* available mediums. That means that if you're communicating with someone in front of you, and both of you are ordinary non-impaired humans, you should be using your full body movement (bounded by the PLE), full vocal capacity, etc. If it's dark, or someone's blind, you should be using touch instead. Etc. SIMULTANEOUSLY. HOWEVER... as Axiem points out (and I forgot to mention on first revision), there comes a point at which you must trade semantic space for redundancy. Such is the case with the armed forces' alpha/bravo/charlie alphabets, and with .rar format "recovery" space (an added 1% or so of space can protect against a surprising amount of corruption). Thus, there should be a means of doing this - adding "buffer space" to the data - in whatever mode presented. However, it should *not* be a rigid thing; after all, I said "optimal". That means different things in different conditions - clear or foggy, quiet or noisy, etc. Ignoring this means, on one side, having to repeat (or simply losing the message, or losing precision [as is the case in many examples of humorously misplaced/missing commas]), and on the other, losing precious semantic space and thereby conveying less information. 3. Principle of Desired Clarity Every statement (though "statment" may well be an inaccurate word for a gesture or other "unusual" mode) should be as exactly as semantically precise as the sender wishes. It should be no less - if you want to specify "table" over "some sort of furniture designed for things to be placed upon" (like shelves, chairs, desks, etc.), you should be able to do so. Neither should it be any *more* precise. First, if you want to know where somebody's conveyance is, you should not need to first know what method of conveyance they used (car, train, motorcycle, horse, feet...) Second, if you want to be ambiguous, you should be able to... and, as an important sub-prinicple, ambiguity should always be *implicit*. If the gender-neutral pronoun is more difficult to produce than "he" or "she", it will be - 151 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 received as a *deliberate* ambiguity. Of course, that too should be able to be expressed, but it should be different than *implicit* ambiguity, in that the former is inclusive and the latter exclusive. 4. Principle of Default Simplicity The easiest concepts to render should be the simplest. E.g., Gender-neutral pronouns should be slightly simpler / easier than gender- or quantity- specific ones. The more complex the idea, the more correspondingly complex its expression. 5. Principle of Iconicity As much as possible, the medium used should represent the thing expressed. This is hard to explain, but an intuitive prinicple. If you're making a sign for "rain", for example, wiggling your fingers in a downward sweep is more "natural" than, say, making a circling motion with your fists. The same works with other mediums also; harsh concepts should *sound* harsh when heard, whereas gentle ones should be more mellifluous. There are two cautionary notes to this principle, however. First, there is the danger of culture bias. Onomatopaeia in spoken languages is a good example; I doubt most English speakers would recognize the Japanese equivalent of "woof woof" or "hee haw", nor vice versa. Also, a sign that represents "money" that symbolizes a sack of coins could well be outdated in fifty years when everybody uses plastic (or other yet-to-be-devised means of exchange). So if there's any question as to the Platonic nature of the representation, it should be completely arbitrary. Second, there is the implication of this principle: that entities unfamiliar with the rules of expression (i.e., people who don't know the language) will have an easier time understanding it, because it is as "intuitive" / "natural" as possible. The problem is that sometimes, this is *not* a desirable feature - like when one is trying to be secretive. However, I believe that some form of encryption should be devisable, and the base nature (by the PDS) of the language should be intuitive. 6. Principle of Cross-Modality Anything should be expressable in any/all available means. There should be absolutely *nothing* lost in "mode shift" - e.g., the written transcript of a radio talk show. This includes all subtleties and other "meta" features that one normally ignores in English, like vocal intonation, pitch, speed, sarcasm, etc. However, there's two clauses to this. - 152 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 First, it may be desirable (*optionally*) to drop meaning (like the fact that someone used a word in a derogatory fashion) in favor of brevity, simply because some modes (like those available in communicating with the deaf-blind) are so limited in "bandwidth". I stress however that this is an OPTIONAL and (if relevant) explicit drop; if you want a full mode shift, so be it; it'll just take longer. Secondly, some mediums may not allow for quite the degree of implicit or other meta-contextual meanings - how, for example, would you indicate that someone had a sarcastic voice when mode-shifting to touch signing? Pressure of the fingers? So, if need be, a shift from implicity to explicity is allowable, following the PDS: it's dropped unless you add it explicitly. 7. Principle of Semantic Conservation Simply put, there should be no such thing as a "nonsense" or "incorrect" phrase. This overlaps with the PSD. In English, for example, the phrase "man got job now" is ungrammatical, though composed of acceptable parts - though one could guess at its "proper" translation. However, why not have this *mean* something? I call this "wasted space". Another example: the non-existent, yet short and easily-pronounced word "bock" (unless I'm missing some extremely rare jargon...). Why? Yet we have words like "inexperienced". There are (again) two warning clauses to this. First, one must leave "space" for new, yet-unformed vocabulary, and an "official" means of its creation. I find English's way - make up a word that isn't yet taken - rather haphazard. How much space to leave, and how "valuable" (i.e., short words are more "desirable"), is an open question. Second, similar to the previous mention of clarity vs. density, the first things to go (if there is some sort of "static" or "corruption") should be the higher-end ones; if a message is garbled, its basic meaning should remain intact; oh well if you lose the speaker's emotion. Third, there is the (open) question of overlap. The word "blue" in english means several things - a color, a mood (depressed), a type of media (soft-pornographic), a blue *thing* ("the blue"), etc. Or "rehd" (when spoken) - a color, past tense of the verb "read", etc. What to do about it? Should there be a one-to-one correlation of meaning and form? I think perhaps not. If a form can "hold" several meanings, like English words, let it, so long as a) those meanings would not, in most cases, be confused with each other (contextual clarification) and b) those meanings can easily be distinguished (by the PDC) with slightly more effort (e.g., "get", meaning #4, but less obtuse). Finally, there is the question of how to deal with the fact that, in a fully conserved system, - 153 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 "noise" would have meaning. Literally speaking, everything you hear, see, smell, etc., should (in principle) carry some meaning. How do you choose which are and are not relevant? A hard (and open) question. (Another example: somebody speaking in sign language, which incorporates the whole body as well as facial affect, who also has some sort of culturally-inbred or physical "noise", like a tic or a tendency to grimace when thinking about a particular topic, even though a grimace would normally be an actual semantic component of the message "at hand".) Hmm... this does seem to echo the PSD a lot. But it's already so big... *sigh* Other Things to Consider: 1. Temporal Order This only applies, of course, to modes that *are* temporal, such as speech; ordinary writing would not count. The question is thus: which should come first, the more or less important? [unresolved] * more: If the message gets cut off, then at least you'll have communicated the maximum possible amount of data for the given (shortened) length alotted. * less: People tend to remember best what happened last. It's a fairly simple fact of memory and psychology. Also, one might not be completely attuned to the first part of a temporal communication - like when you're starting a speech or getting someone's attention - and thus "lose" data. So, if you're going to have loss, it may as well be less-important. The drawback of this is as above: what if it gets cut off? 2. Analog vs. Quantum Descriptors In English, all modifiers - adjectives, color names, etc., - are quantum. You choose one from a spectrum of meanings ("loud", "quiet", "soft", etc.), trying to find the one that best suits the *actual* point on the continuum that you intend. (Note, btw, that the continuum might not be one-dimensional; in the case of color, there's r/g/b, brightness, reflectivity, etc.) Therefore, I propose that all descriptors be, instead, *analog*. This is difficult to conceptualize for some. An example is ASL's sign for size - the hands spread apart. One can make rather fine shades of meaning simply by changing the distance between the hands, and the speed of their movement. Thus, though one might have certain indexes ("this" = big, "that" = very big, etc.), it is at least in principle infinitely mutable. One could do something similar for color, by deriving the name for any given color from its scientific rendition - in RGB, spectrum wavelength, etc. Thus, words for different shades of (say) orange would be very similar, but there would be some particular ones - 154 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 marked out as being common reference points - "generic" orange, as it were. Thus, though you wouldn't need to give a measurement in describing a table's size, you could give a fairly accurate *relativistic* term to describe it. 3. Purposely Wasting Space Every language - or more precisely, every culture - as some form of "um". ("y'know", "uh", "ah", "and", "like", etc.) Instead of fighting this, I would suggest that it be standardized; these filler words *do* serve an important purpose - indicating that the speaker is not relinquishing control, but is not giving any particular data either. Again, standardization would hopefully avoid the social stigma associated with some filler-words ("like" and "y'know" in particular make my mother rather condescending ;-)). OK then. These will be the Guiding Principles of what is to follow. Getting More Concrete: Combining/Utilizing Input Streams note: Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm making liberal use of compter/programming references in a linguistic discussion. If you want clarification, ask. "Input Stream": Any utilized means of conveying information. e.g.: Voice (speech), body movement ("sign langauge"), text (linear static b&w 2d), etc. Putting aside for the moment the question of *how* to optimially utilize a given IS, how is one to go about *combining* them in a meaningful and useful manner? 1. Redundancy The simplest. Conveying the same message in parallel, e.g., signing while speaking the same thing. However, while it may help in case of "corruption" (as discussed earlier), it serves little other purpose. Also, in the case of temporal streams (like anything you'd do one-on-one, vs. recorded in static form), there's the "weakest link" problem: some streams can inherently carry less data. So, you have to either "dumb down" all of them to that level, or simplify (by the PDS) so that you can keep up with the higher-level streams. (e.g.: When talking about something, you gesticulate the basic meanings of what you're saying, ignoring the intonations, overtones, etc.) Frankly, I find this option rather boring. 2. Complementary - 155 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 2a. "stacked" In this version, you would have a hierarchy of streams, with the base one (probably the highest-bandwidth) conveying some data, and the others adding on to or modifying it. For example, if you consider "color" a seperate stream than the text it colors, one could add special meaning (sarcasm, negation, ...) to the base, b&w message. 2b. "intertwined" In this version, all streams would be parallel, and the data would be portioned out between them. Thus, continuing the previous example, color could be used to signify grammatical structures (tense, aspect, etc.) that would then be *removed* from the text itself, resulting in a more compact (PSD, yay) result. The potential problem with this is that if the receiver loses one stream, the total content of the message is drastically altered, or even made indecipherable, whereas the "stacked" method would have it merely "dumbed down". However, I think that one could find clever ways to (ab)use this effect: varying the message by recipient (if there's multiple ones with varying capabilities), humor, etc. Also, it may sometimes be desirable to make a message indecipherable without all of its parts. 3. Interchanged In this case, one would switch between streams. This could be useful, for example, if your arms get tired and you'd rather talk, or vice versa, but I think this doesn't quite qualify as a means of *combining* input streams per se. *** This needs a lot more thought. It may also have implications for things outside language. (Think about it...) The basic question is, how do you send information, using multiple sources, so that the recipient(s) get something that is more than the sum of its parts? Applying the PSD In order to do this - and thus have input streams available for the previous discussion - we first have to list the various possibilities for input... * static 2d colored line-based (writing) * static 2d colored non-line-based (drawing) * dynamic 2d colored ? (movies of some sort) * static 3d colored (sculpture? hologram?) * sound, naturally human-produceable (speech) [sound is intrinsically temporal, so "dynamic" is redundant] - 156 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 * sound, artificially human-produceable (music / instruments) * sound, artificially machine-produceable (anything else) * dynamic visuals, human-produceable (sign language) - subdivided by sections (1 or 2 arm, legs, torso, head, neck, face, etc.) [ etc ] .... Let's start with the first... Writing Frankly, I think that most people's conception of writing is very limited compared to its potential. We do not need a *mere* transcription, as it were, of the phonology of the oral streams; that's redundant (though useful, certainly). And Asian-style ideograms are also limited in their own fashion. I would call all present writing systems "linear 2d", as they depend on discrete units (letters, kanji, hanzi, whatever) which are put in a line. They do not take advantage of the fully 2d nature of their writing surface, nor of the semantic possibilities of their color. I envision something more like a "web", that is read from any given point in a semi-stream-of-consciousness fashion. It would take some thought to get the design quite right, as my proposal is (to my knowledge) completely novel. However, it brings up intriguing possibilities: true branching grammar (as opposed to "traversing" grammar we have now), fractal detailing (have letters made up of letters for applying adjectives, or have branches for less-important "footnote"-type clauses), etc. I'm sure the more imaginative of you out there can come up with several more applications (post 'em!). The point is simply: why limit oneself? Yes, there are cases where it may be desirable to have a "linear 2d" writing system - computer input, for example (though one could devise a linear transcription). It also needs to be practical in that modern materials (books) generally require discrete chunks (pages), so would need a way in which to do so. Also, it would hopefully be at least as semantically dense as its single-spaced linear counterpart. More to come later. NOTE: This work is my copyright. Don't use it without permission, and even then only if you give due credit. I wrote it. - 157 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Good Glosses – ? 2003 Paul M. Hoffman – nkuitse@nkuitse.com. Used with permission. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, version 2.0. Good Glosses The problem When creating a language, you might find yourself making a simple word-list something like this: adri v.i. walk. ahyoloi n. flower. aprangu v.t. bury. asopa v.i. fall apart. awiru v.i. sink. But if you look in a good bilingual dictionary of natural languages, you'll see something more like this (adapted from Doke and Vilakazi's Zulu-English dictionary, Witwatersrand University Press, 1958): hamba v.i. 1. travel, move along, go, walk, proceed; 2. flow, run (as water); 3. live, be well. mbali n. 1. flower, blossom. 2. comely person, with well-formed features. ngcwaba v.t. 1. bury. 2. forget. phihlika v.i. 1. fall apart, crumble, decay; get smashed. 2. fall in showers (as rain). 3. break out in sores. 4. be abundant (as harvest). shona v.i. 1. sink, go down; 2. go out of sight, disappear; 3. set (of sun or moon); 4. die; 5. lose heavily, go broke, become ruined. Now, you don't necessarily want to get that elaborate, but if you want your language to seem natural, you'll need to go beyond a word-list that's comprised mostly of one-to-one translations. In other words, you need Good Glosses. Some possible solutions In an attempt to help solve the problem of impoverished glosses, I've written up some notes on how to make good glosses. This how-to guide goes through a few examples using relatively simple techniques, and touches on something I call semantic n-space (which some of you may recognize, though almost certainly under a different name; I'm afraid I haven't had time to research the subject and provide references). - 159 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 A fairly long list of ready-made glosses may also be useful (and much quicker). These glosses might further be altered or expanded using techniques such as those described in the how-to document. These ready-made glosses have been made the old-fashioned way: by real speakers of real languages over hundreds of years. Last modified Friday, April 23, 2004 at 21:01:50 GMT -0500 webmaster@nkuitse.com - 160 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 How to make good glosses Introduction For me (and probably for you, too), creating a language is a very personal thing. Each creator has her or his own strategies and tactics, which are liable to change over time, and what works for one person may not work for another. My hope in writing this how-to is to help glottopoeists of all stripes, but it would be silly to pretend that there is some ideal, universally useful, process for creating good glosses; the best I can do is this description of some methods that work well for me. Caveat lector. Gloss-making methods In general, I recommend a simple three-step approach: 1. Find one or more English* words that are somehow related (in meaning) to the one-word gloss you're trying to expand upon. 2. Think about what the English words have in common. (You may have already done this in finding the words in step 1.) 3. In your mind, stake out an area that covers one or more of these related meanings, picking two or three English words that seem representative. (You may decide simply to list two English words with the same meaning.) * Substitute your preferred language of description for English, of course. USING A THESAURUS Let's use the Sinampaiton noun odande as an example. This is currently glossed 'hook'. To fill out this gloss I'll begin by finding one or two close synonyms. My Roget's International Thesaurus (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1977) lists hook under 9 entries; picking one at random (entry 252.2) I see the following: curve, curvi-, sinus; bow, arc; crook, hook; parabola, hyperbola; ellipse; [etc.]. Nearby (252.3) I also see the following: bend, bending; bow, bowing, oxbow; turn, turning, [etc.]. This is good; I'll give odande two basic senses: (1) a hook (like you'd use to catch a fish or hang a coat on), and (2) a sharp bend in a curving (or sometimes straight, sometimes curving) thing--e.g., a river or other geographical feature. I see (1) as a more specific application of the more abstract (2); if I want to, I can go on to specify other applications of (2): a cape or spit of land, an elbow, a kink in a garden hose, and so on. Hey presto--mission accomplished. - 161 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Now, if you like, you can go on to other related entries in the thesaurus, but for the sake of brevity I'll leave it at that. USING A DICTIONARY The simplest way to come up with good glosses is simply to copy glosses from a bilingual dictionary. That's easy enough, but it can introduce a bias toward the language whose words' glosses you're copying; besides, it's boring! The second way is practically identical to the thesaurus approach, but I tend to use it more so I'll run through it in more detail. As an example, I'll use the Sinampaiton verb lapen, currently glossed 'push'. But first, a note about the dictionary I'll use... One of my favorite bilingual dictionaries is the Zulu-English dictionary by C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi; I have the second edition, published in 1958 by Witwatersrand University Press in Johannesburg. When I was in high school, my father, who was once more or less fluent in Mpondo (a dialect of Xhosa, closely akin to Zulu), gave me this dictionary and a number of other books on Zulu and Xhosa. (Thanks, Dad!) Doke & Vilakazi is a wonderful dictionary of a language very unlike English, containing some 900 pages of Zulu-to-English entries. (A companion work by Doke et al., going from English to Zulu, is helpful but not in the same league as the Zulu-English work). Though I can't really judge the quality of the entries from a purely practical point of view (i.e., to Zulu speakers or to others learning the language), the dictionary is filled with multiple senses, the typography is terrific, and there are lots and lots of good examples of usage, including many that illustrate idiomatic uses. Getting back to the task at hand, I begin by looking up the word push in the English-Zulu dictionary. Several Zulu translations are listed: phusha (borrowed from English), hlohla, hlukumeza, qhuba, sunduza, and qhubusha. I'll skip the English borrowing, since one of my aims in using a bilingual dictionary is to minimize the bias toward the language of description (English, in this case). Instead, I'll just pick two whose shapes appeal to me; here they are in the Zulu-English dictionary (edited for clarity): hlohla 1. push, ram, drive in; 2. get flooded, become over-clouded. 3. load (a gun). 4. Idioms: hlohla ikhwelo blow ("push") a whistle, hlohla umsindo make ("push") a noise. sunduza move, shift; push aside; shove. (Interesting sidenote: compare hlohla with French pousser 'push', which is used, like Zulu hlohla, to denote the production of various non-verbal sounds and uterrances: e.g., Elle poussa un cri 'She shouted/cried out'.) At this point, I could stop and assign the Sinampaiton verb lapen a gloss like 'push, shove; drive (in or away)' that combines senses from both of these entries without being overly complicated. That would be a perfectly satisfactory gloss, but I'll go on instead. - 162 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 One thing I noticed is that sense 1 of hlohla and the middle sense of sunduza both denote a (somewhat forceful) movement of an object away from the speaker: the former more specifically into another object, the latter simply out of the way of the speaker. On the other hand, hlohla in sense 3 and sunduza in its first sense don't necessarily entail motion away from the speaker. Also, I particularly like the grouping of the two senses 'push away' and 'push aside'. Make what you will of these observations; it can be very helpful to notice things like this, but I won't dwell on them here. The next step is to look up the words ram, drive (in), move, shift, and so on in the English-Zulu dictionary, seeing where they take me in the Zulu-English dictionary. I don't want to go overboard, so I'll just look up the translations for move and drive in their transitive uses (again, edited for clarity): move v.t. susa, nyikinya, nyukuza. drive v.t. qhuba; hambisa, shayela. Quick trips to the words susa and hambisa yield the following: susa [Interestingly, the word move doesn't appear in this entry! Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that its underlying meaning is 'take or (cause to) move off or away'.] 1. remove, take away; drive off. 2. deduct, subtract. 3. kill, remove, get rid of. 4. erase (from a list or register). 5. Idioms: susa insini (be humorous [lit., 'move off laughter'?]), susa umsindo (make a noise) [lit., 'move off sound/din']. hambisa [This is a causative form of the verb hamba 'go, travel, etc.'.] 1. cause to walk or travel; make flow. 2. send off, drive. hambisa incwadi dispatch a letter. 3. accompany on wedding trip. 4. purge (as medicine). There's plenty of good material to choose from here; you can mix and match words from these entries, or look up the other Zulu words to branch out more. (Shayela in particular looks intriguing; it's derived from shaya 'strike' and means, essentially, 'drive along or away by striking'). OTHER MEANS Another approach, which to me is much more of a game than a chore, is to take two or three bilingual dictionaries and follow a chain of meaning through all of them. This sort of thing can be a lot of fun, though there's the risk of getting carried away and ending up with hideously complicated glosses. Another tool you might find handy is WordNet. Looking up troponyms and hypernyms can be particularly helpful. For example, a troponym of push is a verb that designates a particular way of pushing something. A hypernym of push is ... well, the easiest way to define it is to say that the hypernyms of push are those words to which push is a troponym. Got that? WordNet lists move and displace as hypernyms of push. - 163 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Tools IMAGINATION I've already mentioned bilingual dictionaries and thesauri; these and similar tools can be very helpful. The most important tool of all, however, is your own mind, and especially your imagination and your capacity to think abstractly. Dictionaries and thesauri are very useful tools, but remember that you can always put down the books and just think about a word and the "thing" (object, action, etc.) it represents, focusing on a particular aspect of it and thinking of other things that share that same aspect (closely or otherwise). This is perhaps easiest when done with nouns that denote a physical object, but can work well for other kinds of words, too. DICTIONARIES In general, I look for dictionaries with sizeable entries (preferrably of "exotic" languages which nonetheless seem easy to pronounce, at least approximately). I have some favorites besides Doke and Vilakazi's Zulu-English dictionary; here are a few of them. As you can see, these are all quite old; I suppose I should buy some new ones: , Harrap's new collegiate French and English dictionary. Edited by Peter Collin, et al. London : Harrap, 1982. ISBN: 0-8442-1859-6. , Cassell's German-English English-German dictionary. [Edited by] Harold T. Betteridge. London : Cassell ; New York : MacMillan, 1978. ISBN: 0-304-52293- 7 (Cassell; thumb-indexed). , Pukui, Mary Kawena, et al. The Pocket Hawaiian dictionary with a concise Hawaiian grammar. Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 1975. ISBN: 0-8248- 0307-8. [A 276-page paperback, very nice.] , Ramos, Teresita V. Tagalog dictionary. Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 1971. ISBN: 0-87022-676-2. [Typescript, but well laid out and very readable. Unfortunately, there's no English-Tagalog section.] THESAURI I prefer the true Roget's--i.e., editions of Peter Mark Roget's original thesaurus, which consist of numbered entries. I prefer this method of organizing groups of synonyms because of the way it keeps clusters of meaning close to each other (for the most part). Furthermore, it keeps together words with different parts of speech that nonetheless share a common meaning. A quote from the thesaurus's front matter (How to use this book) explains (emphasis mine): [This thesaurus] has a structure especially designed to stimulate thought and help you organize your ideas. The backbone of this structure is the ingenious overall arrangement of the large categories. [...] Beginning at 448, for example, you will see HEARING, DEAFNESS, SOUND, SILENCE, FAINTNESS OF SOUND, LOUDNESS, etc., a procession of similar, contrasting, and opposing concepts, all dealing with the perception - 164 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 and quality of sounds. So, when you are not quite satisfied with what you find in one glance, glance at nearby categories too [...]. Other thoughts ABOUT SEMANTIC N-SPACE I like to think of word senses (meanings) as points in an n-dimensional space. Well, OK, I just imagine a cloud of senses and think about how they're clustered and the shapes those clusters take. Perhaps a simple two-dimensional example will help. I'll have to resort to ASCII art, I'm afraid. I'll begin with the word sharp. Looking in my thesaurus, I'll pick an antonym: dull. Here's a diagram: sharp -------+------- dull The plus sign in the middle is meant to represent a central "point"--a semantic point which denotes neither sharpness nor dullness. Next, I'll pick another antonym of sharp: smooth. To plot it, I'll make another axis. Note that I put the word sharp in a second time: smooth / / / sharp -------+-------- dull / / / sharp The fact that sharp appears twice is a reflection of its two distinct meanings. The sharp-dull axis has something to do with the cutting potential of an edge, while the sharp-smooth axis has to do with (say) taste. (It could be something else, but let's stick with taste.) In some hard-to-define way, these two meanings are quite similar. In fact, it may help to think of sharp as two different, synonymous, words. Another thing you might observe from this diagram is that smooth and dull are, in a way, synonymous. Or rather, they're synonymous in the same way that their antonyms, the two senses of sharp, are syonymous. To see this more clearly, reverse the situation. Let's create a word ndiyo that carries both "un-sharp" meanings: 'smooth (of an edge), dull (of taste)'. And let's give it two distinct antonyms: kluva 'sharp (of an edge)' and kwetta 'sharp (of taste)'. Here's what the diagram looks like now; compare it to the English diagram above: ndiyo - 165 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 / / / kluva -------+-------- ndiyo / / / kwetta Et voilà! Another good gloss... Conclusion Try out some of these techniques and see what you think. If you'd like, you may contribute your creations to the list of ready-made glosses by sending them to me at nkuitse@nkuitse.com. In the meantime, have fun! Last modified Friday, April 23, 2004 at 21:02:16 GMT -0500 webmaster@nkuitse.com - 166 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Apologia pro Imaginatione - ? 1999 Boudewijn Rempt - boud@valdyas.org. Used with permission. BACKGROUND The focus on theology might be surprising to people who don't know that I try to be a sincere Christian. I belong to the Orthodox church, under the Patriarch of Constantinople. I really can't separate my beliefs from the rest of my life - there are no compartments where I don't allow God to be. CHARYA Even so, is Charya not rather un-Christian, immoral and depraved? How can a Christian create something with a content like that? I don't think it's as immoral and depraved as that. One argument is that Charyan People are still people, like people everywhere, and I believe (in contrast to what Terry Pratchett maintains) in the essential goodness of men (not necessarily greatness, or holiness), but just, everyday, humdrum goodness. In that I follow Mencius and Pelagius. But primarily, I think the essence of Christian morality is unconditional love - love of people for themselves, for other people, for their surroundings, and finally, and most importantly, love for God. In this, the people from Andal are not our inferiors, and by creating a culture that celebrates this love, I hope to share some of my essential Christian beliefs. Apologia pro Imaginatione As I said, people seem to feel quite strongly about the 'waste of time' I have perpetrated, and am perpetrating, in preparing this website. Giving free reign the the figments of my imagination, spending countless hours on completely improductive activities (whether improductive is defined as not making money or not bringing me closer to God) - that is surely wrong, and should be corrected! * I might answer that the knowledge gained by playing around with websites and code and stuff does make me money - since I can use a lot of that in my daily job, or that it does bring me closer to God, since it means I meet a lot of people who do the same thing better than I do, thus bringing me humility. Or I could argue that I don't waste that much time - but I won't. - 167 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 My true argument is that in creating worlds, cultures and languages, in writing computer programs (as Brooks has noted (**), in drawing sketches, sculpting and writing stories and bits of poetry, in constructing music and in preparing those works for reception, I am following my nature, doing what God intended me to do. I am created in the image of God the creator - after all, in the first bit of Genesis, it is said that 'God created this and God created that, and finally he created man in his image'. To me (and to Dorothy L. Sayers ***, to whom I am indebted for that observation) this means that one of the primary characteristics of God is that God creates. Being created in that image, means that I must create, too - even if it is, as Tolkien said, sub-creation. It's an old idea, and according to Stephan Belsky, it goes back to Judaism: I don't know that much about the inner workings of Christian theology/philosophy, but to take this idea of subcreation back a generation, in Judaism one of the commandments ... is what i've seen called in Latin imitatio Dei, or in Hebrew some probably conjugated form of lehidamot laBorei, "imitation of God" / "to become similar to the Creator". If i remembered the expression exactly in Hebrew, i'd quote it, but part of the probably most famous expression of what this means (i think the commandment comes from Dvarim/Deuteronomy) goes something like "...because He is merciful, you be merciful; and because He is patient, you be patient..." Therefore, because He creates, you create. I think therefore that sub-creating is following my created nature. Lucifer has revolted against his created nature, and lost that nature, meaning he can't follow it anymore. That's why the Devil can't create, only warp - he can't even sub-create. The grace of God lets us make; whoever refuses the grace, loses the ability to make. As Irina Rempt has said on the Conlang mailing list, where this subject has been discussed: But Lucifer never created anything - at least not in orthodox (note the lowercase initial) doctrine. He just took what was already there, what God had already created, and warped it to his purposes. Being a creature himself, he couldn't create anything new except with the support of God, which he didn't accept. The point - as Tolkien understood very well - is that subcreation can only be done in the image of God (whether one acknowledges that or not; you can't help being an icon of God), or you'll destroy rather than create. and: ... an image representing God. Lucifer's mistake was to renounce that image of God in himself, so he couldn't draw on it to (sub)create. - 168 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 People tell me that my work is warping the creation, like the Lucifers work is, since I merely take what exists and rearrange that. To that I can only answer that all creative work, including the great Icons and all art is a form of sub-creation - rearranging of what already existed. And that's good - things that are completely original cannot be but boring since they are unconnected to anything the audience knows and therefore can recognise. Making something induces a concentration and focus that makes me feel one with the Maker - when I am truly making I am nearly as close to God as I can be - I'm nearly as much in communion with God as when I commune with Him during the holy Liturgy. By making an honest job of sub-creating, as good as I can, with a feeling of love and interest in my own creation, I think I can say that I dedicate my creative work to God. Boudewijn Rempt John 15:4-5 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. - 169 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Glossopoeia for Fun and Profit - ? ―Ostadan‖ - ostadan@theonering.net OSTADAN'S LORE & LETTERS: Glossopoeia for Fun and Profit Table of Contents What is Glossopoeia? Esperanto: Language of Hope That Elvish Vice tlhIngan Hol: The Warrior's Tongue The Languages of Myth Other References What is Glossopoeia? One of J.R.R. Tolkien's less famous works is A Secret Vice, a lecture first presented in 1931, and reprinted as an essay in The Monsters & the Critics and Other Essays. The ―vice‖ to which the essay refers is the peculiar practice of creating languages, not as a code, but as an art form, perhaps to be shared for the use or appreciation of interested parties, as one would share a painting or manuscript. The word glossopoeia is a coinage derived from Greek, meaning ―the making of tongues.‖ As Tolkien explains, the creation of languages offers both intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction, but at the time he wrote, there were few such creations known to the public. As we will see, this situation has changed considerably since that time. In this article, we will consider the genesis and effects of the three best-known glossopoeic works in chronological order: the international language Esperanto; the Elvish cluster of languages; and tlhIngan Hol, better known by its English name, ―Klingon‖. Esperanto: Language of Hope Esperanto was conceived and developed during the 1870s and 1880s by L.L. Zamenhof (1859–1917). Dismayed as a child by the mistrust that followed when people did not share a common language, he made it his life's work to create a language that could be learned by people in many lands as a common second language. Zamenhof's language was first published in 1887 as La Lingvo Internacia, with Zamenhof assuming the pseudonym of ―Dr. Esperanto‖; the word esperanto in the new language meant ―one who hopes‖, and indeed Zamenhof hoped that his language would help the cause of international peace and understanding by encouraging communication among ordinary citizens of the world. Before long, the name became associated with the language itself, rather than the author. Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn and understand, at least - 171 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 relative to other European languages. As an example of what Esperanto looks like, here is a couplet, translated by Bertil Wennergren, that may seem familiar: Unu Ringo ilin regas, Unu ilin prenas, Unu Ringo en mallumon ilin gvidas kaj katenas. This example shows a few of Esperanto's interesting features. The vocabulary is largely derived from Latin roots (reg-, ―rule‖), but has some Germanic or English roots like ring- in the mix as well. The word mal-lumon for ―darkness‖ demonstrates how the vocabulary is extended by using affixes; the word can be literally analyzed as ―un-light‖. The number of Esperanto speakers grew steadily after its publication. A number of [1], as well as original articles, prose, and poetry, appeared during the literary translations next twenty years, and the first international congress conducted entirely in Esperanto was held in France, in 1905. Among the people who eventually learned Esperanto to the point of being able to write in it was a young English Boy Scout named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In 1909, he wrote a [2]small sixteen-page notebook, the Book of the Foxrook partly in Esperanto, describing a ―privata kodo‖ for scouts. This private code consisted of a rune-like alphabet and a set of ideographs and represents the earliest known alphabet invented by Tolkien. Tolkien maintained some interest in Esperanto even while his own linguistic creativity was in full bloom. He refers to the language favorably in A Secret Vice, and in 1932 wrote an open letter to the British Esperanto Association. In part, he wrote, … technical improvement of the machinery … tends … to destroy the ―humane‖ or aesthetic aspect of the invented idiom. This apparently unpractical aspect appears to be largely overlooked by theorists; though I imagine it is not really unpractical and will have ultimately great influence on the prime matter of universal acceptance. … [one rival language] … has no gleam of the individuality, coherence, and beauty, which appear in the great natural idioms, and which do appear to a considerable degree (probably as high a degree as is possible in an artificial idiom) in Esperanto … Here Tolkien, echoing some of his thoughts in A Secret Vice, is observing that the creation of a language is more than the simple creation of a tool or code; it is an endeavor that must give not only intellectual satisfaction, but aesthetic pleasure in the arrangement of sounds and meaning. Indeed, Zamenhof evidently spent a fair amount of time ―taste- testing‖ his developing language before deciding on the words and sounds that would finally be part of the language. Tolkien's feelings for Esperanto apparently cooled in later years based on his belief that language and myth are inseparable. In a letter to one Mr. Thompson in 1956 [Letters, #180], he wrote, - 172 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends. Nevertheless, it is worth observing that, of the dozens of prospective international language projects that have appeared in the last 150 years (including the three others Tolkien mentioned), only Esperanto has continued to grow substantially after the death of its creator. Estimates of the number of competent speakers range in the hundreds of thousands, and a Google search for ―Esperanto‖ produces more than 850,000 matching Web pages. There is even an Esperanto translation of The Lord of the Rings in print. Arguably, Tolkien was wrong about Esperanto — but for exactly the right reason. Unlike the other languages he mentions, Esperanto does indeed have its own mythology. It does not consist of magical legends, but is a kind of political mythology of hope, a shared belief among its speakers that the world would be a better and friendlier place if everyone in the world could communicate across borders as easily as Esperantists do, in a language that belongs to no single nation or people. This notion, called the interna ideo by Esperantists, is sometimes a source of embarassment. Nevertheless, this idealism pervades much of Esperanto literature, especially from the first fifty years of its existence. Many, if not most, biographies of Zamenhof tend to mythologize his life, treating the behavior of some of those who tried to gain control of Esperanto's development with the sort of language usually reserved for the likes of a Lucifer or Sauron. So, if Esperanto is not dead, it is precisely because there are legends and myths connected with the language. That Elvish Vice In A Secret Vice, Tolkien distinguishes languages like Esperanto, devised for the practical purpose of serving as an interlanguage, from the real subject of his article — languages constructed as an Art or Game. Tolkien, indeed, was addicted to this ―game‖. Over the years, he created perhaps a dozen or more identifiable languages, including Dwarvish, Adûnaic, Black Speech, Valinorean, and several dialects of Elvish. He wrote, You must remember that these things were constructed deliberately to be personal, and give private satisfaction — not for scientific experiment, nor yet in expectation of any audience. The Elvish languages, and Qenya (later Quenya) in particular, were thus a way for Tolkien to express his individual taste in languages. As has been discussed many times elsewhere, Qenya was strongly influenced by Tolkien's attraction to the Finnish language. In early Qenya for example, the word for ―twenty-three‖, his age at the time, was leminkainen, quite similar to Lemminkäinen, one of the major heroes of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala. Similarly, Goldogrin, the Gnomish language of the Noldor, was heavily influenced by Tolkien's love of Welsh. There is no question that the Elvish languages represent the most complicated such creation ever seen. Not only did Tolkien devise Qenya and Goldogrin, but also a common proto-language from which those two were (within the mythology) derived, and hints of several other related Elvish dialects. - 173 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Closely bound up with the Elvish languages was Tolkien's own emerging mythology, recorded in the Book of Lost Tales. In A Secret Vice, he wrote … for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant. Not solely because some pieces of verse will inevitably be part of the (more or less) completed structure, but because the making of language and mythology are related functions … The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology. So closely bound were the languages and myth that it is impossible to tell where a phrase or word in the language inspired a new part of the story, and where the languages were expanded or changed to suit the tale. Unlike a practical language like Esperanto, in which stability is (as Tolkien himself observed) critically important to its goal of widespread propagation, Tolkien's languages were dynamic and changed as his own tastes changed and, indeed, as his mythology of Arda itself grew and evolved. ―There is no finality in linguistic invention and taste,‖ Tolkien wrote in 1932, and his own languages demonstrated that dramatically. But Tolkien's private game took a different turn when his fiction was published. In The Hobbit, there are a few hints of the Gnomish language — names like Orcrist, Glamdring, and Elrond, with English meanings given for the two weapons. The Lord of the Rings, however, entailed the publication of dozens of such names, and examples of complete sentences and even poetry in both Quenya and Sindarin. In fact, the names and relationships of Sindarin and Quenya themselves changed during the writing of the novel, another example of how the mythology and languages influenced one another reciprocally. The publication of so much Elvish had two profound effects. The first was that Sindarin and Quenya became essentially ―frozen‖. With few exceptions, the names and interpretations that had appeared in print were no longer subject to revision, and had to be considered definitive. To Tolkien, this was just a new feature of the game. Previously, if a word was changed or added, the existing languages were retroactively modified, sometimes extensively, to accomodate the change. But after publication, whenever he devised a new grammatical construct or vocabulary element, he felt bound to make sure it conformed to the published material, even when this was inconvenient. The second effect was that the game was no longer private. Fans of the books quickly learned to write (at least in English) using Tolkien's Cirth and Tengwar, and began their own linguistic game, that of reconstructing the Elvish languages based on the ―linguistic evidence‖ that appeared in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, for as long as his time and energy permitted, encouraged and even participated in this activity. He would answer [3]language-related inquiries, and prepared a detailed analysis of two Elvish poems for publication with the Road Goes Ever On song-book. As a result, Elvish linguistics became its own sub-fandom within organized Tolkien fandom. The journal Parma Eldalamberon first appeared under the auspices of the Mythopoeic Society in September, 1971 and contained articles on writing English using the Tengwar and on the formation of - 174 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 plurals in Sindarin. The journal is still irregularly published; the most recent issue contained the first publication of Tolkien's Qenya Lexicon. Many other journals relating to Tolkienian linguistics have appeared over the years, and with the rapidly-expanding use of the Internet, we now see electronic mailing lists and dozens of Web pages devoted to this esoteric field. One can even find translations into Elvish such as this Sindarin couplet by Ryszard Derdzinski: Er-chorf hain torthad bain, Er-chorf hain hired, Er-chorf hain toged bain a din fuin hain nuded. In all likelihood, there are some thousands of Tolkien fans around the world who, like the [4].