The problem with trying to do things differently or more simply is that while 95 percent of the time everything goes smoothly, there are always bumps in the road.
Thus I had a problem with infinitives. One of the first ideas I had about making my own language was to do away with inifinitives. Since my verbs at that time only had one form, I couldn't foresee any problems. 'I want go' is easy understood as 'I want to go.' "Know him is love him' is understandable as well. But more complex sentences did become a problem to my comfort level. I really wasn't sure what was understandable, and that's not acceptable. So I relented and created a conjunction that works both to replace a relative pronoun and functions like 'to' in English as the marker of infinitives. In sentences where the concept is 'in order to' as in 'I went to see him' I use a different conjunction where it's necessary to make the meaning clear. I still avoid using the infinitive as much as I can. But I don't really have hard and fast rules about how it must be used. One thing that I've noticed is that the infinitive can sometimes be replaced by a form that carries at least some more meaning. As it stands now by using forms with tenses I can literally say 'I went to see him' different ways and have it understood that I meant to see him before now, about now, or sometime in the future, independent of when 'I went.'
Friday, December 17, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Verbs 2
So whether or not you are up to aspect as a main feaure, you do need to come up with some kind of comprehensive verbal system. The more you try to leave out now the more problems you'll have down the road.
Some things can be done away with or expanded upon. If you are willing to use nouns and pronouns as often as you would in English, you don't need to conjugate your verbs, even as little as we do in English. If you'd like to be able to avoid stating 'I', 'we' and 'you' in every last sentence with those concepts as subjects, you can conjugate verbs for case and number, You can even conjugate verbs for gender like Russian and other Slavic languages do in the past tense.
Personally I prefer simple verbs. I originally tried to get by with exactly one form of the verb for everything including the inifinite. I had one ending, -u, that marked that the word was a verb, and invariable particles elsewhere gave the tense and mood of the verb phrase. It seemed to work fine, but as time passed I wanted to get more out of the verbs. I did away with the tense particles and conjugated the verb for tense using the -u ending as the base for perfective and went with -i as the base for imperfective. That allowed me to get rid of the rest of the helping verbs masquerading as particles. I was much happier with the result. You might well decide the opposite is what you'd want.
Years later it occured to me that I didn't need to follow any verbal system I knew from natural languages. As an experiment I tried making verbs of state of being like 'is', 'see' and 'hear' as a different class of verb entirely separate from physical action, and mental action verbs like 'make', 'look' and 'listen'. It was very successful. By giving a different set of endings to my new *stative verbs* I was able to reduce the number of word roots I was using. 'Look and see' and several other pairs needed only one root. The power of what I had became clear when I was translating the phrase "the road wound around the mountain." I suddenly realized that by using a stative verb form of 'wind' in this sentence, I didn't need to struggle with the awkward and perhaps comical possibility someone would think of the road actively winding. And on the other hand, if I wanted to go for the metaphor of the road squeezing the mountain, if I used an active verb, it was there as bold as brass. Stative verbs quickly became something I'd definitely put in any new language I'd dream up.
The stative verbs led to yet another kind of verb, which I call 'cumulative.' These are verbs which show a change in state, 'growing', 'shrinking', 'becoming', 'turning blue', and so on. They aren't as common or necessarily as powerful as the stative verbs. But they do add color and individuality to the language.
To all these types of verbs, I've added passive or passive-like forms by changing the characteristic vowels to diphthongs. All the forms of verbs are instantly recognizable. There are few enough forms, and the forms are similar enough that memorizing the endings is a breeze.
Not everything I tried was so successful. More on that next time.
Some things can be done away with or expanded upon. If you are willing to use nouns and pronouns as often as you would in English, you don't need to conjugate your verbs, even as little as we do in English. If you'd like to be able to avoid stating 'I', 'we' and 'you' in every last sentence with those concepts as subjects, you can conjugate verbs for case and number, You can even conjugate verbs for gender like Russian and other Slavic languages do in the past tense.
Personally I prefer simple verbs. I originally tried to get by with exactly one form of the verb for everything including the inifinite. I had one ending, -u, that marked that the word was a verb, and invariable particles elsewhere gave the tense and mood of the verb phrase. It seemed to work fine, but as time passed I wanted to get more out of the verbs. I did away with the tense particles and conjugated the verb for tense using the -u ending as the base for perfective and went with -i as the base for imperfective. That allowed me to get rid of the rest of the helping verbs masquerading as particles. I was much happier with the result. You might well decide the opposite is what you'd want.
