Monthly Archives: June 2011

Ceci n’est pas un mot

In my introductory posting to this website I wrote, “Another new thing I’ve included is a blog category on ‘Grammar musings.’ […] [They] will hopefully give you some insight into the process that is behind conlanging.” Here is one such insight, and a very basic one at that.

The other day I remembered an episode from when my dad learned – fascinatedly – that I’m doing this language inventing stuff. He asked me first, what e.g. the word for ‘house’ is (nanga) and then, why it’s not something different. The same question also comes up in the forums every now and then.

Case 1: Make up a word from scratch

As I found out in an analysis of my dictionary that I did last year, Ayeri has a number of phonotactic constraints that restrict words considerably. Some of them arose purposefully, others accidentally. Based on this analysis, I programmed a script to make up words for me. However, this does not mean I simply take those generated words and fully randomly assign a meaning to them. Technology and statistics aside, I have an idea in my mind about how the language should sound like and all analysis was done in retrospect. In fact, I often only take my list as a way to help me find a suitable word if I can’t think of one offhand. For example, right now I still need a word for ‘poison’ and don’t feel like duplicating German Gift, lit. ‘something given’ (with some semantic drift …). Using my list for inspiration, I find that I somehow like mikam. There is no word that begins with mik- in the dictionary yet, so I don’t need to tweak it further. But how and why? Why not kotas or desay? I don’t know! Incidentally, I think kotas has something piercing that fits ‘thorn’ (k-t-s sounds hard and pricky) and desay sounds like it could best be an adjective, by analogy with other adjectives in -ay (atay, dakay, gibay, kebay, …).

Case 2a: Extend an existing word’s meaning

This is something I find myself doing a lot, because it’s boring to have 1:1 equivalents to German-English-French words. As an example, take sihiru- ‘to translate’. I wanted to translate ‘to adopt’ the other day and was thinking about whether to coin a new word, or to reuse an old one. I decided for the latter strategy and after a little brainstorming, I thought that translating is also a way to ‘adopt’ a text into one’s own language, thus another possible meaning of sihiru- could be ‘adopt’.

Another example is pray ‘smooth’. When I made that word for Conlang Relay 18, I had to make it up from scratch. I also used it when I needed a word for ‘even number’. ‘Smooth’ and ‘even’ seem to be very English-y by being synonyms, but ‘odd number’ does not re-use the Ayeri word for ‘odd’. Instead, I chose baras ‘rough’ for consistency.

Case 2b: Extend an existing word’s meaning by changing its noun class

Ayeri distinguishes two noun classes, animate and inanimate. Sometimes it’s neat to add a meaning to a word not simply by extending it, but by also by changing its noun class. One such example is the word for ‘navel’, terpeng. This word existed previously as the inanimate terpeng ‘middle’. However, body parts are animate neuter in Ayeri, since they are things that are associated with living entities, thus asking for a category switch. A change in animacy can thus be used to derive a new meaning, whether motivated by grammatical constraints or freely.

Case 3: Derivation from existing words

Take the word minjisān ‘candidate, electee’ for example. I used it in a previous posting and commented on how unwieldy I found it. Nonetheless, let’s have a look at how I made it. First of all, I needed a word that means ‘candidate’. A candidate in this case was someone who is set up as an electable person. Someone to choose, one could say. Searching my dictionary for possible words to derive this from, I found mindoy- ‘to choose’ and mindoyam ‘choice, option’. Since the choosing is applied to someone, I added the causative suffix -isa to the verb, which is a valid way in Ayeri to derive a non-noun with a resumptive meaning – English would make that ‘chosen’ as an adjective. This results in mindoyisa, which then got nominalized to mindoyisān. Since that’s a mouthful at four syllables, I applied reduction and got minjisān.

Case 4: Nick etymologies, but reasonably so

So you have a word, say, ‘bunch’. A ‘bunch’ in English can refer to a number of things, but let us focus on this meaning:

A collection or cluster of things of the same kind, either growing together (as a bunch of grapes), or fastened closely together in any way (as a bunch of flowers, a bunch of keys) (OED, “Bunch.”)

I suspected that ‘bunch’ is maybe somehow related to ‘bind’, as it’s the case in German:

Bund […] ist eine Bildung zu dem unter binden behandelten Verb und bedeutet eigentlich “Bindendes, Gebundenes”.[2. “Bund ‘bundle’ (…) is a formation belonging to the verb discussed under binden ‘to bind’ and in fact means ‘binding thing, bound thing.'”] (Duden Herkunftswörterbuch, “Bund.”)