‖ herb-master in the Houses of Healing, ―know somewhat of the Valinorean With the publication of the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and each volume of The History of Middle-earth, more of Tolkien's linguistic invention has been revealed. Nevertheless, even Quenya, the most well-documented of Tolkien's languages, will never be fully known. Nobody can hope to speak Quenya fluently because neither its vocabulary nor grammar is complete — Tolkien never intended for them to be! Nor is there ever likely to be an official Academy of Elvish that can expand and establish some kind of ―canonical‖ Quenya or Sindarin that everyone can agree upon. In a private correspondence, one professor of linguistics expressed his personal dissatisfaction with Elvish as an area of study: Elvish satisfies a very different need, I think. In some ways, it strikes me as studying Latin. The language is basically dead. It exists in fragments as a fascinating puzzle, but it's not going anywhere. Klingon, on the other hand … tlhIngan Hol: The Warrior's Tongue Perhaps the most profound effect of the prominence of the Elvish languages in Tolkien's hugely popular work was that it made glossopoeia respectable. Indeed, it seems that fantasy and science fiction works in the post-Tolkien milieu practically require the appearance of some exotic language spoken by alien or mythic races, or at least some systematic phonological structure in the names of people and places. One can now find several Web pages devoted to glossopoeia, or ―conlangs‖ as such constructed languages are sometimes called. It was in this post-Tolkienian world that Paramount and Gene Roddenberry created the Star Trek motion pictures of the 1970s. The first film had a short subtitled dialogue among the Klingons, as well as a snippet of Vulcan dialogue, but these were ad hoc creations, not part of any systematic language. For the 1982 Star Trek film, The Wrath of Khan, the studios were looking for a linguist to construct a few lines of Vulcan dialogue and recruited one Dr. Mark Okrand, a linguist with whom a producer's secretary happened to be acquainted. It represented a few days' work, but the producers called upon Okrand again for the somewhat more extensive Klingon dialogue in the 1984 film, The Search for Spock. Unexpectedly, and perhaps himself inspired by Tolkien's work, Okrand - 175 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 created an extensive phonology, grammar, and lexicon for the Klingon language, and even retro-fitted the haphazard speech from the first film into his language as ―clipped‖ Klingon, a battle dialect. The first edition of The Klingon Dictionary was published in 1985, and has had several reprintings (including updates based on additional material appearing in later films). In a sense, Klingon is a linguistic joke. It disobeys certain rules recognized as human language universals by linguists, and its Romanized orthography uses upper and lower case letters in a most idiosyncratic manner. As an example of the language, here once more is the familiar couplet, rendered into Klingon by Ivan Derzhansky: Hoch SeHmeH wa' Qeb 'ej bIH maghmeH wa' Qeb, Hoch qemmeH 'ej ramDaq bIH baghmeH wa' Qeb. With the many harsh aspirants and glottal consonants, the Klingon language would likely have struck Tolkien as an Orkish ―brutal jargon,‖ and indeed does have superficial phonological resemblences to Black Speech. The Klingons, however, are a much more richly depicted culture than Orcs, and have captured the imagination of many viewers. Consequently, The Klingon Dictionary has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, a figure which usually leads to rather inflated numbers claimed for the number of Klingon ―speakers‖. There are instructional language tapes available, and the Klingon Language Institute even produced a Klingon version of [5]. In the case of Hamlet not long ago, largely as a result of a joke in a Star Trek film Klingon, the popularity can be attributed to the mythology that produced it: the mythical future world of Star Trek. While only a small number of people can actually speak it [6]fluently, it is nearly certain that there are a large number of fans who can, with the aid of the dictionary and grammar, construct a grammatical Klingon phrase or sentence, or who have memorized some of the ―useful phrases‖ such as ―Surrender or die!‖ (bIjeghbe'chugh vaj bIHegh) — almost certainly more than the number of people who can do the same with Quenya or Sindarin. The Languages of Myth All three of these invented languages have had considerable success in their own rights. Perhaps to understand why, we can compare the ―cultures‖ associated with Esperanto, Elvish, and Klingon. The stereotypical Esperantist is a slightly naïve idealist who sees Esperanto as a way of increasing the brotherhood of mankind through improved communication, and tries to correspond with pen-pals in as many countries as he or she can. The stereotyped student of Elvish is inspired by a language in which one routinely says things like, ―a star shines on the hour of our meeting,‖ and may write Elvish poetry filled with natural imagery about oceans, forests, trees, rivers, and clouds. The Klingon speaker enjoys the dark irony of a language in which the standard greeting translates as, ―what do you want?‖ and even ―I love you‖ is expressed in a guttural phrase like [7]qamuSHa'. While this is obviously a too-facile characterization, we can see that each of these languages fulfills some need (albeit not necessarily practical) of its community: - 176 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 aesthetically, politically, literarily, or indeed, mythically. They enjoy unusual success out of the hundreds of glossopoeic inventions that have doubtless occurred in the past, because they touch some part of the human linguistic facility in ways that other efforts have not. Other References There are many sources on the Web for information about Esperanto. In North America, a good starting point is The Esperanto League for North America, while those in other countries might look at The Multi-lingual Esperanto Information Center. Two good URLs to find out more about Elvish are Resources for Tolkienian Linguistics and Ardalambion. The leading organization for Klingon is The Klingon Language Institute. There are dozens of other conlangs that you can read about on the Web, including the logical language Lojban and the Tsolyani language from the fantasy role-playing world of Tekumel. One useful starting point is Richard Kennaway's Constructed Languages List, which has an astonishing number of links and thumbnail descriptions. Finally, the author gratefully acknowledges the article by Patrick Wynne and Arden Smith, Tolkien and Esperanto, which appears in issue 17 of the journal Seven. [1] including Zamenhof's own translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. [2] The first page of this notebook was exhibited by the Bodelian Library as part of a Tolkien centenary exhibition in 1992. [3] An important source of information about Quenya nouns is the so-called ―Plotz Declension‖, a letter Tolkien wrote to Richard Plotz showing standard Quenya noun declensions. [4] and who know that the herb-master was a bit mistaken in referring to Quenya as `Valinorean.' - 177 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 [5] although many agree that the play is better in the original Esperanto. [6] The head of the Klingon Language Institute has said that he does not know of a hundred people who can speak the language fluently, although the criteria for judging fluency are necessarily nebulous. [7] If you really like stereotypes, the Esperantist is a 1940s-style leftist; the Elvish scholar is a 1960s hippie, and the Klingon speaker is a biker in black leather. - 178 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Notes on Language Creation and Ergativity - ? David Peterson – dedalvs@free.fr Notes on Language Creation There is no "How To" book for language creation. Everyone has their own opinions; everyone has good ideas. These are a few of mine (opinions, not good ideas--that's for you to decide). Preface Awhile back, Jeffrey Henning (the man behind Langmaker.com) suggested I create a kind of "How To" page for my website, perhaps something like his excellent Model Languages newsletters, which you can find here. He suggested I could start off with some of my better CONLANG posts, probably like this one, which someone posted as a resource to Langmaker.com. My first thought upon hearing (well, reading, I guess) this suggestion was: Why? Not because I didn't think that at least some of my CONLANG posts were useful/helpful--I hope they were. My posts on CONLANG, though, are all spur of the moment, and are certainly not meant to be authoritative in any way. I felt like if you added something like a "How To" page, it would presuppose that you were an authority on the subject, and that there's some special reason why people should believe what you say. I don't feel like an authority on conlanging, and I certainly don't want to make it sound as if I think I am. So that was one reason I was hesitant. Another reason was that there are plenty of "How To" sites out there already, such as Pablo David Flores's essay How to Create a Language (warning: that link is to a .pdf), as well as probably the best guide out there, Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit. And, of course, there are always the essays of Rick Morneau (if you're a language creator, or interested in language creation, and are not familiar with these essays, you probably should become familiar with them). Anyway, the point, I suppose, is this: If we've already got the steel-belted radial, why re-invent the stone wheel? Wow, it's kind of hard to argue with the logic of that analogy... But anyway, I did, in fact, decide to create a kind of "How To" page, of which this page is evidence. The main reason I did so is this: There is no authority on language creation. There's barely even a literature. Sure, there are plenty of books that have created languages in them (go here for an ever-growing, yet inexhaustive, list), but there are very few (one?) that actually discuss the creation of language in any depth. Thus, if we, the language creation community, don't discuss our art ourselves, who will? Chances are it'll be an outsider-- - 179 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 someone like Marina Yaguello, who wrote a book whose title is Lunatic Lovers of Languages (thanks for the vote of confidence, Ms. Yaguello). I, for one, don't want that. Additionally, there are as many ways to create a language as there are people to create them. And since chances are that much of our work will be lost if we don't put it somewhere public, the need to at very least catalog your ideas online is vital. I'm continually amazed at not only the ideas of well-established conlangers, but also of those new to the game who've never even had the privilege of being able to discuss their conlangs with a sympathetic audience. Without fresh ideas, new blood, the communal aspect of the artform can't survive, po-moemu. The purpose of this preface is threefold. First, I wanted to explain why this page is on my site, of course. Second, though, is that I'd like to urge the conlangers reading this (well, the conlangers who have webpages) to put up not only their language sketches, cultural descriptions, scripts, artwork, etc., but also their ideas, their thoughts about language creation; what they've learned. Your experience is invaluable: Let us know about it. Oh, there's also a third reason for the preface. I wanted to explain how this notebook will be structured. Unlike an actual "How To" guide, this notebook will not be in sections that build off one another and gradually increase in complexity. In fact, the first content section (not including this preface or the introduction) is on ergativity--a notoriously sticky subject. So what you should do is just go to the table of contents and see if there's a subject that interests you. If so, click on it, and dive on in. If not, hey, that's life. Try back again some time. I plan to add to this page periodically. Oh, one more thing. There are two types of links on this page. Those that show up in pink but are not italicized go pretty much wherever they say they go. Those that are in pink and are italicized, however, go directly to a linguistic definition of the given term which is hosted on SIL's Glossary of Linguistic Terms. It's a helpful site, and I've made use of it liberally not only on this page, but on all my pages. All right, that's enough of a preface. I bid you a good day, and hope you can find something useful on this page. Introduction Let me pause while I figure out what this is an introduction to... Ah, yes. This is intended to be a general introduction to me as a language creator, so you can know where I'm coming from. I was never really interested in language the way I am now (and the way most language creators have always been) until my junior year of high school. Before then, I came from a house where English was the first language and Spanish the second, but I never fully - 180 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 learned Spanish. So, when I got to high school, I took Spanish, because everyone had to take a language. It was in my junior year, though, that I woke up one morning with a startling thought: Millions of people on Earth could speak French fluently, and I wasn't one of them. This greatly disturbed me. I was more embarrassed, than anything else. Like I'd walked into a black tie social event in my pajamas (and little-kid footy pajamas, at that). From that day forward, I was determined to learn every language on Earth, living or dead. (Note: It wasn't until much later that I learned that there were thousands of these things, and that I would have to revise my self-imposed goal, if I hoped to live anything that even resembled a normal life.) Shortly after my revelation, I started to pick up different language books here and there. And so, I started to teach myself Latin and French. In my senior year, I added a German class, though I was thwarted in my attempt to take French 2 without having taken French 1. I also started to try to learn Arabic. Then when I go to college at UC Berkeley, I took, in my first year, a year of Arabic, a semester of Russian, and a semester of Esperanto. Esperanto was my official introduction to created languages, though at the time, I never imagined that one even could create a language for fun. That thought didn't dawn on me until my next semester, when I (finally) took a French class, and took my very first linguistics class: Linguistics 5, introductory linguistics. Some time during the lesson on the IPA, I thought to myself, "Hey, what if I came up with my own IPA, so that I could write English in an Arabic-style script?" I'd become enamored of Arabic, and especially its script, you see. And then I had a startingly thought. "What if I actually created a language that was like Arabic, but simple and regular, like Esperanto?" And that was the end of it for me. Ever since that day, just about all my free time has been spent creating languages. That first language was a language called Megdevi, named after myself and my girlfriend at the time. My idea was to create a language that we could speak between ourselves. (What a laugh!) When I realized that wasn't going to pan out, I just started to expand it on my own, adding sounds that I liked, not having to worry about how others could pronounce them any longer. Pretty soon I got some font making software and started creating a font. This led to creating more fonts and more languages. It wasn't until March of 2001, it turns out (I could've sworn it was November...), that I came across the CONLANG list. It looks like my first message was on March 8, 2001, and it was rather argumentative. An ill omen. Oh well. One thing that's important to understand about me and language creation is that I really thought I had come up with a novel idea. I new that Esperanto had been created back in the 19th century, and that a few others had been created around that time (Ido, SolReSol, Novial, Volapük, etc.), but I didn't know that anyone had actually created a language for fun. Ever. I never read Tolkien as a child (I almost got three fourths of the way through The Hobbit once), and still am not fond of him. And even though I knew of him, certainly, I never knew that he created languages. I grouped him together with C.S. Lewis and George Orwell (other writers I read in fourth/fifth grade) as a set of sci-fi/fantasy-type authors, and never dreamed that he, as a member of that group, did anything but write. I'd certainly never heard of the actual Klingon language, or any other type of conlang, for that matter. I - 181 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 honestly and truly believed that I was the first. I continued to believe for a few months until I came upon Pablo David Flores's page on the internet, and was crushed. After all, if I was one of many, what was the point? So for the few months when I found out about language creation on the web and found out about CONLANG, I was in a bad mood. It's not surprising that I was so arrogant and rude, though it remains, nevertheless, unforgivable (especially since I was probably one of the reasons that David Bell abandoned CONLANG. I still feel very bad about that, and if he ever reads this, I want him to know that I'm sorry). Anyway, during this time, I started to develop Megdevi. I got to a point where all I had to do was add triconsonantal roots. Thus, the vocabulary began to grow by leaps and bounds. At the same time, there was discussion on CONLANG about vocabulary size. Someone posed (I believe) about how their vocabulary had finally grown to 300 words. I looked at Megdevi and estimated the number of words, and it was well over 5,000. As a result, I got the idea that I was really a lot better at language creation than everyone on the list. What I didn't know, though, was that quite the opposite was true. The language Megdevi itself (and I won't ever put anything up about it. The Babel Text is here if you want to get an idea for what the language was like) was really a very clever code for English. Its triconsonantal roots encoded semantic categories from which nouns, adjectives and verbs could be made. Any time I came across a construction my language couldn't handle, or learned about something new in one of my linguistics classes, I merely added an affix. And Megdevi had prefixes, suffixes, infixes and circumfixes--every kind of affix I'd heard of at that point. Thus, when it came to translation, its power was unlimited. Any time I came across something it couldn't handle, I'd either add another triconsonantal root, or add a new affix. Now, I've no doubt that anybody on the list could've pointed out what was wrong with Megdevi. It would've been like taking candy from a baby who liked to hand out candy to strangers. I think, however, that it was best for me that I discovered it on my own. I believe it was when I was coming up with a new root for "fortify". Thus, the verb meant "to fortify", the verbal noun was "fortification", the utility noun was "(a/the) fortification or fort"... And it was right then, right at "fort", that I realized I was doing nothing more than cleverly recreating the vocabulary of English. And it was then that I realized that all the other languages I'd started at the time (languages like Geydr [not mispelled], Sunshine, Dangelis, Color, Mbasa, Zidaan...) were terrible. The more and more I learned in linguistics, the more and more I saw how little I understood about language, and how much my languages had suffered. So, I stopped working on Megdevi, and all the others, and started a new language: Kamakawi. This was the first language I started that I considered somewhat good. It still suffers from some of my old bad habits, as do Sathir, Njaama and Zhyler, but it was a marked improvement. At the same time, I began to appreciate more and more others' languages, and was finally able to really start getting stuff from the CONLANG community. - 182 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 From that point on, I kind of settled into a groove. I started to learn more languages (Middle Egyptian, Hawai'ian, Turkish...), learn a lot more about linguistics, and to work on the languages that are currently on this site. Some time near the end of my stay at Berkeley, I started up an experiment with John McWhorter that eventually became the Wasabi experiment. The paper I wrote at the end of this experiment is what I used as my writing sample for my graduate school applications. Additionally, I was able to talk about the talk I gave on language creation at a colloquium that our club at Berkeley (the Society of Linguistics Undergraduates, SLUG) put on, and so, quite literally speaking, I can say that language creation is what got me where I am today: at UCSD as a linguistics graduate student. Language creation has made a great impact on my life thus far, and I hope to be able to do even more with it in the future. But, for now, it's fun. And that's what matters most. ~:D Ergativity Ergativity: The Maltese Falcon of language creation. If you'd like a linguistic definition, you can go here, but it probably won't help much. Essentially (and you should take that word with a bucketful of kosher salt), ergativity is this: In English (a nominative-accusative language), the subject of a sentence with a transitive verb and the subject of a sentence with an intransitive verb are treated alike; direct objects of transitive verbs are treated differently. In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of an intransitive verb is treated the same as the direct object of a transitive verb; subjects of transitive verbs are treated differently. That, however, is only the verytip of the flap on top of the roof on top of the house on top of the iceberg. In fact, that definition is wholly inadequate when it comes to explaining ergativity, but many don't know why. That's fine if you're a doormat salesman; not so fine if you're a conlanger who wants to create an ergative-absolutive conlang. In this introduction to ergativity, I'll try to explain what exactly ergativity is, and how it's manifested in natural languages, as well as how it can be used in created languages. I will be drawing on a number of resources which I'll mention throughout this introduction, and will also list at the end. So, without further ado, I give you: Ergativity. 1.0 INTRODUCING TERMS: Before jumping into theory and examples, I want to make sure that we've got our terms straight. - 183 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 a. First of all, there are the terms "nominative-accusative language/system" and "ergative-absolutive language/system". Each of these refer to a language that display either non-ergative or ergative characteristics. This does not mean that the language in question will have cases with these names. After all, English is a nominative-accusative language, but has no case (except in the pronouns, and those cases work differently than standard nominative-accusative). b. With that said, the names that are given to these systems do come from somewhere. Specifically, the four words used in the system names are case names. The nominative case that identifies the subject (regardless of the valency of the verb) in nominative-accusative languages. The accusative case is a case that (usually) marks the direct object of a transitive verb in nominative-accusative languages. The absolutive case is a case that marks the subject of intransitive verbs and the direct object of transitive verbs in ergative-absolutive languages. Finally, the ergative case is the name for a case that marks the subject of a transitive verb (not necessarily the agent) in ergative-absolutive languages. c. Actually, since I introduced a semantic term up above, it might be useful to go over the relevant ones. An agent is, strictly speaking, the initiator of an action. In this section, I'll be referring to the agent of a transitive verb as an A. Now, in a sentence like, "The polar bear's dancing", "the polar bear" is actually an agent--i.e., he's initiating the dancing action. I'll be referring to those types of arguments (i.e., the volitional/agentive subjects of intransitive verbs) as SA. A patient is the undergoer of an action. So, for example, in "The polar bear tapped the panda", "the panda" is the one who undergoes the tapping action. I'll be referring to these types of patients as P. Another type of patient would be "the door" in a sentence like "the door swung open". I'll be referring to these types of patients as SP. Three other semantic roles I'll be talking about are recipients (R), experiencers (E) and stimuli (ST). I'll explain these when I get to them. The prior four, though, will be important to remember as we go along. d. Two processes I'll be discussing later on are passivization and antipassivization. I think it might help just to think of these as a simple valency-decreasing operation, but one typically applies to nominative-accusative languages, and the other typically applies to ergative-absolutive language. Both of these processes affect transitive verbs. The process takes the default argument and turns it into an oblique, and takes the specially marked argument and turns it into the default argument. In a nominative-accusative language, nominative is the default marking; accusative the special marking. In an ergative-absolutive language, the absolutive is the default marking; the ergative the special marking. The resulting verb is a very intransitive-like verb, in both cases. That's all this is. Okay, those are some terms that we need to make sure we're all on the same page about. (Heh. How's that for a sentence ending with a preposition?) If you're not sure how I'm using a term later on, come back here, and it will explain. 1.1 INTRODUCING SOME TEST WORDS: - 184 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In explaining (and hearing explanations of) ergativity, I've always found it more helpful to look at invented examples than actual examples from natural languages. I will talk about natural languages below, but most of the examples will be shown using the words listed below. The words below will be used to illustrate all examples, so that we're not switching languages from example to example, and so that it'll be easier to familiarize yourself with what exactly is going on. Or that's the plan, at least. So below are a list of words from a language that we'll call Ergato: English Ergato English Ergato I ko panda panilo you pe fish tanaki she li sheep folime to dance talu man hopoko to sleep sapu woman kelina to pet lamu book kitapo to see fisu wind makipo to give kanu house paleni and i General Preposition sa Valency Reducing Marker -to Oblique Marker -k Past Tense Marker -ri Recipient/Dative Case -s Plural Marker -ne Extra Case Marker -m Default Case Marker -- Special Case Marker -r It's important to understand why the markers above do not say things like "ergative case marker", or "antipassive marker". These markers are going to be used differently in different contexts in the examples below. Thus, the "special case marker" will show up as both an accusative case marker and as an ergative case marker. Now I'll start in with the examples. 2.0 THE PRISTINE SYSTEM: There are a lot of conlangs out there that are, essentially, pristine systems (note: this is my term). A pristine system, when talking about language, is a system where there are no irregularities, and everything works the same way, no matter the context. This is ideal for an IAL, or a loglang. If your goal is to create a natural language, though, a pristine system is something to be avoided, because no natural language is pristine (not even Turkish). Nevertheless, a pristine system (or an attempt at a pristine system) is what many first-time conlangers aim for (most of the time unconciously). I'm now going to show you what a pristine nominative-accusative system and a pristine ergative-absolutive system looks like. I'll start with a nominative-accusative system. 2.1 A PRISTINE NOMINATIVE-ACCUSATIVE SYSTEM: - 185 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Before I begin, I want to say that I'm assuming that a pristine system will utilize case marking, because, when it comes to conlangs, that's usually the case. There is such a thing as a pristine language that doesn't use case marking, but I'll get to those later. So now for the pristine nominative-accusative language. To test for pristineness (pristinity?), there are some general sentences you can use. You will want to test: 1. a. A sentence with an intransitive verb with a patient-like subject (SP). b. A sentence with an intransitive verb with a agent-like subject (SA). c. A sentence with a transitive verb with a agentive subject (A). d. A sentence with a transitive verb with an experiencer subject (E). e. A sentence with a ditransitive verb. So, let's test those sentences in pristine nominative-accusative Ergato: 2. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelina lamu panilor. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelina fisu panilor. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelina kanu kitapor hopokos. "The woman's giving the book to the man." The above is extremely indicative of a pristine nominative-accusative system. The thing that tips you off to its being a nominative-accusative system is that the subject kelina, "woman", is in the same case (the default case) in sentences (2a), (2c) and (2e). The thing that lets you know that the system is pristine is that kelina is in the same case for sentences (2a) and (2b), and also for sentences (2c) and (2d). English is not a pristine system when it comes to this criterion, though it's not because of case. Take the two translations of sentences (2c) and (2d) above and compare each to its incorrect counterpart in English below: 3. a. The woman is petting the panda. b. *The woman pets the panda. c. The woman sees the panda. d. *The woman is seeing the panda. Sentences (3b) and (3d) above are grammatical, but they don't mean the same thing as sentences (3a) and (3c), respectively. This is because in the present tense English is sensitive to whether the subject is an experiencer (E) or an agent (A). Instead of it being marked as a case, it's marked with the presence or absence of the auxiliary "be". Now, it's not enough to merely test the sentences in (1) to determine whether or not the system is pristine. I'll explain more about why this is later. Suffice it to say that you should also test: - 186 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 4. a. A sentence with a pronoun as the subject of a transitive verb. b. A sentence with an inanimate noun as the subject of a transitive verb. c. A sentence in the past tense with a transitive verb. So, let's test those quickly in pristine nominative-accusative Ergato: 5. a. Li lamu palinor. "She's petting the panda." b. Kitapo lamu palinor. "The book's petting the panda." c. Kelina lamuri palinor. "The woman petted the panda." Now, with sentence (5b), you're going to have to use your imagination. So let's say a woman has a very clean panda that she doesn't want people petting with their hands (because hands have germs). So, not wanting to offend her (or her panda), you pick up a book and kind of stroke the panda with it. Suddenly, the woman asks, "What are you doing?" You reply, "I'm petting your panda." "With your filthy hands?!" she screams. You reassure her, "No, no. The book's petting the panda." Far-fetched, but it will serve our purposes. Anyway, the point is that nothing has changed with respect to case marking. The subject of the sentence still gets default marking, and the object still gets special marking. Based on all this evidence, you can determine that the system is a nominative-accusative system, and that it's pristine. That is, the subject of the sentence will always get default marking, no matter what the tense is, or what kind of verb it is, what tense, animacy, etc. It's hardcore nominative-accusative. And that means that you can safely label the -r suffix as being an accusative marker. Now that we've determined what kind of system we have, let's look at the valency-reducing mechanism. This will only apply to verbs that have at least two arguments: A subject and object (however they're marked, casewise). So we can ignore intransitive verbs for now. So let's look at a couple sentences: 6. a. Kelina lamu palinor. "The woman's petting the panda." b. Palino lamuto (kelinak). "The panda's being petted (by the woman)." c. Kelina kanu kitapor hopokos. "The woman's giving a book to the man." d. Kitapo kanuto hopokos (kelinak). "The book's being given to the man (by the woman)." So, a few things to notice. The first and most obvious thing to notice is that what was the object in the transitive sentence (marked with -r) is now the subject in the passivized sentence (now given default marking). Second, the verb is marked with -to, to let you know the passivization process has occurred. Third, the actual subject of the sentence has been made superfluous. That is, just as you can say "The panda's being petted", so can - 187 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 you say Palino lamuto in this version of Ergato. Expressing the actual subject is optional. Finally, with respect to that optional subject, notice that if you do express it, it's no longer in subjective case (default marking/nominative), but in an oblique case. This is the case for just about every language that has a passive. What will change is what that oblique case is. So, in English we just have a prepositional phrase headed by "by". In Turkish, you have something similar, only with a postposition. The point is that the noun will be marked in some totally different way, and will be treated a different way by the syntax. Well, that's about it for pristine nominative-accusative Ergato. So, onto pristine ergative-absolutive Ergato! 2.2 A PRISTINE ERGATIVE-ABSOLUTIVE SYSTEM: This should go a lot faster. In section 2.1, I wanted to explain why we were doing a lot of the things we were doing. Now that you know, though, we can right to the examples. So, here are our initial batch of test sentences: 7. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Palino lamu kelinar. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Palino fisu kelinar. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kitapo hopokos kanu kelinar. "The woman's giving the book to the man." Immediately, something should jump out at you as being radically different. Aside from the case marking, the subject is appearing in totally different places! This is because this system is pristine. A truly pristine system would line up cases on the same side of the verb, no matter what. So the equivalent to the pristine nominative-accusative system is an ergative-absolutive system where the absolutive case (now the default marked case) always comes before the verb, the ergative case (now the -r case) always comes after the verb, regardless of whether it's the subject of the sentence or not. A good many first-time ergative languages are not pristine, but usually it's unconcious, because, since English is a nominative-accusative language with no case marking, it seems natural to always put the subject on the same side of the verb. That's not the way a pristine ergative-absolutive system would work, though. Now that we've hurdled that...hurdle, we can talk about the other differences. Most notably, the subject of the sentence is being marked differently depending on whether it's in a sentence with a transitive verb or a sentence with an intransitive verb. Notice, though, that this system isn't sensitive to the status of the subject. So in an intransitive sentence, the subject is marked with the absolutive, regardless of whether it's an SA or an SP. Similarly, in a transitive sentence, the subject is marked with the ergative, regardless of whether it's an A or an E. Let's quickly look at our other test sentences: - 188 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 8. a. Palino lamu lir. "She's petting the panda." b. Palino lamu kitapor. "The book's petting the panda." c. Palino lamuri kelinar. "The woman petted the panda." As you can see, there's no change in case marking, or in the placement of the subject. Now onto antipassives. Antipassives seem to really confuse a lot of folks, and I think it's because, to a nominative-accusative speaker, there doesn't seem to exist a conceivable reason to ever use an antipassive. The usual example from English used to try to explain antipassives is the verb "eat". So, you can say "I ate breakfast", or you can say "I ate". Thus, the object is kind of superfluous. This, however, is not the same thing, and that's not why antipassives are used. I'll do my best to explain here. To begin with, let's actually see some antipassive sentences. Here goes: 9. a. Palino lamu kelinar. "The woman is petting the panda." b. Kelina lamuto (palinok). "The woman is petting (and what she's petting is the panda)." c. Kitapo hopokos kanu kelinar. "The woman's giving the book to the man." d. Kelina hopokos kanuto (kitapok). "The woman is giving to the man (and what she's giving is a book)." I used those convoluted translations in (9b) and (9d) to try to show how the optional phrase in an antipassive feels to the speaker. It really is extra, unnecessary information. Anyway, notice what happened. If the absolutive is the default, unmarked case, and the ergative is the special, marked case, what an antipassive did was got rid of the special case. Thus, you might say that there's less mental work involved when it comes to case in antipassives (maybe). Also, an antipassive allows you to focus on one aspect of the action, in this case, the performer of the action. Finally, think about why we use passives in English most of the time. If you think about it, the usual reason to use a passive is if you want to conjoin things in discourse. So, let's say we're talking about an accident where one car is at fault (i.e., it hit the other one). I might say, "I saw the car that was hit". I probably would never say, "I saw the car that the car at fault hit it" (that's probably not even grammatical). The second sentence is how you'd have to say it, though, if there were no passive. Why? Because when two sentences are conjoined in English, the subjects go together. So, if you say, "The Toyota hit the Honda and skidded", the car that skidded has to be the Toyota, and could never be the Honda. The same kind of thing happens in ergative-absolutive languages, but instead of the subject being carried over, it's the absolutive argument. Maybe an example will help explain: 10. a. Palino lamuri kelinar i [palino] talu. "The woman petted the panda and [the panda] danced." - 189 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 b. *Palino lamuri kelinar i [kelinar] talu. "*The woman petted the panda and [the woman] danced." That is, in my opinion, probably the reason why valency-reduction systems exist. If you don't have them, everything you say becomes extremely roundabout. For example: "Yesterday, there was an accident that I saw. A Toyota came and smacked a Honda and the Honda skidded along the street. Later on, I saw the car, such that the Toyota hit it. The Toyota had banged it up pretty badly. The Toyota made it such that its trunk wouldn't close, and also made it such that one couldn't see out of its rear window." If you allow for valency-reduction (in this case, passivization), the whole thing becomes much shorter and easier to understand. In this way, antipassivization is no different from passivization. Think of it as a kind of luxury. After all, not all languages have valency-reduction systems. You best thank your lucky stars that your language does! (Or, well, that the language you're reading right now does.) 3.0 SYNTACTIC ERGATIVITY: You know, I think it'd be easier to explain syntactic ergativity before going on to split-ergativity. So I'll do that. I'm going to explain how pristine syntactic nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive languages work, because, basically, it's identical to what's above, but without the case-marking. 3.1 A PRISTINE SYNTACTIC NOMINATIVE-ACCUSATIVE SYSTEM: English is just about a pristine syntactic nominative-accusative system. Almost. Its sensitivity to experiencer verbs in the present and its pronouns are the only thing standing in the way. Close, though. I'm just going to list the sentences. Note that when I say syntactically nominative- accusative or ergative-absolutive, it means that relations are determined by word order. So here's pristine syntactic nominative-accusative Ergato: 11. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelina fisu palino. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelina kanu kitapo hopoko. "The woman's giving the book to the man." In the examples above, the object comes after the verb, and the subject before, in all cases. In the case of an indirect object, it's put after the direct object (remember: this is a pristine system. If the direct object is going to come after the verb, it should always come directly after the verb). Aside from sentence (11e), this should look a lot like English. Now for the next set: 12. - 190 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 a. Li lamu palino. "She's petting the panda." b. Kitapo lamu palino. "The book's petting the panda." c. Kelina lamuri palino. "The woman petted the panda." Again, not different from English. If this were a purely syntactic language (i.e., isolational), you might expect the past tense suffix to be a past tense word, but that really doesn't have any bearing on what we're doing now. So, now for the last set: 13. a. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." b. Palino lamuto (sa kelina). "The panda's being petted (by the woman)." c. Kelina kanu kitapo hopoko. "The woman's giving a book to the man." d. Kitapo kanuto hopoko (sa kelina). "The book's being given to the man (by the woman)." In these examples, the preposition is used to indicate the demoted subject, just like English "by". Notice that the demoted subject comes after the indirect object (which now sits next to the verb) in (13d). Well, that really does it for pristine syntactic nominative-accusative Ergato. The important thing to notice is that what is what is wholly dependent upon word order. We'll see more of the same with pristine syntactic ergative-absolutive Ergato below. 3.2 A PRISTINE SYNTACTIC ERGATIVE-ABSOLUTIVE SYSTEM: Now we can see the flip-side of the pristine syntactic coin. Here's the first set of examples: 14. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Palino lamu kelina. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Palino fisu kelina. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kitapo hopoko kanu kelina. "The woman's giving the book to the man." Here the absolutive argument always comes sentence-initially, and the ergative argument always comes directly after the verb. Also, you should know that the placement of arguments (i.e., where the absolutive argument goes, where the verb goes, etc.) is totally arbitrary. As long as those places are honored no matter what happens, the system is considered pristine. Now let's look at our secondary examples: 15. a. Palino lamu li. "She's petting the panda." b. Palino lamu kitapo. "The book's petting the panda." c. Palino lamuri kelina. "The woman petted the panda." - 191 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Again, these extra facets don't affect the position of the arguments in the sentence. Now for our antipassive examples: 16. a. Palino lamu kelina. "The woman is petting the panda." b. Kelina lamuto (sa palino). "The woman is petting (and what she's petting is the panda)." c. Kitapo hopoko kanu kelina. "The woman's giving the book to the man." d. Kelina hopoko kanuto (sa kitapo). "The woman is giving to the man (and what she's giving is a book)." Here again, in these examples, the absolutive and ergative arguments are switching places, and the demoted absolutive argument (the old one) is optionally expressed as a PP headed by our all-purpose preposition sa. And that's how a syntactically ergative language works. Rather than looking at case marking, you look at word order, and how the different arguments show up in different types of sentences. Admittedly, it's probably easier to see this kind of thing when there's case marking, but not all languages mark case overtly. Plus, a syntactically ergative conlang would be a real rarity; quite unique. Now it's time for the tough stuff. 4.0 SPLIT-SENSITIVITY: I'm calling this section "split-sensitivity" because all languages show split-sensitivity to something to some degree. I've already shown an example from English. Even though it's nominative-accusative, it's sensitive to experiencer verbs in certain situations, but not in others (e.g., in the past tense). Split-sensitivity is a blanket term for any language that shows one kind of pattern in one place, and a different kind of pattern in a different place. That's all. The thing that characterizes these languages is: (a) What is split (case marking, for example); and (b) where the split occurs. We'll now delve into split-sensitivity. 4.1 TENSE-BASED SPLIT-ERGATIVITY: One of the most common types of ergativity is ergativity that's split based on tense. Hindi and Georgian both display this kind of ergativity. The most common way to split it is so that in the present tense (or nonpast), the language displays a nominative-accusative system, and in the past tense, the language displays an ergative-absolutive system. So let's focus on that kind of split and see what our test sentences look like: 17. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelina lamu panilor. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelina fisu panilor. "The woman sees the panda." - 192 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 e. Kelina kanu kitapor hopokos. "The woman's giving the book to the man." All these sentences are in the present tense, so, unsurprisingly, they look just like the sentences in (1). Now here's where the difference lies: 18. a. Li lamu palinor. "She's petting the panda." b. Kitapo lamu palinor. "The book's petting the panda." c. Palino lamuri kelinar. "The woman petted the panda." Now let me stop right here to explain some things. What you see above is what you'd expect if you were melding to pristine systems (i.e., where the word order and case marking are just like those in the pristine ergative-absolutive version of Ergato). This is not usually the case, though. First off, it's much more likely that the subject of the sentence would be in the same place. Thus: 19. a. Kelinar lamuri palino. "The woman petted the panda." Second, though it would be economical to use the same case marker to mark the accusative and ergative, the ergative languages I know of (I'm thinking of Georgian in particular) don't. Instead, what you'd see is something like this: 20. a. Kelina lamu palinor. "The woman's petting the panda." b. Kelinam lamuri palino. "The woman petted the panda." In effect, what you have is three case markers. One case marker (the default marker) marks the nominative in the present and the absolutive in the past. Another, the special marker -r, marks the accusative in the present. Then you have a third, the extra case marker -m, which marks the ergative in the past. This is exactly the type of system that Georgian has (give or take the lack of an accusative marker that's distinct from the dative, and the inappropriate use of the word "tense"). As you might expect, the valency-reduction mechanism works differently in the present and past. However, here there are further wrinkles. This is how one might imagine the system would work: 21. a. Palino lamuto (kelinak). "The panda's being petted (by the woman)." b. Kelina lamurito (palinok). "The woman's petting (and what she's petting is the panda)." That would be a nice way for it to work. And maybe there are some that do. However, there are theories about the evolution of some ergative-absolutive systems that suggest - 193 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 that ergativity in the past tense arose from present tense passive constructions. So what you might get would look something like this: 22. a. Kelina lamu palinor. "The woman's petting the panda." (Present Tense, Active) b. Kelinak lamuto palino. "The woman petted the panda." (Past Tense, Active) c. Palino ke lamu (sa kelina). "The panda's being petted (by the woman)." (Present Tense, Passive) d. Palino ke lamuto (sa kelina). "The panda was being petted (by the woman)." (Past Tense, Passive) So remember what those markers mean. The first sentence is standard issue. The second sentence, however, might look like a passive. According to some theories (I've heard this about Hindi, but it is just a theory), what happened was that the passive was used so often that it became the past tense, and so the valence-reducing marker -to now function as (and, well, is) the past tense marker. But since it was a passive, the subject is marked with the oblique case (that's what the -k is). And, of course, in a standard passive, the promoted object is marked with the subjective case. When this construction becomes the normal past tense, though, the word order falls in line (subject first; object last), and so you get what looks like an ergative-absolutive system only in the past tense. Then what I wanted to show with sentence (22c) is that some new construction would arise to fulfill the role of the present tense passive. So, ke in that example would be some kind of auxiliary, and the reintroduced subject would be reintroduced by a "by" phrase, like English, rather than being expressed with the oblique (now ergative) case marker. Then, in the past tense...who knows? (22d) is my guess as to what could happen to create an antipassive. It might be advisable to see what Hindi does. (I'll check on that.) Now, this subsection is devoted to ergativity split by tense, not just past tense. The thing is, I've never heard of a split-ergative language that splits it (based on tense) any other way. This could partly be because of the theory I mentioned above. That theory aside, though, this split could work the opposite way: Ergative-absolutive in the present; nominative-accusative in the past. Or maybe even the future. It could be an aspectual split: perfective vs. imperfective. It's perfectly possible. This is just the most common. Georgian does something that really isn't best described as a split system based on tense. This is because what constitutes "tense" in Georgian is incredibly complex. Each verb can be conjugated in 12 or 13 different ways, and these ways are divided into three series: present, aorist and perfect. If I remember right (I'll check my notes and get it straight later), it's the perfect series that displays an ergative-absolutive pattern, whereas the present and aorist series display a nominative-accusative pattern. Anyway, in the case of Georgian, I'd argue that the split isn't based on tense, but on morphological category. The Georgian system is a fascinating system for many reasons. You might go here for more information, or look up Stephen R. Anderson's paper on case in Georgian (though don't take it too seriously). 