Years later it occured to me that I didn't need to follow any verbal system I knew from natural languages. As an experiment I tried making verbs of state of being like 'is', 'see' and 'hear' as a different class of verb entirely separate from physical action, and mental action verbs like 'make', 'look' and 'listen'. It was very successful. By giving a different set of endings to my new *stative verbs* I was able to reduce the number of word roots I was using. 'Look and see' and several other pairs needed only one root. The power of what I had became clear when I was translating the phrase "the road wound around the mountain." I suddenly realized that by using a stative verb form of 'wind' in this sentence, I didn't need to struggle with the awkward and perhaps comical possibility someone would think of the road actively winding. And on the other hand, if I wanted to go for the metaphor of the road squeezing the mountain, if I used an active verb, it was there as bold as brass. Stative verbs quickly became something I'd definitely put in any new language I'd dream up.
The stative verbs led to yet another kind of verb, which I call 'cumulative.' These are verbs which show a change in state, 'growing', 'shrinking', 'becoming', 'turning blue', and so on. They aren't as common or necessarily as powerful as the stative verbs. But they do add color and individuality to the language.
To all these types of verbs, I've added passive or passive-like forms by changing the characteristic vowels to diphthongs. All the forms of verbs are instantly recognizable. There are few enough forms, and the forms are similar enough that memorizing the endings is a breeze.
Not everything I tried was so successful. More on that next time.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Verbs and aspect
The most daunting task in learning languages like German, Spanish or French has to be learning all the forms of the verb and how they are used. English may have fewer distinct forms, but as in German you have numerous irregular (strong) verbs to contend with. In Norwegian even some regular (weak) verbs have vowel changes in the stem to worry about. I think most English speakers who dream about creating their own language think about simplfying the verbal system. There are serval ways to do that.
I think the most productive way is to make verbal aspect a central feature. Sadly unless you are already familiar with a language that has it , you would have difficultly finding a complete simple explanation of how it works, and it is a simple concept.
For those of you who don't know what verbal aspect as a central feature means I would like to simply to direct you to the Wikipedia article on grammatical aspect. However at this moment (December 2010) that article is mostly taken up with trying to relate verbal aspect to languages in which it isn't terribly important! Worse the discussion about aspect in Slavic languages, in which they are important, is grossly overblown and most likely to confuse, unless you already understand the concept.
In Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, there are two basic verb forms, the perfective and the imperfective. Each has an infinitive plus a past and a non-past conjugation, and that's it. No subjunctives, no progressive tenses, no pluperfect or any of that. The perfective form refers to the finish of an act or a state; the imperfective refers to everything else. In Slavic, the perfective is restricted to single acts or states. Most frequently the perfective form is the same as the imperfective with the addition of a prefix. Using other prefixes with the imperfective verb expands the vocabulary with new perfective verbs with new meanings which can then be made into corresponding new imperfective verbs in fairly consistent ways.
The perfective verb only has only present and future tense, it replaces verb forms like:
I did, I have done, I had done, I will do, I will have done.
The imperfective verb in Russian has only past and present tense, and is used in the future in the infinite with a helping verb. The imperfective verb replaces verb forms like:
I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing, I am doing, I do, I will be doing, I will have been doing.
It's really almost just that simple. But if you haven't had to use it actively in a natural language, you are probably not going to feel comfortable with it or use it correctly.
It should be no surprise when I say, the more natural languages you know before you start to create your own, the more choices you will have in verbs and everything else.
I think the most productive way is to make verbal aspect a central feature. Sadly unless you are already familiar with a language that has it , you would have difficultly finding a complete simple explanation of how it works, and it is a simple concept.
For those of you who don't know what verbal aspect as a central feature means I would like to simply to direct you to the Wikipedia article on grammatical aspect. However at this moment (December 2010) that article is mostly taken up with trying to relate verbal aspect to languages in which it isn't terribly important! Worse the discussion about aspect in Slavic languages, in which they are important, is grossly overblown and most likely to confuse, unless you already understand the concept.
In Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, there are two basic verb forms, the perfective and the imperfective. Each has an infinitive plus a past and a non-past conjugation, and that's it. No subjunctives, no progressive tenses, no pluperfect or any of that. The perfective form refers to the finish of an act or a state; the imperfective refers to everything else. In Slavic, the perfective is restricted to single acts or states. Most frequently the perfective form is the same as the imperfective with the addition of a prefix. Using other prefixes with the imperfective verb expands the vocabulary with new perfective verbs with new meanings which can then be made into corresponding new imperfective verbs in fairly consistent ways.
The perfective verb only has only present and future tense, it replaces verb forms like:
I did, I have done, I had done, I will do, I will have done.
The imperfective verb in Russian has only past and present tense, and is used in the future in the infinite with a helping verb. The imperfective verb replaces verb forms like:
I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing, I am doing, I do, I will be doing, I will have been doing.
It's really almost just that simple. But if you haven't had to use it actively in a natural language, you are probably not going to feel comfortable with it or use it correctly.
It should be no surprise when I say, the more natural languages you know before you start to create your own, the more choices you will have in verbs and everything else.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Adjectives and Adverbs
Unless you are using case with nouns there is very little to say about adjectives. The big decision is whether to put your adjectives mostly in front of the noun as in English and Finnish or mostly behind the noun as in French and Spanish.