Upon further investigation, though, I found out that it is of unknown origin and possibly onomatopoeic (cf. OED, “Bunch.”). But anyway, the German etymology doesn’t seem unreasonable for other languages to come up with independently, so let’s simply look whether there’s a word for ‘to bind’ already. And indeed, there is: disy-. Thus, applying regular nominalization, the word for ‘bunch’ in the meaning above is disyan. And it is probably best categorized as inanimate, since it does neither refer to a living thing, nor would I associate it with one off the top of my head (food is inanimate). There should also be a possibility to pluralize it.

  • “Bunch.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OUP, 2011. Web. 28 Jun. 2011.
  • “Bund.” Duden Herkunftswörterbuch. Etymologie der deutschen Sprache. 3rd ed. 2001. Print.

Tahano Hinyan and Daléian alphabet

Tahano Hikamu “Java” Hinyan[1. The italic variant of my Tahano Hikamu font, Tagāti Book, is modelled after this style. — 2012-11-09]

For some time now I’ve played around with a style for Ayeri’s native writing system Tahano Hikamu that I loosely based on the look of the Javanese script (which I’ve already mentioned in a previous posting). I made several examples before using an experimental font, but the style has not been documented anywhere so far. However, the file is up now as a kind of brochure/leaflet/thing intended to be a supplement to the “Alphabet” page. That is, I spared me the work to repeat myself with explanations, so most of the file’s content is really just a table of the different characters with their names underneath.

Download (PDF, 1.1 MB)

For those who are curious: The outlines of the characters were drawn in Illustrator, the brochure was made in InDesign, the stock photos are from the wonderful stock.xchng. This all also explains the file size, by the way.

Daléian Alphabet

Daléian script example

Note that I’ve also put up information for the Daléian script again. I just printed out the relevant page from my old website as a PDF file. The low resolution of the images is suboptimal for this purpose, but I suppose it’s still good enough to read on screen and get an idea.

Download (PDF, 143 KB)

A Likely Translation Challenge

This is a cross-posting from the ZBB, as a note-to-self kind of thing.

Yāng minjisānas nilay.
[gloss]Ø yāng mindoy-isa-an-as nilay.
COP 3SM.AGT choose-CAU-NMLZ-PAT probable[/gloss]
‘He is a/the likely candidate.’
 
Yāng nilay minjisānas.
[gloss]Ø yāng nilay minjisān-as.
COP 3SM.AGT probably electee-PAT[/gloss]
‘He likely is/will likely be a/the candidate.’

Neat-o. Except I need an easier word for “candidate”…

What do we see here? Well, we see difference in meaning through word order in action:

  1. Modifiers mostly follow their heads, so in the first case, where “likely” modifies the “candidate”, nilay follows accordingly.
  2. The second case is a little trickier, and I’m not quite sure about it. Ayeri has a zero copula which I’ve so far glossed as “Ø/COP” at the beginning of sentences, since this is the place verbs usually appear in. However, in the second example above I have what’s technically an adverb follow the agent NP. There are languages that use personal pronouns as copulas actually, e.g. Hebrew (cf. Payne 117), so could we argue here that yāng fulfills the role of the copula here? This demands further investigation!
  • Payne, Thomas E. Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists. Cambridge: CUP, 1997. Print.
  • Prmysl. “TC: Likely.” Zompist BBoard. 6 Jun. 2011. Mark Rosenfelder, 2002. Web. 6 Jun. 2011.

“The Problem with Conlanging” – A Response

[Dieser Beitrag ist jetzt auch auf Deutsch zu lesen, nämlich hier. — 20.08.2011]

Fellow conlanger Vecfaranti wrote a thought-provoking posting on the ZBB some weeks ago. Unfortunately I’ve only managed to read it now, and I would like to share it with you, and also answer with my own thoughts and experiences. Please be so kind not to necromance the thread, if the current date is months past May 24, 2011. What I am doing here is quoting passages from Vecfaranti’s forum posting and comment on them below. So, without further ado —

Conlangs require context. Some conlangs are created for the modern world, although those are becoming less and less frequent. Most conlangs made by ZBB members are artlangs meant for conpeople. But for a lot of us, creating the language is much more fun than creating the […] people.