4.2 PRONOMINALLY-BASED SPLIT-ERGATIVITY: - 194 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Another common way to have a split system is to have one kind of system that's used with overt nominals, and to have a different system used with pronouns. A prime conlang example of this kind of system is the masterful David Bell's ámman îar (click here to go directly to the part that explains the ergativity of ámmar îar). A lot of ergative languages do this, but often it's mixed with an animacy (or, as Payne calls it, "agency-worthiness") system, which I'll describe later. The basic concept behind a system where the split is based on whether you have a pronominal argument or an overt NP isn't that hard to imagine. For this example, let's say that Ergato displays an ergative-absolutive pattern for overt nominals, and a nominative-accusative pattern for pronouns. Here are our example sentences: 23. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelinam palino lamu. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelinam palino fisu. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelinam hopokos kitapo kanu. "The woman's giving the book to the man." I changed the word order to a (in my mind) more natural word order for an ergative-absolutive language. So now there's a dominant SOV word order, but the case marking on the subject changes, so that you get an -m when the subject is an A. Other than the word order, though, the sentences in (23) are identical to those in (7). [Note: I'm going to go ahead and continue using -m as the default ergative marker when A's and P's are marked separately.] Now let's look at our secondary test sentences: 24. a. Li palino lamu. "She's petting the panda." b. Kitapom palino lamu. "The book's petting the panda." c. Kelinam palino lamuri. "The woman petted the panda." Check out sentence (24a). The only way you know which is the subject and which the object is the word order. But that's not the whole story. So far we've sentences with two overt NP's and one with a subject pronoun and object NP. Now let's look at an intransitive sentence with a subject pronoun, and two transitive sentences, one with a subject NP and an object pronoun, and the other with two pronouns: 25. a. Li sapu. "She's sleeping." b. Palinom kor lamu. "The panda's petting me." c. Li kor lamu. "She's petting me." In (25), you can see the fully fleshed out version of a pronominally split-ergative language. A and S pronouns are marked just like S and P NP's, and P pronouns have a special accusative marker. - 195 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 So now we come to valency-reduction. I have no information at hand that addresses what I want to know (e.g., what happens with split-ergative systems and passivization/antipassivization). The only examples that Payne lists of antipassivization in his otherwise fantastic book Describing Morphosyntax are from languages that are entirely ergative-absolutive. Thus, I'll list what a language might do, or could conceivably do: 26. a. Li (kelinak) lamuto. "She's being petted (by the woman)." b. Kelina (lik) lamuto. "The woman's petting (her)." What I've shown in (26) is, essentially, a subject controlled valency-reduction system. In other words, depending on what the subject of the sentence is, that determines whether the result is interpretted as a passive (in the case of a pronominal subject) or as an antipassive (in the case of an overt NP subject). It's also possible that you might have two different kinds of systems. So, maybe you have a normal antipassive system for NP's, and then a different kind of antipassive system for pronouns. Either way could work. (Note: David Bell's pronominally split-ergative language ámman îar appears to have taken a semantic approach to valence functions, as opposed to morphological. In other words, you can make any transitive sentence into a passive sentence or an antipassive sentence regardless of case marking. Go here for a thorough account.) The example I showed above featured an ergative-absolutive system for overt NP's, and a nominative-accusative system for pronouns, but it could easily go the other way. Additionally, you could have different systems for different pronouns, but I'll discuss that in more depth when we get to the section on animacy. One last thing I want to mention (something that doesn't deserve its own section) is person marking on verbs. Person marking on verbs can work exactly the same way as separate pronouns. My language Sathir is a language that works this way (the language is ergative, but pronominal subjects are marked on verbs, whether they're A's or S's). If we wanted to use Ergato as an example, we could pretend that the pronouns were pronominal suffixes (for one type), and suffixes and prefixes (for a different type). Here's an example where subjects are marked on verbs if they're not overtly specified. The case marking system is ergative-absolutive. This yields: 27. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelinar palino lamu. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Sapuko. "I'm sleeping." d. Palino lamuko. "I'm petting the panda." In the above example, the NP's show normal ergative-absolutive case marking (S and P get default marking; A special), but subjects are marked the same way regardless of their status. That's one way it could work. Now imagine a language where NP's are marked in - 196 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 a nominative-accusative way, and verbs inflect for both subject and object. Here's what that could look like: 28. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina palinor lamu. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Sapuko. "I'm sleeping." d. Palinor kolamu. "I'm petting the panda." e. Kolamupe. "I'm petting you." The sentences in (28) are essentially a variant on the word order model. The point is that, in transitive sentences, subjects are inflected with a prefix and objects are inflected with a suffix. In intransitive sentences, subjects are marked with a suffix, just like objects in transitive sentences. At the same time, overt NP's are marked in a traditional nominative-accusative way. This same effect could be achieved (and often is) by having different forms of pronominal inflection for the different roles. Here, though, I wanted to keep it simple. I think that about does it for pronouns. We'll revisit pronouns when we discuss animacy. 4.3 SEMANTICALLY-BASED SPLIT-ERGATIVITY: This type of split is extremely common in all the world's languages, though usually in small doses. Essentially, this type of split is a split that causes similar arguments with different semantic roles to be marked differently. The example of this I already discussed is English's sensitivity to verbs of experience in the present tense. But that's not the whole story. Not by a long shot. Let's start off with something simple. This is what English's pattern might look like in a case-marking language: 29. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelina lamu panilor. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelinas fisu panilo. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelina kanu hopokos kitapor. "The woman's giving the man a book." Above, the word order doesn't change, but notice that the case marking on the subject of (29d) is dative case marking, just like the case marking on the indirect object of (29e). This is a common occurrence in the world's languages, where an experiencer subject gets marked as a recipient of some kind. Additionally, the object of (29d) is marked with the nominative, or default case. Now, the above system, like English, makes sure to line up the subject. A different language, though, might make sure to line up the case, instead, yielding the following: - 197 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 30. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelina lamu panilor. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Panilo fisu kelinas. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelina kanu hopokos kitapor. "The woman's giving the man a book." The reason for the above would be that, grammatically (or morphologically), panilo in sentence (30d) is the subject, and, therefore, should line up with the other subjects. It really depends on how the language defines the notion of subject. Now how about this. We've seen three different case markers employed in one system: Default, -r and -m. Thus far, though, we haven't seen them all in the same tense. Can it happen? You bet it can. This is what it would look like: 31. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelinam lamu panilo. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelina fisu panilor. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelinam kanu hopokos kitapo. "The woman's giving the man a book." In this admittedly bizarre system, S's are marked the same way as P's (default marking), and A's are marked with -m. Then, possibly for semantic reasons, E's are marked the same as S's and P's, and ST's (stimuli) are marked with a third case, -r. That's really a bizarre system. Here's a more normal one that a large number of natural languages have: 32. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelinam talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelinam lamu panilo. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelina fisu palinor. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelinam kanu hopokos kitapo. "The woman's giving the man a book." Here's a system where's there's a distinction drawn between SA's (agent-like subjects) and SP's (patient-like subjects). In (32a) and (32d), the subjects of those verbs are more like patients than agents, so they get default marking, as do normal P arguments. The subjects of (32b), (32c) and (32e), though, are more agent-like (after all, one hopefully doesn't dance by accident). Thus, they're marked with -m. Finally, ST's are marked with -r. (Note: For what it's worth, I think this marking may be optional. Stimuli could very well be marked with the default case--or even with -m, possibly.) Since we brought up SA's and SP's, I'd like to mention a little fact that can pop up in many different systems. Let's say volitionality is important to a given language. Thus, SA's are marked with an ergative marker (say, -m), and SP's are marked with an - 198 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 absolutive marker (default marking). This could be a hard-and-fast rule, or the language can use the volitionality generalization to its advantage. Consider this possibility: 33. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelinam sapu. "The woman is sleeping on purpose." c. Kelinam talu. "The woman is dancing." d. Kelina talu. "The woman is dancing on accident." I could use other verbs that would make more sense here, but I'd rather not use too many different made-up words. Instead, I'll make up different contexts. So, for (33b), let's say the woman isn't so much a woman, but a young girl. It's Sunday morning, and she's woken up, but she knows tomorrow is Monday, and she remembers how nice it is to just laze about in bed. But she hears that her mother has awakened... And her mother wants to make her go to church, thereby ruining her lazy morning. As if on cue, in walks her mother to say, "Get up, Hildegarde: It's time for church." Oh, but young Hilde's concocted a fiendish plan. "Perhaps if I pretend I'm asleep," she thinks, "my mother will leave without me, not wanting to be late." And thus, Hildegarde attempts to sleep on purpose, as to fool her mother. That's context number 1 for sentence (33b). [Incidentally, this rarely works. I've heard.] Now, for (33d). Imagine a dance at a high school gym--let's say, Pacifica High School's gym, located in sunny Garden Grove, CA. Now imagine that there's a woman (or girl) there who doesn't want to dance because she's afraid she won't be that good and doesn't want to embarrass herself. She's by no means unpopular. Several boys (yes, and even a girl or two) have asked her to dance, but she's systematically declined each one, citing the weather, an obscure religion, uncomfortable heels, a full bladder, etc. Unbeknownst to her, though, the ants that live beneath Pacifica High School in the Realm of the Ant have plotted against her. "Foolish human!" squeaks the queen of the ants. "She thinks she can attend a dance and not dance!? We'll see about that. My minions!" The queen's armies snap to attention, "Yes, your highness!" "This night we shall teach that wallflower a lesson. If I'm not mistaken, I spotted a cookie crumb that somehow fell onto that young girl's dress. Your queen desires a late night snack. If you have any love left for your queen at all, you'll bring me that crumb, do you hear!" "Right away, your highness!" And with that, the ants go marching one by one. Hurrah! Hur--"AHHHHH!" screams the young girl, as she spies the benighted trail moving slowly yet persistently up her calf. To get them off, she jumps; she twists; she flails wildly, and...as if by accident, the young girl is dancing! Young and sweet; only seventeen... So there's your context. Languages that work this way are rather neat, because you can handle something so common, yet so rarely encoded morphologically, simply by changing the case of the subject. This is by no means the end, though. After all, if there are different names for each of these types of semantic arguments (SA, SP, P, A, E, ST...), couldn't there be a language that marks each one separately? Yes, there certainly can. I'll show you two different - 199 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 examples. In natural languages, this is rare, but attested. The most common of those types attested looks something like this: 34. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelinam talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelinam lamu panilor. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelina fisu palinor. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelinam kanu hopokos kitapor. "The woman's giving the man a book." In the example above, SP's are marked with default case marking, SA's with -m, and objects (regardless of status) are marked with -r. This is a common enough pattern. But we can go further. Though I don't believe it's attested among natlangs, you can imagine a language like the following: 35. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman is sleeping." b. Kelinak talu. "The woman is dancing." c. Kelinam lamu panilor. "The woman is petting the panda." d. Kelinap fisu palinol. "The woman sees the panda." e. Kelinam kanu hopokos kitapor. "The woman's giving the man a book." I had to make up some case markers on the fly in this one. Okay. Above, SA's are marked with default marking. SP's are marked with -k. A's are marked with -m (there are two. No language marks the agent of a transitive verb differently from the agent of a ditransitive verb. But one can imagine...). P's are marked with -r. Indirect objects are marked with -s. E's are marked with -p. And, last but not least, ST's are marked with -l. Now that's a very precise language. I'd like to point out that though this type of thing is attested, it's generally meted out differently than either of the two examples above (more on that when we get to animacy). We're almost done with this section, but there's one bit left. We've talked about SA's and SP's, but consider the following English sentences: 36. a. "The woman's petting the panda." b. "The book's petting the panda." c. "The wind's petting the panda." d. "The panda's being petted (by the woman)." Those four sentences have four different types of subjects--two of which we haven't really talked about before. The first in (36a) is simply an agent. The last in (36d) is a subject that is, in fact, a patient (i.e., the subject of a passive). The second subject in (36b) is something we've talked about, but not directly. Remember the story about the woman with the clean panda? The woman is still the one initiating the petting action, but the book is the instrument used to perform the action. Thus, the subject is an instrument (SI). - 200 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In (36c), unless the wind is some kind of sentient being, the wind is neither an instrument nor an agent, but simply a force of nature: a non-volitional subject (I'll call it SN). One could imagine a language where all four of these are marked differently, as in these sentences below: 37. a. Kelinam lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." b. Kitapok lamu palino. "The book's petting the panda." c. Makipos lamu palino. "The wind's petting the panda." d. Palino lamuto (sa kelinak). "The panda's being petted (by the woman)." I'm fairly certain that such a language as that in (37) doesn't exist, but it could. For that reason, I wanted to bring it up. And that, unless I think of something else later on, will finally conclude this section on semantically-based split ergativity. 4.4 ANIMACY-BASED SPLIT-ERGATIVITY: It's been alluded to several times in the text above, so here it is: The section on animacy. Animacy really interested me for a long time because I didn't understand it. I don't claim to be a master on the subject now, but I do understand what people say about it. I've also intended Sheli to be a language that's sensitive to the animacy of its subjects and objects. Anyway, so a quick question: What do people mean when they discuss animacy as it relates to language? Well, some languages encode animacy into their grammar. It can be done in many different ways, some of which aren't related to ergativity, per se. The essential point is this. Let's say you have a verb and two noun phrases. Let's say they're this: "eat", "sandwich", "man". In English, these can be arranged in two different ways, giving you "The man eats the sandwich", or "The sandwich eats the man". But leaving out cartoonish contexts, which one of these sentences is really the more likely to be uttered by a human being? Chances are, it's the first one. This is because (speaking of reality as we know it), it's not only possible, but highly probable, that a human will eat a sandwich. It is impossible, though (or, at the very least, highly improbable), for a sandwich to eat a human. For that reason, is it even necessary to say which is the direct object and which is the subject, in any way (either with cases or word order)? According to a lot of languages, no. (For a fascinating example, see Payne's discussion of the language Sierra Popoluca in his book Describing Morphosyntax.) So, how does this relate to ergativity? Well, some languages use animacy to split up case assignment. Thus, some types of arguments will get one type of marking, and the rest will get the other type of marking. So here's a simple example: 38. a. Kelina lamu hopokor. "The woman's petting the man." b. Hopoko lamu kelinar. "The man's petting the woman." c. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." d. Palinom lamu kelinar. "The woman's petting the panda." - 201 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 e. Palinom lamu kitapo. "The panda's petting the book." f. Kitapom lamu palino. "The book's petting the panda." In the example above, human beings are marked with a nominative-accusative system, and everything less animate than a human is marked with an ergative-absolutive system. The result is that in a sentence like (38c), the subject and object are marked with the same case. But this isn't a problem. Why? Because the more likely subject is the most animate one, which is the woman. Thus, it doesn't matter that there seems to be fixed word order in the sentences above. All six sentences below in (39) could only mean "The woman's petting the panda": 39. a. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." b. Palino lamu kelina. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina palino lamu. "The woman's petting the panda." d. Palino kelina lamu. "The woman's petting the panda." e. Lamu kelina palino. "The woman's petting the panda." f. Lamu palino kelina. "The woman's petting the panda." In fact, a language that uses this system has the advantage of achieving relatively free word order without having heavy-handed case marking like a language like Zhyler (cases everywhere in that language! And it doesn't even have free word order!). That's the basic idea behind an animacy system as it relates to case marking. So, a question: Is this the only way it can be split (i.e., one type of marking for humans, another type for the rest?). Absolutely not. So what are the ways to split it up? Well, there are two answers. The first is: Anyway you can imagine it. If you can dream it up, it's possible. Now, what's common among natural languages? For that there's a different (and rather definite, it seems) answer. According to Payne, there's a grand hierarchy of agent worthiness which I will try my darndest to reproduce here (I think I'm going to need to use a table...): 40. 1 > 2 > 3 > 1 > 2 > 3 > Proper NameHumans > Non- s > Human Animates > Inanimates Agreement > Pronouns Definte > Indefinite So...as I understand it...the table above is... Hmm... Okay, I get it. Odd he did it that way, though... Okay, the reason that 1, 2 and 3 are up there twice, is because the first set of 1, 2 and 3 refer to first, second and third person verbal agreement markers. The second set refers to pronouns. I guess it would've been too difficult to repeat everything after "proper names" twice, though, because those only appear once. Essentially, this is how to read that table. Let's take "proper names". Proper names will always be considered to be of higher animacy than humans, non-human animates and inanimates (regardless of definiteness [I guess in this table, proper names are always assumed to be definite--not - 202 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 necessarily an uncontroversial claim]). However, both pronominal verbal agreement, and personal pronouns will be considered more animate than proper names. For that reason, if you had a proper name and a pronoun as two arguments, the pronoun would be construed as being the subject, and the proper name the object (to indicate otherwise, an inverse marker, or something like it, would be required). This relates to case marking because of a universal claim that Payne makes. So let's say that in a given language, everything to the left of proper names will be marked one way, and everything that's to the right of the last 3 will be marked a different way. According to Payne, it will always be the case that what's to the left of "proper names" will be marked with a nominative-accusative system, and what's to the right of the last 3 will be marked with an ergative-absolutive system. Why? I can't seem to find a good answer. I'm sure something metaphysical can be guessed at, though. Anyway, I could spend a long time showing you every possible example of where the hierarchy could be split, but instead I'll show you just one interesting example. This is an Ergato version of a language Payne describes called Cashinawa. Cashinawa has a system where first and second person pronouns are marked one way, third person pronouns another way, and full NP's are marked yet another way. Here's what that might look like in Ergato: 41. a. Ko sapu. "I'm sleeping." b. Ko lamu per. "I'm petting you." So those are the first and second person pronouns, and they're marked with a nominative-accusative system. Now here are the third person pronouns: 42. a. Li sapu. "She's sleeping." b. Lim lamu lir. "She's petting her." Above you have a three-way system, where each argument is marked differently. Again, this is only with third person pronouns. Now here's what the NP's look like: 43. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelinam lamu hopoko. "The woman's petting the man." And, to round it off, the NP's are marked with an ergative-absolutive system. Now, here's something to notice: To what does the pronoun li refer in the sentences in (42)? I guess the default assumption would be a human, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a female panda, or some other female animal. Despite the semantics of its referent, though, the pronoun will always be higher up in the hierarchy. This is why Payne objected to the terms "agentivity hierarchy" and "animacy hierarchy". It doesn't really depend on the animacy of the referent--or, at least in this system. Rather, it depends on the - 203 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 morphological status of the argument. In that way, a less-animate third person pronoun will be higher up in the topic-worthiness hierarchy than an animate human NP. Now, it doesn't have to work this way for a conlang. You could easily imagine a system like this: 44. a. Li sapu. "She (human)'s sleeping." b. Li sapu. "She (animal)'s sleeping." c. Li lamu lir. "She (human)'s petting her (human)." d. Li lamu li. "She (human)'s petting her (animal)." e. Lim lamu lir. "She (animal)'s petting her (human)." f. Lim lamu li. "She (animal)'s petting her (animal)." A system like that above would surely help to disambiguate pronouns in certain situations. But, then again, you might have a whole different set of pronouns for different types of NP's. After all, in English we have "he", "she" and "it". Another thing to remember is that these claims of universality are for the natural languages spoken on this planet we live on. One can easily imagine a language spoken by a race of intelligent (yet still quite cleanly) cats. In this language, perhaps there would be a new category: sentient non-humans. And perhaps NP's referring to sentient non-humans would be higher up in the hierarchy than humans. Additionally, there's always androids and robots, or talking trees. Or one can also imagine a highly-sexist matriarchal society where women are seen as more animate (and more worthy of being the topic of discussion) than men, dividing humans into male humans and female humans (and maybe the same is true of animals and pronouns). Thus, maybe a female flea would be considered more animate than a male human. The possibility for flux in the hierarchy is limited only by the reality you want your language to live in. So in that respect, think of the above as a guide, rather than a set of rules to follow. 5.0 MIXING SYSTEMS: To quote the great linguist Thomas Wier, "every language shows some features of ergativity and some features of accusativity" (click here for that discussion). Thus, a good system will include some elements from all the sections discussed above. I've already mentioned (dozens of times) how English makes a distinction between experiencer and non-experiencer verbs in the present tense. Another famous example is the -ee suffix, summarized below: 45. a. Escape (intransitive verb) + ee = escapee, "one who escapes" (nominalizes intransitive subject) b. Nominate (transitive verb) + ee = nominee, "one who is nominated" (nominalizes transitive object) c. Nominate (transitive verb) + or = nominator, "one who nominates" (nominalizes transitive subject) - 204 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In the example above, you can see a clear ergative-accusative pattern. This only applies to one tiny little corner of English grammar, but, then again, the same can be said of experiencer verbs in the present. This is part of what goes into creating a realistic language. Not everything is perfect, and not every pattern jumps out and draws attention to itself. Another simple pattern from a natural language can be seen with French. In French, there's a distinction in (what is now) the simple past tense between verbs that take an SA and verbs that take an SP. Take a look at this example: 46. a. J'ai dormi. "I slept." (SA) b. Je suis arrivé. "I arrived." (SP) In the example above, the subject is enacting the sleeping event (to an extent), whereas in the second sentence, the verb is something that happened to the subject. "Appear" is another verb like this. There are many, many ways you could create a mixed system. One way might be to have a nominative-accusative system to mark pronouns in the present tense, and an ergative-absolutive system to mark NP's in the present, while all arguments, pronoun and NP alike, are marked with an ergative-absolutive system in the past tense. And then maybe, in all tenses, the cases are flipped for verbs of experience (i.e., nominative marks pronoun stimuli, and accusative marks pronoun experiencers, in the present, and everywhere else, the ergative case marks stimuli, and the absolutive marks experiencers). The theoretical possibilities are endless (though certain possibilities become more difficult to justify linguistically than others). 6.0 SOMETHING ELSE TO CONSIDER: DITRANSITIVES: One thing that often gets ignored in a discussion of ergativity is the marking of secondary objects in ditransitive clauses. As it turns out, it's by no means simple. Below I'll summarize a description of possible types of indirect object marking laid out explicitly in a paper by Matthew S. Dryer entitled "Clause Types" (warning: that link is to a .pdf). So far in the nominative-accusative ditransitive examples I've shown, the direct object (P) has always been marked with the accusative case -r, and the indirect object (R) has always been marked with the dative case -s. Does this necessarily have to be the (excuse the pun) case, though? As it turns out, no. Actually, there are three different possibilities. First let's detail the common (to us) pattern. This is a pattern like Latin. This is an example where the direct object of a transitive verb is grouped together with the direct object of a ditransitive verb: 47. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina lamu palinor. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina kanu kitapor palinos. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." - 205 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The ordering of the indirect object and direct object in (47c) can vary, but nevertheless, this is a very Latinate kind of pattern. Now let's take a look at a different kind: 48. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina lamu palinor. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina kanu palinor kitapos. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." In the example above, the cases on the objects of kanu, "to give", flip-flopped (as did the order, just to keep everything in line). A language that does ditransitives like this will usually mark that last argument with an instrumental, as opposed to a dative, case. Nevertheless, it is a different case, as opposed to an oblique, like in the English "I gave the book to her". In that English example, the "to her" part isn't as much a part of the argument structure as the R is in the counterpart sentence "I gave her the book". For a final example, we can see a pattern that looks a lot like the last English example I gave: 49. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina lamu palinor. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina kanu palinor kitapor. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." As you can see, now there's only two cases operating in the (c) sentence. How do you know which is the direct object and which the indirect object? Strict word order. So, in the above example, there'd be some kind of rule that states that the first object in a ditransitive clause would be interpreted as the indirect object, and the second the direct object. This is exactly how it works in English, in a phrase like, "You gave me him" (an odd sentence, I know. And why? Because of animacy!), "me" is always interpreted as the indirect object, and never as the direct object. (Note: There are dialects where the opposite is still productive, thus the indirect object in, "Give it me, I say!" is "me", not "it".) So those are three possibilities for nominative-accusative systems. What about ergative-absolutive systems? Well, there's three possibilities for them, as well, and they match up nicely with the three systems above. The first ergative-absolutive system is one where the absolutive argument of a transitive clause is marked the same as the direct object of a ditransitive clause. This is what it looks like: 50. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelinar lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelinar kanu kitapo palinos. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." - 206 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 This should look just like the system in (47), only with -r's flipped around. This would be like ergative Latin, which I call Nital. Pretty straightforward. Next system: 51. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelinar lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelinar kanu palino kitapos. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." Again, this is like the examples in (48). Perhaps a helpful way to think of the ditransitive verbs in sentences like these is that kanu isn't defined as "to give (something)", but rather "to give to (someone)". The extra case, then, specifies what's being given (again, usually something like an instrumental). Now for the last example: 52. a. Kelina sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelinar lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelinar kanu palino kitapo. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." And, again, the way you tell which object is which in (52c) is strict word order. That wraps up this discussion of ditransitives. There's more to them, to be sure, but this is all that presently concerns us. Again, it's just something to think of. The status of indirect objects is something I certainly didn't think about in many of my languages, and I believe they're the less realistic for it. 7.0 IMPOSSIBILITIES: There are certain patterns deemed to be impossible, which makes them immediately interesting. I'll just mention them here. One that I may have mentioned already has to do with split-tense systems. In all the split-tense systems that have been found, the present tense has a nominative-accusative pattern, and the past tense has an ergative-absolutive pattern. Based on this evidence, experts have deemed the opposite impossible. While it may be easier to come up with a historical explanation for the opposite, it's by no means unworkable. Related to tense, if you read up on this stuff, you'll notice that the only tenses that are mentioned are present and past, or, at the most, past and non-past. The future tense is never discussed. And I'm sure any conlanger can think up more tenses than even past, present and future. As far as I know, there are no universals for what kind of marking you get in the future (well, except maybe that it probably looks like the present). That's something to think about. Let's say that we are working with just past, present and future (no aspect). That's three tenses. The reason why nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive works so well with present and past tense is because they line up: Two systems, two tenses. But what do - 207 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 these terms stand for? In a sentence with three basic arguments, S, A and P, nominative-accusative stands for the system that groups S and A together to the exclusion of P. Ergative-absolutive, on the other hand, stands for a system that groups S and P together to the exclusion of A. Do you see what I see? There's a third pattern not mentioned here, and, coincidentally, a third tense that doesn't get to play. So imagine, if you will, the following: Nominative-accusative in the present; ergative absolutive in the past; and in the future (using -sa as an impromptu future marker)...! 53. a. Kelinar sapusa. "The woman's gonna sleep." b. Kelina lamusa palino. "The woman's gonna pet the panda." Oh, yeah! This is a system that, paradoxically, groups A and P together to the exclusion of S! This kind of system is unattested in natural languages, and judged impossible. Thus (to my knowledge), it hasn't been officially named. Therefore, I'm going to name it. What ties together the subject of a transitive verb and the patient of a transitive verb...? Well, how about this: In a transitive clause, there are two arguments; in an intransitive, there's one. Thus, the case assigned to both the subject and object of a transitive verb is the duative, and the case assigned to the single argument of an intransitive verb is the unitive. Yeah! That sounds good. Thus, I dub the above pattern a duative-unitive system. I named them this way because the pattern seems to be that the case that's assigned to the subject of a transitive verb is the one that goes first. Hee, hee... Now I wish I had a language that used this pattern. I'll have to work on that... (Quick Note: On the CONLANG list, this pattern was dubbed the "Monster Raving Loony", or MRL, pattern. The case names were called the "intransitive" and "transitive" cases. I don't like this naming strategy, because both "inransitive" and "transitive" already mean something, and confusion could easily ensue. Go here to see the various related posts.) Some other impossibilities have been touched on in the animacy section. Here's an idea. Referring to the hierarchy mentioned in the animacy section above, why not have two splits. And not like the kind I described for the Cashinawa system. This is a system where the section in the middle is marked one way, and the sections on either end are marked another way. So let's say that all pronouns are marked with a nominative-accusative system, as are everything to the right of humans, and then humans and proper names are marked with an ergative-absolutive system. That would be strange, and definitely would violate the universal Payne proposed. Another impossibility one can imagine is with ditransitives. In all six examples above, the indirect object and direct object could be marked in various ways, but they were always marked differently from the subject. Why not mark the indirect object the same way as the subject? In fact, let's do these three possibilities with a duative-unitive system, just for kicks: 54. - 208 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 a. Kelinar sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina kanu kitapo palinos. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." In this pattern, the direct object of both transitive and ditransitive verbs are treated alike. And, as you can see, they're both marked with the duative case. The subjects of the transitive verbs are as well. The subject of the intransitive is marked with the unitive, and the indirect object in (54c) is marked with the dative. Now for the next one: 55. a. Kelinar sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina kanu palino kitapos. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." Same thing here as with the "give to (someone)" verbs we've seen before, where the R is assigned the objective case, which is in this case the duative. And here, the -s probably stands for an instrumental case. Last one: 56. a. Kelinar sapu. "The woman's sleeping." b. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman's petting the panda." c. Kelina kanu palino kitapo. "The woman's giving a book to the panda." And this is about as duative as you get. Here the subject of the intransitive verb in (56a) is marked with the unitive, and everything else is marked with the duative, the status of each object being determined by word order in (56c). Oh, one thing I forgot about: What about a valency reduction system in a duative-unitive system? This would be odd, because in this case (and in this case only), the case that would be reduced would be the unmarked/default case, rather than the marked/special case. (Well, that is if the duative is the unmarked case.) Anyway, the result is that the transitive verb becomes intransitive, and the duative argument becomes a unitive argument. But which duative argument?! You don't know. Therefore, the resulting verb would mean something like, "Y is a participant (either agent or patient) in an X action". Thomas Wier suggested this might be like the Ancient Greek middle voice construction (see his post to CONLANG by clicking here). In any case, here's what it'd look like in Ergato: 57. a. Kelina lamu palino. "The woman is petting the panda." b. Kelinar lamuto (palinok). "The woman's petting (the panda)/being petted (by the panda)." c. Palinor lamuto (kelinak). "The panda's petting (the woman)/being petted (by the woman)." d. Kelina hopokos kanu kitapo. "The woman's giving the book to the man." - 209 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 e. Kelinar hopokos kanuto (kitapok). "The woman is giving to the man (and what she's giving is a book)/being given to the man (by the book)." f. Kitapor hopokos kanuto (kelinak). "The book is giving to the man (and what it's giving is a woman)/being given to the man (by the woman)." Given a system like the above, one can easily imagine that discourse context and animacy would help you decide which reading is the correct one (for example, if giving is the act, and you're talking about a woman and a book, it's pretty likely that the book's the one being given). Anyway, that's what a duative-unitive system would look like, in toto (I believe). As for the valency-reduction system, if you already have passive and antipassive, then I propose that the name of this system should be an ambipassive, since it can apply to either of the arguments in a transitive clause. Here's a thought I don't think I've run across before: What if the subjects of intransitive verbs, tranisitive verbs, and ditransitive verbs all had different subject marking? This would be treating the subjects of ditransitive verbs as something inherently different from transitive verbs. This is probably unattested, but nevertheless, a possible pattern. Those are some ideas to mull over. There's a lot more that's possible than is attested in the world's languages (though they do do a lot more than most universalists would have you believe). 8.0 CONCLUSION: The intention of this section has been to document the basics of ergativity. It's my hope that this is a starting point. If you have more information, or if you think I've made a mistake (or if you spot any typos--I know there are tons!), my hope is that you'll e-mail me, so that I can further improve this section. Though I did write all this, I prefer to think of this as a collaborative effort, since I got my information from many different sources. I hope you've got something from this section on ergativity, and that if you have something to share, you'll let me know, so I can make improvements in the future. 9.0 REFERENCES AND THANKS: These are a list of references I used and some shout outs: , Bell, David. ámman îar Reference Grammar. , 2004. , Dryer, Stephen S. "Clause Types". SUNY Buffalo, 2001. Download .pdf , Henning, Jeffrey. Langmaker.com. , 2004. , Hiller, P.J. The Georgian Language: An outline grammatical summary. , 2004. , Loos, Eugene E. (gen.ed.). Glossary of linguistics terms. , 2004. , Payne, Thomas E. Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Amazon.com Info - 210 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Rye, Justin B. Learn Not to Speak Esperanto: Case. , 2004. , Wier, Thomas. Re: ergative + another introduction. bin/wa?A2=ind0411c&L=conlang&F=&S=&P=31479, 2004. , Wier, Thomas. Re: Ergativity Reference Done. bin/wa?A2=ind0411D&L=conlang&P=R12196, 2004. I'd like to thank all those who contributed to the recent discussion of ergativity on the CONLANG list (well, recent as of November 28, 2004), as well as all those who've discussed ergativity many, many times on CONLANG over the years. In particular, I'd like to thank Thomas Wier for reminding me of the escapee example, which, despite its fame, always seems to elude me in times of need. I'd also like to thank Roger Mills for reminding me of David Bell's section on ergativity in ámman îar. I'd also like to thank Taliesin for his design advice. (As you can probably tell, I'm not too good a judge of what is and is not easy to read on the screen.) And, of course, I'd like to thank Christophe Grandsire for providing me with webspace. Vive la France! - 211 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The Language Creation Kit - ? Mark Rosenfelder - markrose@rcn.com Models NATURAL AND UNNATURAL LANGUAGES I personally like naturalistic languages, so my invented languages are full of irregularities, quirky lexical derivations, and interesting idioms. It's easier, no doubt, to create a "logical" language, and desirable if you want to create an auxiliary interlanguage, à la Esperanto. The danger here is a) creating a system so pristine, so abstract, that it's also impossible to learn; or b) not noticing when you reproduce some illogicality present in the models you're using. Ask me about the irregularities of Esperanto sometime. NON-WESTERN (OR AT LEAST NON-ENGLISH) MODELS Looking at some non-Indo-European languages, such as Quechua [see my intro to Quechua here in Metaverse], Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, or Swahili, can be eye-opening. Learn other languages, if you can. If languages are difficult for you, just skim a grammar for nice ideas to steal. Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages contains meaty descriptions of fifty languages. Anatole Lyovin's An Introduction to the Languages of the World readably surveys all the world's language families, pointing out touristic highlights, and gives more detailed sketches of some important languages Comrie skips. If you don't know another language well, you're pretty much doomed to produce ciphers of English. Checking out grammars (or this html file) can help you avoid duplicating English grammar, and give you some neat ideas to try out; but the real difficulty is in the lexicon. If all you know is English, you'll tend to duplicate the structure and idioms of the English vocabulary. Below I'll give you some hints on minimizing this problem. Sounds Non-linguists will often start with the alphabet and add a few apostrophes and diacritical marks. The results are likely to be something that looks too much like English, has many more sounds than necessary, and which even the author doesn't know how to pronounce. You'll get better results the more you know about phonetics (the study of the possible sounds of language) and phonology (how sounds are actually used in language). Useful - 213 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 references are J.C. Catford, A Practical Introduction to Phonetics (excellent for home study), and Roger Lass, Phonology. Below is a quick overview. YPES OF CONSONANTS T Consonants are formed by obstructing the flow of air from the lungs. As a first approximation, consonants vary in these dimensions: , Place of articulation-- where the obstruction occurs: o labial: lips (w), lips + teeth (f) o dental: teeth (th, French or Spanish t) o alveolar: behind the teeth (s, English t, Spanish r) o palato-alveolar: further back from the teeth (sh, American r) o palatal: top of palate (Russian ch) o velar: back of the mouth (k, ng) o uvular: way back in the mouth (Arabic q, French r) o glottal: back in the throat (h, glottal stop as in John Lennon saying bottle). , Degree of closure. This proceeds in steps o from stops (stopping the airflow entirely: p t k) o to fricatives (impeding it enough to cause audible friction: f s sh kh) o to approximants (barely impeding it: r l w y). o An affricate is a stop plus a fricative, which must occur at the same place of articulation: t + sh = ch, d + zh = j. , Voicing: whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not. That's the difference between f and v, t and d, k and g, sh and zh. , Nasalization: whether air travels through the nose as well as the mouth. For instance, m, n, and ng are stops like b, d, g, but only the oral airflow is stopped. , Aspiration: whether stops are released lightly, or with a noticeable puff of air. In Chinese, Hindi, or Quechua, there are series of aspirated and non-aspirated stops. , Palatalization: whether the tongue is raised toward the top of the mouth while pronouncing the consonant. In Russian and Gaelic, there are distinct series of palatalized and non-palatalized consonants. - 214 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 English consonants can be arranged in a grid like this: labial lab-dnt dental alv alv-pal velar glottal stop p b t d k g fricative f v th th s z sh zh h affricate ch j approximant w r l y nasal m n ng Sometimes the same sound in a language takes different forms based on its position in the word. For instance, English p is aspirated at the beginning of a word, but non-aspirated elsewhere; or, English m is usually labial, but it's labiodental before an f (compare schematic, emphatic). Linguists call the basic sounds of a language, the ones that can distinguish one word from another, phonemes, and the actual sounds as pronounced, phones. They'd say that English has a phoneme /p/, which has two phonetic realizations or allophones, aspirated [ph] and non-aspirated [p]. INVENTING CONSONANTS You'll notice that the grid of consonants for English has gaps in it. Does this mean you can invent new sounds by filling in the grid? Oh, yes. For instance, English has voiced nasals; your language could have unvoiced nasals. English has a velar stop but no velar fricative. German has one (the ch in Bach); some languages have two, a voiced and an unvoiced one. German also has a labial affricate, pf. Even more exciting is to add entire series of consonants using contrasts not used in English, such as palatalization or aspiration. Or remove a series English has. Cuzco Quechua, for instance, has three series of stops: aspirated, non-aspirated, and glottalized, but it doesn't distinguish voiced and unvoiced consonants. The key to a naturalistic language, in fact, is to add (or subtract) entire dimensions. It's conceivable that a language could have a single glottalized consonant, but more likely that it will have a series of them (along the points of articulation: p' t' k'). A language might have just two palatalized consonants (Spanish does: ll, ñ), but one that has a whole series of them is more typical. - 215 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 You can also add places of articulation. For instance, while English has three series of stops, Hindi has five (labial, dental, retroflex, alveolo-palatal, and velar. Retroflex consonants involve curling the tongue backwards a bit), and Arabic has six (bilabial, dental, 'emphatic' (don't ask), velar, uvular, glottal). Some consonants are more common than others. For instance, virtually all languages have the simple stops p t k. Lass's book gives examples; see also David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p. 165. OWELS V The most important aspects of vowels are height and frontness. , Height: how open the inside of the mouth is. The usual scale is high [i, u], mid[e, o], and low [a]. There may be two middle steps in the ladder, usually called closed [ay, oh] and open [eh, aw]. , Frontness: how close the tongue is to the front of the mouth. Vowels can be classified into front (i, e), central (a, or the indistinct vowel in 'of'), or back (o, u). You can arrange the vowels in a grid according to these two dimensions. The bottom of the grid is usually drawn shorter because there isn't as much room for the tongue to maneuver as the mouth opens more. To get a feel for these distinctions, pronounce the words in the diagram, moving from top to bottom or side to side, and noting where your tongue is and how close it is to the roof of the mouth. Vowels can vary along other dimensions as well: , Roundedness: whether the lips are rounded (u, o) or not (i, e). English doesn't have front rounded vowels, but French and German do (Fr. u, oe; Ger. ü, ö). We also don't have (say) an unrounded u, but Russian, Korean, and Japanese do. - 216 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Length: vowels may contrast by length, as in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Old English; Estonian has three degrees of length. , Nasalization: like consonants, vowels can be nasalized. French, for instance, has four nasalized vowels. , Tenseness: vowels can be tense or lax-- hard to explain, tho' English is an example; lax vowels are closer to the center of the vowel space-- look at soot and sit in the diagram. English has a rather complicated vowel system: --lax-- --tense-- front------back front------back high pit put peat poot mid pet putt pate boat low pat pot father bought Interesting simple systems include Quechua (three vowels, i u a) and Spanish (five: i e a o u). Simple vowel systems tend to spread out; a Quechua i, for instance, can sound like English pit, peat, or pet. Spanish e and o have two allophones each: open (as in pet, caught) in syllables that end in a consonant, closed (as in pate, pot) elsewhere. Again, for your invented language, don't just add an exotic vowel or two; try to invent a vowel system, using the dimensions listed above. For instance, starting from the English system, you could bag the tense/lax distinction, add roundedness, and then collapse the front and back low vowels (there are often more high than low vowels). STRESS Don't forget to give a stress rule. English has unpredictable stress, and if you don't think about it your invented language will tend to work that way too. French (lightly) stresses the last syllable. Polish and Quechua always stress the second-to-last syllable. Latin has a more complex rule: stress the second-to-last syllable, unless both final syllables are short and aren't separated by two consonants. If the rule is absolutely regular, you don't need to indicate stress orthographically. If it's irregular, however, consider explicitly indicating it, as in Spanish: corazón, porqué. In English, vowels are reduced to more indistinct or centralized forms when unstressed. This is one big reason (tho' not the only one) that English spelling is so difficult. - 217 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 TONE Mandarin Chinese syllables have four tones, or intonation contours: high level; rising; low falling, and high falling. [For zhongguórén: No, I haven't described the third tone wrong. Think about it.] These tones are parts of the word, and can be used to distinguish words of different meanings: ma 'mother', má 'hemp', mâ'horse', mà 'curse'. Cantonese and Vietnamese have six tones. [The first tone should have a straight line over the vowel, and the circumflex over the third tone should be inverted, but this is the best I can do in html, and it beats adding numbers.] If that seems a bit elaborate, you might consider a pitch-accent system, such as I used in another invented language, Cuêzi: the stress in a word can either be high or low in pitch. Japanese and ancient Greek are pitch-accent languages. In (standard) Japanese, syllables can be either high or low pitch; each word has a particular 'melody' or sequence of high and low syllables-- e.g. ikebana 'flower arrangement' has the melody LHLL; sashimi 'sliced raw fish' has LHH; kokoro 'heart' has LHL. It rather sounds as if a tone has to be remembered for each syllable; but this turns out not to be the case. All you must learn for each word is the location of the 'accent', the main drop in pitch. Then you simply apply these three rules: , Assign high pitch to all moras (= syllables, except that a long vowel is two moras, and a final -n or a double consonant takes up a mora too) , Change the pitch to low for all moras following the accent , Assign low pitch to the first mora if the second is high. Thus for ike'bana we have HHHH, then HHLL, then LHLL. PHONOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS Every language has a series of constraints on what possible words can occur in the language. For instance, as an English speaker you know somehow that blick and drass are possible words, though they don't happen to exist, but vlim and mtar couldn't possibly be English. Designing the phonological constraints in your language will go a long, long way to giving it its own distinctive flavor. Start with a distinctive syllable pattern. For instance, , Japanese basically allows only (C)V(V)(n): Ranma, Akane, Tatewaki Kunoo, Rumiko Takahashi, Gojira, Tookyoo, konkuuru, sushi, etc. , Mandarin Chinese allows (C)(i, u)V(w, y, n, ng): wô, shì, Mêiguó, rén, wényán, chìàn, mànhuà, Wáng, Zhang, etc. - 218 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Quechua allows (C)V(C): Wallpakuna sarata mikuchkanku, achka allin hatun mosoq puka wasikuna, etc. , English goes as far as (s) + (C) + (r, l, w, y) + (V) + V + (C) + (C) + (C): sprite, thinks. Try to generalize your constraints. For instance, m + t is illegal at the beginning of a word in English. We could generalize this to [nasal] + [stop]. The rule against v + l generalizes at least to [voiced fricative] + [approximant]. Another process to be aware of is assimilation. Adjoining consonants tend to assimilate to the same place of articulation. That's why Latin in- + -port = import, ad + simil- = assimil-. It's why the plural -s sounds like z after a voiced stop, as in dogs or moms. It's also why Larry Niven's klomter, from The Integral Trees, rings so false. m + t (though not impossible) is difficult, since each sound occurs at a different place of articulation; both sounds are likely either to shift to the dental position (klonder) or the labial (klomper). Another possible outcome is the insertion of a phonetically intermediate sound: klompter. ALIEN MOUTHS If you're inventing a language for aliens, you'll probably want to give them really different sounds (if they have speech at all, of course). The Marvel Comics solution is to throw in a bunch of apostrophes: "This is Empress Nx'id''ar' of the planet Bla'no'no!" Larry Niven just violates English phonological constraints: tnuctipun. We can do better. Think about the shape of the mouth of your aliens. Is it really long? That suggests adding a few more places of articulation. Perhaps the airstream itself works differently: perhaps they have no nose, and therefore can't produce nasals; or they can't stop breathing as they talk, so that all their vowels are nasal; or the airstream is at a higher velocity, producing higher-pitched sounds and perhaps more emphatic consonants. Or perhaps their anatomy allows quite odd clicks, snaps, and thuds that have become phonemes in their languages. Several writers have come up with creatures with two vocal tracts, allowing them to pronounce two sounds at once, or accompany themselves in two-part harmony. Or, how about sounds or syllables that vary in tonal color? Meanings might be distinguished by whether the voice sounds like a trombone, a violin, a trumpet, or a guitar. Suggesting additional sounds is difficult and perhaps tiresome to the reader; an alien ambience can also be created by removing entire phonetic dimensions. An alien might be unable to produced voiced sounds (so he sounts a pit like a Cherman), or, lacking lips, might skip over labials (you nust do this to de a thentrilocooist, as ooell). - 219 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Alphabets ORTHOGRAPHY Once you have the sounds of your language down, you'll want to create an orthography-- that is, a standard way of representing those sounds in the Roman alphabet. I don't recommend trying to be very creative here. For instance, you could represent a e i o u as ö é ee aw ù, with the accents reversed at the end of the word. An outlandish orthography is probably an attempt to jazz up a phonetic system that didn't turn out to be interestingly different from English. Work on the sounds, then find a way to spell them in a straightforward fashion. If you're inventing a language for a fantasy world, it's wise to take account of how English-speaking readers will mangle your beautiful words. Tolkien is the model here: he spelled Quenya as if it were Latin, didn't introduce any really vile spellings, and kindly indicated final e's that must be pronounced. Still, he couldn't resist demanding that c and g always be hard (I couldn't either, for Verdurian), which probably means that a lot of his names (e.g. Celeborn) are commonly mispronounced. Marc Okrand, inventing Klingon, had the clever idea of using upper and lowercase letters with different phonetic values. This has the advantage of doubling the letters available without using diacritics, but it's not very aesthetic and it sure is a tax on memory. Or you may go for neatness, as I did in inventing Verdurian. I don't like digraphs, so I adapted Czech orthography-- for ch, for sh, etc. This ultimately involved creating a special Macintosh font, so I was probably crazy. (Note however that fonts for non-Western-European languages are plentiful by now.) A sense of variation among the nations of your world can be achieved by using different transliteration styles for each. In my fantasy world, for instance, Verdurian arcaln and Barakhinei Dhârkalen are not pronounced that much differently, but the differing orthographies give each a different feeling. Surely you'd rather visit civilized arcaln than dark and brooding Dhârkalen? (Tricked you. It's the same place.) If you're inventing an interlanguage, of course, you shouldn't worry about English conventions; create the most straightforward romanization you can. You're only asking for trouble, however, if you invent new diacritic marks, as the inventor of Esperanto did. AN EXAMPLE Here's the alphabet I came up with for Verdurian: - 220 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Note that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the Verdurian alphabet and the standard English representation. This is not very naturalistic-- transliteration schemes are not usually this straightforward-- but it's a good place to start. Once you can fluently read your own alphabet, feel free to add complications. A good alphabet can't be created in a day. This one took shape over a period of weeks, as I played with various letterforms. Keep the letters looking distinct. The best alphabets spread out over the conceptual graphic space, so that letters can't be confused for one another. Tolkien is a bad example here: the elves must have been tormented by dyslexia. If letters start to approach each other too closely, users find ways to distinguish them, in the way that computer programmers, for instance, write zeroes with a slash. Europeans write 1 with an elaborate introductory swash-- impossible to confuse with I, but looking much like a 7, which has therefore acquired a horizontal slash! Remember that letters are written over and over again, over the life of an individual or a civilization. Elaborate letters are likely to be simplified. You can simulate this process by writing the letter over and over yourself; the appropriate simplifications will suggest themselves automatically. Note that I supplied upper and lower case forms, as in the Roman and Greek alphabets. The lowercase forms are all cursive simplifications of the uppercase forms (which are also the ancient forms). In retrospect I probably shouldn't have imitated the mixed-case system, which on our world is basically limited to Western alphabets. I should have kept the 'uppercase' forms for ancient times, the 'lowercase' forms for modern times. I tried to give the letters individual histories, as with our alphabet. The letter t, for instance, derives from a picture of a cup, touresiu in Cuêzi; n was originally a picture of a foot (nega). I have to admit that I did this backwards-- I invented pictograms that could have developed into the letters, which I had devised years before! Also note that the voiced consonants, in the uppercase forms, are simply the unvoiced forms with a bar over them (this is a bit obscured with d and t), and that the letters for are all transparent variations of each other. This slightly violates my 'maximally distinct' rule, but I think it adds interest to the alphabet. You'll also notice both c and k in the alphabet. This is the sort of ethnocentrism it's all too easy to fall into. Why would another language duplicate the convoluted history of our alphabet's c and k? I've reinterpreted these symbols to refer to /k/ and /q/. - 221 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 IACRITICS D Some advice: never use a diacritical mark without giving it a specific meaning, preferably one which it retains in all uses. I made this mistake in Verdurian: I used ö and ü as in German, but ë somewhat as in Russian (indicating palatalization of the previous consonant), and ä as a mere doubling of a. I was smarter by the time I got to Cuêzi: the circumflex consistently indicates a low-pitch accent. Avoid using apostrophes just to make words look foreign or alien. Since apostrophes are used in contradictory ways (they represent the glottal stop in Arabic or Hawai'ian, glottalization in Quechua, palatalization in Russian, aspiration or a syllable boundary in Chinese, and omitted sounds in English, French, and Italian), they end up suggesting nothing at all to the reader. FANCIER WRITING SYSTEMS What, you say you want to build a syllabary? A cursive form of your alphabet? A logographic system? Read a good book on how writing systems work. Writing Systems by Geoffrey Sampson is a very good book. If that seems too much, read up on the type of writing system you want to imitate: Chinese characters, the Japanese or Maya syllabary, the Sanskrit syllabic alphabet, the Korean featural code, the all-cursive Arabic alphabet, and so on. A book like Kenneth Katzer's Languages of the World gives examples of a wide variety of scripts. Comrie's The World's Major Languages does the same, but gives more detail. Or invest in the 800-pound gorilla of the field, Daniels & Bright's The World's Writing Systems, which explains how every writing system in the world works. Note that logographic scripts and syllabaries tend to work best with languages that have a very limited syllabic structure-- Japanese, with (C)V(n), is close to ideal; English is close to pessimal. Word building HOW MANY WORDS DO YOU NEED? Where the conlang bug bites, the Speedtalk meme is sure to follow. Let Robert Heinlein explain it: - 222 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Long before, Ogden and Richards had shown that eight hundred and fifty words were sufficient vocabulary to express anything that could be expressed by "normal" human vocabularies, with the aid of a handful of special words-- a hundred odd-- for each special field, such as horse racing or ballistics. About the same time phoneticians had analyzed all human tongues into about a hundred-odd sounds, represented by the letters of a general phonetic alphabet. ... One phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a "normal" language, one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence. --"Gulf", in Assignment in Eternity, 1953 This is a tempting idea, not least because it promises to save us a good deal of work. Why invent thousands of words if a hundred will do? The unfortunate truth is that Ogden and Richards cheated. They were able to reduce the vocabulary of Basic English so much by taking advantage of idioms like make good for succeed. That may save a word, but it's still a lexical entry that must be learned as a unit, with no help from its component pieces. Plus, the whole process was highly irregular. (Make bad doesn't mean fail.) The Speedtalk idea may seem to receive support from such observations as that 80% of English text makes use of only the most frequent 3000 words, and 50% makes use of only 100 words. However (as linguist Henry Kuera points out), there's an inverse relationship between frequency and information content: the most frequent words are function words (prepositions, particles, conjunctions, pronouns), which don't contribute much to meaning (and indeed can be left out entirely, as in newspaper headlines), while the least frequent words are important content words. It doesn't do you much good to understand 80% of the words in a sentence if the remaining 20% are the most important for understanding its meaning. The other problem is that redundancy isn't a bug, it's a feature. Claude Shannon showed that the information content of English text was about one bit per letter-- not too high considering that for random text it's about five bits a letter. Sounds inefficient, huh? On the other hand, we don't actually hear every sound (or, if we're accomplished readers, read every letter) in a word. We use the built-in redundancy of language to understand what's said anyway. To put it another way: y cn ndrstnd Nglsh txt vn wtht th vwls, or shouted into a nor'easter, or over a staticky phone line. Similarly distorted Speedtalk would be impossible to understand, since entire morphemes would be missing or mistaken. Very probably the degree of redundancy of human languages is pretty precisely calibrated to the minimum level of information needed to cope with typical levels of distortion. However, go ahead and play with the Speedtalk idea. It's good for some hours of fun, working out as minimal a set of primitives as you can; and the habit of paraphrase it gives you is very useful in creating languages. Just don't take it too seriously; if you do, your - 223 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 punishment is to learn 850 words of any actual foreign language and be set down in a city of monolingual speakers of that language. LIEN OR A PRIORI LANGUAGES A If you're making up a language for a different world, you want, of course, words that don't sound like any existing language. For this you simply need to make up words that use the sounds and the syllable structure in your language. This can fairly quickly get tiresome. I don't advise you to sit down and come up with a hundred words at once; you're likely to run out of inspiration, or find that all the words are starting to sound the same. You may also be creating new roots where you could more easily derive the word from existing roots. It's not hard to write computer programs that will randomly generate words for your language (even respecting its syllable structure). If you do, remember that sounds (and syllable structures) are not equiprobably distributed in natural languages. English uses many more t's than f's, more f's than z's. Resist the temptation to give a meaning for every possible syllable. Real languages don't work like that (unless the number of possibilities is quite low). Even if you're working on a highly structured auxiliary language, you'll want some maneuvering room for future expansion. And the speakers of your language shouldn't have to throw out an old word whenever they want to construct a coinage or an abbreviation. You will want a mixture of word lengths for variety; but don't invent too many long words. It's better to derive long words by combining shorter words, or adding suffixes. Or, imitating the way English is full of polysyllabic borrowings from Latin and Greek, or Japanese is full of Chinese loanwords, create two languages, and build words in one out of components in the other. A FEW HALF-RECOGNIZABLE BORROWINGS I intended Verdurian to look mildly familiar, as if it could be a distant relative of the European languages. For example: Sul A e otál mudray dy tü, dalu esë, er ya ceel rho sen e sënul. Only God is as wise as you, my king, and even there I'm not certain. So cuon er so ailuro eu druki. Cuon ride e sluir misotém ailurei. So ailuro e araó rizuec. The dog and the cat are friends. The dog laughs at the cat's jokes. The cat is quite amusing. - 224 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 To achieve this impression, I borrowed from a number of earthly languages-- e.g. ailuro 'cat' and cuon 'dog' are adapted from Greek; sul 'only' from French; rizir 'amuse' and ya 'indeed' from Spanish; druk 'friend' and sluir 'hear' from Russian. The friendly orthography and the simple (C)(C)V(C) syllable structure also help make the language inviting. By contrast, another language, Xurná, was intended to look more alien: Ir nevu jadzies mnoudacij. Toc izen ri tos bunjai asik rili. Tos denjic u bunji dis kezi. Syu ao cu u izraugi. My niece is dating a sculptor. She can see no flaws in him. He hopes one day to govern a province. Myself, I don't envy that province. LANGUAGES BASED ON EXISTING LANGUAGES Interlanguages are often based on existing languages; for instance, Esperanto is chiefly based on French, Italian, German, and English. Here the problem of creating words largely reduces to one of acquiring enough good dictionaries. A few language creators have tried to approach the task systematically-- e.g. Interlingua is based on nine languages, and usually adopts the word found in the most languages. Lojban uses a wider variety of languages, including some non-Western ones, and uses a statistical algorithm to produce an intermediate form. The intention is to provide some mnemonic assistance to a very wide variety of speakers. It's an intriguing idea, although the execution is so subtle that the language is often mistaken for a priori. SOUND SYMBOLISM Some linguists claim to have found some common meaning patterns among human languages. For instance, front vowels (i, e) are said to suggest smallness, softness, or high pitch; low and back vowels (a, u, o) to suggest largeness, loudness, or low pitch. Compare itty-bitty, whisper, tinkle, twitter, beep, screech, chirp, with humongous, shout, gong, clatter, crash, bam, growl, rumble; or Spanish mujercita 'little woman' with mujerona 'big woman'. Cecil Adams took advantage of this pattern when he commented, on the subject of penis enlargement surgery, that "if nature has equipped you with a ding rather than a dong, you'll just have to live with it." Exceptions aren't hard to find, of course-- notably small and big. Inventing alien languages, authors also simply make use of what we might call phonetic stereotypes. Tolkien's Orkish, for instance, makes heavy use of guttural sounds and is full - 225 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 of consonants, while his Elvish tongues are more vocalic, and seem to have plenty of pleasant-sounding l's and r's. OME GUIDELINES FOR NOT REINVENTING THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY S , If the literal meaning of an expression doesn't make sense (e.g. "make good", "go all out", "have it in for someone", "look lived-in"), you're probably dealing with an idiom. Translate using expressions that make sense literally ("succeed", "work at full capacity", "have a grudge against someone", "seem inhabited"), or create your own idioms ("laugh at hell", "play bee", "circle your eye at someone", "be breathed and worn"). , Look through the foreign-to-English section of a bilingual dictionary. Look at the range of English meanings particular foreign words have: think about what kind of root concept could cover all of them. Look at the foreign words used to translate a single English word: try to see what distinctions the foreign language is making where English uses that one word. , Derive your lexicon from basic roots using regular derivation processes. , Look up the etymology of the English word. See if you can come up with an alternative process. , Consider a whole class of related English words-- verbs of motion, for instance. Design the related class of words in your language, dividing up the conceptual space in your own way. , Read Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Create your own metaphors and the vocabulary that goes with them. , Read a text on semantics (Palmer's Semantics is short; Takao Suzuki's Japanese and the Japanese: Words in Culture, a.k.a. Words in Context, is wonderful), for a greater awareness of the structure of the lexicon. , For a fantasy language, think about the culture that your language serves. What concepts are most important to it? They will likely have many synonyms, or even be reflected directly in the grammar. What's its history or mythology? They will probably generate a number of derived words. Grammar Once you've bundled together some words and perhaps an alphabet, you may think you're done. If you do, it's likely that you've just created an elaborate cipher for English. You still have the grammar to do, bucko. This section doesn't attempt to cover all the issues in morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Instead, it suggests what your grammar should minimally do, mentions some of the issues, and lists some interesting approaches taken by various languages. - 226 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 S YOUR LANGUAGE INFLECTING, AGGLUTINATING, OR ISOLATING? I Inflections are of course affixes used to conjugate verbs and decline nouns. Examples from English are the -s we add to verbs for the 3rd person present form, the -s added to pluralize nouns, and the -ed of the past tense. Languages such as Russian or Latin have complex, not to say baroque, inflectional systems. A single inflection may encode multiple meanings. For instance, in the Russian form domóv, the -óv ending indicates both plurality and the genitive case; it doesn't bear any evident relationship with other plural endings (e.g. nominative -á) or the singular genitive ending (-a). In Spanish comí 'I ate', the -í ending indicates the 1st person singular, past tense, indicative mood-- quite a job for one vowel, even accented. In agglutinating languages, one affix has one meaning. Compare Quechua wasikunapi 'in the houses'; the plural suffix -kuna is separate from the case suffix -pi. Or mikurani 'I ate', in which the past tense suffix -ra- is kept separate from the personal ending -ni. In isolating languages, there are no suffixes at all; meanings are modified by inserting additional words. In Chinese, for instance, wô chi fàn could mean 'I eat' or 'I was eating', depending on the context; the verb is not inflected at all. For precision, adverbs can be brought in: wô chi fàn zuótiàn 'I was eating yesterday'. (In practice natural languages are all a bit mixed; some inflections have a single meaning; Quechua does have a few inflections, for instance, and Chinese does have required grammatical particles, such as the aspect particle le, used to show completed action: wô chi fàn le 'I ate.') Conlang creators seem to gravitate toward agglutinating or isolating languages; but there's something to be said for inflections. They tend to be compact, for instance. You can't beat -í for succintness. DO YOU HAVE NOUNS, VERBS, AND ADJECTIVES? Why not get rid of one or two of them? It's not hard to get rid of adjectives. One easy way is to treat them as verbs: instead of saying "The wall is red", you say "The wall reds"; likewise, instead of "the red wall" you say "the redding wall". With such tricks you can even get rid of the verb be, which according to some theorists is responsible for most of the sloppy thinking in the world today. (Heinlein was careful to - 227 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 ban 'to be' from Speedtalk.) About the only response this notion deserves is: would that clear thinking was that easy. You can extend the idea to get rid of nouns. For instance, in Lakhota, ethnic names are verbs, not nouns. There's a verb 'to be a Lakhota': the present forms mean 'I am a Lakhota, you are a Lakhota, etc.' You can have some fun with this. "The rock is under the tree" could be expressed as something like "There is stonying below the growing, greening, flourishing",or perhaps "It stones whileunder it grows greeningly." If we really encountered a language like this, however, I'd have to wonder whether we weren't just fooling ourselves. If there's a word that refers to stones, why translate it as 'to stone' rather than simply 'stone'? Jorge Luis Borges, in "Tlön, Uqbar, Tertius Orbis", posits a language without nouns; but this was because its speakers were Berkeleyan idealists, who didn't believe in object permanence. However, linguists really do not like using semantic classes-- or metaphysics-- to define syntactic categories. (It's not the right level of analysis; and it tends to obscure how languages really work by making them all look like Latin.) Jack Vance (in The Languages of Pao) posited a language without verbs. For instance, "There are two matters I wish to discuss with you" comes out something like "Statement-of-importance -- in-a-state-of-readiness-- two; ear-- of [place name]-- in-a-state-of-readiness; mouth-- of this person here-- in-a-state-of-volition." Vance may be in a state of pulling our legs. OW DO YOU INDICATE PLURAL, CASE, AND GENDER FORMS OF ADJECTIVES AND H NOUNS? What's case? It's a way of marking nouns by function: e.g. Latin mundus subject or nominative: the world (is, does, ...) mundum object or accusative: (something affects) the world munde vocative: O world! mundi possessive or genitive: the world's mundo indirect object or dative: (given, sold, etc.) to the world mundo ablative: (something is done) by the world English actually has cases: possessives like 'world's' are actually genitive case forms; while the subject/object distinction is made with pronouns (I vs. me, we vs. us). Conlang enthusiasts generally either love case (because it makes a language compact and frees up word order) or hate it (because English doesn't do much with it). - 228 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Some languages, such as Basque, have a different arrangement of cases. Instead of the subject of the sentence always being in the same case (the nominative), the subject of intransitive sentences (e.g. "The window broke") and the object of transitive sentences (e.g. "I broke the window) are in the same case, the absolutive, while the subjects of transitive sentences (e.g. "I broke the window") are in the ergative case. If you think that's weird, a few languages, such as Dyirbal, use the nominative/accusative system for 1st and 2nd person pronouns (I, we, you), and the ergative/absolutive system for nouns and for 3rd person pronouns. If a language doesn't have case it may rely on word order to indicate the relationship between a verb's arguments; but there is another alternative: head-marking on the verb. For instance, in the Swahili Kitabu umekileta? 'Did you bring the book?', the verb leta has prefixes indicating the subject (u- 'you') and the object (-ki-, a third person prefix agreeing in gender with kitabu). (-me marks the perfect tense.) The gender-specific object marker on the verb allows free word order even without case marking on the nouns. O NOUNS HAVE GENDER? D Note that gender need not be simply masculine/feminine. Swahili, for instance, has eight gender classes, none of them masculine/feminine: one is for animals, one for human beings, one for abstract nouns, one forms diminutives, etc. I daresay not many conlangs have grammatical gender. (Verdurian has it, because it's intended to be naturalistic.) People ask, what is gender for? Gender is remarkably persistent: it's persisted in the Indo-European, Semitic, and Bantu language families for at least five thousand years. It must be doing something useful. A few possibilities: , It helps tie adjectives and nouns together, reducing the functional load on word order and adding useful clues for parsing. , It gives language (in John Lawler's terms) another dimension to seep into. In French, for instance, there are many words that vary only in gender: port/porte, fil/file, grain/graine, point/pointe, sort/sorte, etc. Changing gender must have once been an easy way to create a subtle variation on a word. , It allows indefinite references to give someone's sex. , It offers some of the advantages of obviative pronouns (see below): one may have two or more third person pronouns at work at the same time, referring to different things. , It can support free word order without case marking, as in the Swahili example above. - 229 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 OES THE VERB INFLECT BY PERSON, GENDER, AND/OR NUMBER? D Like case, personal endings make for nice compact sentences, since if you have them you can generally omit subject pronouns. Some languages, such as Swahili and Quechua, include the object pronoun in the verb as well, usually as an infix. The Romance languages have clitic forms of the pronouns, which stop just short of being verb inflections: e.g. French Je le vois, 'I see him'; Spanish Digame, 'Tell me'. Basque verbs can inflect to encode information about the listener. For instance, ekarri digute is a neutral way of saying 'They brought it to us'; ekarri zigunate means the same, but also indicates that the listener is a woman addressed with the informal personal pronoun. WHAT DISTINCTIONS ARE MADE IN THE VERB? Some distinctions languages make: , time, of course (tense strictly speaking) , whether the action is completed (grammarians say perfect) or not , whether the focus is on the ongoing process (progressive), or a single action, or a habitual action, or a repeated action (all these are aspects) , whether the action can be counted on (indicative mood), or is doubtful or merely to be desired (subjunctive), or isn't happening at all (negative) , whether I'm telling you (indicative again) or ordering you (imperative) , whether the speaker knows about the action from personal experience, or merely from hearsay, or merely considers it probable (evidentiality) , whether the verb is intransitive (it just happens) or transitive (it happens to something) or reflexive (it happens to the subject) , whether the verb simply describes a state (static) or reports a change in state (dynamic). In Arabic, for instance, rukubun means 'ride' in its static forms, 'mount' in its dynamic forms; 'iqamatun is static 'reside' and dynamic 'settle'. , degree of deference between speaker and listener Any language can express these distinctions, but they differ in which features are grammaticalized: reflected in the morphology and syntax of the language. English, for instance, grammaticalizes person and number in its verbal system, while Japanese does not. On the other hand Japanese verbs have positive and negative forms, as well as a morphological indication of levels of deference. Languages also differ in how many distinctions are made in these categories. - 230 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , There is an Austronesian language which has four past tenses (last night, yesterday, near past, remote past) and three futures (immediate, near, remote). , The languages of the Vaupés river basin distinguish five levels of evidentiality: visual perception; non-visual perception; deduction from obvious clues; hearsay; and mere assumption. WHAT ARE THE PERSONAL PRONOUNS? The basic, universal persons are first (referring to the speaker), second (the hearer), and third (everybody else). However, there's lots of room to play around. Distinctions may be made: , by gender (not necessarily just in the third person) , not by gender (many languages don't distinguish 'he' and 'she') , by number (I vs. we... sometimes there's special dual forms for pairs of things) , not by number (an optional distinction in Chinese) , by animacy (cf. he/she vs. it) , whether 'we' includes 'you' (inclusive we) or not (exclusive we) , by level of formality or politeness , by whether third persons are present or not , between two sets of third persons (proximate and obviative)-- imagine having two forms of 'he' to distinguish two different persons , between real and hypothetical reference: e.g. English 'one', French on I invented an alien race once that used different pronouns on land and underwater (they were amphibians), and had the inclusive/exclusive and proximate/obviative distinctions. They also had a pronoun for group minds, and pronouns for each of their three sexes. The complete list was impressive. WHAT ARE THE OTHER PRONOUNS? To me, the best idea Zamenhof had was his table of correlatives, a nice way to organize all these pronouns. For English, it looks like this: QUERY THIS THAT SOME NO EVERY ADJECTIVE which this that some no every PERSON who this that someone no one everyone THING what this that something nothing everything PLACE where here there somewhere nowhere everywhere - 231 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 TIME when now then sometime never always WAY how thus somehow REASON why It's easy and diverting to regularize the table, although natural languages generally leave holes, which must be filled in with phrases ('in that way', 'for no reason'). You might ask yourself whether the interrogative pronouns ("Who did it?") and the relative pronouns ("Is this the man who did it?") are the same; in some languages they aren't. Generally, if nouns decline, these pronouns decline the same way. Sometimes they're worse-- English, for instance, retained separate 'from' and 'to' forms for pronouns of place (here / hence = from here / hither = to here) long after such distinctions were lost for ordinary nouns. WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS? Are the numbers based on tens, or something else? Many human number systems are based on fives instead. My pronoun-happy aliens had a duodecimal system. Intelligent machines would surely prefer hexadecimal... How do you form higher numbers? 'Forty-three', for instance, may be formed in several ways: forty three four three forty with three three and forty four tens and three eight fives and three fifty less seven twice twenty and three Where nouns decline, numbers may also. Or they may not. In Latin, you stop declining the numbers at four. In Indo-European languages we are used to unanalyzable roots for the numbers; but in other families number names are derivations, often related to the process of counting on fingers and toes-- e.g. Choctaw 5 = tahlapi 'the first (hand) finished'; Klamath 8 ndan- ksahpta 'three I have bent over'; Unalit 11 atkahakhtok 'it goes down (to the feet)'; Shasta 20 tsec 'man' (considered as having 20 countable appendages). - 232 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 For more on numbers, see the Sources page of my Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 2000 Languages page. HAT ABOUT ADJECTIVES? W Adjectives can be something like nouns, something like verbs, or like neither. If they're like nouns, they generally agree with their head noun in gender, case, and number. If they're like verbs, they conjugate like verbs. How are comparative expressions ("holier than thou", "most holy", "as holy as thou") formed? It's useful to have some regular derivations for or from adjectives: opposite (un-) lack (-less) or surfeit (-ful) possibility (-able) liking (-phile) or disliking (-phobe) inhabitant (-er, -ian, -an, -ese) weakening of meaning (-ish) strengthening of meaning (to the max) adverb (-ly) ARE THERE ARTICLES (A, THE)? Many languages, such as Latin and Russian, get by quite happily without them. It may help to understand what the distinction really means. Ordinarily it's pragmatic: the can be paraphrased 'You know which one I'm talking about'. Consider: I saw a man at the rodeo. The man had on a horrid plaid suit. A man in the first sentence signals that this character is being introduced in this conversation; the in the second sentence signals that he's old news, he is in fact the same guy we just started talking about. The before rodeo also indicates that the speaker expects that the hearer can figure out which rodeo-- if not, he'd have said a rodeo. Word order serves the same function in Russian. There you'd say, in effect, I saw man in rodeo. Man wore horrid plaid suit. When he's introduced, the man lives near the end of the sentence; when he's old news, he appears at the front. (Actually, they don't have many rodeos in Russia.) - 233 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 HAT ORDER DO THE VARIOUS COMPONENTS OF A NOUN PHRASE APPEAR IN? W Consider articles, numbers, quantifiers, adverbs, adjectives, possessives, subordinate clauses-- e.g. The ten very happy robots who passed the bar exam You can generally divide phrases into heads and modifiers. Some languages are very consistent about placing all modifiers before, or all after the head. English is head-final, with the exception of subordinate clauses. Japanese is head-final too, but it's more consistent: it would say "the bar exam passed robots". WHAT ORDER DO THE VARIOUS COMPONENTS OF A SENTENCE APPEAR IN? Linguists like to talk about the order of subject, object, and verb, which of course can occur in just six combinations: SVO (as in English or Swahili), SOV (Latin, Quechua, Turkish), VSO (Welsh), OVS (Hixkaryana), OSV (Apurinã), VOS (Malagasy). The last three are for some reason rare, although they do exist. Combinations and complications are common; for instance, German is basically SOV, but a finite verb (anything but a participle or an infinitive) appears after the subject in a main clause: Mein Vater ist vor einigen Tagen nach London gefahren. My father has several days ago to London travelled. (German isn't usually described this way; but my way is equally correct, and requires only one exception. The usual approach requires two exceptions, one for nonfinite verbs in the main clause, one for subclauses.) HOW DO YOU FORM A RELATIVE CLAUSE (THE MAN WHO...)