The Third Language Creation Conference is THIS WEEKEND! If you aren't going, it will be simulcast on the web at the previous link. I'll be there, when I'm not working.
The podcast is my translation of the conlang relay text into Pitak (pee-tawk) from Kapakwonak.
Translation: Li pisu na mul kiso funefemu - I close to sea seated in-a-time En molfos kotiko i a mol fimilu pumo - A wave up-broke and the water over-me swept Li tepo molfous netokwa i ama nami tilwato - I tried the-wave to-not-fight and this to-me happied Li meno onos molfousi pumisu puma - I dreamt about the waves away-me sweeping Wo la tiko, li komanu kuso - When it broke, I continuously-it felt A molfos komanu moso sapwa i pumisu teko - The wave continuously was-able to-go and away-me took
First of all, participating in the relay was a great experience for a bunch of reasons, and I highly recommend participating in one on the ZBB or other conlanging forums! One reason was that it forced me to really get into someone else's mentality about language and their conlang, and break outside of my own. Another reason was that it also forced me to think about my conlang from someone else's point of view, as I had to type up enough of an explanation for them to be able to translate it.
Kapakwonak is a fusional language and difficult to parse through; it was a challange to figure out how each infix added meaning to a sentence or word. There were six sentences in the text, and each one seemed to get a little harder; I think because the message was getting more garbled as we got into it. The first sentence had the peculiar challenge of figuring out that 'I moved downwards upon my legs' meant 'I sat down.'
Pitak is meant to be a simple, primitive language; the biggest challenge with translating it was simplifying what was being said. I did not translate 'I moved downwards upon my legs' literally; and more's the pity - it would have been hilarious to see how this got interpreted by the conlanger after me in the relay! But it wouldn't be said in this way in Pitak - unless you were describing a dance move, perhaps. However, there are other confusing things about Pitak - most words can be nouns or verbs, depending on how they are inflected; so to sit, would be translated more like 'to seat,' or 'to be seated,' because 'kis' means 'seat,' not sit.
I realized something as I came out of this. I've written about simplicity in conlanging, but I think there is an inverse relationship between simplicity and comprehension/transferability of meaning. I think that the simpler a language is, the easier it is to misconstrue meaning and what is trying to be said. I still believe that simplicity is the way to start; that if you don't understand all the underlying linguistic principles you should keep breaking it down until you get to a level you do understand, and I believe that too much complexity can make your own conlang impossible to conjugate/speak/write. But I no longer believe that complexity is the enemy. And I still believe there is a lot more I have to learn about linguistics.
More on the 3rd Language Creation Conference soon.
Sound changes are when an established sound in a language shifts into another sound or sounds. This is, in my opinion, a fun part of conlanging, and a great way to lend some pseudo-reality or aging into your conlang. However, as my mantra has always been to SIMPLIFY, I need to say up front that this is also a great way to make your conlang much more complicated, so experiment and play with this but use with caution.
No language is ever truly static, but is constantly changing and shifting as new cultural influences rise, new celebrities make new things cool (or uncool), and create new vocabulary or import words from other languages, possibly bringing new sounds into the language. In this article by Jeff Henning he mentions sound changes and shows a table of common sound changes (look for a 10 X 9 table). Sound changes can be something that happen over time in a language, or in a region (New England vs. Southern vs. California dude accents) and/or something grammatical. I wanted to show some examples of these without getting into too much detail, and maybe you'll find something you want to use in your conlang.
Think of the word 'knight,' as in 'medieval knight.' Doesn't it sound like the word should be spelled n-i-t-e? There's been some major sound changes and lenitions here since Middle English. As you move from your proto-lang to your conlang, you might consider integrating things like this. For example, creating a rule that all mid-clusters in all words retain all letters but only the last letter of the cluster is pronounced. 'Halketht' would thus still be spelled h-a-l-k-e-th-t, but pronounced 'haketht.' Switching the clusters, 'hathtelk' would become 'hatelk.'
