Deconstructing Ubese - a Star Wars conlang extrapolation

And now for something completely different.



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...

Orthography Evolution

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 made three posts 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.