? It can be useful to think about relative clauses using transformational grammar. For instance, a sentence like The man that John hit yesterday prefers beer to wine. can be seen as deriving by transformation from one sentence that's embedded in another: The man [John hit him yesterday] prefers beer to wine. - 234 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In English, you can think of relativization as proceeding in two steps: a) replacing the pronoun in the subclause with an interrogative pronoun (or that) The man [John hit whom yesterday] prefers beer to wine. and b) moving that pronoun to the head of the clause. The man [whom John hit yesterday] prefers beer to wine. Your language may also put limits on what exactly can be relativized. The following examples are legal in English, for instance, but not in certain other languages. the girl [you think [I love her] >> the girl you think I love the neighbor [I traumatized his pastor] >> the neighbor whose pastor I traumatized the cat [I said [Alesia brought it home]] >> the cat that I said Alesia brought home Not everything is possible in English: This is the man [my girlfriend's father is a friend of John and him] >> This is the man that my girlfriend's father is a friend of John and. or (thanks to Leo Connolly for this example) There's the barn [more people have gotten drunk down in back of it than any other barn in the county] >> There's the barn that more people have gotten drunk down in back of than any other barn in the county. Some languages can handle such sentences simply by leaving the pronoun in the subclause. S.J. Perelman liked to do this in English: "That's the man which my wife is sleeping with him!" If your language has cases, you must be careful to put the pronouns in the right case-- English doesn't give you the right instincts here, now that whom is used only by pedants like me. Generally the proper case to use is the one that would be appropriate in the subclause. In The cat that I said Alesia brought home, for instance, the that representing the cat should be in the case appropriate for the cat in Alesia brought the cat home. Quechua has an interesting way of forming clauses, using participles. For instance: Chakra-y yapu-q runa-ta qaya-mu-saq field-my plow-participle man-accusative call-[movement-toward]-[I-future] I'll call the man that plowed my field. The subclause has, rather than the form of an ordinary sentence ("the man plowed my field") the form of a participle ("the my-field-plowing man"). - 235 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 OW DO YOU FORM YES-NO QUESTIONS? H English has a rather baroque procedure (inverting subject and verb). Other languages simply make use of a rise in intonation, or add a particle at the beginning of the sentence (e.g. Polish czy) or to the verb. Many languages offer ways of suggesting the answer to the question. For instance, the Latin particle num expects the answer 'no' (Num ursi cerevisiam imperant? Bears don't order beer, do they?), while nonne expects 'yes' (Nonne ursus animal implume bipes? Bears are featherless bipeds, aren't they?). Where questions are formed by appending a particle (e.g. -ne in Latin, or -chu in Quechua), the particle can be added directly to the word being questioned. We can only achieve the same effect in English by emphasis (Is the bear drinking beer? Is the bear drinking beer?) or by rearrangement (Is it beer that the bear is drinking?). One way of asking a quesion in Chinese is to offer the listener a choice: Nî shì bu shì Bêijing rén? "You're from Beijing?", literally "You be, not be from Beijing?" Some folks, believe it or not, get by without having words for 'yes' or 'no'. The usual workaround is repeat the verb from the question: "Do you know the way to San José?" can be answered "I know" or "I don't know", as in Portuguese: --Você conhece o caminho que vai a São José? --Conheço. ['I know'] HOW ABOUT OTHER QUESTIONS? English usually moves the question word to the beginning of the sentence, but other languages don't, asking in effect "You said what?" or "She's going out with whose boyfriend?" Also note that some languages have different pronouns for relative clauses ("The man who fishes") and questions ("Who is this man?"). HOW DO YOU NEGATE A SENTENCE? Again, there are many options: , add a particle before the verb (as in Russian or Spanish) , ...or after the verb (as we used to do: thou rememberest not?), , ...or both (French je ne sais pas) , use a special mood of the verb (Japanese nageru 'throw', nagenai 'not throw') - 236 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , add a particle at the beginning or end of the sentence (e.g. Quechua mana, which however also requires a supporting suffix on the verb) , insert a special verb and negating that, as English does , use a special inflected auxiliary (e.g. Finnish e-)-- it's as if 'not' was an inflected verb: I not, you not, he nots... HOW DO CONJUNCTIONS WORK? Latin has a neat trick: to express X and Y, you can say X Y-que, using a clitic. The expression SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romae, is an example of this construction: the Senate and the People of Rome. Latin also distinguishes inclusive and exclusive or: vel X vel Y means that you can have X or Y or both, but aut X aut Y means you get one or the other but not both. Quechua (before the Spanish conquest) got by without conjunctions at all. For adding things together, you can usually get by with juxtaposition. Or you can use a case ending meaning with: in effect you say 'X and Y' by saying 'X with Y'. I'm not sure how disjunctions ('or') were handled-- today Quechua uses forms borrowed from Spanish. Style A natural language has a wide variety of registers, or styles of speech: from the ceremonial or ritual, to the official or scientific, to the journalistic or novelistic, to ordinary conversation, to colloquial, to slang. Children talk in their own way; so do poets. The upper crust speaks differently from the lower classes. Some of these registers work in predictable ways. For instance, rites are often conducted in an archaic form of the language (or sometimes another language entirely). Educated speech usually includes older, longer, foreign, or technical words. In Verdurian, for instance, educated speech borrows many words from the parent language, Cainor. Slang often provides humorous substitutions for common words. Some such substitutions from Vulgar Latin have become the normal word in the Romance languages: testa 'pot' replaced caput 'head', giving French tête; bucca 'cheek' replaced os 'mouth', giving bouche; caballus 'nag' replaced equus 'horse', giving cheval. Slang also borrows from minority groups: e.g. French toubib, chnouf, bled from Arabic; English shiv and pal from the Gypsies, schlock from Yiddish, jazz and jive from blacks; Spanish calato and cachaco from Quechua. - 237 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 OLITENESS P All cultures have ways of expressing politeness, but they differ in the methods used, and in what ways politeness is grammaticalized. According to Anna Wierzbicka, polite speech in English lays great stress on respecting others and avoiding imposition. English has a vast array of indirect forms for asking people to do things, or even for offering them things: Will you have a drink? Would you like a drink? Sure you wouldn't like a beer? Why don't you pour yourself something? How about a beer? Aren't you thirsty? We're so used to such pseudo-questions that we use them rather than a direct imperative even when actual politeness is far from our minds: Will someone put this fucking idiot out of his misery? For Christ's sake, will you get lost? In Polish, by contrast, a courteous host pushes his hospitality on the guest, dismissing the guest's expressed remonstrances and desires as irrelevant: Prosze bardzo! Jeszcze troszke! --Ale juz nie moge! --Ale koniecznie! "Please, a little more!" "But I can't!" "But you must!" And Polish is very free with imperatives-- indeed, to be really forceful you must use the infinitive instead. Japanese is often even more indirect than English: e.g. it avoids the imperative "Drink Coca-Cola!" in favor of Koka kora o nomimashou! (lit. "We will drink Coca-Cola!"). Japanese is also notable for having verbal inflections which add a level of politeness (e.g. tetsudau 'helps'; polite form tetsudaimasu), as well as entirely different lexical items with the same purpose (e.g. iku 'go', humble form mairu, honorific irassharu). Terms of address are a fertile field for exquisite complications; so are pronouns. In quite a few languages it's perceived as rather a familiarity to address someone using the second person pronoun: to be polite you use the plural (French vous), or a third-person form (Italian Lei, Spanish Usted from vuestra merced 'your mercy', Portuguese o senhor 'the gentleman'), or a title (Japanese sensei 'teacher', otousan 'father', etc.). If this seems odd, it's worth noting that English took the first approach, so thoroughly that the second person singular pronoun 'thou' disappeared. Attempts have been made to formulate universals of politeness, but this can be tricky. E.g. it's been suggested that politeness involves avoiding disagreement; but in Jewish culture disagreement expresses sociability and is taken as bringing people closer together. Or, it's been said that direct praise of oneself is avoided, and praise of others is approved; but self-praise among Black American speakers is good form, and direct praise of others is avoided in Japanese. POETRY - 238 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 For poetry you must consult your own Muse. However, it's worth pointing out that rhyme is not the only thing poetry can be based on: , Old English verse was based on alliteration. , Latin and Greek poetry was based on quantity, that is, patterns of long and short vowels. , Blank verse, of course, is based on patterns of stress, without having to rhyme. , French verse is generally based on lines of a certain syllable length, e.g. the alexandrine, of twelve syllables. Similarly, the haiku is composed of three lines, of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each. , Ancient Hebrew poetry was based on parallelism, the near repetition of an idea ("But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."), or on successive sentences or verses each beginning with a different letter (notably Psalm 119). Language families You can add enormous depth to a fantasy language by giving it a history, and relatives. Verdurian and its sister language Barakhinei, for instance, derive from Cainor, as French and Spanish derive from Latin. Cainor, Cuêzi, and Xurná, in turn, all derive from Proto-Eastern, and thus are related in systematic ways, much as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit all derive from proto-Indo-European. What can you do with such relationships? , Create doublets of words to enrich the language: one that derives from the ancient language and is worn down by milennia of sound change, one that has been borrowed more recently in its ancient form. Verdurian has doublets such as these: feir 'hurl' / pegeio 'force' sönil 'saddle' /asuena 'seat' anec 'coming' / ctanec 'future tense' elut 'fair play' / aelutre 'virtuous' , Create learned borrowings. Legal, scientific, medical, literary, and theological terms in Verdurian are often reborrowed from Cainor: e.g. vocet 'summons'; gutia 'epilepsy' (from a Cainor word meaning 'shaking'), menca 'style, school'. Verdurian has also borrowed educated terms from Cuêzi: avisar 'school', deyon 'matter', risunen 'draw'. Moreover, some terms were borrowed direct from Cuêzi; others were borrowed from Cuêzi into Cainor in ancient times, and then inherited in Verdurian: e.g. risunen << risunden << Cuêzi risonda 'drawing', ultimately from risi 'reed pen'. , Set up borrowings from related languages, e.g. Verdurian kenek 'camel', borrowed from Barakhinei kêntek, derived from Cainor kentos 'plain', which has also come down into Verdurian as kent. Or compare ite 'guitar', borrowed from - 239 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 another sister language, Ismaîn, and cognate with native sista 'box', both going back to Cainor cista 'box'. Words often change meaning as they're borrowed. Some cute examples from Verdurian: , ayma 'tent' << Western chaimba 'shelter'-- because the shelters of the Western barbarians were in fact tents , dalu 'king' << C. dalu 'prince'-- because when the Cainorian empire fell, its princes each became independent rulers , garlo 'sorcerer' << C. garorion 'wise or clever man'; note the dissimilation of the two r's; compare Latin arbor >> Spanish arbol , kestora 'natural philosophy' << C. kestora 'the categories (of study)' , minyón 'cute' << C. mingondul 'beggar' << mingonda 'large mat', i.e. all that a beggar possessed , noula 'together' << C. nodatula 'tied up' , ponyore 'baritone' << Cuêzi pomioro 'manly' HOW DO YOU DO IT? To do this well you have to know something about historical linguistics. The sci.lang faq will give a brief overview. Better yet, read Theodora Bynon's excellent Historical Linguistics, or Hans Henrich Hock's more thorough Principles of Historical Linguistics. The basic principle is that sound change is almost completely regular. This is good news: it means all you have to do is devise a set of sound changes between the parent language and its derivative(s), and apply them to each word. Here, for instance, are just some of the sound changes from Cainor to Verdurian: , loss of final -os: corsos >> cos , p fricativizes to f before s or t: psis >> fsiy , c becomes s before a front vowel, or before n: cisir >> sisir; aracnis >> arasni , g becomes before a front vowel: gina >> ina , l becomes y between vowels: bileta >> biyeta , nd, dr, lg, kr simplify to n, d, ly, rh respectively: sudrir >> sudir, unge >> unye , diphthongs normally simplify: aios >> a, caer >> cer, Endauron >> Enäron A different set of sound changes can be used to create a sister language. For instance, Barakhinei changes unvoiced consonants to voiced between vowels (this is an extremely common change in languages), loses the final sound of each word, etc. The net result is a language related to but subtly different from Verdurian: Cadhinor Verdurian Ismaîn Barakhinei gloss - 240 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 prosan prosan prozn proza 'walk' molenia mólnia moleni molenhi 'lightning' ueronos örn rone feron 'eagle' aestas esta este âshta 'summer' laudan lädan luzn laoda 'go' geleia jeleze gelech 'calm' elea If you're interested in applying sound changes to one language in order to generate a descendent language, you may find my Sound Change Applier program useful. DIALECTS You can use the same technique to create dialects for a your language. Linguistically, dialects are simply a set of language varieties which haven't diverged far enough apart that their speakers can't understand each other. Dialects can be created simply by specifying a smaller number of less dramatic sound changes. For instance, the Verdurian dialect of Avéle is characterized by the following changes: , Unstressed vowels are reduced to i (front vowels), schwa (back vowels), or vocalic r (before r) , Consonants between vowels become voiced: standard epese 'thick' becomes ebeze , Where Cainor c changes to s in standard Verdurian, in Avéle it changes to , Where Cainor ct changes to in standard Verdurian, in Avéle it also changes to Dialects can also have their own lexical terms, of course, perhaps borrowed from neighbors or previous inhabitants of the local territory. People often suppose that the dialect of the capital city (or whatever other place has supplied the standard language) is more 'pure' or more conservative than provincial speech. In fact the opposite is likely to be true: the active center of a culture will see its speech change fastest; rural or isolated areas are more likely to preserve older forms. If you're inventing an interlanguage you may of course want to do everything possible to prevent the rise of dialects. This is probably an expression of the fascistic streak common to language tinkerers. Why not design your interlanguage with dialects, reflecting the phonology of various linguistic regions? The resulting language, with varieties close to the major natural languages, might achieve more acceptance than uniform interlanguages have. - 241 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 What is Writing? - This and following Omniglot pages ? 1998-2004 Simon Ager – questions@omniglot.com. Languages or scripts may be ? of their respective authors, if applicable. Used with permission. What is writing? There are a number of different ways to describe writing and writing systems. In the world's writing systems, Peter T. Daniels defines writing as: a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer. In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writings Systems, Florian Coulmas defines a writing system as: a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way, with the purpose of recording messages which can be retrieved by everyone who knows the language in question and the rules by virtue of which its units are encoded in the writing system. All writing systems use visible signs with the exception of the raised notation systems used by blind and visually impaired people, such as Braille and Moon. Hence the need to include tactile signs in the above definition. In A History of Writing, Steven Roger Fischer argues that no one definition of writing can cover all the writing systems that exist and have ever existed. Instead he states that a 'complete writing' system should fullfill all the following criteria: , Complete writing must have as its purpose communication; , Complete writing must consist of artificial graphic marks on a durable or electronic surface; , Complete writing must use marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech (the systematic arrangement of significant vocal sounds) or electronic programing in such a way that communication is achieved. Types of writing system , Abjads / Consonant Alphabets Abjads, or consonant alphabets, represent consonants only, or consonants plus some vowels. Full vowel indication (vocalisation) can be added, usually by means of diacritics, but this is not common. Most of abjads, - 243 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 with the exception of Divehi hakura and Ugaritic, are written from right to left. Some scripts, such as Arabic, are used both as an abjad and as an alphabet. , Alphabets Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, represent consonants and vowels. , Syllabic Alphabets / Abugidas Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or abugidas consist of symbols for consonants and vowels. The consonants each have an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or muted by means of diacritics. Vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning of a word or on their own. When two or more consonants occur together, special conjunct symbols are often used which add the essential parts of first letter or letters in the sequence to the final letter. , Syllbaries A syllabary is a phonetic writing system consisting of symbols representing syllables. A syllable is often made up of a consonant plus a vowel or a single vowel. In Japanese, for example, you use different symbols to write ka, ki, ku, ke or ko (か、き、く、け、こ). , Logographic writing systems (Chinese, Hieroglyphs, etc.) The symbols used in these complex scripts may represent both sound and meaning. As a result, these scripts generally include a large number of symbols: anything from several hundred to tens of thousands. In fact there is no theoretical upper limit to the number of symbols in some scripts, such as Chinese. Complex scripts may include the following types of symbol: , Logograms - symbols which represent parts of words or whole words. Some logograms resemble the things they represent and are sometimes known as pictograms or pictographs. , Ideograms - symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas. , Semantic-phonetic compounds - symbols which include a semantic element, which represents or hints at the meaning of the symbol, and a phonetic element, which denotes or hints at the pronunciation. - 244 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Sometimes symbols are used for their phonetic value alone, without regard for their meaning. , Alternative writing systems (fictional and constructed alphabets, and other communication systems) , Undeciphered writing systems - 245 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Numerals in many different writing systems - 246 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Arabic script Origin The Arabic script evolved from the Nabataean Aramaic script. It has been used since the 4th century AD, but the earliest document, an inscription in Arabic, Syriac and Greek, dates from 512 AD. The Aramaic language has fewer consonants than Arabic, so during the 7th century new Arabic letters were created by adding dots to existing letters in order to avoid ambiguities. Further diacritics indicating short vowels were introduced, but are only generally used to ensure the Qur'an was read aloud without mistakes. There are two main types of written Arabic: 1. Classical Arabic - the language of the Qur'an and classical literature. It differs from Modern Standard Arabic mainly in style and vocabulary, some of which is archaic. All Muslims are expected to recite the Qur'an in the original language, however many rely on translations in order to understand the text. 2. Modern Standard Arabic - the universal language of the Arabic-speaking world which is understood by all Arabic speakers. It is the language of the vast majority of written material and of formal TV shows, lectures, etc. Each Arabic speaking country or region also has its own variety of colloquial spoken Arabic. These colloquial varieties of Arabic appear in written form in some poetry, cartoons and comics, plays and personal letters. There are also translations of the bible into most varieties of colloquial Arabic. Arabic has also been written with the Hebrew, Syriac and Latin scripts. Notable Features , The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. Some additional letters are used in Arabic when writing placenames or foreign words containing sounds which do not occur in Standard Arabic, such as /p/ or /g/. , Words are written in horizontal lines from right to left, numerals are written from left to right , Most letters change form depending on whether they appear at the beginning, middle or end of a word, or on their own. (see below) , Letters that can be joined are always joined in both hand-written and printed Arabic. The only exceptions to this rule are crossword puzzles and signs in which the script is written vertically. , The long vowels /a:/, /i:/ and /u:/ are represented by the letters 'alif, yā' and wāw respectively. , Vowel diacritics, which are used to mark short vowels, and other special symbols apppear only in the Qur'ān (Koran). They are also used, though with less consistancy, in other religious texts, in classical poetry, in textbooks children and foreign learners, and occasionally in complex texts to avoid ambiguity. - 247 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sometimes the diacritics are used for decorative purposes in book titles, letterheads, nameplates, etc. Arabic consonants Arabic vowel diacritics and other symbols Arabic numerals and numbers - 248 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The first lot of number names are Modern Standard Arabic. The second lot are Moroccan Arabic. The Arabic language Arabic is a Semitic language with about 221 million speakers in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Cyprus, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebannon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Oman, Palestinian West Bank & Gaza, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, Uzbekistan and Yemen. There are over 30 different varieties of colloquial Arabic which include: , Egyptian - spoken by about 46 million people in Egypt and perhaps the most widely understood variety, thanks to the popularity of Egyptian-made films and TV shows , Algerian - spoken by about 22 million people in Algeria , Moroccan/Maghrebi - spoken in Morocco by about 19.5 million people , Sudanese - spoken in Sudan by about 19 million people , Saidi - spoken by about 19 million people in Egpyt , North Levantine - spoken in Lebannon and Syria by about 15 million people , Mesopotamian - spoken by about 14 million people in Iraq, Iran and Syria , Najdi - spoken in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Syria by about 10 million people For a full list of all varieties of colloquial Arabic click here (format: Excel, 20K). Source: www.ethnologue.com Sample Arabic text Translation - 249 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) - 250 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sutton SignWriting Sutton SignWriting, or SignWriting, was created in 1974 by Valerie Sutton. It uses visual symbols to represent the handshapes, movements, and facial expressions of signed languages. SignWriting is based on Sutton DanceWriting, a notation system for representing dance movements which Valerie Sutton developed in 1972. SignWriting is a "movement-writing-alphabet", which can be used to write any signed language. It is the written form of 27 Sign Languages. The SignWriting alphabet writes the way the body looks, when people sign, just as the Roman alphabet writes the way words sound, when people speak. SignWriting can be used to write American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL) or any other variety of sign language. There are newspapers, magazines, dictionaries, and literature written in SignWriting. It is also used to teach signs and signed language grammar to novice signers, and can be used to teach skilled signers other subjects, such as maths, history or English. A selection of basic ASL SignWriting signs - 251 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sample text in ASL SignWriting (from Goldilocks and the Three Bears) Gloss and English version provided by Marq Thompson - 252 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Korean Origin of writing in Korea Chinese writing has been known in Korea for over 2,000 years. It was used widely during the Chinese occupation of northern Korea from 108 BC to 313 AD. By the 5th century AD, the Koreans were starting to write in Classical Chinese - the earliest known example of this dates from 414 AD. They later devised three different systems for writing Korean with Chinese characters: Hyangchal (??/鄕札), Gukyeol (??/口訣) and Idu (??/吏 ,). These systems were similar to those developed in Japan and were probably used as models by the Japanese. The Idu system used a combination of Chinese characters together with special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used to in official and private documents for many centuries. The Hyangchal system used Chinese characters to represent all the sounds of Korean and was used mainly to write poetry. The Koreans borrowed a huge number of Chinese words, gave Korean readings and/or meanings to some of the Chinese characters and also invented about 150 new characters, most of which are rare or used mainly for personal or place names. The Korean alphabet was invented in 1444 and promulgated it in 1446 during the reign of King Sejong (r.1418-1450), the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty. The alphabet was originally called Hunmin jeongeum, or "The correct sounds for the instruction of the people", but has also been known as Eonmeun (vulgar script) and Gukmeun (national writing). The modern name for the alphabet, Hangeul, was coined by a Korean linguist called Ju Si-gyeong (1876-1914). King Sejong and his scholars probably based some of the letter shapes of the Korean alphabet on other scripts such as Mongolian and 'Phags Pa, and the traditional direction of writing (vertically from right to left) most likely came from Chinese, as did the practice of writing syllables in blocks. Even after the invention of the Korean alphabet, most Koreans who could write continued to write either in Classical Chinese or in Korean using the Gukyeol or Idu systems. The Korean alphabet was associated with people of low status, i.e. women, children and the uneducated. During the 19th and 20th centuries a mixed writing system combining Chinese characters (Hanja) and Hangeul became increasingly popular. Since 1945 however, the importance of Chinese characters in Korean writing has diminished significantly. Since 1949 hanja have not been used at all in any North Korean publications, with the exception of a few textbooks and specialized books. In the late 1960s the teaching of hanja was reintroduced in North Korean schools however and school children are expected to learn 2,000 characters by the end of high school. - 253 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In South Korea school children are expected to learn 1,800 hanja by the end of high school. The proportion of hanja used in Korean texts varies greatly from writer to writer and there is considerable public debate about the role of hanja in Korean writing. Most modern Korean literature and informal writing is written entirely in hangeul, however academic papers and official documents tend to be written in a mixture of hangeul and hanja. Notable features of Hangeul , There are 24 letters (jamo) in the Korean alphabet: 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The letters are combined together into syllable blocks. , The shapes of the the consontants g/k, n, s, m and ng are graphical representations of the speech organs used to pronounce them. Other consonsants were created by adding extra lines to the basic shapes. , The shapes of the the vowels are based on three elements: man (a vertical line), earth (a horizontal line) and heaven (a dot). In modern Hangeul the heavenly dot has mutated into a short line. , Spaces are placed between words, which can be made up of one or more syllables. , The sounds of some consonants change depending on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a syllable. , A number of Korean scholars have proposed an alternative method of writing Hangeul involving writing each letter in a line like in English, rather than grouping them into syllable blocks, but their efforts have been met with little interest or enthusiasm. , In South Korea hanja are used to some extent in Korean texts. , Korean can be written in vertical columns running from top to bottom and right to left, or in horizontal lines running from left to right. Used to write Korean, a language spoken by about 63 million people in South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The relationship between Korean and other languages is not known, though some linguists believe it to be a member of the Altaic family of languages. Grammatically Korean is very similar to Japanese and about half its vocabulary comes from Chinese. The Hangeul alphabet (??) - 254 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Note on the transliteration of Korean There are a number different ways to write Korean in the Latin alphabet. The methods shown above are: 1. (first row) the official South Korean transliteration system, which was introduced in July 2000. You can find further details at www.mct.go.kr. 2. (second row) the McCune-Reischauer system, which was devised in 1937 by two American graduate students, George McCune and Edwin Reischauer, and is widely used in Western publications. For more details of this system see: Sample of in Korean Translation - 255 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) - 256 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Mongolian alphabets (Монгол) Origin The Mongolian alphabet was adapted from the Uighur alphabet in the 12th Century. The Uighur alphabet was a derivative of the Sogdian alphabet, which ultimately came from Aramaic. Between the 13th and 15th Centuries, Mongolian was also written with Chinese characters, the Arabic alphabet and a script derived from Tibetan called Phags-pa. As a result of pressure from the Soviet Union, Mongolia adopted the Latin alphabet in 1931 and the Cyrillic alphabet in 1937. In 1941 the Mongolian government passed a law to abolish the Mongolian alphabet. Since 1994, the Mongolian government has been trying to bring back the Mongolian alphabet and it is starting to be used more widely and is now taught in schools. In Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China the traditonal Mongolian alphabet is still used. Notable features , This is a phonemic alphabet with separate letters for consonants and vowels. , Written vertically from top to bottom and from left to right. This is very unusual as all other scripts that are written vertically (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) are written from right to left , The letters have a number of different shapes, the choice of which depends on the position of a letter in a word and which letter follows it. Used to write Mongolian, an Altaic language spoken by approximately 5 million people in Mongolia, China, Afghanistan and Russia. There are a number of closely related varieties of Mongolian: Khalkha or Halha, the national language of Mongolia, and Oirat, Chahar and Ordos, which are spoken mainly in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China. Other languages considered part of the Mongolian language family, but separate from Mongolian, include Buryat and Kalmyk, spoken in Russia and Moghul or Mogul, spoken in Afghanistan. Traditional Mongolian alphabet Vowels - 257 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Consonants Consonant/vowel combinations - 258 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Numerals The first set of numbers (tegen, nigen, etc.) are Classical Mongolian, the others are modern Mongolian. Punctuation Sample of Mongolian written in the traditional alphabet - 259 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Cyrillic alphabet for Mongolian (Khalkha) Sample Mongolian text in the Cyrillic alphabet Transliteration - 260 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Khün bür törzh mendlekhdd erkh ëolööte?, adilkhan ner törte?, izhil erkhte? ba?dag. Oyuun ukhaan, nandin ëanar zayaasan khün gegë öör khoorondoo akhan düügi?n üzel sanaagaar khar'tsakh uëirta?. Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) - 261 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Devanāgarī alphabet Origin The Nāgarī (lit. 'of the city') or Devanāgarī ('divine Nagari') alphabet descended from the Brahmi script sometime around the 11th century AD. It was originally developed to write Sanksrit but was later adapted to write many other languages. Notable Features , Some scholars use the term alphasyllabary to describe Devanāgarī, while others call it an abugida. , Consonant letters carry an inherent vowel which can be altered or muted by means of diacritics or matra. , Vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to. This feature is common to most of the alphabets of South and South East Asia. , When consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used. , The order of the letters is based on articulatory phonetics. Used to write: Awadhi, Bagheli, Balti, Bateri, Bhili, Bhojpuri, Bihari, Braj bhasha, Chhattisgarhi, Garhwali, Gondi, Harauti, Hindi, Ho, Kachchi, Kanauji, Kankan, Kashmiri, Konkan, Limbu, Marwari, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Sanskrit, Santali, Sherpa, Sindhi Devanāgarī alphabet Other symbols - 262 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Consonants A selection of conjunct consonants Numerals - 263 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Japanese Hiragana Origin Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters, as shown below. Hiragana were originally called onnade or 'women's hand' as were used mainly by women - men wrote in kanji and katakana. By the 10th century, hiragana were used by everybody. The word hiragana means "oridinary syllabic script". In early versions of hiragana there were often many different characters to represent the same syllable, however the system was eventually simplified so that there was a one-to-one relationship between spoken and written syllables. The present orthography of hiragana was codified by the Japanese government in 1946. The hiragana syllabary In each column the rōmaji appears on the left, the hiragana symbols in the middle and the kanji from which they developed on the right. There is some dispute about which kanji the hiragana developed from. The symbols for 'wi' and 'we' were made obsolete by the Japanese Minsitry of Education in 1946 as part of its language reforms. The symbols 'ha', 'he' and 'wo' are pronounced 'wa', 'e' and 'o' respecitvely when used as grammatical particles. Additional sounds are represented using diacritics or combinations of syllables: - 264 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Characteristics and usage of hiragana The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obselete. Hiragana are also sometimes written above or along side kanji to indicate pronunciation, especially if the pronunication is obscure or non-standard. Hiragana used in this way are known as furigana or ruby. In horizontal texts, the furigana appear above the kanji and in vertical texts, the furigana appear on the right of the kanji. In newspapers it is a legal requirement for furigana to be attached to kanji which are not included in the official list of the 1,945 most frequently-used kanji. Newspapers in fact rarely use kanji not included in this list. Furigana in action The furigana in the following text are the small red symbols. - 265 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Hiragana are sometimes used to write words which would normally written with katakana to make them appear more "feminine", particularly in comic books and cartoons for young girls. In children's video games texts are often written entirely in hiragana or katakana. - 266 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Japanese Katakana Origin The katakana syllabary was derived from abbreviated Chinese characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century. At first there were many different symbols to represent one syllable of spoken Japanese, but over the years the system was streamlined. By the 14th century, there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written syllables. The word katakana "part (of kanji) syllabic script". The "part" refers to the fact that katakana characters represent parts of kanji. Characteristics and usage of katakana The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and was originally considered "men's writing". Since the 20th century, katakana have been used mainly to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words, foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English). Before the 20th century all foreign loanwords were written with kanji. The Japanese katakana syllabary In each column the rōmaji appears on the left, the katakana symbols in the middle and the kanji from which the symbols were derived on the right. The symbols for 'wi' and 'we' were made obsolete by the Japanese Minsitry of Education in 1946 as part of its language reforms. Additional sounds are represented by diacritics or combinations of syllables: - 267 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The katakana for with the initial "v" are recent creations. This sound used to written with the ones with the initial "b" and some people still prefer to use those katakana. - 268 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Chinese , Origins of writing in China , The Chinese writing system , Evolution of characters , Types of characters , Chinese numerals , Simplified characters , Chinese links , Recommended books , Phonetic transcription of Chinese , Braille for Chinese , Spoken Chinese Origins of writing in China Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China during the latter half of the 2nd millenium BC and that there is no evidence to suggest the transmission of writing from elsewhere. The earliest recognisable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BC (Shang dynasty) and were inscribed on ox scapulae and turtle shells - "oracle bones". In 1899 a scholar from Beijing named Wang Yirong noticed symbols that looked like writing on some "dragon bones" which he had been prescribed by a pharmacy. At that time "dragon bones" were often used in Chinese medicine and were usually animal fossils. Many more "oracle bones" were found in the ruins of the Shang capital near Anyang in the north of Henan province. The script on these "oracle bones" is known as 甲骨文 (ji?g?wén) - literally "shell bone writing". They were used for divination, a process which involved heating them then inspecting the resulting cracks to determine to answers to one's questions. The bones were then inscribed with details of the questions and the answers. Most of the questions involved hunting, warfare, the weather and the selection of auspicious days for ceremonies. Further information about the oracle bones: - 269 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 A collection of oracle bones in the National Palace Museum near Taipei. Recently archaeologists in China have unearthed many fragments of neolithic pottery, the oldest of which date from about 4800 BC, inscribed with symbols which could be a form of writing. None of these symbols resemble any of the Shang characters and the likelyhood of deciphering them is remote given the paucity of material. The Chinese writing system Chinese is written with characters known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi). Each character represents a syllable of spoken Chinese and also has a meaning. The characters were originally pictures of people, animals or other things but over the centuries they have become increasingly stylised and no longer resemble the things the represent. Many of the characters are actually compounds of two or more characters How many characters? The Chinese writing system an open-ended one, meaning that there is no upper limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters is sufficient to read Modern Standard Chinese. To read Classical Chinese though, you need to be familiar with about 6,000 characters. Usage Characters can be used on their own, in combination with other characters or as part of other characters. Click here to see how this works for the character for horse: 馬 Strokes Chinese characters are written with the following twelve basic strokes: A character may consist of between 1 and 84 stokes. The strokes are always written in the same direction and there is a set order to write the strokes of each character. In dictionaries, characters are ordered partly by the number of stokes they contain. - 270 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 When writing Chinese, every character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how many strokes it contains. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you not only have to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together. Homophones There are approximately 1,700 possible syllables in Mandarin, which compares with over 8,000 in English. As a result, there are many homophones - syllables which sound the same but mean different things. These are distinguished in written Chinese by using different characters for each one. Not all the following characters are pronounced with the same tone, so to Chinese ears they sound different. To Westerner ears however they all sound the same. These syllables can be distinguished in speech from the context and because most of them usually appear in combination with other syllables. If you look closely, you will notice that some of the characters above have parts in common. These parts give you a clue to how to pronounce the characters. More examples Compound words Chinese verbs and adjectives generally consist of one character (syllable) but nouns often consist of two, three or more characters (syllables): - 271 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 More examples Simplified characters In an effort to increase literacy, about 2,000 of the characters used in China have been simplified. These simplified characters are also used in Singapore, but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia the traditional characters are still used. Here are some examples (simplified characters in red): More examples Chinese characters, with some modifications, are also used in written Japanese and Korean, and were once used to write Vietnamese. [ contents ] Sample text in Chinese Hàny? pīnyīn transliteration Rénrén shēng ér zìyóu, zài zūnyán hé quánlì shàng yīlù píngd?ng. Tāmen fùy?u l?xìng hé liángxīn, bìng yīng y? xīongdì guānxì de jīngshén hùxiāng dùidài. Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) - 272 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 How the Chinese writing system works The illustrations below of the various ways the character for horse is used in Chinese give you an idea of how the Chinese script works. Evolution of the character You can see below how the character for horse has evolved since it first appeared in the Oracle Bone Script during the Shang Dynasty (c. 1400-1200 BC). Further information about the evolution of chinese characters Basic meaning The character is pronounced m? in Mandarin and máh in Cantonese. It means horse and is also used as a family name. Usage in compound words The character is also used in horse-related compound words such as: Radicals and phonetics About 90% of Chinese characters contain a radical or bùsh?u, which gives you a clue to the meaning of a character, and a phonetic component, which hints at how to pronounce the character. The character for horse is used both as a phonetic compontent and as a radical. The charcter for horse is used as a phonetic component in the following characters: The charcter for horse is used as a radical in the following characters: - 273 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Further information about types of Chinese characters. Usage in the transliteration of foreign words The character for horse is also used for its phonetic value alone when writing foreign loanwords or the names of foreign people or places. The few foreign loanwords that exist in Chinese come mainly from English but the word m?hū comes from the Sanskrit moha - ignorance. The syllables of m?hū are usually doubled to make it m?mahūhu. This is a common way to intensify the meaning of adjectives. - 274 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Simplified Chinese characters The Simplified script (a.k.a. Simplified Chinese) was officially adopted in the People's Republic of China in 1949 in an effort to eradicate illiteracy. The simplified script is also used in Singapore but the older traditional characters are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia. About 2,000 characters have been simplified in a number of different ways (the simplified characters are shown in red): Many simplified characters are based on commonly used abbreviations: Others retain only one part from the traditional character. Some replace the phonetic element of the traditional character with a simpler one that is pronounced in the same or in a similar way: In some cases, several traditional characters are represented by one simplified character: Recently the traditional characters have started to make a come back, particularly in southern China. - 275 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Blissymbolics Origin Blissymbolics were developed by Charles K. Bliss (1897-1985). Bliss originally called his invention "Semantography" and intended for it to be used as a universal written language which would enable speakers of different languages to commuicate with one another. Since 1971 Blissymbolics have been used mainly as a communication aid for people with communication, language and learning difficulties. Such people have limited or no ability to use ordinary spoken and/or written language but manage to learn Blissymbolics. Notable features , Blissymbolics consists of over 2,000 basic symbols which can be combined together to create a huge variety of new symbols. , The symbols can be formed into sentences and their order is based on English word order , The symbols are made up of simple shapes designed to be easy to write. , Blissymbolics are used in over 33 countries. A selection of Blissymbolics symbols - 276 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 - 277 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Tengwar Origin J.R.R. Tolkien created many languages throughout his life. He wrote in one of his letters that the tales of Middle-earth (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, etc) grew from these languages, rather than the languages being created for use in the stories. Tolkien also created a number of different alphabets to write his languages - Tengwar, or Feanorian letters, is the one which appears most frequently in his work. The way the vowels are indicated in Tengwar resembles Tibetan and other Brahmi-derived scripts. Notable features , Written from left to right in horizontal lines. , Tengwar is written is a number of different ways known as "modes". For example there is a Quenya mode, a Sindarin mode and even an English mode. The phonetic values of the consonants (tengwa) and the ways vowels are indicated varies from mode to mode. , Vowels are indicated by diacritics (tehtar) which appear above the consonant which precedes them (in Quenya mode) or above the consonant which follows them (in Sindarin mode). When vowels stand on their own or come at the beginning of a word, the diacritics appear over a special vowel holder. Long vowels are always attached to a vowel holder. , Consonants are doubled by adding a wavy line below them. , When followed by a vowel, the letters /s/ /ss/ and /r/ are written with the tengwa silme nuquerna, esse nuquerna and rómen respectively. Otherwise these letters are written with the the tengwa silme, esse and óre. , When the letter /s/ follows another consonant it is written with a little downward hook. Used to write A number of different languages of Middle-Earth, such as: Quenya, Qenya or High-Elven, the most prominent language of the Amanya branch of the Elvish language family. Tolkien complied the "Qenya Lexicon", his first list of Elvish words, in 1915 at the age of 23 and continued to refine the language throughout his life. It is based mainly on Finnish, but also partly on Greek and partly on Latin. Sindarin, the language of the Grey-elves or Sindar. Tolkien based Sindarin on Welsh and originally called it gnomish. Sylvan, Westron, etc - 278 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Tengwar can also be used to write English, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Swedish, Polish, Esperanto and a variety of other languages. Quenya mode Consonants Sindarin mode - 279 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Consonants Vowels (same for Quenya and Sindarin modes) Punctuation marks Numerals - 280 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Pronunciation of Quenya Quenya pronounciation provided by Joshua Boniface Sample text (Quenya) Transliteration / Translation Elen síla lumenn' omentielvo / A star shines on the hour of our meeting Sample text (Sindarin) Transliteration / Translation Ennyn Durin Aran Moria: pedo mellon a minno. The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter. (inscription on the Gate of Moria) - 281 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Braille Braille is writing system which enables blind and partially sighted people to read and write through touch. It was invented by Louis Braille (1809-1852), a French teacher of the blind. It consists of patterns of raised dots arranged in cells of up to six dots in a 3 x 2 configuration. Each cell represents a letter, numeral or punctuation mark. Some frequently used words and letter combinations also have their own single cell patterns. There are a number of different versions of Braille: , Grade 1, which consists of the 26 standard letters of the alphabet and punctuation. It is only used by people who are first starting to read Braille. , Grade 2, which consists of the 26 standard letters of the alphabet, punctuation and contractions. The contractions are employed to save space because a Braille page cannot fit as much text as a standard printed page. Books, signs in public places, menus, and most other Braille materials are written in Grade 2 Braille. , Grade 3, which is used only in personal letters, diaries, and notes. It is a kind of shorthand, with entire words shortened to a few letters. Examples: brl=braille. bl=blind. gd=good. Braille has been adapted to write many different languages, including Chinese, and is also used for musical and mathematical notation. Braille - 282 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sample text in Braille (Grade 1) Transliteration: "Be kind to others" Sample text and other information provided by Samuel Barnes - 283 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Braille for Chinese When Braille is used to write Chinese, it represents the sounds of the language rather than the characters. It is written from left to right in horizontal lines running from top to bottom. Each syllable is made up of three Braille letters: one for the initial, one for the final and one for the tone, though the tones marks are rarely used. Words are separated by spaces. Where there is no possibility of confusion, some initials are written in the same way. For example g and j, and h and x in Mandarin Braille. Braille for Mandarin Source: www.braille.ch/pschin-e.htm - 284 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Braille for Cantonese Source: www.hadley-school.org/Web_Site/8_d_chinese_braille_alphabet.asp - 285 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 12480 Alphanumeric System 12480 was designed in 2002 by Bradley Tetzlaff from Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA. It was invented for both use in a computer game named Ecclemony (1E78) and as a basis for constructed languages. It was also designed to show how a true alphanumeric* writing system looks and works. 