Adverbs are perhaps even less exciting. English has fairly free adverb placement. You could make your adverb placement more restrictive if you wish.
All of the adjectives and adverbs in my language end in -o. Orginally I intended adjectives and adverbs to be indistinguishable as they often are in German. But as time went on there were some times when having some difference helped in my situation. So now adjectives are stressed on the initial syllable and adverbs are stressed on the -o suffix which is reflected by a spelling convention.
Adverbs are perhaps even less exciting. English has fairly free adverb placement. You could make your adverb placement more restrictive if you wish.
All of the adjectives and adverbs in my language end in -o. Orginally I intended adjectives and adverbs to be indistinguishable as they often are in German. But as time went on there were some times when having some difference helped in my situation. So now adjectives are stressed on the initial syllable and adverbs are stressed on the -o suffix which is reflected by a spelling convention.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Nouns
Nouns play a large part in the discussion of any natural language's grammar. But I have to believe that anyone interested in making up their own language will have given considerable thought to nouns before they start. Other than reminding about some options I won't say much.
Besides whether to use case, you have the option of how to show number or whether to show number at all as a part of your nouns. Mandarin nouns do not show number, for instance. If you want your nouns to show number you can be creative and include the idea of 'some', 'many' or 'none of' in your noun as well as singular and plural. Though it's a complicating factor Russian uses a singular noun with any number ending in 1, and different noun forms with numbers ending in 2,3 or 4 from the forms with and those numbers ending in any other number.
There is nothing exciting about the simple nouns in my own language. All of them end in stressed -a in the singular and all of them can take one of two related endings for the plural. One ending keeps the stress on the end of the word and the other moves it back one syllable. It's purely for euphony.
I will discuss noun suffixes at a later time, because they are a very critical part of my own language, but as a demonstration of how you can get creative with your noun structure I show you one trick I've added.
Noun suffixes in my language are not added directly to the stem. Instead there is a link vowel. In my language the link vowel can carry it's own meaning.
The word for 'magic' is woba
11-year-old Harry Potter is a wobuka, a general term for wizard.
Dumbledore is also a wobuka, but also a wobaka, a wizard famous for his magic skill.
11-year-old Neville Longbottom is a kiro wobika a poor wizard who isn't much good at magic.
Lord Voldemort is a påyo wobika an evil wizard, though those who fear him would certainly call him a wobaka instead.
Besides whether to use case, you have the option of how to show number or whether to show number at all as a part of your nouns. Mandarin nouns do not show number, for instance. If you want your nouns to show number you can be creative and include the idea of 'some', 'many' or 'none of' in your noun as well as singular and plural. Though it's a complicating factor Russian uses a singular noun with any number ending in 1, and different noun forms with numbers ending in 2,3 or 4 from the forms with and those numbers ending in any other number.
There is nothing exciting about the simple nouns in my own language. All of them end in stressed -a in the singular and all of them can take one of two related endings for the plural. One ending keeps the stress on the end of the word and the other moves it back one syllable. It's purely for euphony.
I will discuss noun suffixes at a later time, because they are a very critical part of my own language, but as a demonstration of how you can get creative with your noun structure I show you one trick I've added.
Noun suffixes in my language are not added directly to the stem. Instead there is a link vowel. In my language the link vowel can carry it's own meaning.
The word for 'magic' is woba
11-year-old Harry Potter is a wobuka, a general term for wizard.
Dumbledore is also a wobuka, but also a wobaka, a wizard famous for his magic skill.
11-year-old Neville Longbottom is a kiro wobika a poor wizard who isn't much good at magic.
Lord Voldemort is a påyo wobika an evil wizard, though those who fear him would certainly call him a wobaka instead.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Prepostions and Case
Since the discussion of prepostions in English grammar is often an afterthought, it may seem strange to talk about them now before I get to nouns. The fact is that after years of thinking they'd pretty much take care of themselves, I decided to take a more systematic approach to prepositions and discovered that as words that are used very frequently they should be given serious thought.
Case comes into play here because, nominal cases can eliminate the need for some prepositions and help decide how the rest connect to sentences.
For speakers of languages like English, French and Spanish, nominal cases might seem like an unnecessary complication. Indeed, I would suggest that if you don't very well know any natural languages with an extensive case system you do not attempt to introduce case into your constructed language. If you wish to introduce object case versions of the pronouns (which each of the languages I mentioned in this paragraph have) you won't have any trouble and now is the time to do it. But a full blown case system is a very different matter.
My first graduate school roommate studied Classical Literature. I very well remember him struggling to understand his Latin translation assignments, and saying what a breeze his Ancient Greek readings were by comparison. I had a similar experience with different languages. It was easy enough to use the cases of German, but since the cases of German have very much fallen together and are sometimes barely distinguishable, reading the complex formal German of the late 19th and early 20th century was often a headache. By comparison the more extensive case system of Russian, which I learned a little later, was a breeze; easy to use, easy and even fun to read.