In Bulgarian, any voiced consonants at the end of a word become unvoiced, although they are still written as a voiced consonant; a mark would be spelled b-e-l-e-g (I don't know how to write Cyrillic characters in the middle here), but would be said 'belek.'
Ok, so far everything has been shifts in consonants. What about shifts in vowels? Consider the difference between the British and Scottish accents. Okay, there are quite a lot of different British accents, but listen to clips of Braveheart and you can hear some right proper Scottish accents. Both Scottish and British accents can/will trill the r, but the biggest difference between them are the vowel sounds. Most short i sounds become 'eh's. Most long i sounds become 'aw's. "I'll do it" becomes "Aw'll doo et."
Americans don't round things out and exercise our lips and tongues as much as the Brits do and our language sounds quite different. Say 'me' and draw the corners of your mouth back, like when you smile. Now say it again but purse your lips as if you were saying 'oooh.' Might be the same vowel, but a very different sound, right? You could build something into your proto-lang/conlang progression that over time, people got lazy with the vowel rounding and vowels became unrounded and 'brighter' (I'm borrowing a singing term - brighter means the sound is more in the mouth and not back in the throat).
Another thought on vowel changes: long vowels vs. short vowels. I use this in my conlang - Pitak has only long vowels, but Fauleethik has both long and short vowels. But there is a dialect that converts all sounds to short vowels, so Fauleethik is actually said like Falitik (listen to the podacast to hear how I pronounce this). But what are long and short vowel sounds anyway? Maybe your language will use a different classification, like... 'initial' vowels and 'ultimate' vowels. Whatever classification you use, you could have vowel sounds shift and migrate over time or for different accents.
So, in summary - sound changes can happen in many ways for many reasons, and we just touched on a few. Changes in the sounds of a word while the spelling remains the same, grammatical changes making a sound different from the spelled sound, accent changes, and vowel changes.
You might have noticed I'm trying to spiff up the blog a little! Let me know what you think. But only if you have good things to say. ;)
I want to share some new resources I just found out about. This is for everyone that wants their own font for their conlangs, but don't want to spend the money for font software.
Go to www.yourfonts.com NOW, and follow the easy steps. You can have your own conlang font in MINUTES for FREE. It doesn't get any easier or cheaper than this, folks.
This is designed for you to make a font out of your own handwriting in English, but there's no reason it can't work for conlanging purposes!
If you don't want a hand-written font, the other resource I found is called FontStruct and you can check it out at Fontstruct.com. Free!
I don't know about you, but I was always intrigued by the language Boushh/Leia spoke in Return of the Jedi. There were only a few examples of it in the film: "Yatay, yatay, yotoh," supposedly meant "I have come for the bounty on this wookie." "Yotoh, yotoh" = "$50,000, no less." "Ey, yotoh" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "Because he's holding a thermal detenator!" "Yatoh, cha" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "He agrees." There is something else Boushh/Leia says after the business with Jabba is concluded but I can't really make it out. But the 'yatay yotoh' stuff is what fascinates me.
After a bit of searching I discovered that it was called Ubese. After all this research into linguistics and blogging about conlangs, I thought it would be fun to explore an unknown language, and see if I can deconstruct it, and extrapolate on it. Of course, this would have to be a very simple language; but I've posted a few times about how important I think simplicity is.
Ubese seems to be the ideal choice to examine and extrapolate on. How would you convey meaning with such seemingly limited and simple vocabulary? Such simplicity would imply, to me, that this is a very context-based language; that words mean many different things according to their context. If this is the case, repeating a word, or reduplication, alters, shifts, deepens, etc. the meaning. If this is the case, what could the sentences mean, if translated to English?
"Yatay, yatay, yotoh," supposedly meant "I have come for the bounty on this wookie." I'm guessing the literal meaning would be something closer to... "I come, bounty." In other words, there is very little literal meaning. In every sentence Boushh is talking about the bounty, and in every sentence 'yotoh' is said, so I don't think its a stretch to assume that yotoh is the word bounty, or probably, given the minimalistic nature of the language, it means just reward or money. By repeating 'yatay,' which must refer to his coming, I think this deepens the importance of his coming; either because he's coming for money, or he's come from a great distance. Being such a minimal language, no connecting words are used - you have to infer what is meant by saying yotoh/bounty. But since he's got a wookie on a leash, its not too hard to guess what bounty he is talking about.