12480 is not based upon phonemes, but rather upon binary. It achieves complete universality with an optimal amount of applications from its binary basis. A writing system based on phonemes will only last as long as the human voice is used. 12480's binary foundation will last as long as numbers exist. * "Alphanumeric" is used here to describe the combination of an alphabet and a numeral system. Notable features , 12480 is composed of various scripts, each of which could be considered a separate writing system on their own. Each script has its own specialities and advantages. , Each script is used to represent either a word or a number by default. Visit 's default is. , Each alphanumeric has both a consonant and a vowel assigned to it. They can be used interchangeably except for the initial phoneme--An initial consonant represents a word and an initial vowel represents a number. , The punctuation is limited to break symbols, grouping symbols, and radix indicators, but it may be extended in future versions. , Words are typically separated with a circle instead of a space. A space is used to group symbols in radixes lower than 16 into hexadecimal segments. , 12480 is usually written from top to bottom and from left to right. A baseline underline is used to show how the text is oriented. Used to write Binary (radix 2), quadnary (radix 4), hexadecimal (radix 16), radix 256, and all other numeral systems based on a power of two. Anything that can be expressed with a numeric value can be written using 12480. - 286 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 - 287 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sample texts - 288 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Betamaze alphabet The Betamaze alphabet is the creation by Terrana Cliff (rillani@yahoo.com), an American art student in California. It is designed to draw mazes, which Terrana has been interested in for a long time. Terrana would like to encourage other people to find new (perhaps more artful) ways to meet the simple demands of the concept. Notable features , All the letters connect together so they can form paths. To make sure this happens, they all fit within a 3x3 grid. Letters are made from black squares and triangles in the grid. To allow the paths to connect, every letter has white space on the sides of the 3x3 grid. , Paths can branch, terminate, and come together. The locations on the 3x3 grid that are not used for connecting are used for giving each letter its shape. Within each letter, the black space is used to close or alter the path between the white connection spaces. Some letters have more black space in the grid than others. Some letters only allow a 3-way path, some are 2-way, some turn the path 90 degrees, some close in all directions, and some open to all directions. , Path structure can be altered without having to alter spelling, word order, etc. Every letter has a unique shape, unlike in the english alphabet, where some letters have the same shape (m and w are the same shape, just vertically flipped). Each letter can be turned upsidedown or flipped without a change in its meaning, so the direction of the path can be changed. The Betamaze alphabet Sample text/maze - 289 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Transliteration I think; therefore I am. - 290 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Ihathvé Sabethired Ihathvé Sabethired is the creation of Jason Liekhus. It developed from an older alphabet called Ihadva, which Jason based on of Arabic and Tengwar. The script is used to write a language called Sabethir, meaning "Eastern Language", which Jason invented for use in a fictional world. Noteable features , Ihathvé Sabethired is an abjad which is written fully vocalised. , It includes a number of ideographs for verb conjugations, some conjunctions and pronouns. , It is cursive and is written from right to left Ihathvé Sabethired script - 291 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sample text - 292 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Transliteration Erthéhyathra eratidhiahythuelyared arethoved aregoled. Aceidhia eratisevuin ma?dya i sirvya, orvydhia erthéhydavenin saradén. Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) Longer sample text (Tower of Babel) - 293 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sunscript Sunscript is the creation of Colin Williams. He created it when he had nothing better to do in school and based its appearance partly on Arabic and partly on some of the Indian syllabic alphabets. Colin uses Sunscript to write "navthāladasa?", a language he invented after the creating the alphabet. The language is based primarily on German and Latin but has been distorted almost totally out of recognition so as to sound more like an Indian language. Notable features , Sunscript is a fully vocalized abjad , It is cursive and written left to right in horizontal lines , Vowels are represented with diacritics, however; the vowel "a" can be simplified if it occurs in more than one leter in a row by drawing a line between consonants (e.g. the example in the name of the language). , The language uses a system of consonant-vowel groups. The first group takes the first vowel, the second the first and second vowels, the third the first three, etc. The letters "r", "lz", "dh" and "c" are erroneous letters and take slightly different vowels than their greater group. Sample text in Sunscript - 294 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 - 295 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 How to Create a Language - ? Pablo David Flores - pablo-flores@sinectis.com.ar. Used with permission. If you enjoy this, Pablo would love to get a postcard from you. Mail it to: Pablo Flores J. J. Paso 6038 2007AKT Rosario Argentina How to create a language by Pablo David Flores (partly based on Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit) [All the pages of How to create a language can be downloaded for offline browsing in a .zip file. That doesn't include multimedia content. A big consolidated page with all the topics is also available for reading, and is a bit more suitable for printing.] These pages are intended for people interested in creating languages for fictional purposes (or just for fun) and in linguistics in general. They're not meant to be an online linguistics course, but you sure can learn quite a few things about linguistics by reading them, the same way I, not being a linguist, learned from others. They're also not supposed to be a guide to the creation of auxilliary or international languages such as Esperanto. The pages are divided into two main fields: phonology and grammar. These in turn cover topics going from phoneme theory and phonotactics to typology, morphology and syntax, with interspersed comments on orthographical representation, diachronical change of both grammar and phonology, and methods of word generation. The full table of contents is available elsewhere. Technical terms are often used -- correctly and clearly, I hope -- but no piece of jargon is left unexplained. Before starting, I'd like to give the credit deserved to Mark Rosenfelder, who gave me the first tool to engage myself in serious language development. The structure and main points on these pages are based on his work, although I have tried not to copy everything (which would be quite silly of me), but instead give some advice and go deeper into some details he didn't mention in the Language Construction Kit. Some material has also been drawn from the Model Languages newsletter, run by Jeffrey Henning. Fellow conlangers and helpful readers suggested a lot of corrections and useful additions to the original version of this document. Some explanations have been adapted from posts to the Conlang list. Thank you all! I've used examples from, or mentioned, a good couple dozens of languages, both natural and fictional, the latter by me or by others. I have tried to be as accurate as I can; it all depends on my sources, which are sometimes books from a library that I took back - 297 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 months or years ago, so I have to cite from memory. This also explains the mentions of "an African language" whose name I can't remember, and the somewhat dubitative nature of some statements. Nevertheless, I have a good memory and I believe every piece of information is correct as far as I know; I haven't included conjectures or guesses which aren't noted as such. If someone finds anything that seems to be a mistake, or wishes to make a suggestion, or wants a particular topic to be discussed here, please write to me. These pages do not require any plug-in or fancy gadget in order to be viewed correctly (not Flash, not Shockwave, not even Java). However, it is recommended that you use a browser with the ability to interpret Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS specification). Though not required, these pages are compatible with Opera, which provides support for certain innovations in the standard allowing for easier navigation. Also, a couple of topics are accompanied by sound samples in MP3 format, which was chosen since it produces compact files that can be listened to, recorded and/or modified with software tools anyone can access for free. These samples are not indispensable for the comprehension of the rest of the content. Sounds Sounds are the way a language first becomes real in the physical world, so we'll start talking about them. Some people believe that a letter in their alphabet is the same as a sound, or that all sounds in all languages are the same (as the sounds in their own language), only with different 'accents'. Why this is false can be easily explained and understood by most people. I won't mix sound with representation or transliteration, here, and I'll give examples of sounds in languages that may be familiar to you just in order to simplify things. Other languages need not use the same sounds as one's own, or pronounce them the same way. However, we'll have to stop at a fairly abstract topic first, in order to move on confidently then. We'll talk about phones (real sounds) and phonemes (the sounds in a language as seen by a linguist). PHONES AND PHONEMES The immense (actually infinitely dense) range of possible sounds that a human being can produce are called phones. Each particular position of the lips, tongue, and other features in our organs of speech can be thought of a point in a multidimensional continuum. Given two positions of the tongue with respect to the interior of the mouth, there is always a position in the middle, and so on. Remember the real numbers from school? However, we group sounds into prototypical examples of themselves, to study them better and more easily, and we call each of these a phone, a single sound that can be described by certain features (for example: the tongue touches the teeth, vocal chords are vibrating, etc.). - 298 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 In a particular language, we'll find a lot of phones, but those are not the object of our study. We need to distinguish the sounds that are distinguishable by the speakers of the language, i. e. that they conceptualize as different sounds. These are called phonemes. A phoneme can be thought of as a family of related sounds which are regarded as the same phonetic unit by the speakers. The different sounds that are considered part of the same phoneme are called allophones or allophonic variants. Each allophone is said to be a realization of the given phoneme. /X/), while In phonetic symbols, phonemic transcriptions are surrounded by slashes (phonetic transcriptions (those who distinguish the different phones that are allophones of the phoneme) are surrounded by square brackets ([X]). The standard phonetic symbols that are used by most people nowadays belong to a set, the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). They are a lot, and you'd need a special font to see them if I used them here, so I (as most people that have to handle IPA symbols in the Web or e-mail) use a transliteration that allows IPA to be represented by 7-bit ASCII characters. There are several kinds of ASCII-IPA renderings. In this site I tend towards a version of the X- SAMPA scheme, as employed customarily in the CONLANG e-mail list (see a chart). If you want to listen to the sounds in the IPA, try IPAHelp. Back on topic... The allophones of a phoneme need not be similar sounds (from one's own point of view, that is). For example, the Spanish phoneme /b/ has two allophones, [b] (like the English b) and [β] (a bilabial fricative, similar to English v but with air blown between the two lips). These are similar, related sounds. On the other hand, Japanese /h/ has three allophones, [h], [ç] (more or less like the sound in 'huge', or the German Ich-Laut), and [φ] (like /f/, but blown between the two lips). These are quite different sounds. What makes them allophones is that Japanese speakers treat them as the same sound (phoneme). Note that in German, for example, [ç] and [h] are allophones of different phonemes, so they can distinguish words. Allophones of a given phoneme are in complementary distribution. This means that which allophone appears in a particular position depends on the position, and position determines one and only one allophone to be present, and not any of the others. Coming back to our examples, Spanish /b/ is [β] in all positions except after /m/ and when clearly starting a word (for example, at the beginning of a sentence); it's [b] otherwise. You can't have [mβ] or [ab], because only [mb] and [aβ] are possible. This all boils down to a fact that defines what phonemes are: they are sounds that can make words different. If two sounds are allophones, you can't produce two words exchanging them, because they are in fact the same; if you pronounce one where the other should be, it'll sound bad to native speakers, but they won't hear a different word. You'll see more of this afterwards, in other sections, since I'll keep repeating myself. If you don't understand the concept of phoneme, you'd better keep trying. VOWELS VS. CONSONANTS - 299 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 The sounds used in any language can be divided (generally) into consonants and vowels. This division is not necessarily universal; in many languages some "consonants" like r, m, n, l, are actually vowels (this is, they are treated as syllable nuclei, can be stressed, or lengthened, etc.). For example, Sanskrit has syllabic l and r (as in Rgveda); and Japanese syllable-final n is syllabic (actually "moraic", but that's a distinction I won't explain here). The division between vowels and consonants is a matter of closure: the more closed the air passages are, the more consonantic a sound is. We will examine the different kinds of sounds using this scale. CONSONANTS Sounds vary along dimensions. These represent ranges of possible features, or yes-no features. Each language has a phonology with one or more dimensions within which sounds are placed and recognized. One important dimension is the degree of closure. According to this, consonants can be classified into: , Stops: the airflow is completely stopped for a moment, and then released, to produce the sound. The sounds p, k, b, d in English pin, king, ban, dad are stops. , Fricatives: the airflow is not completely stopped, but it causes an audible friction. For example: English s, sh, v, German ch as in Achtung, Ich, München. , Approximants: the airflow is barely modified at all. For example: English w, l, r, y. Also an affricate is a stop plus a fricative occurring in the same place of articulation, like English ch (which can be analyzed as t + sh) or German z (pronounced /ts/). A click is a sound produced by placing the tongue in position for a stop while there's a second closure somewhere else, accumulating pressure and then releasing the closure (see below). Then there's the place of articulation, this is, where the obstruction or modulation of the airflow occurs. According to this, consonants can be: , Labial: formed by the lips (w, p), or by the lips and the tongue (f, also called labio-dental) , Dental: between the teeth and the tongue (th, French or Spanish t) , Alveolar: in the alveola, the place right behind the teeth (s, English t, Spanish r) , Alveolo-palatal: further back from the teeth (sh, ch), with the body of the tongue retracted towards the palate. , Palatal: at the top of the palate (Russian ch, Spanish ñ as in niño) , Retroflex: with the tip of tongue curled backwards, its underside touching the border of the hard palate (American r, in many dialects; in Sanskrit there's a complete series of retroflex consonants (which are called cerebral), which parallels the alveolar series t, d, n, s). , Velar: at the back of the mouth (k, ng as in sing) - 300 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Uvular: way back in the mouth, at the uvula (Arabic q, French r) [also called post-velar] , Glottal: back in the throat (h, glottal stop as in uh-oh). Some other dimensions are: , Voicing: whether the vocal chords are vibrating (voiced) or not (voiceless or unvoiced). Sounds like p, t, f are voiceless, while b, d, v are voiced. , Nasalization: whether the air goes through the nose (nasal) or not. The sounds m, n, ? (ng) are nasals. , Aspiration: (this applies mostly to stops) whether there's a puff of air when releasing the airflow. Initial English p, t, k as in paw, toe, kite are aspirated (while the same sounds in spawn, star, sky are unaspirated). , Palatalization: whether the middle part of the tongue is raised towards the palate (the top of the mouth) when pronouncing the consonants. English doesn't have palatalized consonants (see below), but Russian has a whole series. , Glottalization: whether there's a glottal closure together with the main sound. English doesn't have glottalized consonants (see below), but Georgian has a whole series. Let's examine these contrasts. I call them contrasts because that's what they are: things that may be distinguished. Linguistics is based on contrasts, on differences. If a language doesn't distinguish one sound from another, then it's the same sound for all practical purposes, and in that way it should be studied. Voicing is a very usual contrast in Western Indoeuropean languages, not so in many other language families, where this distinction is not made (so in fact p and b, or t and d, are regarded as exactly the same sound). In English you might say that /p/ is a phoneme, with two phonetic realizations or allophones, [p?] (aspirated, at the beginning of words) and [p] (non-aspirated). In Hindi, where aspirated and non-aspirated stops are regarded as different families, /p/ and /p?/ are two phonemes. Nasalization is quite a common contrast in many languages. The most common nasals are voiced stops, but some languages do have voiceless nasals, and a few have nasalized fricatives. If you can't imagine how to pronounce a voiceless nasal, take into account that an m is actually a nasalized b, so a voiceless m is a nasalized p: pronounce a p while you let air through your nose, and you're done. Many people in fact nasalize consonants (and vowels) after a nasal, although they don't notice it: the distinction is usually not phonemic (it can't be used to distinguish a word from another one). We have already talked about aspiration. A language can have aspirated stops, non- aspirated ones, or both; and it can make the distinction phonemic (like Hindi) or just phonetic (like English). Palatalization is a common device in languages. A consonant is palatalized by raising the middle part of the tongue towards the top of the mouth. Normally the palatalized - 301 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 consonant should be alveolar in the first place. The result is something that sounds like /j/ sound (as in yet, new, pure). Russian has a distinct series the original consonant plus a of palatalized consonants, transliterated with an apostrophe (t', l', d'). Spanish has two palatalized consonants, ll (only pronounced this way in Spain, not in Latin America) and ñ /J/ (as in año), also found in French, written gn (as in baigner). Glottalization is performed by closing the glotis, and opening it at the same time you pronounce the sound. The glotis is at the back of the throat. Glottalized sounds are usually stops. You can produce a glottalization by producing a glottal stop in the middle of the pronunciation of the original consonant, and then releasing the air in the two closures at the same time. But what's a glottal stop? In English, a glottal stop is usually pronounced as a pause before a word that begins with a vowel, especially when the previous one ends in a vowel too, as in uh-oh. German always places a glottal stop before an initial vowel. The glottal stop is not phonemic in English or German, but it's quite a common phoneme in other languages, like Hawai'an (the apostrophe ' represents /?/, the glottal stop). Glottalized consonants are also called glottalic egressive or ejective. Georgian and Quechua have a complete series of glottalized/ejective voiceless stops. There are also glottalic ingressive consonants, also known as implossives. Those are produced by making a sound, but just before opening the mouth also rapidly lowering the glottis to produce a hollow sounding effect. Some African languages, among others, have implossive consonants, which are also voiced stops. There are also some contrasts I didn't mention before: A lateral consonant is one in which the airflow doesn't go between the tongue and another spot, but instead leaves that space closed and lets air pass through the sides (lateral release). Some languages, like Welsh, have a voiceless lateral. The most common lateral we know is l (which is usually alveolar and voiced). However, English /l/ has two variants, one alveolar and one velar [L\], the latter occurring in syllable-final position, especially in clusters, as in milk. This 'dark L' is an independent phoneme in other languages. If you use only the two main dimensions (degree of closure and place of articulation), and simplify a bit, you can show the distribution of consonants in English with a grid like this (in a common variation of SAMPA): labial lab-dnt dental alv alv-pal velar glottal stop p b t d k g fricative f v θ ð s z S Z h affricate tS dZ approximant w r l j nasal m n ? - 302 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 (where /w/ is actually labiovelar, not just labial; /j/ is palatal, not alveolo-palatal; and /r/ may be alveolar or retroflex according to dialect). NEW CONSONANTS How do you invent new consonants for your language? The first step should be deciding which contrasts you will use. English three places of articulation (POAs) for stops, which are usually the reference frame, and distinguishes voicing for most consonants and nasalization for stops. The important thing is that the phonology of a language is a system. Consonants which are out of the system (because they use exceptional contrasts, for example) tend to be left out and disappear or are merged with similar consonants. For example, English couldn't possibly have a glottalized consonant, because it would use a contrast not found elsewhere in the language and wouldn't survive long. Exceptions are possible, of course, but try not to abuse them. If you have an exotic sound, you should have others of the same kind. On the other hand, you probably shouldn't invent many strange sounds; you must know how to pronounce each of them, and be able to read your language fluently. (This also involves a careful planning of the transliteration scheme.) Once you have decided the contrasts you'll be using, set up the grid and fill in the gaps. You'll probably have to invent new symbols or digraphs for some letters (see Writing). If you decide there are too many consonants, delete a series, or just some members. You don't have to occupy all the places in the grid (English, as you may notice, leaves lots of empty spaces). For example, you might have voiced and voiceless stops, but only voiceless fricatives and voiced nasals. English only has two affricate consonants, voiced j and voiceless ch, and on the same position. Your language could have affricates in all positions where there's a stop and a fricative; for example pf (found in German, as in Pferd), ts (also in German, written z as in zehn, and in Japanese, as in tsukuru, though it's just an allophonic variant of /t/), tth /tθ/ (not in any language that I know, but possible), tsh (ch), kkh, etc. You can complete a series of consonants, for example the English fricatives: there are no bilabial or velar fricatives (there's no reason why there should be any; but there's no reason why there couldn't, either). An unvoiced bilabial fricative /φ/ sounds like an f pronounced by letting air out between the lips; and an unvoiced velar fricative /x/ is just the sound represented in Spanish by j (as in Juan, viejo), or the sound of Hebrew hhet, sometimes transliterated kh. Some languages have both unvoiced /x/ and voiced /γ/. Spanish voiced stops between vowels become fricatives, though the distinction is not phonemic, so b, d, g in cabo, cada, soga are actually a bilabial fricative, a dental fricative (/ð/, English soft th), and a velar fricative (/γ/). If you want to go right into it, you can add a contrast not used in English, and create a series of palatalized consonants. Or use aspiration as a phonemic distinction. Or even lateralizing or retroflexing consonants. As Mark Rosenfelder says, the key to a - 303 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 naturalistic language is to add (or substract) dimensions. Being into the study of Quechua, he mentions that it has not one, but three series of stops: aspirated, non-aspirated, and glottalized; but it doesn't distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants. So, for a Quechua speaker, the p in pat and the b in bat would be the same sound (phoneme), but the p in pat and the one in spat would be clearly different. /p t k/. Some sounds are more common than others. Most languages have the simple stops From what I've been able to gather, the average language has twice as much consonants as vowels. The simplest systems belong to Hawaiian, with only eight consonants and five vowels, and Rotokas, with six consonants and five vowels. Quechua has a lot of consonants but it's only got three vowels (/a i u/, which are the most common). The most complex systems are those found in the Khoisan linguistic family; the !X? language (also written !Kung) has 141 phonemes, with 92 consonants, 47 of which are clicks. (!X? is pronounced as a glottalized dental click followed by a nasalized /u/). VOWELS Vowels are produced exactly the same way as consonants; they're not different in essential ways from consonants. The main thing is that the airflow is almost not disturbed while passing through the mouth; it's only modulated by the position of the tongue and other parts of the vocal organs. Also, vowels are usually voiced (some languages have voiceless vowels, especially at the end of words; they sound exactly as if you pronounce /h/ with the tongue and lips in position for the vowel). Vowels can vary along these dimensions: , Height: how open the mouth is. Vowels are usually classified into high (i, u), middle (e, o) and low (a). This scale is of course continuous, not discrete; in some cases you cannot describe a vowel as middle or low, for example, but you have to say it's higher than a but not so high as e. , Frontness: how close the tongue is to the front of the mouth. Can go from front (i, e) to central (a), or back (o, u). Front vowels are sometimes called palatal, and back vowels are also called velar. There are also pharyngealized vowels (produced with the pharynx), but I can't imagine how they actually sound. , Roundedness: whether the lips are rounded (o, u, German ö, French u) or not (i, e, a). (In most languages this covers it all, but Swedish has three degrees of roundedness in a front vowel, from unrouded to semi-rounded to fully-rounded, not just a yes-no choice). , Length: how much you keep pronouncing the vowel, of course. English doesn't distinguish vowels by length, but Latin, Greek, Old English and many other languages do. Estonian has three degrees of length. , Nasalization: like consonants, vowels can be nasalized. In English, a vowel next to a nasal may get nasalized, but this is not distinctive. In French, on the other hand, there are four vowels that can be nasalized or not. , Voicing: vowels are usually voiced, but some languages have voiceless vowels (sounding exactly as /h/ pronounced with the lips and tongue in position for the - 304 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 /u/ and /i/ are usually voiceless if they aren't high-pitch and vowel). In Japanese, stand between voiceless consonants (but they get voiced if for some reason there's need to emphasize them.) , Tenseness: difficult to explain except for examples. In English, the vowels in pit, put are said to be lax, and the ones in peat, poot are called tense. I'm sure you understand the difference! , Retroflexion: the same as retroflex consonants. A vowel can be retroflexed by curling the tongue towards the back of the mouth before pronouncing it. An African language (I don't remember the name right now) has three series of three vowels each; the first is of non-retroflex vowels, the second is semi-retroflex, and the third is fully-retroflex! (I assume the neighbouring sounds tend to get retroflexed too.) , Constriction: a constricted vowel sounds as if you were choking. In some languages, this and other ways of pronouncing sounds are phonemic, not just an accident. , Others: there are probably more contrasts for vowels, but I don't know anything about them. Other modifications can be made by stress and tone (in tonal languages like Chinese or Vietnamese; see below). English has this vowel system: --lax-- --tense-- front------back front------back high pit put peat poot mid pet putt pate boat low pat pot father bought If you read a book on linguistics or phonetics, you'll probably find a recurrent diagram for vowels. It uses the two main contrasts (height and frontness) and places vowels in a triangle, like this (corresponding to Spanish or Latin): HIGH i u FRONT e o BACK a LOW Along the i-u line are the high vowels, going down to the low vowel a, and the front of the mouth is equated to the left side of the triangle. You can place vowels anywhere in the triangle formed by i-a-u. The English schwa /@/ (as in alive, rodent) is in the middle, right over the a; it's mid-central. There's a high central vowel ы in Russian which would - 305 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 /i\/, is also found in many North be located in the middle of the line i-u. This sound, American languages and in Guarani (the final y in Paraguay and Uruguay is the Spanish adaptation of this sound, which is a one-phoneme word in Guarani, meaning 'water'). NEW VOWELS As with consonants, you can invent as many vowels as you like. You should take into account that vowels form a system, and one which can't be disbalanced. If you have a tense and a lax version of i, then you're using tenseness as a contrast, and it should be present in some other pair of vowels. Roundedness is not disbalanced in English, or in Spanish. It seems that roundedness is more frequent in back vowels than it is on front vowels. Nevertheless, many languages have rounded front vowels, which English doesn't have (German and French have rounded i and e, represented ü, ö in German). On the other hand, you can have unrounded back vowels (like Japanese u or Turkish ?). You can have as many vowels as you want to. The simplest systems have three vowels, generally i, a, u (the vertices of the triangle, and not by chance). This means they distinguish three vowel sounds, not that its speakers do not know how to pronounce an e or an o. A Quechua speaker might say something that sounds e to an English speaker, but it's actually an i, of which English e is just a phonetic, not phonemic, variant. Spanish and Japanese have five vowels, i e a o u. Swedish has nine vowels, British RP English has twelve, German has fourteen, and !X? (the absolute record) twenty-four. But perhaps you shouldn't go that far. There are at least three languages with only two vowels: Ubykh, Abkhazian and Abaza, spoken in the Northwest Caucasus (in fact, Ubykh is extinct now, as of 1993). Each of them distinguishes between an open vowel /a/ and a close vowel /@/ (a schwa). Phonemically, that is; it's quite probable that phonetically each of these two is realized in multiple ways according to their position and proximity with different consonants. Stress and pitch Stress is of course the strength placed on certain syllable of each word (or of the important words in a complete sentence). Languages can have a regular stress rule, in which case you only have to mention it, or it can be irregularly stressed, in which case you should indicate it. English has an unpredictable stress and it's not marked anywhere; even identical words in writing can have different stress patterns. Spanish has an unpredictable stress too, but it can be read correctly without trouble. In Spanish, an unaccented word receives stress on the penultimate syllable if it ends in a vowel or in n or in s; if it ends in any other consonant it receives stress in the last syllable; and if it is accented (a vowel is marked with an accute accent as in álamo, adiós), stress falls in the accented vowel. French words always receive stress in their last syllable. Quechua receives stress in the second to last syllable. Latin stresses the second-to-last syllable if - 306 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 ['sekulus]); both final syllables are short (short vowels and single consonants, as in seculus else stress falls on the first-to-last syllable (as in secundus [se'kundus]). Pitch is the height of the syllable. Japanese, for example, doesn't use stress, but pitch, to "accent" words. Some syllables are low pitched, and some others are high pitched. The pitch of each syllable is determined by the position of the main pitch drop or accent. (Jump here for more details.) In most languages, some words are not stressed when in a complete sentence. In English, for example, "I'm here for the ad" gets no stress over I'm, for, the. (Also, unstressed vowels are reduced to centralized forms, namely a schwa or a weak /I/.) Tone Tone is the intonation contour of a syllable. Tone exists in all languages, but it's not phonemic sometimes. In English, you pronounce "What did you do?" (normal) and "What did YOU do?" (emphatic reply) differently, and key words have different tones. In some languages, tone is phonemic. These languages include Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Vietnamese, and a lot of African languages. Each syllable receives a particular tone, which is as characteristic as the height of the vowels in it, and can distinguish words. Mandarin Chinese, for example, has four tones, called high, rising, low falling, and high falling (you can imagine what they mean). For example: ma "mother", má "hemp", mâ "horse", mà "curse". Vietnamese has six tones, two of which include creaky voice -- lowering the pitch so much that the individual vibrations of the vocal chords can be heard. You can try using tones in your language, but I don't recommend it unless your native language is tonal too. It's an interesting device, but it takes quite a lot of self-reeducation of the vocal organs. Tone can be a phonemic feature or (rarely in natural languages) a grammatical feature. There's an interesting short discussion in a work by Marjorie K.M. Chan: "Tone and Melody in Cantonese", positing and answering an interesting question: how do you sing a song in a tonal language? Phonological constraints Each language has combinations of sounds that are considered difficult, forbidden, or impossible. These are called phonological constraints, and are the moulds into which any word has to be made to fit for the sake of coherence and "familiarity". The rules of syllable- and word-formation are part of what is called phonotactics (i. e. which sounds can come in contact with other given sounds). - 307 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 English is quite free of phonological constraints. Hence the enormous quantity of foreign words it has been able to absorb, like garage, sombrero, mosquito, ersatz, schmuck... Some languages do not resist such invasions. For example, Japanese (one of the most restricted languages) basically allows syllables /n/: (C)V(V)(n). The formed by a (perhaps double) consonant, a vowel (perhaps double), and English word club was adapted into Japanese as kurabu, to give an extreme example. If you're an anime fan, you know how Japanese anime shows typically employ English (in Sailor Moon, the main character shouted the invocation muun kurisutaru pawaa akushon -- that's "moon crystal power action"). Fidjian is almost as much restricted as Japanese: a consonant plus a vowel form a syllable, with an optional consonant at the end of the word. Finnish didn't tolerate consonants clusters like pr or fl in not-so-old times. The Elvish language Quenya doesn't tolerate initial or final consonant clusters at all. Greek words can only end in -s, -n, or a vowel. Some languages only use certain sounds together with others and never alone. It's difficult to design a pattern in abstracto --but you should have some ideas about it. The main thing is defining whether your language will be vocalic or consonantic, to put it in non-technical and inexact terms. English (and most North European languages) are quite consonantic. Spanish, Japanese and Greek are quite vocalic. Hawai'ian is very vocalic (a word like Kilauea is not possible in many languages). The global tendency, according to some theories, is towards the basic consonant-vowel syllabic structure. This is confirmed by the tendency, found in many languages, to simplify the codas -- i. e. to reduce or drop consonants that end a syllable. A synthetic language with lots of inflections usually prefers a simple structure. (Nevertheless, consider Georgian, a very agglutinating language, where you may find up to six consonants in a row, as in vprtskvni "I am peeling it" [ts is an affricate, so it counts as one consonant]). An isolating language can have very intrincate words, because you won't be adding anything else to them. The best thing is try and try until words begin to look and sound right to your particular taste and mood (just don't change it in midway!). Sounds tend to influence one another and change. Sound change can ultimately produce a new language, or a distinct dialect. Sound change Nobody knows why, but sounds change in all languages. The only languages that don't change are the dead ones. Sounds change into other sounds, sometimes influenced by others. Sound changes can be classified into conditional and inconditional. An inconditional sound change transformed the Old English sceadu /'skæadu/ into shadow /'SædOw/, as well as every word beginning with - 308 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 /sk/ into a new one beginning with /S/ (sh) . Most modern English words in /sk/ are Scandinavian borrowings, in case you were wondering. A conditional sound change transformed French marbre into English marble, the second /r/ being dissimulated by the presence of the first one. The main types of sound changes are: , Assimilation: a sound "gets nearer" to a neighbouring sound, i. e. takes on some of its phonetic features, especially when this eases the pronunciation. For example assimilate from Latin ad- + simul-; /d/ became /s/ because of the neighbouring /s/. Also cupboard, pronounced no more as cup-board but as cubbord. Assimilation can transform two sounds at the same time: got you becoming gotcha. Italian got a lot of double consonants from old clusters of two different consonants (e. g. otto 'eight' from Latin octo). , Dissimulation: the reverse of assimilation, two (identical o similar) sounds move away from each other. For example: the changes from (French?) marbre to English marble, and Latin arbor giving Spanish árbol, show /r/?/l/ dissimulation. Nasal dissimulation also changed /mn/ to /mr/ in the process that gave Spanish hombre from homre ? homne ? Latin hominem. , Metathesis: two sounds exchange places. This generally produces a new combination which is easier to pronounce (although the term "easier" is quite subjective). For example: Old English thridda became English third. The name of the Turkish city of Iskenderun shows metathesis too (the original form was Alexandretta -- aleksand(e)r- ? (al)iskend(e)r-). , Elision, syncope, apocope: all these are names for the same phenomenon. They refer to the loss of sounds; elision especifically means loss of unstressed vowels or syllables, while syncope applies to the loss of medial sounds, and apocope is the loss of final sounds. Examples: elementary being pronounced /El@'mEntri/ (elision), in French au revoir /or'vwa/; boatswain /bOws@n/ (syncope); the loss of final -e in English is an apocope, as well as the alternative forms of certain words in Spanish (grande 'big', gran casa 'big house'). , Haplology: the loss of a sequence of sounds because of similarity of neighbouring sounds. In Latin stipendium should have been *stipipendium; haplology would have been reduced to *haplogy if it were a common, non-technical word. , Liaison: introduction of a sound between two other sounds, especially between words. Pronounced /li.e'zõ/. French, where the word comes from (meaning 'binding'), is the best example: the final consonants of many words are pronounced only when the next word begins in a vowel. For example C'est moi /sE'mwa/ vs. C'est Anne /sEt'an/. , Prothesis: an extra initial sound is added to the beginning of certain words, as in Spanish: e- before initial cluster sp-, Latin spectrum > Spanish espectro (Spanish speakers also add /e/ at the beginning of many English loanwords, such as escáner, estándar for scanner, standard). , Epenthesis: an extra medial sound is inserted between others. In Welsh, an epenthetic vowel appears between certain pairs of consonants in final position; - 309 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 for example llyfr pronounced as if it were llyfyr. In French, nombre 'number' got an epenthetic /b/ (into Latin numerus) to bridge the gap between /m/ and /r/. Conditional and inconditional sound changes are not always easy to take apart. If we take the definition as a strict rule, almost all changes are conditional; very few are absolutely inconditional. For example, the change of Latin /k/ (written c) in Romance languages is regarded as inconditional, but it was actually produced by the influence of vowels: Latin /k/ changed into /s/ in Spanish and French (although continued to be written c) when the next sound was a front vowel (/e/ or /i/). Sound change most often produces irregularities. In Spanish, the different forms in which the Latin /k/ changed produced the following forms of the verb decir 'to say': digo 'I say', dice 'He says', dijo 'He said', he dicho 'I've said'. But one specific type of change can be actually regularizing. It's called analogy, and it will treated in its own section. RULES OF SOUND CHANGE Sound changes can be of a lot of different types, as we have seen above. But all kinds of sound change obey some rules: , Sound change is grammatically irrestricted. If a certain phoneme changes into another one, it does not matter the word class. A rule of change that transforms one phoneme or set of phonemes into another can have only phonetic restrictions, for example: 'A changes to B whenever it follows C, except in stressed syllables', or 'intervocalic X changes to YZ'. A rule of change cannot be restricted to certain word classes or grammatical constructions, like 'final A and B are dropped, except on adjectives' or 'X changes to Y on inflected nouns'. , Sound change has no memory. This may sound stupid, but it's not. A rule of change that transforms X into Y cannot discriminate between a certain X that the language has had from the beginning and another X that comes from a previous change W ? X. Cycles of sound change are cumulative and each one erases the previous one's tracks, so to speak; imagine waves coming to a sand beach one time after another... , Sound change is unstoppable. Some people used to argue that a written language helps to keep the spoken language from changing. This is obviously untrue. What a written language does is to keep the written words looking as they were before the change. If we learned language from books, the argument would probably be true; but we first learn to speak by listening to other people speaking! If a language doesn't change, it's probably dead. This of course doesn't apply to artificial auxiliary languages such as Esperanto, or to artificially resurrected-and- kept-alive languages like Latin. As for Esperanto, I don't know if Esperantists speak the language at home for their children to hear so that they learn it as a (second) native tongue. If they do, the kids will probably be producing changes very slowly over the years (if they do the same with their own children, and so on). This perhaps would horrify doctor Zamenhof and his followers, but it would be a sure sign that the language is indeed used for communication and is alive, a - 310 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 natural(ized) language among peers. As for Latin, everybody pronounces it more or less as they prefer... These rules have exceptions, but they must be adequately explained. If you write down the history of your language, you may explain them or use 'for some unknown reason...', but don't let this become an excuse for violating linguistic rules. Exceptions to the rules are mostly caused by analogy or related processes tending to regularize the language. For example, if a sound change makes X become Y and this makes two pronouns sound the same, one of these things will probably happen: 1) nothing, 2) the pronouns will be merged into one, grammatically as they were phonetically, 3) the pronoun to be changed will 'refuse' to change, 4) people will stop using one of the pronouns, replacing it by another construction. Also, sound change might be slowed down or sped up. Some people have tried to come up with a set of factors that may cause a language to enter a rapid change phase (such as economic and social chaos, wars, a new religious movement, etc.) These theories have proven useless. There are surely social factors that regulate the speed and quality of sound change, but they depend on so many 'social variables' that they are impossible to calculate. Some you can imagine: if an enclosed country (in an island, for example) suddenly gets in contact with a massive and constant amount of foreign visitors, its language will probably begin to change faster, borrowing new words and structures, creating or copying new idioms, and inventing new words for concepts they had no previous knowledge of. Another cause for exceptions is the fact that some words are less common than others. Words may change if they are said and repeated over and over, thus being "worn out"; strange, rarely used words, are likely to stay unchanged. These rarely used words usually include educated terms, or very formal or specific words. Sometimes they are not exactly preserved, but reborrowed from the ancient language (or another one), like English foreign, which comes from Proto-Indoeuropean *dhwor-, hence also door; or semaphore, where -phore "carry" has the same origin *bhero- as the verb to bear. Other examples include pairs of related words like night-nocturnal, viril-werewolf, blanch-blank, etc. Harmony Harmony is a set of sound changes that some languages produce in parts of speech on certain occasions. Although simple, it can be considered a different type of sound change, related to the assimilation process. One type is called vowel harmony. It produces changes on vowels, according to other vowels in the same word. Vowel harmony is present in Turkish, the Finno-Ugric languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) and some Native American languages. These have in common the fact that they are agglutinating, so the root of the word may be followed by a lot of suffixes or come after a string of prefixes, which are concatenated (agglutinated). The stressed vowel in the root (which is usually the first or the last one, - 311 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 depending on whether you use suffixes or prefixes) is cathegorized according to a certain contrast, usually the place of articulation. So you may have, for example, vowels divided into front (i, e, German ä, ö, ü) and back (a, o, u). Then you change all the vowels in the agglutinated affixes to match the quality of the root vowel. In this way, each affix has to have two forms, a front form and a back form. (Some languages may have three or four steps in the scale instead of just two.) For example, take a look a some Finnish words with case marks: autossa 'in the car' laatikossa 'in the box' järvessä 'in the lake' Do you see how the final vowel alternates between -a (back) and -ä (front)? Some more examples, with the perfect tense of verbs: on lyönyt 'has beaten' on ajanut 'has driven' The perfect tense mark is -nut for roots with back vowels, -nyt for roots with front vowels (y = /y/, like German ü). I have a language with vowel harmony of my own: Knarwaz. Compare the following words: back vowel gnolpusut 'in the mountain' vs. front vowel lempüsüt 'in the tree'. The first syllables (gnol-, lem-) are the roots, while