The use of case can free up word order and make for interesting stylistics. But those stylistic twists can either be a headache for the learner like in Latin or a joy as in many of the Slavic languages. The difference is in how easy it is to recognize the case of words at a glance. If you are going to use case, limit the number of noun classes you use(and if you don't know what that means you are probably not ready to be using your own case system). Then make each of the case endings distinct. Don't fall into the temptation of using the same endings for different cases as you may find in the natural languages you know. The natural languages have had thousands of years to develop and even then, some of the results aren't as happy as we'd like. Most of all remember that the first and perhaps only person who will learn your language is you. If you write something down one month and then can't make sense of it the next, there will be no one else to help you out.
How many cases you should use is up to you. Personally I think, a four case system, as in German or modern Greek, is something of a waste. You introduce much of the complexity without getting all the benefits of having a case system. On the other hand having 16 cases like Finnish is said to have, is most probably excessive. I would say that if you are familar with Latin or one of the Slavic languages with lots of cases, you should feel free to adjust the number of cases up or down to fit your imagination and needs.
Getting back to prepostions, if you are using cases, you will need to decide which cases go with which prepostions. Simply copying this from some language you already know will certainly work, but it does beg the question of whether you are making up a language or simply encoding the one you knew. Not everything you do in your language has to be new and different. But to make it worth all the effort, some things ought to be changed or improved just to make yourself happier with your end product.
The grammatical function which prepostions fill, does not necessarily have to be performed by words in front of noun phrases. In English we can readily understand the sentence Who are you going with?. Teachers of English who've been taught to think rigidly in terms of Latin grammar (whether they've been taught so much as a word of Latin or not) violently object to this kind of construction, saying it's ungrammatical. The truth is they don't understand grammar the same way a linguist does. It's not ungrammatical, it's just a construction totally alien to Latin! There is no reason the things we call prepostions could not be placed after the noun phrases and be called, say, 'postpositions!'
The plane sailed the sky through.
The woman signed the letter her pen with.
We can puzzle these sentences out. Though for sanity's sake having the words 'sky' and 'pen' above in a case relating the noun to the 'postposition' instead of the verb would be a giant help as sentences became more complex!
Personally, I didn't do anything so daring with my own language. I have a complete set of case endings (eight, including the Russian cases plus vocative and ablative) which I can use with my langauge. However I do not currently use them and don't intend to use them ever. In fact I do not even use object forms of prepositions. I do use a genitive case for nouns to avoid the chains of 'of phrases' I kept running into when I was learning Spanish. ...de la casa del hermano de Maria... I have a preposition for 'of' to use for stylistic variety, and indeed it is tempting to use it just as in English.
I made things a little more interesting by coming up with the concept of parallel prepostions. Those who know Russian know the verbal prefixes and prepostions that go together to make a set for talking about coming and going. I chose to make up prepositions in sets for 'location, direction, and destination.' I have eight sets corresponding to - in, out, to, from, up, down, into and out of. (The rest of my prepostions do not fit in this scheme). While it has made things interesting, the simple concept has turned out to be complex in use. I won't get rid of it, but I would not recommend it for others to use.
Case comes into play here because, nominal cases can eliminate the need for some prepositions and help decide how the rest connect to sentences.
For speakers of languages like English, French and Spanish, nominal cases might seem like an unnecessary complication. Indeed, I would suggest that if you don't very well know any natural languages with an extensive case system you do not attempt to introduce case into your constructed language. If you wish to introduce object case versions of the pronouns (which each of the languages I mentioned in this paragraph have) you won't have any trouble and now is the time to do it. But a full blown case system is a very different matter.
My first graduate school roommate studied Classical Literature. I very well remember him struggling to understand his Latin translation assignments, and saying what a breeze his Ancient Greek readings were by comparison. I had a similar experience with different languages. It was easy enough to use the cases of German, but since the cases of German have very much fallen together and are sometimes barely distinguishable, reading the complex formal German of the late 19th and early 20th century was often a headache. By comparison the more extensive case system of Russian, which I learned a little later, was a breeze; easy to use, easy and even fun to read.
The use of case can free up word order and make for interesting stylistics. But those stylistic twists can either be a headache for the learner like in Latin or a joy as in many of the Slavic languages. The difference is in how easy it is to recognize the case of words at a glance. If you are going to use case, limit the number of noun classes you use(and if you don't know what that means you are probably not ready to be using your own case system). Then make each of the case endings distinct. Don't fall into the temptation of using the same endings for different cases as you may find in the natural languages you know. The natural languages have had thousands of years to develop and even then, some of the results aren't as happy as we'd like. Most of all remember that the first and perhaps only person who will learn your language is you. If you write something down one month and then can't make sense of it the next, there will be no one else to help you out.