"Yotoh, yotoh" = "$50,000, no less." This is said after Jabba offers $25,000. It makes me wonder if by repeating 'yotoh' it doubles the amount, or just means 'more!'? Here's another question: can it mean EITHER, depending on HOW you say the yotohs? For example, you might say 'yo-TOH, yo-TOH,' with the stress on the latter syllable, to change the meaning from 'bounty, bounty' to 'twice the bounty.' Or, you might say 'yo-TOH, YO-toh' to change the meaning to 'half the bounty' or even, 'the bounty has been cut in half.' But for now, lets decide that it means to double the amount.
"Ey, yotoh" = "Because he's holding a thermal detonator!" This is definitely paraphrased. But what would the literal meaning be here? The word for bounty/reward is repeated, preceded by a vowel sound. AND the really cool thing is, if you listen carefully, THIS time when he says yotoh, he stresses the FIRST syllable. How might this change the meaning? Whatever it is, its something you say when you pull out a thermal detonator. I think the 'ey' is basically a 'hey' like, "Hey look!" There's probably a technical term for this, like 'attentional exclamatory.' And I think the different stress could simply be Boushh's way of connoting that he's about to get really crazy - the same way we change the intonation or stress of a normal phrase to make it obvious we are either being funny or sarcastic. I thought about assigning this change of stress some sort of inflectional meaning, but in a language so minimalistic, it seemed more fun to make this a way for speakers to show some emotion.
"Yatoh, cha" = Boushh agrees to $35,000, and C-3PO paraphrases this as "He agrees." The yatoh is troubling, because if it was another yotoh, along with the one syllable word, it wouldn't be hard to assume that the 'cha' is some sort of affirmative word or even a suffix. But, its yatoh, NOT yotoh; so what could it mean? Without a bigger corpus to study, I'm going to assume that it is an inflection. This sentence agrees to Jabba's compromise, so I'm going to say that the 'a' changes the meaning to be 'you/your.' So by saying 'yatoh, cha,' Leia is saying 'your bounty, ok/yes."
But this raises another question: what about the other words? The meaning of 'yatay' would now be extended to mean 'I come to you.' 'Yotoh' could now be extended to mean either 'my bounty/reward' or 'his bounty' referring to Chewbacca; I'm going to go with 'his bounty.'
Phonology - Known consonants: t, ch Known semi-vowels: y Known vowels: a, ay, o That's not going to be enough. The phonoaesthetic of this language seems, to me, to be one that wouldn't use lips much, so I'm not going to use p or b.
Yes, I know Boushh's name has a B in it, and he was supposed to be an Ubese bounty hunter, so, given that the name of the people and this Ubese character HAS A B IN IT, UBESE SHOULD HAVE A B IN IT. However, I am ignoring this. Let's face it - Lucas wasn't thinking about linguistics when he created the names, and at best he just approved whatever audio Ben Burtt created for the brief exchange. I'm just using the material that is directly apparent from ROTJ, and, to my ears, a b sound just doesn't fit in with the phonoaesthetic of this language. In fact, I want to stay away from voiced consonants altogether. This also means no front rounded vowels that might require a lot of lip action to make. So here's the phonology I came up with: t, sh, ch, k, n, l, hh (an h sound further back in the throat), y, ee, ay, i, a, u, o (the six vowels compare with these six words: beet, bait, bit, bat, butt, boat). I kept trying to imagine other words and sounds coming out of Boushh's helmet in that synthesized, amplified, hoarse voice. I realized something that made me think I may have gotten it right: I was keeping my tongue inside my teeth and lips. One more thing; I didn't think there would be any diphthongs. The language seems like its not supposed to require much effort to pronounce or enunciate.