the endings show locative case and masculine gender. The form -pusut uses the back vowel /u/ because the root vowel /o/ is a back vowel. The form -püsüt uses ü = /y/ (rounded i or front u) because the root vowel /e/ is a front vowel. Vowel harmony can also be extended to other contrasts besides place of articulation; it could include length, nasalization or roundedness, too. Vowel height harmony is also possible, but it isn't found in any known natural language. Another form of harmony is called nasal harmony. It's found on Guarani (the language of a South American native group which inhabited in Northeastern Argentina and Paraguay, where it's still spoken by many people and has formed a pidgin). I don't know of any other language featuring nasal harmony, but again I didn't go researching. Nasal harmony 'turns on' nasalization in certain consonants of the agglutinated affixes (yes, Guarani is also agglutinating) when the root of the word contains nasal consonants. So many affixes have two forms, a nasal one and a non-nasal one. For example, from hecha 'see' we can form jajoechapeve 'until we see (each other)'. This is non-nasal. But from hendu 'hear', we must say ñañoendumeve 'until we hear (from each other)', where ñ is the palatalized n also found in Spanish (almost like /nj/). See the change? Non-nasal palatal j changes to nasal palatal ñ, and also non-nasal labial p (in -peve) changes to nasal labial m (-meve). You can have other types of harmony in your language. For example, a kind of 'inverse harmony' where two consecutive syllables cannot have the same vowel, or cannot begin - 312 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 by a certain consonant cluster. This is closely related to the phenomenon of dissimulation, only that it's systematic, not accidental. Greek provides an example of this: when deriving words from their roots, there can't be two fricative sounds beginning consecutive syllables; it there are, the first one becomes a stop. For example, the root thrikh- 'hair' gives trikhós (instead of the expected **thrikhós). (Greek also produces a lot of assimilation.) Sandhi or mutation Sandhi is the name given by the ancient Sanskrit scholars to a regular set of sound changes which are produced on words on certain conditions. It can be also called mutation. These changes can be of several forms. I will mention one, the one I'm most familiarized with: lenition. Lenition or softening is a change produced on the initial sounds of words whenever they are used in certain positions, or for certain purposes. These changes affect the beginning of words by removing, adding or changing initial sounds. In that way, words can have two or more forms. Of the Western languages I know something of, Welsh and Irish have lenition patterns. Welsh, in fact, inspired the phonology of the famous Sindarin language invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the Grey Elves of Middle-Earth. I don't know much Welsh, but I happen to have some material on Sindarin, which has lenition patterns taken from Welsh. So I'll use Sindarin for the examples. Sindarin lenition affects the initial consonants of words in certain contexts. A lenited consonant changes this way: the voiceless stops p, t, k become voiced b, d, g. The voiced stops become fricatives, except for g: b, d, g change to v, dh (/ð/), and nothing. Voiceless lh and rh become voiced l, r; s gives h, and m gives v. In Sindarin, a word is lenited when it is (a) the object of a verb and is next to it, (b) anything after conjunctions and articles, (c) an adjective following the noun it describes, and (d) the second element of a compound. For example: from certh 'rune' we have i gerth 'the rune'; from peth 'word' the magic spell Lasto beth lammen 'listen to the word of my tongue'; from calen 'green' the name Tol Galen 'Green Island'; from mellyn 'friends' the name Elvellyn 'Elf-Friends'. Welsh mutation patterns are quite more complicated than that; there are three types of mutation, called soft (lenition), nasal, and spirant mutation. Welsh also features a related phenomenon involving verb conjugation (at least for the verb bod 'to be') where interrogative and negative forms, besides changing intonation and/or using particles, produce a change in the initial sounds. You can use other types of lenition and consonant mutation, and specify when they should be used. In the African language Ful, a personal-class noun is lenited when it's - 313 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 pluralized; singular jim 'mate', plural yim'be 'mates', with lenition j ? y. Curiously, thing- class nouns are lenited exactly the opposite way. Writing your language Once you have determined which sounds your language will have, you'll need a way to write them down in the Roman alphabet (transliterate them), and perhaps an alphabet of its own. We'll talk about alphabets in a minute. Transliteration can be a nightmare. The ideal thing would be having one symbol for each sound, but the Roman alphabet doesn't have symbols to represent some very common sounds. Here you have your first choice: will you invent or use one symbol for each sound, or use some other devices? If you want one symbol for each sound, then you'll probably have to use either non-letter symbols (such as ' @ ?) or resort to diacritic marks, i. e. modify letter symbols by using little signs on top of (or below) them. The accents and diaeresis over vowels are diacritic marks: á è î ÿ. English doesn't use any diacritic marks. Spanish shows some stressed vowels with an accute accent: acá éramos ínfimos órganos súbitos, and writes the palatalized nasal sound as ñ (as in año). French uses accents to show that a written e should be pronounced and for the sake of tradition in many words: été âme à mère; and it has a letter ç for /s/ before a, o, u. Portuguese shows nasalized vowels with a tilde (~) over them (as in são). German shows front versions of back vowels with a diaeresis over them (ö ü). Danish writes a kind of rounded a with å, and a fronted o with ø. Many languages have nonstandard letters for certain sounds, and unless you speak those languages and your keyboard is configured for them, you won't be able to easily access to them when writing your language in your computer. If you don't want to use so many strange symbols, you'll probably have to use two or more symbols to represent some sounds, like English uses sh and th for single sounds. These are called digraphs (trigraphs are possible but to be avoided for the sake of length). The letter h is very good for digraphs. But you have to take something into account: two symbols should never be used to form a digraph if they can appear on their own to represent two different sounds. English can use th because the cluster /t/+/h/ does not appear in English, but couldn't use sn to represent a nasal fricative, because some words have sn with the value of /sn/. Transliteration has no rules on which symbols you use to represent which sound, but you should try to make the language readable: it's OK to use zh to represent /f/, but most people will surely read something completely different from /f/ when they find it, and besides, you already have a more familiar f to fill that place, right? Transliteration should be as phonemic as possible. English is a bad example; words are written the way they were pronounced centuries ago, so the written and spoken forms of a word are usually inconsistent. French is even worse (in a word like oiseau, pronounced /wa'zo/, there's not one sound corresponding to its 'proper' letter). Written Spanish and Italian are quite phonemic, and almost as much important, the sounds can be guessed - 314 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 from the written form, although inaccurate. Some languages are remarkably consistent in their written forms. ALPHABETS AND OTHER SCRIPTS An alphabet is a collection of symbols representing sounds. You can invent an alphabet for your language if you want to. If you do, and your romanized spelling is phonemic, then your alphabet should be too: one symbol for one sound. You can use digraphs and add diacritics to your own alphabet. If your language derives from another language for which you already had an alphabet, then probably the newest language will use the old alphabet, but some letters will have changed sound. For example, Spanish uses the Latin alphabet, but the letter c now represents /s/ before e, i. This is not phonemic spelling, but the change is completely regular. When inventing letters, play around with them and write them quickly one after another. People write carelessly in most cases, and elaborate letters are likely to be simplified. Also try to make each letter different from all others, so that they are not confused. When two symbols look very similar, people find ways to distinguish them. The dot over the i appeared when the little stick of the lowercase i began to be confused with the vertical lines of m's and n's in Gothic handwriting. Computer fonts and programmers distinguish 0 (zero) and O (the letter o) by writing a slash over the zero. You have to decide how you will read and write. Will it be from left to right, like the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are usually written? Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left, and vowels are not written except in children's books and (Arabic) in the Koran. Japanese is usually written from top to bottom and from right to left, but it's written from left to right in certain books, like mathematics ones. Alphabets are not the only kind of writing. Chinese uses ideograms, or characters which used to represent a picture of an object. Each character represents a concept and is read as a syllable; but words that sound the same and are not related are written as different characters. Chinese characters have two parts, the radical and the phonetic. The radical gives an idea of the meaning, while the phonetic gives an idea of the sound; a radical can sometimes act as a phonetic and viceversa. Japanese uses a mixed system of kanji (ideograms) and kana (phonetic syllabic characters). In general, the main content of what you're trying to say is written in kanji, while particles, conjunctions and inflectional endings are written in kana. There are about 90 kana divided into two sets (hiragana and katakana). Hiragana are most often used for original Japanese words; katakana are preferred for borrowed words, and also to add emphasis, just like italics in the Roman alphabet. Also, when an unusual kanji is used, it can be clarified by spelling it phonetically in hiragana, which are called furigana ('handicap kana'). You can change the quality of the consonant in a kana by using some diacritic marks. There are 1945 'standard' kanji, of which 1006 are taught in elementary school, and each kanji can be read according to its Japanese pronunciation (kun-yomi) or its original Chinese pronunciation (on-yomi). As if it weren't confusing already, each - 315 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 kanji can have several readings of each of the two forms. [See a description of Japanese and Chinese writing here. Includes a hiragana-katakana chart!] Korean uses an alphabet called Hangul (or Hangeul), which is a featural code, a system in which similar sounds are represented by similar symbols. I don't know when this was originated, but it requires a remarkable phonetic analysis. In Hangul, symbols are grouped in syllables, making the writing look as if it was composed of many ideograms or syllabic characters, which is not the case. Arabic uses a cursive alphabet, which is unusual because most peoples in history have started out with block letters, due to the nature of the material support for writing. Arabic was written with fine brushes on some kind of smooth surface from the beginning, I guess; cursive letters are completely inadequate for (quick) stone carving or clay. Thai, while a syllabic language, uses a phonetic alphabet of single letters, which often have little curls and twists at the ends. Some other scripts of peoples in that area of the globe use that kind of characters which seem a bit too much elaborate. The reason is that they were first written using materials which required lines to be 'closed' in some way. This all boils down to a principle: to invent an alphabet, you must know where it's going to be written and by what means. Inventing an alphabet is simple, but a syllabary (or ideograms) can be a headache, so you should think of it carefully before. Ideograms are probably the worst kind of writing, and you should probably refrain from using them unless you have a photographic memory. Syllabaries are fine, but they work best on very restricted languages; English has an enormous number of possible syllables, and inventing a sign for each one would be impossible. Take a look at some natural language scripts in Ancient Scripts, a page with examples from all around the world. ORDERING YOUR SCRIPT We're used to have our letters in order. This is very useful for dictionaries and phone books, and for indexes in general. How are you going to order your symbols? Western alphabets derived from the Roman alphabet usually follow a predictable order. English uses a relatively small set of symbols, and digraphs aren't considered independent symbols, but this is not so in other languages. For example: , The Spanish alphabet consists of all the letters in the English alphabet, plus the following: ch (which goes after c), ll (after l), and ñ (after n). So you won't find a word like chico under the C chapter. Does your language use a Latin-derived script? What extra symbols do you have, and which of them are given their own place in the ordered alphabet. - 316 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Finnish alphabetizes the umlauted vowels ä and ö after the letter y. , In Dutch, the digraph ij is sometimes still considered one symbol. (Older typewriters have a key for it!) , In Swedish, v and w are considered two versions of the same letter, so they fall into the V chapter of alphabetic lists. This causes great trouble given the many many English and German words with w that have been borrowed into Swedish (which only uses v for native words). Some other languages, using non-Latin scripts, order their characters in different fashion. Some of them use the phonetic features of sounds to order the letters; for example, first the labials (p, b, m, f), then the alveolars (t, d, n, s) and so on. As for syllabaries, there's usually also a fixed order. In Japanese, both types of kana are arranged like this: first the vowels, a i u e o, then the syllables beginning with k (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko), then t-, n-, h-, m-, y-, r-, w-, and finally the symbol for syllabic n. Another order, more traditional, was used in former times (and is still used in indexes and tables, as opposed to the modern order, which is used in dictionaries). This order follows a poem by Buddhist monk Kuukai, which uses each character of hiragana exactly once: Iro ha nihohe to chirinuru wo waka yo tare so. Tsune naramu uwi no okuyama kefu koete asaki yume mishi wehi mo sesu. (Note: this is probably not good modern Japanese, nor is this the correct pronunciation. The kana for ha is pronounced wa, and the kana for wi and we are obsolete. The kana for wo is pronounced o.) As for ideograms, Japanese kanji (and Chinese hanzi) are ordered by the radical number and, within the same radical, by the number of strokes needed to write the character (there's a method to count them properly). It would be a nice idea to have letters with names that mean something, or that can be recited in order. Latin letters have meaningless names in all languages that use them, and their names are often too similar to one another, hence the need for codes like 'Alpha, Bravo, Charlie'... Other languages and scripts don't have such problems. Grammar This section will take some grammar issues and develop them, showing with examples, when possible, how natural languages manage them, and what can you do about them. You can't have a language without a grammar; if you don't think about it, you'll probably - 317 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 copy the structures of your own language, and the whole thing will be an exercise of translation of single words. MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY The classic cathegorization is that languages can be inflecting, agglutinating, or isolating. This cathegorization has proven to be too limited, but I'll explain it, because it's a good starting point to understand the differences. Inflection An inflecting language uses inflections, which may be affixes used, for example, to conjugate verbs, decline nouns and other tasks. Some languages use suffixes for this purposes, while others use prefixes; most use both, though there's usually a preference. A few languages employ infixes or circumfixes. Examples of inflection in English are the -s used for pluralizing names and the -ed used to form the past of regular verbs. Another type of inflection (and "purer", if you like) is the change of the root forms of words. Examples are the inflection of strong verbs of English, like sing/sang/sung, which are inflected forms of a root concept "sing". Inflection by vowel change (called ablaut) is quite usual in certain languages. Consonant change does exist, but it's rarer. Curious examples in English are the pairs breath/breathe (changes voiceless to voiced th, besides vowel change), house (noun) vs. to house (verb) (same change). Inflection includes some other devices like changing suprasegmental features like tone, stress or pitch; lengthening a vowel or geminating a consonant; and repeating a part of the root (reduplication). The main thing about inflections, however, is that an inflection can carry more than one meaning at the same time. For example, in Spanish viví "I lived", the inflection -í shows that the verb is in the past tense, first person singular, indicative mood. Examples of inflecting languages are English, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, and in general all Indoeuropean languages. Agglutination An agglutinating language uses suffixes or prefixes whose meaning is unique, and which are concatenated one after another without overlap. Some known agglutinating languages are Quechua and many other American languages, Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian. For example, in the Quechua word wasikunapi "in the houses", the plural suffix -kuna is separate from the locative case suffix -pi. In Finnish, huoneissansakaan means "(not) even in their rooms", and it consists of five agglutinated morphemes, "room-s-in-their-even". Isolation An isolating language doesn't use affixes or root modifications at all. Each word is invariable, and meanings have to be modified by inserting additional words, or - 318 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 understood by context. The best known example of isolating language is Chinese. In Chinese, a noun by itself is not singular, nor plural; and a verb has no tense or person; these distinctions are made by adding quantifiers, adverbs, or pronouns. In effect you say "books" by saying "several book". ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS The modern classification of language grammars is a continuous scale which goes from analytic to synthetic. The more analytic a language, the more meaningless the words by themselves, so as to say, and the more important is context and word order (analysis is thus roughly equivalent to isolation). The more synthetic a language, the more self-contained the words (synthesis involves inflection or agglutination). The scale is meant to be taken as a reference; there are no extreme points, but you can compare two languages and say that one is more synthetic than the other. Chinese is very analytic; a Chinese word by itself can mean a lot of different things, because no distinctions are made in it: you don't know if it's a verb, a noun, an adjective, or if it's past tense or future, or plural, or singular, or anything, you only have the root concept. Some Native American languages like Nootka or Chinook are the other end, so synthetic that indeed they were called polysynthetic, inflecting words in such ways that a single word can mean "the many little fires been lit in the house in the past" (I'm not making this up; the word is inikwihl'minih'isit, and by the way, it's not properly a verb or a noun; it needs verbal or noun prefixes...). In the middle, we have Japanese (quite analytic except for verbs), English (quite analytic too, as it barely distinguishes noun case or verbal person), Spanish, French and Italian (of the ones I know a bit of), German (already with many inflections) and all the agglutinating languages, which are in fact a subset of inflecting languages, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit... So you'll have to pick up a point in the scale and stay there. This is probably the most important decision in the process. Each kind of grammar has its own pros and cons. , An isolating language avoids a lot of work on difficult fields like deciding how to pluralize nouns and conjugating verbs. But it requires that you plan a rigid word order for sentences, and respect it at whatever cost, after assuring that it can't lead to ambiguities (serious ones at least). And a totally isolating language is difficult to devise, because you have to eliminate all traces of inflection, even ones that you'd never suspect about. , An agglutinating language means a careful planning of affixes (dozens of them) which must have unique meanings. Also, you must decide in which order they will appear after or before a word. Finally, agglutinating languages may tend to produce very long words, or ones that are very difficult to pronounce (consider Georgian, where many affixes are formed by just one or two consonants; sometimes they have to be joined to other affixes of the same kind, so you might end up with six consonants in a row). , An inflecting language produces shorter words and compact sentences (the more inflecting the language, the more compact the sentences), but it requires that you - 319 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 plan all inflections and combinations of inflections, because sometimes you won't be able to place two or more of them in a row (agglutinated). You can take inflection to its simplest expression (as in English) or produce a polisynthetic language which inflects words for almost every conceivable purpose. The more inflected a language, the more you'll have to care about concordance (the agreement of adjectives and nouns, and nouns and verbs). SAPIR'S CLASSIFICATION There's another classification of languages, which is far more complex, and was created by Edward Sapir in the 1920s. This divides concepts into four classes: Group I. Basic (concrete) concepts (objects, actions, qualities): normally expressed by independent words or radical elements; they don't include any kind of relationship with other words. For example, English nouns and adjectives like dog, party, ugly, strange. Group II. Derivative concepts (generally less concrete than those in group I): normally expressed by affixation of non-radical elements to radicals, o by internal modification inside these. They denote ideas that don't have to do with the proposition (sentence) itself, but give the radical element a certain particular twist of meaning and are therefore intimately related to it in a concrete fashion. For example, English prefixes pre-, for-, un- and suffixes -less, -ly. Group III. Concrete relationship concepts (yet more abstract): normally expressed by affixation or internal modification, but commonly in a less intimate fashion than group-II elements. They indicate relationships that go beyond the word itself. For example, English -s for plural nouns. Group IV. Pure relationship concepts (totally abstract): expressed by affixation or internal modification of radical elements, or by independent words, or by word order within the sentence. They connect the concrete elements of the proposition, giving them a definite syntactic form. For example, the modifications of English him, her from he, she indicating accusative case; the prepositions to, for; the position of the dog in I see the dog indicating that it's the object of the verb, etc. The classification of languages according to these classes is as follows: Type A. Languages which only express concepts of groups I and IV, so that they have no means of modifying the meaning of the radical element by means of affixes or internal changes. For example, Chinese. Type B. Languages which express concepts of groups I, II and IV, preserving pure syntactic relationships and being able to modify the meaning of radical elements by affixation or internal change. - 320 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Type C. Languages which express concepts of groups I and III, where syntactic relationships are expressed in necessary connection to barely concrete concepts, but they can't change the radical elements by affixation or internal change. Type D. Languages which express concepts of groups I, II and III, i. e. where syntactic relationships are expressed in mixed ways, like in Type C, and can also modify the meaning of radical elements by affixation or internal change. In this group belong most of the "flexive" (inflectional) languages with which we are familiar, as well as many "agglutinating" languages. Each one of the types A, B, C, D can be subdivided into agglutinating, fusional and symbolic. Agglutination means the things added to the radical element are just juxtaposed (put together); fusional means they are sometimes merged; symbolism roughly means internal change. Type A also has an isolating subtype. The method (agglutinating, fusional, or symbolic) for a certain group of concepts needn't be identical to the method for a different group. The classification uses a compound term, the first part referring to the method for group II concepts, and the second part to concepts in groups III and IV. These methods are sometimes not alone; English uses them all. For example, goodness from good is agglutination; books from book is regular fusion, depth from deep is irregular fusion, and geese from goose is symbolic fusion or symbolism. All this rant is just about one thing: you don't have to expect everything must be in its "proper" place in your language (the proper place being that of English). English number (singular vs. plural) is a Group III concept, quite abstract and forming part of the very core of words; we can't conceive an English noun without number. In Tibetan, number is an optional feature and it's not grammaticalized as in English; it's not an abstract thing that belongs into the word, but a concrete thing: the idea of plurality, "several" or "many", is expressed by a radical element which is a separate full-fledged word, a Group I concept. It's not syntactic and can therefore be omitted when not needed. Think hard about this! After you place your language on the scale, you have to decide which word classes you'll use, and how they'll link to one another. Nouns NUMBER Number is not restricted to singular vs. plural; many languages have forms for pairs of things (dual) and some for groups of three things (trial). Others have a paucal number (from the same root as paucity, meaning 'few'), that is used for items up to a certain approximate quantity (such as three or four), resorting to the plural for higher quantities. - 321 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 You can have a singular number which refers to a unique object, or two plurals distinguishing the things at view ('these men') and all the things of the stated kind ('men')... Your imagination is the only limit. You can however simply leave number out of your system. This is what Mandarin Chinese and Japanese do. You can have a particle or an adjective with the meaning of 'several' or 'many' to express the idea of plurality when needed, if context is not enough to make it clear. If you use an inflection for plural number, be aware that it doesn't have to be a short suffix; it can be quite long (like the two-syllable Quechua -kuna) or be a prefix, or an infix, or it can appear as vowel change (e. g. umlaut or ablaut). Many languages show plurals of some kinds of items by reduplication, which means repeating the whole word, or the first syllable, or the last syllable, etc. In Bahasa Indonesia you have baterei-baterei 'batteries' (this is from the multilingual manual of a calculator!); in Japanese you have hitobito 'people' from a slightly modified reduplication of hito 'person'. English irregular plurals of the kind man/men, goose/geese, mouse/mice are examples of vowel gradation, which resulted from umlaut, in turn produced by a suffixed inflection that was lost. Other languages are much more regular, like Spanish (which always marks plural with -s, -es). GENDER Gender is the common term for the more general concept of class. Gender need not be feminine vs. masculine. German, Greek and Latin have the genders feminine/masculine/neuter. Swahili has noun classes ('genders') for animals, for human beings, for abstract nouns, etc. Many languages make a distinction based on animacy, between animate and inanimate objects (people and animals vs. plants and non-living objects, or the like). You can invent new distinctions. Noun classes can be more or less arbitrary. In Indoeuropean languages there is usually no relationship between the gender and the actual object. While the Spanish noun mesa 'tabla' belongs to the feminine gender, not only is it unrelated to femininity, but also has nothing in common with most other feminine nouns, like comadreja 'weasel' or crisis 'crisis'... The animate/inanimate distinction tends to be less arbitrary, but there are always borderline cases and particular cultural influences (for example, some languages may take 'fire' to be an animate noun). When there are many classes with semantic content (as in Bantu languages) it may happen that some nouns change meanings but stay in the same class (suppose you have a class for round objects and another for square things, and the word for 'ring' comes to mean 'boxing playfield', as in English...). CASE In a broader sense, grammatical case is the role of the noun in the sentence (for example, subject, object, complement of place, etc.). In the restricted sense which we'll refer to - 322 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 from now on, a case is some morphological mark of that role, usually shown by inflection or agglutination. There is no fixed set of cases; each language distinguishes one or more morphologically-marked cases and uses them for given purposes. However, some common cases found in many languages are always given the same names. Latin has the following inflected cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative, dative, and vocative. A noun is in the nominative case when it's the subject of a sentence; accusative when it's a direct object; dative when it's an indirect object; genitive when it's a possessive; ablative when it's part of a verbal complement; and vocative when it shows a call (plus many, many special cases). English actually has a genitive case, marked by the possessive ending -'s, and distinguishes nominative and accusative forms of pronouns (we-us, I-me, they-them, etc.). Certain cases are used after certain prepositions (the preposition is said to govern the case). My language Terbian has a core case (used for subjects and objects, which are further distinguished by other marks) and an oblique case (used as a genitive or compounding case, and with all postpositions). Romance languages have mostly lost the Latin case system altogether, and resort to prepositions and word order to show syntactic roles. Your language can have many cases; Estonian has 14 cases, and Finnish even more (18, according to some analyses). There are many syntactic roles that can be codified by a case, but these tend to overlap, and the majority are local cases (used to convey relationships of position and movement -- on, over, under, around, inside, outside, at a side, from, towards, into, out of, etc.). Adjectives With adjectives, we enter the land of possibilities. You can choose to have adjectives (as a separate word class), or not. Adjectives can be an entirely different word class, as in English; or they can be a subset of nouns (considering morphology and behaviour), as in Spanish or Latin; or they can behave like verbs (as some do in Japanese). Let's examine these alternatives. If adjectives are a completely different word class, then they don't have to behave like anything else; they can have their own rules of inflection, or not inflect at all. English adjectives are an example of this: they are invariable words (except for the comparative and superlative forms). If adjectives are like nouns, or a subset of nouns, then they behave like nouns. In Spanish, where nouns have gender and number, adjectives have them too, and they must agree with their head noun. Sometimes they can become nouns without any change; rojas means both 'red' (feminine and plural) and 'red ones' (when preceded by an article). Curiously, nouns can become adjectives, in colloquial sentences like ?Es tan payaso! 'He's so (much of a) clown!'. In Latin, adjectives agree with their head noun even in case. - 323 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 But the distinction between nouns and adjectives is usually well-defined in these languages; some other languages may choose not to make it. In Japanese, adjectives of a particular class (na-adjectives) behave like nouns; they are placed before the noun they modify, followed by na, which is the relative form of the copula 'to be'. For example: kirei na kimono 'beautiful kimono' -- the nominal adjective (or qualitative noun, as some people call it) kirei means 'beauty' or 'beautiful', and the phrase could be translated as 'kimono which is beautiful / which has beauty'. You can add tense to the adjective by marking tense on the copula: kirei datta kimono 'kimono which was beautiful'. If adjectives are like verbs, then they conjugate like verbs. Another class of Japanese adjectives (i-adjectives, because they end in -i) work this way; adjectives are usually a kind of participial form of verbs, or a single-word relative clause (relative clauses in Japanese come before the noun phrase they modify, the same as adjectives and demonstratives do). You can think of Japanese adjectives as a combination of an English adjective + the copula 'to be', though Japanese adjectives can and do take the copula sometimes. But the tense is still on the adjective, not on the copula. For example: Kakkoii desu 'He is cute' (polite form); Kakkoikatta desu 'He was cute'. Here kakkoi- is the root, while -i is the suffix for adjectives in present tense, -katta is for past tense, and desu is the polite present tense form of the copula. As you see, the tense in this class goes directly on the adjective, not on the copula, which can be omitted sometimes. In my own language Draseléq, adjectives do not exist as such. There are verbs that mean 'to be big', 'to be yellow', and even 'to be four'. You say 'a tall tree' by saying 'talling/talled tree', using a short participle. You say 'the tree is tall' by using the third person singular present tense of the verb 'to be tall' with 'the tree' as the subject: 'the tree *talls'. The best thing about this is that you merge two word classes into one, and you can use whatever devices you invented for one on the other. In Draseléq, you can express the equivalent of 'make/cause to be four' in one word. Many adjectives may not exist at all in any form (although every language has some words that act like adjectives). The ideas of qualifying can be expressed in other ways. Tibetan uses abstract nouns instead of adjectives; you don't have the adjective 'large', but the noun 'magnitude, largeness', and you can express 'a large room' by saying 'a room of magnitude'. This is not ridiculous in English. 'A room of magnitude' is rare but possible, and 'a disaster of biblical proportions' (which follows the same structure) is common. In some languages, the adjectives form a closed word class (like prepositions in English); there are a certain number of them (pairs like 'big'/'small' and the colours) and others can't be formed. If you have a morphologically separate word class for adjectives, you should also invent some affixes to colour their meaning, to negate them, and to transform them into other word classes. Also think of comparatives and superlatives. It's not an obligation to have - 324 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 them, but a language should be able to express such ideas as something being taller, or redder, or uglier, than something else. As an extra, you can read a compilation of a thread in the Conlang list, started by a question by Fredrik Ekman: are there languages without adjectives? Verbs PERSON AND NUMBER In many languages, the verb agrees with one of its arguments (one of the noun phrases in the sentence); in languages that mark subject vs. object, generally the subject. However, some languages have double agreement (Hungarian verbs agree with both the subject and the object), which is a form of polypersonal agreement (Basque verbs agree with subject, direct object and indirect object when applicable!). The verb usually agress with the noun phrase in one particular case (nominative in nominative/accusative languages, absolutive in ergative/absolutive ones). In quite a few languages, there's no agreement at all: English barely distinguishes the third person singular from the rest in the present tense; Mandarin Chinese and Japanese don't mark person in the verb in any way. TENSE The tense system can be anything from a distinction between present and non-present actions to a complex structure. The only universal tense is present. Many languages don't have a real future tense and employ a past/non-past distinction that conflates present and future. English actually doesn't have a morphological future tense, since futurity is modelled by an auxiliary, will, not by inflecting the verb. For the sake of generality we'll call this a tense (a periphrastic one). You can have several types of present or past or future. Spanish has two different pasts; one shows actions that took place over a period of time in the past (imperfect), and the other shows that things just happened. That's more or less the difference between English I lived and I used to live. Some languages do not distinguish tense, using adverbs of time or suggesting a temporal frame by other means (like aspect marks) when necessary. ASPECT From Richard Harrison's Invisible Lighthouse: Aspect refers to the internal temporal constituency of an event, or the manner in which a verb's action is distributed through the time-space continuum. Tense, on the other hand, points out the location of an event in the continuum of events. In many traditional grammar descriptions, tense and aspect (as well - 325 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 as mood) are conflated together; for example, English has what is called 'present perfect tense', which is in fact a present tense with a perfective aspect. Verbs can inflect to show that the focus is on the ongoing process (progressive), or a single action (punctual), or a habitual action, or a repeated action (iterative), or the beginning of an action (inchoative, inceptive), or the ending of an action (cessative), etc. Some languages have literally dozens of these aspects. An interesting pair is the distinction between static and dynamic. A static form describes a particular state, while a dynamic form reports a change in state. In Arabic, rukubun means 'ride' in its static forms, and 'mount' in its dynamic forms. Japanese has a conditional aspect: it can inflect verbs to show conditional clauses, so for taberu 'eat' there's tabetara 'if/once I eat' and tabereba 'if I eat'. Perfectiveness Perfectiveness is an aspectual distinction. In grammar descriptions, perfect means 'completed' (referring to the verbal action). I have come is perfect (or has a perfective aspect) while I'm coming is imperfect. The Spanish example above is an aspect opposition. MOOD Mood refers to whether the action is real and certain (indicative), or is doubtful or desired (subjunctive), or isn't happening at all (negative), etc. etc. The indicative mood (it just happens) is the most common. English doesn't distinguish indicative and subjunctive (it uses past forms of indicative mood to show the subjunctive), and it uses an auxiliary to negate a verb. In Spanish and other Romance languages, the subjunctive mood is used (among other things) for hypothetical actions and for wishing formulae: si pudieras 'if you could'; ojalá pudieras 'wish you could'. Japanese inflects verbs to negate them (keru 'I kick', keranai 'I don't kick'), while Finnish uses inflected forms of an auxiliary (ei) before a form of the main verb (much like English auxiliaries don't, doesn't). There's also the imperative mood, which is used to give orders or make requests. These moods, of course, are not the only ones. Nenets, a Siberian (Uralic/Samoyedic) language, has a lot of moods (some of which I would've taken as aspects!): indicative, imperative, hortative ('Let me'), optative ('Let him'), conjunctive ('He will' [request]), necessitative ('He must'), interrogative ('Did he?'), probabilitative ('He may'), obligative ('He should'), approximative ('He seems to'), superprobabilitative ('He probably'), hyperprobabilitive ('He must have'), reputative ('He is supposed to'), Habitive ('He is used to'). EVIDENTIALITY - 326 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Refers to the kind of evidence that the speaker has about what he or she's saying (does he know about the action from personal experience, or just by hearsay, or just believes it likely?). Quechua, Aymara and many other Native American languages distinguish these aspects with different levels of subtlety. You may have heard of it as 'levels of experience', or 'trivalent logic' (i. e. not only consisting of 'true' and 'false' statements but also of 'maybe' statements). ARGUMENT STRUCTURE The arguments of a verb are the parts of the sentence (generally noun phrases) that it joins and that it has a close grammatical relationship with. In general this means the subject and (if present) a direct object and maybe also an indirect object. The number of arguments of a verb is called its valency of the verb (by analogy with the valency of chemical elements, which is the quantity of atoms of other elements that can be joined to one atom of the element). Valency Verb type Example 0 impersonal none in English 1 intransitive "he runs" 2 transitive "she ate lettuce" 3 ditransitive "we gave presents to them" So-called impersonal verbs (with valency=0) have no arguments, not even a subject. In English all verbs must have at least a dummy 'it' to fill the subject slot (as in 'it rains'), but e. g. in Spanish the equivalent form llueve is impersonal (it appears in the third person singular form, but does not and cannot have a explicit subject). Most languages do not morphologically distinguish transitive and intransitive verbs, but e. g. Hungarian does (transitive verbs have different person/number inflectional endings than intransitive ones, i. e. different paradigms). Some intransitive verbs are semantically reflexive, i. e. there's an implied object that is identical to the subject. Some languages mark reflexivity in the verb (English does it, but not productively, in verbs like 'self-destruct'), while others use reflexive pronouns ('itself', 'themselves', etc.) in the object position. In some languages, pronouns acting as objects (and/or subjects) are incorporated in the verb (Spanish tacks clitic object pronouns on the verb, either before or after). Some languages are more rigid than others with respect to the argument structure of verbs. For example, transitive verbs may always need a explicit object. Compare this to English, where the objects of many transitive verbs can be left out, and many verbs are interchangeably transitive or intransitive (e. g. burn, write, see, etc.). - 327 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 VOICE Voice can be understood from two points of view: the syntactic and the semantic. The semantic point of view refers to what voice represents for the meaning of the verb and the sentence. In English you can show whether the topic or theme of the proposition is the subject (active voice) or the object (passive voice). The dog bit me is active (the topic is the dog), while I was bit by the dog is passive (the topic is I). Since English, like many other languages, tends to equal topic with subject, this is how you topicalize a part of the sentence (in Japanese this is unnecessary, since topic can be explicitly marked in a different way, apart from the subject/object distinction). From the syntactic point of view, the idea is that voice changes the way in which the arguments are arranged. Voice change is a grammatical operation that shifts arguments from their original places and may increase or decrease the valency of the verb. In English passive voice constructions, the original object becomes the subject (it gets promoted), while the original subject becomes an optional complement (it gets demoted). English and other languages use a periphrastic construction with the verb to be and a participle for passive voice. Latin verbs, on the other hand, can be inflected by voice: curare 'heal', curantur 'they are healed'. Active and passive are not the only voice distinctions. Greek had a middle voice, which suggested an action performed by the subject for his/her own sake. From the point of view of meaning, Spanish has a middle (or mediopassive, or pseudo-reflexive) voice shown by the pronoun se: Se vende bien 'It sells [itself] well', apartarse 'set oneself aside'. In addition to these, there are voices that are more difficult to define from the semantic point of view, but can be understood as syntactic devices. For example, many ergative/absolutive languages have an antipassive voice, that transforms a transitive verb into an intransitive one ('I eat meat' becomes 'I eat'). In these languages, this also means that the subject is demoted from ergative to absolutive, though this doesn't show up in the translation. Changing the case of the subject may be done to allow coordination with other propositions. One of my languages, Terbian, has an applicative voice, which promotes an optional (oblique) complement to the object position, with a special marking on the verb that shows the general function of the original complement (did it refer to a position or place, to a destiny, to a source?). For example (to take one that is easily translatable), 'he swims under the boat' becomes 'he underswims the boat'. In Terbian there is a kind of antipassive voice that also acts on intransitive verbs with complements by promoting one complement to the subject position and demoting the original subject: 'the cat sleeps on the mat' becomes 'the mat *sleeps the cat'. DEFERENCE - 328 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Verbs may show the degree of deference (or the need of politeness) between the speaker and the hearer. In certain languages, there are different forms of verbs (and pronouns) to address a subordinate, a master and an equal. Japanese verbs can be inflected to increase politeness: hanasu 'speak', polite form hanashimasu. Japanese also has hyper-polite verb forms, and several other registers of speech that may be used in different occasions, by and to different people. WEIRDNESS AND TRIVIA Some very common verbs in English aren't found in other languages, like 'to have'. Many languages rephrase 'I have a book' by 'A book is to me', or 'with me' or something to that effect, either using prepositions or case marking. The copula 'to be' is in many languages not a verb, but a special word in its own class. In Japanese the copula has a special paradigm that differs from common verbs. Many languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew and Russian) simply omit the copula in the present tense (this is called zero copula), so two noun phrases, or a noun and an adjective, put together, form a valid sentence (A B = A is B). Some verbs can be used as grammatical words beyond their original status. For example, in Khmer you use the verb 'to give' as the preposition 'to', to mark the indirect object of verbs. I'm guessing that this might correspond to a serial construction: English 'I give the book to her' could be translated as 'I take the book and give her'. This could be common for languages that avoid ditransitive verbs. In Ainu, the conjugated forms of the verb 'to have' are used as possessive marks. For example: kukor kunupe kunukar rusuy 1s.have 1s.brother 1s.see want 'I want to see my brother' Note the 1st person singular prefix 1s is placed before verbs and nouns. Given this, it's not impossible to think of a language where possessive pronouns don't exist, nor are they formed from personal pronouns, but are instead subordinate clauses, consisting of conjugated forms of 'to have': 'my brother' becomes 'the brother that I have'. In Japanese, verbs are sometimes used in place of adjectives, taking advantage of the fact that subordinate clauses come before the modified noun. For example: sabitsuita kokoro 'rusted heart' (sabitsuita 'it rusted'), takanaru mirai 'soaring future' (takanaru 'it soars'). Conjunctions Conjunctions are words which put together different parts of a sentence. English common conjunctions are and, or, if, but, etc. Conjunctions can be present or not. It's possible to include some distinctions in conjunctions which aren't made in English; for example, the - 329 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 difference between exclusive and inclusive or. In Latin, you can say vel X vel Y (X or Y, or both) or aut X aut Y (X or Y, but not both). Conjunctions can be sometimes transformed into other things; in Latin, while you have et 'and', you can also use a postposed particle -que to join two nouns: Senatus Populusque Romae 'the Senate and the People of Rome'. Some languages do not have conjunctions at all; they simply put things together. 