How many cases you should use is up to you. Personally I think, a four case system, as in German or modern Greek, is something of a waste. You introduce much of the complexity without getting all the benefits of having a case system. On the other hand having 16 cases like Finnish is said to have, is most probably excessive. I would say that if you are familar with Latin or one of the Slavic languages with lots of cases, you should feel free to adjust the number of cases up or down to fit your imagination and needs.
Getting back to prepostions, if you are using cases, you will need to decide which cases go with which prepostions. Simply copying this from some language you already know will certainly work, but it does beg the question of whether you are making up a language or simply encoding the one you knew. Not everything you do in your language has to be new and different. But to make it worth all the effort, some things ought to be changed or improved just to make yourself happier with your end product.
The grammatical function which prepostions fill, does not necessarily have to be performed by words in front of noun phrases. In English we can readily understand the sentence Who are you going with?. Teachers of English who've been taught to think rigidly in terms of Latin grammar (whether they've been taught so much as a word of Latin or not) violently object to this kind of construction, saying it's ungrammatical. The truth is they don't understand grammar the same way a linguist does. It's not ungrammatical, it's just a construction totally alien to Latin! There is no reason the things we call prepostions could not be placed after the noun phrases and be called, say, 'postpositions!'
The plane sailed the sky through.
The woman signed the letter her pen with.
We can puzzle these sentences out. Though for sanity's sake having the words 'sky' and 'pen' above in a case relating the noun to the 'postposition' instead of the verb would be a giant help as sentences became more complex!
Personally, I didn't do anything so daring with my own language. I have a complete set of case endings (eight, including the Russian cases plus vocative and ablative) which I can use with my langauge. However I do not currently use them and don't intend to use them ever. In fact I do not even use object forms of prepositions. I do use a genitive case for nouns to avoid the chains of 'of phrases' I kept running into when I was learning Spanish. ...de la casa del hermano de Maria... I have a preposition for 'of' to use for stylistic variety, and indeed it is tempting to use it just as in English.
I made things a little more interesting by coming up with the concept of parallel prepostions. Those who know Russian know the verbal prefixes and prepostions that go together to make a set for talking about coming and going. I chose to make up prepositions in sets for 'location, direction, and destination.' I have eight sets corresponding to - in, out, to, from, up, down, into and out of. (The rest of my prepostions do not fit in this scheme). While it has made things interesting, the simple concept has turned out to be complex in use. I won't get rid of it, but I would not recommend it for others to use.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Pronouns
At this point, if you've decided to go deeper into constucting a workable language, not just a few stray phrases, you need to start making some serious choices that will affect how the language will work in terms of grammar and equally in terms of how efficient your vocabulary will be.
No matter how many vowels and consonants you have chosen, and how many consonant clusters you've decided to accept, there is a mathematical limit to the number of individual word-roots possible of a given length. Just starting out, it will seem that you can make everything as simple, regular and unambiguous as you please and never have to worry about running out of new words you can create to expand your vocabulary. Such is the case as long as you don't attempt to create literature (short stories, poetry, essays or longer works) or attempt to translate existing works of literature into your own language.
There is a reason that on any page of an English dictionary you find words with multiple meanings. These mulitple meanings help keep words short in our language and help provide space for new terms within the phonology. It also helps make the language difficult to learn. The same is true of having grammatical gender. Theoretically you can nearly triple the number of word roots, by having nouns with three genders (masculine, feminine and neutrar) instead of none. Where the genders of the nouns are fairly obvious from the form of the word as in Spanish or Russian, learning to handle gender isn't difficult. In a language like German where the gender of many, many nouns is unpredictable from their forms, handling gender can be an endless battle.
You can see vocabulary problems more easily in languages with limited numbers of possible syllables like Mandarin or Hawaiian. In Mandarin there are many spoken words with several meanings dispite the fact that pitch stress allows Mandarin to quadruple the number of possible word roots. In Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. the words are mostly short but the phrases and sentences to express many things can be quite long, because the number of short word-roots is very limited.
Basically I'm saying that for most purposes you will not have to worry about the number of word roots you are using, but the more extensive your language's vocabulary becomes the more you may find it necessary to introduce complications which will make your language less concise, less regular and less easy to learn than you hoped.
I recommend starting your vocabulary with pronouns. The function of pronouns need not always be separate words. In Navajo and the artificial language Klingon the pronouns are very often incorporated into the verbs as suffixes, instead of I saw him and He heard me you have something like Isawhim and Heheardme, where the forms of 'I', 'he', 'me' and 'him' might possibily change to make different classes of verbs (increasing the number of possible word-roots). Spanish has this in a more limited sense with words like verlo and verla where only the object is part of the word. If you are comfortable with this kind of suffixes then by all means try it.
One thing that immediately comes up when discussing pronouns is the Latin concepts of person and number. Just about any language taught to English speaking student will have pronouns and often verbs forms explained in terms of first person singular, third person plural and so on. Latin concepts of grammar are not the only way of looking at things and sometimes they lead us far astray. But for what we think of as person pronouns, Latin grammar does give a useful frame work, which we need not copy too rigidly.