Morphology - We already have a basic word demonstration in our examples, so lets stay with it. One word is basically a phrase, the meaning of which can be deepened, shifted, extended, etc. if the word is reduplicated, or different stresses are used. Words will consist of open-syllables (CVCV, or just CV). I went to Fantasist.net to try out the phonology and see what kind of words I got from one of the word generators. I'll post the entire word list it gave me here, so you can see the results: tiya, keeto, sheeli, kayyo, teechu, hhaylo, kashu, chuta, litay, naychu, sheenay, shosha, chayshay, tayyu, yaykay, chochu, sheehho, lanee, naylee, kayto, sheekay, kuti, hhahha, tayyi, luna, shushay, yohha, yakee, luhho, taynu, hheena, lalee, naku, kika, nuyee, yukay, kaysha, lochu, yoko, shayay, shuyo, yisha, tihhi, shocha, cheeni, koshay, kuhha, luno, yohho, tichay.
Remember, as you read these, that you have to use the correct vowels; some of the words look like they could be pronounced a certain way in English, i.e. kayyo looks like it could be pronounced kaiyo, with an i sound as in 'hi,' but that sound is not in the phonology - its kayyo and the ay sounds like bait or bray. Not all of them sound exactly right to me, but looking through them I could easily come up with phrases that "sounded right" to me, as though Boushh might have spoken them as well; "yakee, yakee, teechu," or "shocha kayyo tayyu." Ah, but I forgot - the 'cha.' Okay, so now we can have sentences like"keeto shuyo tee."
Let's nail down the possessive/relationship inflection rule I started to create when I was wondering about 'yotoh' vs. 'yatoh.' The first vowel sound of a word will Ok, so I = i, you = a, it/he/she = o, we = ay, they = u. yitoh = my reward, yatoh = your reward, yotoh = his reward, yaytoh = our reward, yutoh = their reward
Lastly, lets talk about grammar and syntax. Given the simplicity of the language, it doesn't initially look as though it is fully conveying Subject Verb Object, but it is. Through the morphology rules, subject is conveyed in the first word of the phrase, which is also the verb. And the next word is the object. Whichever comes first is the verb, and the second is the object. So, by this rule, if you switched the phrase 'yatay yotoh,' to 'yotoh yatay,' the meaning would then become something like 'He rewards your coming;' or lets use 'yitoh yatay.' 'I reward your coming,' makes a little more sense. If you said 'yitoh yitoh yatay' the meaning would be 'I truly/deeply/doubly reward your coming.'
But let's not leave out that little nugget 'cha' (as in 'yatoh, cha'). I think that in a language so minimalistic, there would have to be some helper words to convey meanings that the standard rules of grammar do not allow. I think the smaller one-syllable words can help us here. So, we already have 'cha' as an affirming word. Let's add: nay = negating or 'no'; tee = elevating or up; hhu = declining or down. Ooo, and I almost forgot a big one - How do we convey past, present, future tense? No marker for present tense, but ko = past tense, kay = future tense.
This is not very much, but I wanted to finish by translating a few phrases into this so far. "Do you like to run down the hill?" Let's establish 'shishay' as 'run' and 'tiya' as 'like.' We haven't talked about how questions work in this language yet, but lets borrow a little from our own language and say that a higher pitched ending syllable denotes a questioning phrase. 'Taya shishay hhu?' A gesture pointing down the hill would be used, instead of saying it. 'I built two houses.' Let's establish 'kito' as 'build' and 'tinay' as 'house' and 'shay' as 'two.' We haven't talked about how singulars, plurals, or other numbers are conveyed in this language (this post can only be so long!) so now we have to. Alright, adding an n to the end of a word makes it plural (you can only do this to the second word in a phrase; doing it to the verb doiesn't make sense), and numbers will be added in before the word they modify. 'Kitoko shay tinayn.' Supposedly, you could also say 'Twice I built a house' by saying 'Shay kitoko tinay.' Which one should be the most correct?