'X Y' (perhaps with a pause between them) means 'X and Y' (or even 'X or Y', depending on intonation and context). You can also use a case ending to join things, saying 'X together-with-Y' for 'X and Y'. Or you can replace conjunctions by adverbs: 'I tried but I couldn't' gives 'I tried, however, I couldn't'. Articles Do you have articles? English has two, a and the. Spanish has four, two indefinite and two definite ones; two are feminine and two are masculine. If your language has grammatical gender, then perhaps the articles should agree with their nouns. In Greek, articles agree not only in gender, but also in number and case, with their head noun. Scandinavian languages place the articles at the end of words, attached to them as inflections (for example, in Swedish en bok 'a book', boken 'the book', böcker 'books', böckerna 'the books'). Many languages do not have articles. In most cases, you can paraphrase articles by using adjectives, quantifiers (like some, all), or demonstratives (that, this). Articles are often unstressed and joined to the following words, perhaps with elision of vowels and other simplifications. In French, you say la voiture 'the car' but l'avion 'the plane'. In Italian and Portuguese, the articles are joined to whatever particle is in their way. Adpositions and particles The word 'particle' refers to little words, generally invariable, that modify the meaning of other words, or the sentence. Among them we find adpositions (prepositions and postpositions), which are used by most languages to modify the meaning of noun phrases and create complements (of place, time, manner, etc.). There are also particles that have a wider range of functions, like the many particles of Japanese, some of which function as postpositional case marks, others as part of adverbial phrases, and others to add different twists of meaning to the whole sentence. For example, anata no 'your' uses the genitive particle no; the particle wa signals a new topic (a change of subject of the sentence and the following utterances), which will be omitted and understood in the next sentences. There's even an 'exclamation particle', yo, used to add force to statements; and an 'interrogative particle', ka, which signals a question (taberu ka 'shall we eat?'). In addition, ka produces indefinite deictics (itsu 'when', itsuka 'sometime'). A language can have prepositions or postpositions, or neither (I know of no language that has no adpositions at all, though). Whether a language is pre- or postpositional depends mainly on the position of the parts of speech (especially the verb arguments) in a sentence. As a general rule, SOV languages are postpositional, and VSO languages are - 330 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 prepositional; SVO languages can go either way. When you're designing a language, you can go against these general rules, but you'll soon run into certain practical problems that will make it clear why this is so. The most common adpositions can be adequately replaced by case, and perhaps adverbs. Japanese shows many relationships with postposed particles which don't have a real meaning, but only general functions. In some cases, when it needs to use the equivalent to an adpositional statement, it uses two nouns joined by the genitive particle: heya no naka 'room (genitive) in-side', 'the room's inside, inside the room'. So in fact some of our prepositions are rendered by nouns. This is not unheard of in English ('in front of', 'on top of'), and Spanish is full of noun phrases that replace single-word prepositions (bajo 'under' vs. abajo de, encima de lit. 'on-top of'). Syntax In simplified terms, syntax is the order and structure of words and phrases in a grammatical proposition. The various components of a sentence often appear in a fixed order. The more analytic the language, generally the more fixed the word order is. In Chinese and English, for example, sentences are ordered in such a way that the misplacement of any word can alter the meaning completely. The more synthetic the language, probably the freer the word order, because synthetic, very inflected words, can stand on their own, and they don't depend so much on context. For example, in Latin Petrus amat Paulum 'Peter loves Paul', the subject and the object are perfectly determined by case endings, and their place can be changed with no change of the meaning of the phrase: you can say Paulum Petrus amat or amat Petrus Paulum and it's OK. But in English, 'Peter loves Paul' and 'Paul loves Peter' mean different things, because word order serves the function of distinguishing subject and object; and 'loves Peter Paul' or 'Paul Peter loves' are impossible or ridiculous. A synthetic language may have a free word order not only by resorting to case endings, since other grammatical devices such as agreement (between verbs and nouns, nouns and adjectives, etc.) may serve this purpose by reducing ambiguity. SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT The main structure of a complete sentence includes subject, object, and verb. These can of course be ordered in only six different ways: SVO, SOV, VSO, OVS, OSV, VOS. English affirmative sentences usually employ SVO, although sometimes English lets out an OSV (in sentences like 'this I don't know' or 'to thee I will sing'). Spanish is a bit more loose: usually SVO, VSO as an alternative for most verbs, SOV or OVS when the object is a pronoun, etc. Perhaps certain verbs of your language can use one form, and others use a different one; or perhaps you could use one form for short sentences and another one for longer complex sentences. - 331 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 There is always an unmarked word order, that is, a particular order that doesn't convey any extra information (such as emphasis), and is therefore 'neutral' for the hearer. For example, English unmarked word order is SVO. The examples of OVS order I gave are marked; they make you focus on the object. Some orders are more common than others. According to surveys, SVO and SOV languages each comprise about 40% of the world's languages. VSO languages are relatively frequent too, 15%. The other word orders (where the object is before the subject) comprise about 5%. So if your language is intended to be average, use SVO or SOV; if you want it to be exotic and weird, try OVS, OSV or VOS. HEADS AND MODIFIERS Each part of a sentence can be divided into a head and zero or more modifiers. The head and its modifiers make up the phrase. A phrase that functions as a noun (and whose head is a noun) is called a noun phrase. In a noun phrase like 'the little red cottage', the head is 'cottage' and the modifiers are the article and the two adjectives. A phrase whose head is a verb is called a verb phrase, and it may be modified by adverbs, negative auxiliaries, etc. All languages have an unmarked order for heads and modifiers in each case, which is sometimes fixed. A language like English, that places modifiers before heads ('red dog', 'terribly hot summer'), is called head-last. A language like Spanish, where modifiers come after their heads, is called head-first. There are more technical designations for these tendencies, 'left-branching' and 'right-branching'. Be aware that I speak of tendencies here. While English adjectives tend always to come before nouns, in poetry they are sometimes placed after them. In Spanish the opposite happens: most adjectives follow nouns, but in some cases they come before, especially for emphasis and in poetic speech. There is also variation according to the kind of modifiers used: English places adverbs before verbs, but longer adverbial phrases (such as 'in the park') after the verb. Japanese places everything before the corresponding heads, even subordinate clauses; the subordinate clause acts as an adjective: Kanojo ga dakishimeta otoko wa goshujin deshita. she NOM embrace-PAST man TOPIC her_husband be-POLITE-PAST "The man (that) she embraced was her husband." There are general tendencies correlating sentence-level word order (the order of subject, verb and object) and the place of heads and modifiers within phrases. Sentence order Phrase order Adpositions SOV head-last postpositional VSO head-first prepositional - 332 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Sentence order Phrase order Adpositions SVO either way either way These are only tendencies and have many exceptions. While SOV languages are almost always head-last and use postpositions (the prototypical example is Japanese), Latin is SOV, yet uses prepositions and moves heads and modifiers around rather freely. SVO languages can go either way (English and Chinese are both prepositional, but Chinese is markedly more head-last than English; and Spanish, French and Italian, also SVO, are head-first). SOV languages usually mark the subject somehow, since it could get confused with the object that follows; SVO languages don't need that marking (though many of them use it), because the verb itself separates subject and object. VERB-SECOND LANGUAGES Some languages (featuring different word orders) are known to have a peculiarity regarding the position of the verb within the sentence. They are called verb-second languages (or shorter V2 languages, though that may have bad historical connotations). All the Germanic languages (except English) are V2 languages. The verb (or more correctly, the finite verb or auxilliary) has to be the second constituent of the sentence. This is not the same as SVO or OVS order; English is SVO, but in a sentence like 'Yesterday I went to a party', the verb is actually the third constituent (the first is the adverb, 'yesterday', and the second is the subject pronoun, 'I'). For our purposes, constituents are noun phrases (i. e. article or demonstrative + adjectives + noun), verb phrases (i. e. conjugated verbs and auxiliaries), adverbs and adverbial complements. In V2 languages there is room for one and only one constituent before the verb. If something has to be emphasized, it usually comes to the front of the sentence (this is called focus fronting and happens in many languages). If the language is V2, however, this means that something else will have to move to the other side of the verb. For example, in German you can say (the verb, or actually the auxiliary, since the complete verb phrase is hat geschenkt, is in UPPERCASE): Zum Geburtstag hat sie ihm ein Buch geschenkt. for (his) birthday has she him a book given "For his birthday she has given him a book." Ein Buch hat sie ihm zum Geburtstag geschenkt. a book has she him for (his) birthday given "She has given him a book for his birthday." Geschenkt hat sie ihm zum Geburtstag ein Buch. given has she him for (his) birthday a book She has given him a book for his birthday. Of course, German has case, so the subject and objects don't get so confused as in the English literal gloss. - 333 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 English is a Germanic language too, and though it has lost V2 compulsory order, it has kept some traces. You can see it in the way questions are asked (*'Who you saw?' is 'Who did you see?' because the auxiliary occupies the second position), in the use of auxiliaries in general, in phrases like 'There is', 'Here is', etc., and notably in seemingly 'inverted' sentences like 'Never had I seen such a thing'. TRIGGER SYSTEMS This topic is a bit outside the scope of this section, but I felt it was worth including. The word order classification of which I've been talking presume that there will be a subject, a verb and an object, and that they'll be differentiable by the word order itself and/or by case marks. There's a different system, which is used in Malagasy and most Filipino languages, like Tagalog, in which subject, object and other modifiers may appear in different orders, and they're not marked in traditional ways. It's called a trigger system. The trigger is the part of the sentence over which emphasis is placed (I'd call it the topic, but I'm not so sure about this). The trigger can be the 'subject' of the sentence according to our view, but also the object, or a location, or the verb (predicate) itself. The trigger is marked as such (by a particle or inflection, or by word order), but you only state 'this is the trigger', not its function. Other parts of the sentence are marked differently. Then the verb is marked to show the relationship of the action to the trigger. The 'case' of the trigger is not marked on the trigger but on the verb. In order to illustrate this, I'll just transcribe part of a post to the Conlang list, by Kristian Jensen, who was kind enough to repost it when I asked for an explanation about the subject. Here it is: In Tagalog, there are only three markings for case: the Trigger, the Genitive, and the Oblique. This is exactly like most (if not all) the Philippine languages. Furthermore, much like many Western Austronesian languages, there are a large inventory of affixes used to create different nuances in the verbs, noteably the verbal trigger. When the trigger plays the role of the agent, an agent-trigger affix is used with the verb. When the trigger plays the role of the patient, a patient-trigger affix is used with the verb. When the trigger plays the role of location, then a location-trigger affix is used with the verb. Etc. etc., etc... A particularly noteworthy feature of this system is that non-triggered (unfocused) core arguments are marked as the genitive. As a result, "I am buying" and "the buying (of something) of mine" (or "my buying (of something)") have identical structures. Verbal constructions appear to be identical with nominal constructions by the use genitives. One theory has it that the verbal affixes are actually nominalizing affixes. Examples always help. Take the sentence "The man cut some wood in the forest". With three different arguments, three trigger forms are possible. Below are parsing examples of the way a Filipino language would translate the sentence. I have refrained from using real language examples at this point hoping that it would be easier to understand how the _grammatical system_ (_not_ the morphological system) works.: AGENT Trigger: AT-cut GEN-wood OBL-forest TRG-man "[cutting-agent] [of wood] [at forest] = [man]" lit.: "The wood's cutter in the forest is the man" transl.: "The man, he cut some wood in the forest" - 334 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 PATIENT Trigger: PT-cut GEN-man OBL-forest TRG-wood "[cutting-patient] [of man] [at forest] = [wood]" lit.: "The man's cutting-patient in the forest is the wood" transl.: "The wood, the man cut it in the forest" LOCATION Trigger: LT-cut GEN-man GEN-wood TRG-forest "[cutting-location] [of man] [of wood] = [forest]" lit.:"The man's cutting-location of wood is the forest" transl.: "The forest, the man cut some wood in it" Note how I have nominalized the verbs in the transcription. Thus, the verb for cutting has been nominalized as an agent, a patient, or a location depending on what role the trigger plays. There are other verbal trigger forms too including benefactor and instrument. My own theory is that trigger languages only have one core argument. Such being the case, trigger languages resort to nominalizing verbs. This might also explain why passive constructions do not exist in trigger languages since the valency of the verb is not changed (cannot change) with different triggers. In a language using a trigger system, it's not useful to talk about subject, object, etc., and word order may greatly vary. In Tagalog, the predicate (the nominalized verb) is the first word in the sentence, and the trigger is last. Other languages might be different. It's equally useless to talk of transitive or intransitive verbs, or of voice (active, passive, middle). This is just to show you how things can be really different, and still understandable. See if you can imagine something else! Morphosyntactic typology When one talks about verb arguments (or syntactic elements in relation to the verb), one usually distinguishes two basic ones, which we will call subject and object. According to the manner in which a language marks those, we have several types thereof: 1. An accusative language is one where , the subject of all verbs (transitive and intransitive) is marked with one grammatical case, conventionally known as 'nominative'; , the object of a transitive verb is marked with another case, which is conventionally named 'accusative'. 2. An ergative language is one where , the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are both marked with one grammatical case, called 'absolutive'; , the subject of a transitive verb is marked with another case, conventionally known as 'ergative'. - 335 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 3. An active language is one where , the subject of a transitive verb is marked with a grammatical case, usually named 'agentive' (A); , the object of a transitive verb is marked with another case, usually known as 'patientive' (P); , the subject of an intransitive verb is marked with either one of the two cases mentioned above (A or P) according to semantic considerations. A different, more formal way of looking at it, is using three syntactical categories, usually labelled S, A, and P, where S is the only argument of an intransitive verb, and A and P are the two arguments of a transitive verb. There is (it seems) no language on Earth that marks these three roles using three different cases; they're usually divided, one marked with one case and the other two with a different case. Thus, a language that groups (treats alike) S and A is an accusative language (P gets the accusative case); a language that groups S and P is an ergative language (A gets the ergative case); and a language that groups S and A or S and P according to the verb is an active language. There's apparently no language that groups all three roles; something (some morphology or word order) distinguishes between them on most occasions (and context disambiguates if not). Also, almost no language groups A and P and sets S apart (A and P need to be distinguished since they're both arguments of one verb, but S doesn't need marking since an intransitive verb has no other argument). ACCUSATIVE LANGUAGES Let us recall the definition given above: accusative languages mark the subject of all verbs with one case (nominative, NOM), and the object of transitive verbs with another case (accusative, ACC). That's why they are also called nominative/accusative. The typical example of an accusative language is Latin. domin -us veni-t master-NOM come-3sPRS "The master comes." domin -us serv -um audi-t master-NOM slave-ACC hear-3sPRS "The master hears the slave." Most Romance languages have not preserved the morphological case marks of Latin, but the order of the words within the sentence, as well as concord (grammatical agreement) and context, allow us to differentiate the nominative and the accusative roles. Therefore these languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc.) show a syntactic accusative quality, rather than a morphological one. - 336 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 English, while not a Romance language, also derives from a case-inflected language and has also lost most morphological cases, but its syntactic accusativity can be confirmed by observing sentences where an argument is deleted. In the sentence "the pupil saw the teacher and left" there are two coordinated propositions with a common argument. The fact that the missing argument is assumed to be "the pupil" points to the fact that English is an accusative language, because the nominative role takes precedence to occupy the vacant space, since the verb in the second proposition ("left") requires a nominative subject. In an ergative language (see below) the missing slot would have been occupied by the absolutive case argument (which is the object of the first proposition). The great majority of Indoeuropean languages are accusative. However, some present a partial ergative behaviour. ERGATIVE LANGUAGES An ergative language, as we saw, is one that marks the subjects of transitive verbs with one case (ergative, ERG), and the subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive ones with another case (absolutivo, ABS). The ergative language most known in Europe is Euskara (Basque), which is in fact the only European ergative language, and cannot be grouped within any linguistic family, being probably the last remnant of ergativity left behind after the Indoeuropean occupation. Georgian (spoken in the nation of Georgia, an ex-Soviet republic and birthplace of Stalin) shows ergative patterns in one of its verb series (the verb system in Georgian is extremely complicated), but is accusative in the rest. In one grammar sketch of Georgian that I have, it is described as having formal ergativity with features more in line with those of active languages of the Split-S type (see below). The Australian language Dyirbal is also partially ergative (it uses an ergative structure for third-person sentences, but becomes accusative for the first and second persons), with an underlying syntactic structure that is ergative. Hindi is ergative in the perfect tenses, and accusative in the imperfect ones. (These weird cases have been explained in several ways, all of them rather dense...) An example of ergativity (from Euskara): umea erori da ume -a -0 eror-i da child-the-ABS fall-PRF AUX:PRS+3sS the child (ABS) fallen is "The child fell." emakumeak gizona ikusi du emakume-a -k gizon -a -0 ikus-i du woman -the-ERG man -the-ABS see -PRF AUX:PRS+3sS+3sO the woman (ERG) the man (ABS) seen has - 337 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 "The woman has seen the man." In an ergative language, the argument in the absolutive case is the one that is assumed when it is missing. Thus, while in English "the pupil saw the teacher and left" is interpreted as "the pupil saw the teacher" + "the pupil left", the equivalent in Euskara or another ergative language (with syntactic ergativity) would be interpreted by assuming the absolutive object of the first proposition as the subject of the second verb (which is intransitive): "the pupil (ERG) saw the teacher (ABS) and left" is interpreted as "the pupil (ERG) saw the teacher (ABS)" + "[the teacher (ABS)] left" A test of this kind with the native speakers of a language (where they are forced to fill in the vacant slots and complete their interpretation) is a way to decide if a language is ergative/absolutive. Interestingly, ergative languages usually do not have a passive voice, but they do have an antipassive voice, which deletes the direct object and demotes the subject from ergative to absolutive (i. e. it makes the verb intransitive). See also this article about split ergativity. ACTIVE LANGUAGES As explained above, an active language is one where the S-role (the subject of an intransitive verb) can be marked in one of two ways (either as A = agentive or as P = patientive), according to semantic considerations with respect to the verb or its argument. Active languages are in turn divided into two types: , a. Languages with a split S-role (Split-S), in which the decission to mark the Subject of a given verb as A or P has been made beforehand, so to speak, in a conventional way, and fixed as part of the syntactic structure; , b. Lenguages with a fluid S-role (Fluid-S), in which the decission to mark the subject as A or P depends on real-time semantic considerations and must be taken by the speaker according to his/her intention and the context, since the meaning of the expression can be changed. The semantic considerations mentioned above may have to do with the kind of concept described by the verb (is it an event or action, or is it a state?), as well as the degree of control or will of the subject over the action or state expressed by the verb (is it a voluntary act or an involuntary one?, does the actor perform it directly or through an instrument?). In Fluid-S languages these considerations have to be pondered by the speaker to twist the meaning to one side or the other. In Split-S languages each verb has these connotations (and the way of marking the intransitive subject) already assigned as part of its definition, and all the speaker may do is learning this and employing it in the - 338 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 usual way, modifying it through other means when s/he deems necessary to change the meaning. For example, 'sleep' shows an involuntary state. In a Split-S langauge, the speaker will mark the subject of 'sleep' as P always. If s/he wishes to make it explicit that an effort was made to sleep, or something like that, s/he will have to resort to auxilliaries ('try to sleep') or other means to convey this meaning. On the other hand, in a Fluid-S language, while the typical use of 'sleep' will have the subject marked as P, the speaker might actually be allowed to suggest 'go to sleep, make an effort to sleep' by using the same verb 'sleep' with a Subject marked as A. In this way one could also give different meanings to verbs like 'cough' (generally involuntary, but sometimes willfully performed by the actor) or 'turn around' (active and usually voluntary, but sometimes an unconscious reflex act). Daniel Andreasson, from the CONLANG list, researched the subject and sent the list a brief explanation. He states that active languages distinguish between A and P Subjects according to several criteria (each language uses primarily one of these): , a) event vs. state , b) control , c) performance, effect and instigation "Event vs. state" means that if the verb is an event (like 'run', 'dance', 'chat', 'kill'), then the argument is marked like A. If it's a state ('be hungry', 'be tired'), then it's marked like P. "Control" means that if the argument of the verb is in control of the event (or state), then it's marked as A. If it is not in control, then it is marked as P. 'Go' and 'be careful' are controlled predicates. 'Die' and 'fall' are not. Then there's "performance, effect and instigation". Some predicates are in some way performed or instigated by the actor. However, they need not be controlled. These are verbs like 'sneeze' and 'vomit'. In languages like Lakhota and Georgian, it's enough if the actor in some way performs the action (or state), s/he doesn't need to be in control. Thus the argument of predicates like 'sneeze' and 'hiccup' are marked as A. In languages of group (b) ("control") these would be marked as P. Analogy Analogy is the blanket term for various kinds of processes that change the phonetics and the grammar of a word or expression, produced by very special causes. When I speak of analogy I will usually be referring to phonetic change. Analogy is the creation of a new form of a word by influence of similar, analogical forms. Analogy is quite a fruitful device, and it's probably one of the major word-creators in languages. Let's see an example. - 339 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Latin derives from Proto-Indoeuropean (a language or set of dialects of a language that has been reconstructed based on its daughter languages). In PIE, nouns had case, so they changed form according to case. The word for honour was reconstructed as having the forms *honos, *honosem. As PIE evolved and gave origin to Latin (and also Greek, /s/ sound Germanic, Sanskrit, etc.) some sound change took place. In particular, the between vowels gradually became voiced (/z/) and finally gave an alveolar trill, /r/ (this change is called rhotacism). This only happened when the /s/ was intervocalic, and not in any other position. (Before) (After) *honos -> honos *honosem -> honorem This, as you see, produced an irregularity; the root form of the word split in two forms, honos- and honor-. All languages have some irregular forms, but this one (and many others of the same kind) probably wasn't accepted by speakers. Now put your hand over the "Before" column and hide it, ignore it. Speakers couldn't know anything about the sound change, which is a subtle and unconscious process (and not studied in those times). What could you do with the irregular pair honos/honorem? The solution came by analogy with the many words which hadn't changed form (I don't know enough Latin to give an example), and with the same root. They had honorem and also honoris, perhaps even honorificum and so on, so they began saying honor instead of honos. That's analogy. Of course, no language ever takes analogy so far as to regularize its whole grammar. A related form of analogy appears when people create words out of elements they had, based on other similar words. English is quite prolific in this respect. Having words like pulverize or finalize, English speakers have created analogical forms like idealize, nationalize, hospitalize and hundreds more. If you're creating a language, probably analogy will be the best tool to increase your lexicon. Grammatical devices This section is a general one which will mention and summarize the main grammatical devices found on languages, i. e. how a grammar is managed at the practical level (on actual words). We already seen most of these devices in a way or another. Here's a brief list of them: , Affixion: this includes adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes to words in order to change their meaning or their relationship with other words. These affixes include what we call inflections and also agglutinated affixes. , Word order: it's free in some languages and fixed in some others (see Syntax). In general, the more synthetic the language, the freer the word order. An analytic - 340 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 language such as Chinese relies on word order to clarify the meaning of words, because they are never inflected and therefore don't show their functions on their structure. (Actually Chinese does have some inflections... in fact, according to certain authors, English is more analytic than Chinese.) A synthetic language like Latin can construct a sentence with scattered words (this is called hyperbathon [I think] and is used as a poetic device). , Stress and pitch: we've already talked about them. In some languages they are only formal; in many others, two words can have different meanings according to their stress patterns. Compare English a record /'rek@rd/ and to record /ri'kord/ (and many other pairs). , Tone: the same as for stress and pitch. Sometimes a change in tone distinguishes two completely different words, and sometimes it produces a different form of the same word. In Shilluk, yít (high tone) means "ear", and yìt (low tone) means "ears"; tone is not a phonetic feature but a grammatical feature. , Alternation: we've seen it with examples. It's the (regular) change of sounds on words. The most common is vowel alternation, which is indeed found in English: compare sing, sang, sung, and man, men, etc. In some languages this is not irregular but the norm. Consonant alternation is less common but does exist (compare a house, to house, voiceless vs. voiced). Consonants can alternate in different ways, not only by voice; they can change stop to fricative, or fricative to affricate, or simple to double, or even in strangest ways. There's an African language where /t/ alternates with /l/ and /p/ alternates with /w/ (this is voice alternation but also involves other contrasts). , Reduplication: (a part of) the root of a word is doubled, repeated before or after it. A reduplicated verb can increase its force, like Hotentot go "look" vs. go-go "examine with attention" (used by Philip J. Farmer in Riders of the Purple Wage, in the Go-go School of Criticism). A reduplicated noun can be taken as plural, like gyat "person" vs. gyigyat "people" (again an African language), which also shows vowel alternation. Sometimes the reduplication is just put there as part of an inflection. In Greek, the perfect forms of verbs use reduplication and vowel alternation: līpō "I leave", hélipon "I left", léloipa "I have left". Creating words Well, now you have everything set up, so you have to begin creating words. Probably you already have some particles, case endings, affixes, etc., but that's only the skeleton. How many words do you need? If you're creating a full language (which I assume you are, because you wouldn't have come this far if you weren't), then you'll need about 2000 (two thousand) words to communicate with a certain comfort. You can do quite a lot with about 1000 words, if that scares you; but you'll probably be creating new words now and then. Mark Rosenfelder mentions (and I'm not going to repeat it here) the thesis of Ogden and Richards. These guys showed that the most part of any English text contains a very reduced lexicon. A group of common words cover 80% or 90% of any text. Then they - 341 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 said, "Well then, let's isolate those words and use them and only them, combining them to form complicate concepts instead of using not-so-common words". For example, forget the word "success" and use "make good". All in all, you could do with only 850 common words and perhaps a hundred more for specific fields. The argument is right, but it has a failure. The most common words which cover so much of the text are also the ones that carry the least information: articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc. In newspaper headlines, those are usually deleted, because they are not so important and the rest can be understood. The not-so-common words cannot be deleted, because they are the ones which convey all the meaning, all the information. In fact, the theoretical basis of modern informatics says that the most unusual signs are the ones that possess the most information. If you understand the 90% of the words in a text, but the 10% remaining is composed of the most critical information, then you're actually getting nothing except a lot of particles connecting inintelligible concepts. So don't spare your words. You can never have too many. How do you start? There's no method, but I'll tell some ways I have used: , You can translate simple texts. When you need a word, you create it; if there's an available related root, you derive it from there, or else create and note a root first. You can't have words coming out of nowhere. Translation is tedious, and it bothers you to stop at each word and invent it, but it's wonderful to create words. What to translate is your decision. I don't recommend James Joyce or Kierkegaard or Borges, of course. The Babel text is quite good. You can go on with the Bible (or the Talmud or the Rigveda or whatever sacred scriptures your religion has, if it does and you have a religion). If that seems too dense, use comic books, or The Hobbit. If you dare, try translating from a conlang (a glossed text) into your own. , Perhaps you can find a list of basic vocabulary. I have an English-English dictionary intended for non-English speakers, with a list of 2000 common words that are used to explain the definitions, and I've taken some words from there and translated them into my own (invented) language. Don't translate dictionary entries. It's boring, it's time-consuming, and it's pointless: you'll be having lots of unusual words, all of whose English glosses will begin with a, and nothing else. , Find a topic or field and invent words on it. For example, verbs of motion (walk, go, jump, come, rise, raise, drag, spin), or body parts (head, arms, legs, toes, fingers, face, eyes, hair), or colours (you know the colours), or numbers (you'll have to create a numeric system or use the decimal one), or tools, or animals, or domestic appliances. , This one I haven't used yet, but it just seems interesting: create rhyming words. Take any collection of English concepts you like, and translate the first one with a certain word in your language, and all the others with words that rhyme with it. Or the other way round (English has lots of rhyming words, especially monosyllables). Or you could build alternating series, words which vary only in their first consonant, or in their vowels (of course they should be totally unrelated - 342 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 concepts, unless sound alternation is a valid inflecting mechanism). You can then use these words to make puns if you like :-). There's a very interesting list of words (the Universal Language Dictionary) which comprises 1600 words divided into topics, and used in some way by the most common languages of the world. You can find it at the Model Languages site: it comes with the Langmaker language generator. Very good, at least to check for words (it's not very fun to sit and generate them one after another). For a simpler but still useful way to generate random words, try Wordgen. It lets you specify beginning, medial and final consonants, clusters, vowels and diphthongs, and the number of syllables you want. Final words If you want to become a great language creator, read! Read everything that falls into your hands or passes by. The Web is full of material, though a bit scattered. I have already mentioned some of my sources. Here's a full list of sites you should visit: Model Languages is a newsletter devoted to language creation, which used to be published bi-monthly. The newsletter is not published any more, but the old issues are still online. You can find lots of online material there; it's quite a lot of reading material and it also features a wonderful list of more than 200 links to pages about invented languages. There's also a word generator that can handle different syllable structures and produce words, and derive them according to simple phonetic changes. Mark Rosenfelder has made a terrific work in his site, Metaverse, including the Language Construction Kit, a review on Quechua, a list of numbers from 1 to 10 in 3500 languages, and lots of material about one of his languages, Verdurian. Then there's the Human Languages Page, which is a bit scrambled, but helps you find linguistic resources on lots of natural languages. The folks at SIL have collected an immense amount of definitions having to do with linguistics and the study of language (including rhetorics). Check out the Glossary of Linguistic Terms. If you're a J. R. R. Tolkien fan, you can find descriptions of the languages he invented in Ardalambion, the Tongues of Arda. For a look at some real world scripts, you can visit Ancient Scripts, a very well-made set of pages with examples of writing systems from around the world, including Mesoamerica, Europe, and Middle East. You shouldn't leave without visiting the pages in the Scattered Tongues webring. Follow the arrows! - 343 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 If you want to get into the conlanging community, join the Conlang list by sending an e- subscribe conlang your_name as the body of your mail to listserv@listserv.brown.edu with message. Conlang is dedicated to the discussion of constructed languages for fictional purposes. If you belong to Conlang already, or you're simply curious, visit the Conlang FAQ for a lot a topics covered in past threads, or consult the Conlang Archives. Joshua Shinavier, a fellow member of Conlang, has a quite comprehensive list of constructed languages of which you can find some material in Internet: The Conlang Yellow Pages. No better way to learn about language construction than seeing how others have managed it. And then of course there are libraries, those quiet buildings full of books. I've learned a lot from linguistics books. Most often than not, they are dense and sometimes inintelligible (they weren't intended for ordinary people trying to create languages), but they often provide explanations on curious stuff along with examples. The best way to learn how to invent a language is studying natural languages. Well, so long! If you're creating a language and would like to expose them to the praise and critique of the world, or just need to get some advice or to give some advice, mail me and I'll do my best to correspond to your expectations. Don't go away without checking out Language Creation. Acknowledgements I want to give thanks to the following: , Mark Rosenfelder, for his excellent work in the Language Construction Kit, which taught me a lot and inspired me to write this, and for not complaining when I took big chunks of it. , Jeffrey Henning, for his (also terrific) work as the editor of the famous Model Languages newsletter. , Nik Taylor, a fellow member of CONLANG, who was if I recall correctly the first person to write to me re: How to create a language, correcting some gross mistakes and contributing data about the record 92 consonants of !Xu~ and the average proportion of obstruents to sonorants. , Kristian Jensen, who taught me and the rest of the CONLANG list about trigger systems. , Markus Miekk-oja, a.k.a. Miekko, who shared a lot of curious things about languages real and fictional, including the mysteries of the many Finnish cases and the names and uses of verb moods in Nenets. , Jarkko Hietaniemi, for one nice example of agglutination in Finnish. , Donald Patrick Michael Goodman III, for teaching me how to say "He's cute" in Japanese and then make it past tense. , Reena D., for correcting a typo in Donald's example. , Mathias Lasailly, a fellow CONLANG member, who supplied the example of possession shown by a subordinate clause with the verb "have" in Ainu. - 344 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 , Cseri Benedek, who corrected my mistake of stating that no languages consistently mark transitivity on verbs by showing me how this is done in Hungarian. , All the members of the CONLANG list that I haven't named above. , John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, and so many others that have made me think about words, their meanings, their beauty and the magic wrought by them, which makes tangible the matter of dreams and thoughts. - 345 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Conlang Errors - The purpose of this page is to display and correct several errors I've found (newbie) language creators make all the time. I'm certainly not up to the challenge of a complete, well-articulated essay on the matter; I'm not a linguist or a philologist or a phonologist, and almost everything I know I owe to people who corrected me. That's why I'm risking to be named Obnoxious Pedantic Lecturer of the Millenium by some people who are the source of these errors, and the target for the corrections. I have a compulsion for correcting mistakes. I will say it in Spanish: La verdad no ofende ('Truth does not offend'). The truth is many people are creating languages (so to speak) without real knowledge. I was one of those a few years ago. La verdad no ofende, so I didn't resent it when my lack of knowledge was pointed out. But then, I like to learn. Most people I've met in the conlanging environment like to learn too, though many would not bother to learn too much. Some people don't like to learn; they just want to do as they please. All of them have the right to do so -- just don't write to me telling me "I do as I please, my language is nice and you're a stupid because you dismiss it". On the other hand, "You're a geek" is accepted, though not welcome given the implicit tone. Enough. Let's enter the slaughterhouse now... Here's my language (points to a dictionary) If you can enclose it in a dictionary (in the normal meaning of the word), then it's not a language, but a code. Now, an encyclopedia would be useful. A language doesn't consist of words and meanings only; it has a phonology, and a grammar, and many many subcategories under those. If you replace English words for [your language] words and maybe add some strange letters and diaeresis over vowels, you're creating a nice code, but nothing else. As I said, you can do as you please with your creation, but if you call it a language, it should be a language. I can't boast to have mastered chess if I use the board to play checkers. I don't have that sound -- there's no letter for it in my con-script This one is very frequent. It seems many people blend sound with sound representation -- and even worse, they do it in the opposite order. I'll just go biblical here: in the beginning there was the (spoken) Word! Are you telling me you can't produce a sound that you don't have a letter for? Did you learn to read before you learned to speak? - 347 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 English has no letters for many very common sounds. English has no single letters for several sounds found in English -- it has to use digraphs which usually don't have a single reading. This is not important at all. On Earth, first you learn to speak, and then, if you're lucky, you go to school and learn to read and write. Recipe: don't mix sounds and letters. Letters are not sounds. The same letter or combination of letters can be used to represent many sounds. The letter j is used for four different sounds in English, French, German and Spanish. Letters do not exist in a language -- they are conventional marks that belong in other fields of study. Once you have your sounds, assign them to letters, but don't delete sounds only because they're unrepresentable -- no sound is, since you can always invent. The sound [X] and the sound [Y] are the same in my language Nope. The sound [X] and the sound [Y] are different in all languages. Lemme guess: you mentioned them because they both exist in English, right? What you're saying here is that people do not distinguish between them. Actually, [X] and [Y] are called allophones; they are not the same sound, but they're treated similarly by speakers. They are the same phoneme -- you can't distinguish two words only by them. In general, if [X] and [Y] are allophones, they're in complementary distribution: you can't have one in the same environment as the other (for example, between vowels you pronounce [X], but elsewhere you pronounce [Y]). If you exchange them, it sounds wrong, but you can't produce a different word. You have to say when you will pronounce one or the other. Free allophonic variation, if I got it right in the first place, is not common. On the other hand, maybe you just wanted to say you only have [X], not [Y] (or the other way round). As in "I have [p], but no [b]". That's all right -- you don't have to clarify that. There are many sounds you don't have, even common sounds. You can't mention them all. How do you say that in English? This one is close to the one that immensely bothers abstract artists: "What does it mean?" Sometimes you can translate more or less properly and convey the original meaning. Sometimes you cannot. As for myself, I love it when you cannot. Two languages need not be terribly different or alien to each other in order to have untranslatable utterances. Off the top of my head, the English expressions 'go ballistic', 'how come' and 'set sail' are untranslatable in Spanish (you can certainly find rough equivalents, but no literal translations, and they lack the original force). And in Spanish you can say 'se mató' and not knowing if it means 'he killed himself' or 'he got killed' or just 'he died by accident'. Such ambiguities and quirks are what gives a language a definite character. - 348 - Conlangs DE-Cal – Spring 2006 Try and make words that don't calque English meanings. Have a colour like Japanese aoi, which means both 'blue' and 'green', or like Spanish tetilla which means 'nipple' (but only of a man), or of such wide field of meaning as English 'set' or 'get'. I have this very weird unique sound... If it's truly unique, you should pay attention. Sounds are gregarious -- they die out if they're alone. You can't have a well-formed (human) language if you describe it as having all sounds found in English minus /p/, plus a very strange sound which is produced by sticking your tongue out, opening your lips and snoring. This weird sound (and many not so weird) would be out of place. If you want a natural-sounding human language, you have to keep sounds in a stable frame -- no weird sounds, unless you have more than one. This is not a serious restriction: if you want a nice-sounding language, you can surely forget about strange sounds which are cumbersome and difficult for you to produce; and if you want a exotic language, you won't stop at just one isolated weird phoneme, right? I've created 20000 words with [some program] Uh, no, the program did. You just filled in some blanks! I do not advocate against random word generators. They're terrific for people which don't have time or patience to come up especially with the first hundred words in a new language. I prefer to produce each word myself, but if I catch a nice combination of sounds at random in any way, which I like, I will adapt it for my language. Nothing wrong about that, as long as you have a criterion to choose them. But don't tell me you've made 20000 words if all the hard boring job was done inside a FOR cycle. - 349 -