We don't need to fill in every slot in the Latin frame work with a separate distinct word. In English we use the personal pronouns I, we, you, he, she, it, they. If we are being complete we might include thou but for 95% of all English speakers that's a relic of the past. Most of us use the word you for both second person singular and plural, and don't feel a teensy bit guilty about it. The point is that falling together of forms is a normal part of the history of real languages though it horrifies purists. There is no reason you need to be a purist for your own language, nor any reason you need avoid being one. It's your choice.
Surprisingly many natural languages have dual forms of nouns and the personal pronouns, besides singular and plural. You can use the dual or not as you wish.
Not every language has words to directly translate each of our personal pronouns and your language may have more personal pronouns than English or fewer. Very many languages (Finnish, Turkish, Navajo, etc.) with no history of grammatical gender do not have pronouns to distinguish between he and she. Many of those also don't distinguish between he/she and it. Mandarin distinguishes between all three of them in modern writing, but not in speech! Finnish distinguishes it from he/she and even has a separate they for things. From what I've read Samoan avoids using a pronoun for it altogehter.
For my own language I kept he, she, and it, though I have no grammatic gender. It just seemed a good way to make sentences clear without extra verbiage. However I did introduce two personal pronouns, which I don't know exist in any natural language. The first is a different we.
Have you ever a misunderstanding like this?
We are going to the movies tonight.
Oh, no *we* are not. I'm busy.
Uhm, I meant my family and I.
I have in my language an 'exclusive' we which excludes the intended listener as well as an 'inclusive' we which includes the intended listener. This is very helpful at times especially in writing. I'm not a native user of the concept so I do have to think which 'we' to use and sometimes make mistakes.
Much easier to remember to use is my form of a second it. I use one it only for concrete touchable objects, the other for abstract concepts. Obviously, it's not a necessary distinction. But I have found that the it for concepts can often be left out of some constructions entirely or used for emphasis. It's another feature I'm glad I have.
No matter how many vowels and consonants you have chosen, and how many consonant clusters you've decided to accept, there is a mathematical limit to the number of individual word-roots possible of a given length. Just starting out, it will seem that you can make everything as simple, regular and unambiguous as you please and never have to worry about running out of new words you can create to expand your vocabulary. Such is the case as long as you don't attempt to create literature (short stories, poetry, essays or longer works) or attempt to translate existing works of literature into your own language.
There is a reason that on any page of an English dictionary you find words with multiple meanings. These mulitple meanings help keep words short in our language and help provide space for new terms within the phonology. It also helps make the language difficult to learn. The same is true of having grammatical gender. Theoretically you can nearly triple the number of word roots, by having nouns with three genders (masculine, feminine and neutrar) instead of none. Where the genders of the nouns are fairly obvious from the form of the word as in Spanish or Russian, learning to handle gender isn't difficult. In a language like German where the gender of many, many nouns is unpredictable from their forms, handling gender can be an endless battle.
You can see vocabulary problems more easily in languages with limited numbers of possible syllables like Mandarin or Hawaiian. In Mandarin there are many spoken words with several meanings dispite the fact that pitch stress allows Mandarin to quadruple the number of possible word roots. In Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. the words are mostly short but the phrases and sentences to express many things can be quite long, because the number of short word-roots is very limited.
Basically I'm saying that for most purposes you will not have to worry about the number of word roots you are using, but the more extensive your language's vocabulary becomes the more you may find it necessary to introduce complications which will make your language less concise, less regular and less easy to learn than you hoped.
I recommend starting your vocabulary with pronouns. The function of pronouns need not always be separate words. In Navajo and the artificial language Klingon the pronouns are very often incorporated into the verbs as suffixes, instead of I saw him and He heard me you have something like Isawhim and Heheardme, where the forms of 'I', 'he', 'me' and 'him' might possibily change to make different classes of verbs (increasing the number of possible word-roots). Spanish has this in a more limited sense with words like verlo and verla where only the object is part of the word. If you are comfortable with this kind of suffixes then by all means try it.
One thing that immediately comes up when discussing pronouns is the Latin concepts of person and number. Just about any language taught to English speaking student will have pronouns and often verbs forms explained in terms of first person singular, third person plural and so on. Latin concepts of grammar are not the only way of looking at things and sometimes they lead us far astray. But for what we think of as person pronouns, Latin grammar does give a useful frame work, which we need not copy too rigidly.
We don't need to fill in every slot in the Latin frame work with a separate distinct word. In English we use the personal pronouns I, we, you, he, she, it, they. If we are being complete we might include thou but for 95% of all English speakers that's a relic of the past. Most of us use the word you for both second person singular and plural, and don't feel a teensy bit guilty about it. The point is that falling together of forms is a normal part of the history of real languages though it horrifies purists. There is no reason you need to be a purist for your own language, nor any reason you need avoid being one. It's your choice.