Ayeri, too, is a language that is supposed to somehow be linked to an imaginary world not much unlike ours. Nonetheless, I can say that it’s also become kind of a personal language to me, so it also contains words for things that may or may not exist in this world my language’s speakers are supposed to live in, such as television, internet, or car. The necessity for this has arisen from writing the one or the other journal entry in the language, as well as doing Translation Challenges at the ZBB that I did not bother to somehow adapt culturally. Whenever I can, I try to either metaphorically extend the meaning of already existing words[1. E.g. bukoya ‘library’ → ‘web server’] (natural languages also seem to do this a lot!), or I calque these words,[2. E.g. narakahu ‘telephone’ ← nara- ‘speak’ + kahu ‘far’ (cf. German legalese Fernsprecher ‘far-speaker’)] and as a last resort borrow them. However, this borrowing mostly happens from the language I mainly work in: English. Even “in-universe” borrowing is a problem, because, as Vecfaranti observes, conlangs require context, and I don’t have much.[3. I drew a map some years ago, but not much has come of that. Also, the level of technology of my con-people varies a lot.] Ayeri is the third language I am working on technically, but I’ve completely given up on the “Nameless Language” and Daléian, both of which I created in my first half year of language tinkering back in 2002. Also, I must say, that my interest in languages as such is bigger than in the people who speak them. Cultural Studies, history and sociology simply are not my primary interest. Trying to create a believable, naturalistically complex culture around my conlang and doing that on top of trying to create (an) artificial language(s) in depth seems quite “taxing” indeed to me, and frankly I have no idea where to start, hence my reluctance to come up with at least some kind of setting.

Are you going to make a book using it? Are you going to make a movie? A game of some sorts? Or are you just making it for the sake of making it and presenting it on a website in encyclopedic format? Which brings me to the other problem. No one likes reading grammars. […] And most people don’t have in depth knowledge to critique aspects of grammar besides phonology and maybe rudimentary morphology. […] Which is why most threads about in depth grammars do not get many responses around here.

My work on Ayeri is kind of a purpose to itself, though it also helps exploring Linguistics as a discipline, thus helping me to learn more about things as I go. Personally, I must admit that it’s no joy for me to sit down and read grammars – whether “nat” or “con” – cover to cover. Exploring bits and pieces here and there is more interesting, though it takes me conscious effort and concentration to sit down and read linguistic papers, and I don’t feel like doing that all the time. Also, I naturally have knowledge holes in areas I didn’t do any reading in for my own conlang, since I’ve never learnt Linguistics formally. In my experience, posting things on small issues you come across and want to hear others’ opinions about is far more successful in terms of response than just posting a link to your grammar, and say “Discuss.” For the same reason I’ve started this blog, more or less: I can write short articles about things, which helps working out details, and I can utter my thoughts so that people maybe can look into my reasoning and the way in which I create grammar, or decide on how to proceed. If they’re interested. However, all bite-sized, if possible.[4. This and the last couple of posts on Ayeri grammar have become quite lengthy, however…]

For context, we must work and work and work tirelessly. And the process usually ends up being private. This board is good for quick questions and socialising, but deep questions require outside research. For presentation, we must either have a lot of work already done, in order to get away with the website approach or we must set a goal for ourselves that goes beyond conlanging (and conworlding) for conlanging’s (or conworlding’s) sake.

Working tirelessly? Well yes, creating a whole world on your own must be very tiresome and takes ages if you want to arrive at a high level of depth. People say they admire my work, however be aware that I guess it could only achieve a certain level of quality because I’ve been working on this for about 8 years. Which goals beyond “conlanging (and conworlding)” should I pursue, though? I guess one I’ve already mentioned above: self-education, and releasing the little scholar in oneself to satisfy one’s curiosity.

Once I make a conlang, relatively in depth, I’m not easily willing to just discard it and not put it to use.

What Vecfaranti writes above I can affirm. And it’s also why I’m stubbornly clinging to Ayeri, although others have suggested to start a new thing, e.g. to make a parallel language or several less in-depth parallel languages to borrow words from. Maybe if I come round to make up a diachronic history of my conlang I will derive some sister-languages. But so far I have been very reluctant to try even that. It’s definitely a goal of mine, though, even if another 10 years have to pass (and should I still be interested in this kind of thing then).

  • Vecfaranti. “The Problem with Conlanging.” Zompist BBoard. 8 May 2011. Mark Rosenfelder, 2002. Web. 4 Jun. 2011.