There's still a looong way to go, but I like the way this is going so far...
I've been working on a few posts, but wasn't feeling very spiffy about any of them when I had an idea to post something about how my orthography has evolved since I madethreeposts about it at the end of '07.
I just couldn't leave well enough alone. I had my orthography, it worked, but each time I looked at it, there was still something that bothered me - ome little nagging itch in the back of my brain somewhere. So one day as I was sitting in a meeting, I starting listening to my itch to see what where it lead. Now these are little things, but maybe something I learned will benefit you, too. So here is the alphabet I had settled on previously:
An item of interest: the Pitak characters have thicker horizontal strokes than vertical strokes. I thought it would be interesting to see how this looked, since our English alphabet characters are thicker on the vertical strokes (meaning, the sides of an O are thicker than the top and bottom, and the same goes for the other letters). It turns out, I like having thicker vertical strokes, and you'll be able to compare the two a little further down the page.
I realized one thing I wasn't entirely comfortable with was the letter order/arrangement. I designed the Pitak letters to manifest certain phonetic characteristics; for example, the voiced characters have middle strokes, or partial middle strokes if they are a combined sound (ch=t+sh, a combined sound). I had tried to arrange the letters so that the "related" letters flowed together, i.e. the unvoiced plosives were together, the voiced plosives were together, so that when you looked at the alphabet, you could see the relationships. The above letter order wasn't very conducive to that. I made a letter order I felt better about, and re-made the font, with vertical strokes now being thicker than the horizontal strokes, and I liked the way it looked much better:So now, the plosives are all on the left, or on the right, unvoiced or voiced, along with the unvoiced and voiced consonant combinations of ch and j, nestled in between the consonants that make up their sound. Then the second and fourth columns are fricatives, unvoiced and voiced. In the middle, nasals, a liquid, and h, because I wanted it to have a special heritage, if you will, of being a half letter, and that it is used in words for childhood, shortness, and etherealness. Also, semi-vowels are between the consonants and the vowels, showing their mixed heritage, and their letters are combinations of consonant and vowel shapes. Well the W and R are... the Y symbol is a bit of a stretch, to my mind. The ng sound is where it is because... well I was just experimenting, and thought I didn't want a voiced th sound, so substituted the ng sound in, so its close to the n sound, to which it is related.
This letter arrangement I liked much better, and I reworked a few characters to better reflect their new placement and their phonetic qualities. H is now a very minimal letter; only two strokes; this is to reflect the attributes I mentioned above, as well as a minimal effort being required to make this sound. Ch and J characters are better combinations of the letters for t+sh and d+zh.
Now originally, I had 30 characters in the alphabet, which, on a keyboard, still allowed me some keys to make up punctuation. With the new alphabet, now I had 33 characters and I'm getting short on keyboard space. I wanted to have one character for each sound (meaning no sounds that require two letters, such as th, sh, ch), but I don't want to have too many characters either. I started wondering if I should shorten my phonology. I also wanted to improve my font; in comparison with the English characters, my letters look so little - I wanted to beef them up more. So I decided to cut out the ch and j letters, and the ng. I moved the l into the place of the ng, because this column is all voiced consonants, and h isn't voiced (h was the only other consonant I was considering moving). I also moved the postion of w, y, and r to where they match up more closely with the vowels they are close to. You can see now, in this third iteration, that the characters are bigger, "beefier," and don't seem as small when compared to the English letters, although I think they could still be bigger and better. But the vertical strokes are now noticeably thicker When I prepared the earlier alphabet graphics, I actually had to use a bigger font size each time. This time, I didn't. As you create your own font, you'll probably go through a similar period of trial and error, until you know how big and thick you need to make the letters. Again, I used High-Logic's FontCreator 5.6 to create this font.
If any of you have orthographies to share, please do! Feel free to put links in the comments to your alphabets, abjads, syllabaries, etc., handwritten or otherwise.
Translation: Li pisu na mul kiso funefemu - I close to sea seated in-a-time