Surprisingly many natural languages have dual forms of nouns and the personal pronouns, besides singular and plural. You can use the dual or not as you wish.
Not every language has words to directly translate each of our personal pronouns and your language may have more personal pronouns than English or fewer. Very many languages (Finnish, Turkish, Navajo, etc.) with no history of grammatical gender do not have pronouns to distinguish between he and she. Many of those also don't distinguish between he/she and it. Mandarin distinguishes between all three of them in modern writing, but not in speech! Finnish distinguishes it from he/she and even has a separate they for things. From what I've read Samoan avoids using a pronoun for it altogehter.
For my own language I kept he, she, and it, though I have no grammatic gender. It just seemed a good way to make sentences clear without extra verbiage. However I did introduce two personal pronouns, which I don't know exist in any natural language. The first is a different we.
Have you ever a misunderstanding like this?
We are going to the movies tonight.
Oh, no *we* are not. I'm busy.
Uhm, I meant my family and I.
I have in my language an 'exclusive' we which excludes the intended listener as well as an 'inclusive' we which includes the intended listener. This is very helpful at times especially in writing. I'm not a native user of the concept so I do have to think which 'we' to use and sometimes make mistakes.
Much easier to remember to use is my form of a second it. I use one it only for concrete touchable objects, the other for abstract concepts. Obviously, it's not a necessary distinction. But I have found that the it for concepts can often be left out of some constructions entirely or used for emphasis. It's another feature I'm glad I have.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Word Stress
Just a short word about stress. It's a topic a little beyond those who just want to put some alien looking words in their stories.
Certainly if you use accent stress instead of tone and do not mark stress, no one will know for sure how you want the words stressed. This isn't exactly a great tragedy, in fact, in most cases, it won't matter. But the one thing you do not want to do is to choose a stress scheme and later forget what it was. It will almost guaranty that the phrases that sound great in your head to start with, will sound awful months later.
The choices for stress are endless. You can have stress consistently on the initial syllable like in Czech. You can have stress always on the end syllable like French. You can always have stress on the second-to-last syllable as in Polish. You can have variable stress as in English. You can even avoid strong in-word stresses as in Japanese. Some form of consistent stress would be easiest to remember.
For my own language stress is mostly dependent on the part of speech. It gives the language a very distinctive cadence. My original intent was to have the parts of speech rigidly defined and then have word stress float to fit the sentence and it's intent. Gradually the stresses have become more fixed in my mind, though there is some wiggle room still in nouns with suffixes, in verbs, and in adjectives.
Certainly if you use accent stress instead of tone and do not mark stress, no one will know for sure how you want the words stressed. This isn't exactly a great tragedy, in fact, in most cases, it won't matter. But the one thing you do not want to do is to choose a stress scheme and later forget what it was. It will almost guaranty that the phrases that sound great in your head to start with, will sound awful months later.
The choices for stress are endless. You can have stress consistently on the initial syllable like in Czech. You can have stress always on the end syllable like French. You can always have stress on the second-to-last syllable as in Polish. You can have variable stress as in English. You can even avoid strong in-word stresses as in Japanese. Some form of consistent stress would be easiest to remember.
For my own language stress is mostly dependent on the part of speech. It gives the language a very distinctive cadence. My original intent was to have the parts of speech rigidly defined and then have word stress float to fit the sentence and it's intent. Gradually the stresses have become more fixed in my mind, though there is some wiggle room still in nouns with suffixes, in verbs, and in adjectives.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Madha Phonology and Orthography
Before I leave the topic of phonology, which after all may be as far as is necessary for most people wanting a snippet of odd sounding language for their writing, I should share some of my own language.
The name of the language is Madha, which simply means 'speech.' It had a different, more grandiose name back when I was a teenager. But in time the original name began to sound more and more ridiculous. The roots which I joined together in the original name still are in the language as separate roots and are unchanged. They are the oldest pieces of the language as it exists now, over 40 years old.
The literary context behind Madha is a group of humanlike aliens called dars. They are discovered, on their own planet, before humans are discovered by a community of more advanced aliens who look nothing like us. The dars are thrust into the Void before they are ready as a culture, which results in them copying what their discoverers are doing. A couple hundred years later humans are discovered making their first clumsy steps into deep space. My first novel was set several hundred years after that when humans have become the darlings of the advanced aliens in terms of running the combined Fleet. While the dars have been somewhat been pushed to the background in Void, politically and morally they are much more respected than humans. The ship in my novel is a microcosm of the changes in both human and darrish society necessary to bring all of these allies through a long, painful war against an outside society with entirely different ideas about how the Void should be ruled.
Despite the fact that some pieces of the language have survived intact, much has changed over the years. Several times I changed the quality of the vowels, because as my study of linguistics and real languages got deeper, the sounds I liked hearing in Madha changed.
The vowels of Madha are: a å e i æ x o u
a as in father
å as ai in pain (I use a' or sometimes ai in English fonts)
e as in met
i as in machine
æ as i in tie (i' in English fonts)
x as u in nut
o as in open
u as oo in moon, not as the word you
The paired voiced and unvoiced consants of Madha are:
b,p,j,c (always pronounced like English ch),d,t,v,f,g,k,z,s,ź,ś,ð,þ,w,q
The unpaired consonants are h,l,m,n,r,y
r is a flap as r in Spanish or Russian, never like r in French or German.
ź or zh is as z in azure
ś or sh is as sh in should
ð or dh is as th in the or there
þ or th is as th in thin or thistle
q is as kf in book fair
The alterneratives make it easier to use English fonts. The letter 'w' represents a variable sound, explained as different dialects. It was originally intended to be pronounced 'gw' compared to q's 'kf' because I did not like the way English w sounded with some of the older vowels sets I was using. Now English w is working fine, but I still have the urge to pronounce it some other way. It's a true historical change in the making in phonology!
The name of the language is Madha, which simply means 'speech.' It had a different, more grandiose name back when I was a teenager. But in time the original name began to sound more and more ridiculous. The roots which I joined together in the original name still are in the language as separate roots and are unchanged. They are the oldest pieces of the language as it exists now, over 40 years old.
The literary context behind Madha is a group of humanlike aliens called dars. They are discovered, on their own planet, before humans are discovered by a community of more advanced aliens who look nothing like us. The dars are thrust into the Void before they are ready as a culture, which results in them copying what their discoverers are doing. A couple hundred years later humans are discovered making their first clumsy steps into deep space. My first novel was set several hundred years after that when humans have become the darlings of the advanced aliens in terms of running the combined Fleet. While the dars have been somewhat been pushed to the background in Void, politically and morally they are much more respected than humans. The ship in my novel is a microcosm of the changes in both human and darrish society necessary to bring all of these allies through a long, painful war against an outside society with entirely different ideas about how the Void should be ruled.
Despite the fact that some pieces of the language have survived intact, much has changed over the years. Several times I changed the quality of the vowels, because as my study of linguistics and real languages got deeper, the sounds I liked hearing in Madha changed.
The vowels of Madha are: a å e i æ x o u
a as in father
å as ai in pain (I use a' or sometimes ai in English fonts)
e as in met
i as in machine
æ as i in tie (i' in English fonts)
x as u in nut
o as in open
u as oo in moon, not as the word you
The paired voiced and unvoiced consants of Madha are:
b,p,j,c (always pronounced like English ch),d,t,v,f,g,k,z,s,ź,ś,ð,þ,w,q
The unpaired consonants are h,l,m,n,r,y
r is a flap as r in Spanish or Russian, never like r in French or German.
ź or zh is as z in azure
ś or sh is as sh in should
ð or dh is as th in the or there
þ or th is as th in thin or thistle
q is as kf in book fair
The alterneratives make it easier to use English fonts. The letter 'w' represents a variable sound, explained as different dialects. It was originally intended to be pronounced 'gw' compared to q's 'kf' because I did not like the way English w sounded with some of the older vowels sets I was using. Now English w is working fine, but I still have the urge to pronounce it some other way. It's a true historical change in the making in phonology!
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Sound
So what do you want your language to sound like?
Beauty in speech, to steal a phrase, is in the ear of the listener. But there are definite qualities you can build into your language.
If you want have a language that sounds like Hawaiian you need to limit the number of consonants severely and have long and short vowels to help build your word roots.
If you want a language that sounds like French, you'll need gargled r's, nasal vowels, end stress and be careful about how words run together together in phrases.
If you want a language that sounds like German, you'll want lots of consonant clusters, particularly those using the characteristic 'ch' of words like Gesicht. A common prefix in 'ge' or 'ke' would also help.
If you want a language to sound like Spanish, you need trilled r's, mostly open syllables (in other words) mostly words and syllables that end in vowels, with a few final consonants like 'r' and 'l'.
If you want a language to sound like Japanese you need to stick to open syllables in orthography, but give hints that some short 'u' and 'i' sounds aren't fully pronounced. Suffixes on the order of -masu and -mashita at the end of words would help. Letting the reader know that none of the syllables of the words are stressed more than the other would help as well.
If you want a language to sound like Chinese you need to incorporate tone into the language.
Obviously it's easier to mimic a language you are familiar with. If you don't want to sound like any particular human language here are some tips:
The more open syllables you have the smoother the language will sound. The more closed vowels you have the more rough it will sound. Stops made with the lips, teeth, and the ridge just behind the teeth tend to sound chattering like a finger rubbed across a comb. (eg. baby, dentist), Stops made far back in the mouth and in the throat, including the glottal stop in English, German, and Arabic sound 'guttural' (eg. cook, gargoyle). Sibilants, like 's','z','sh', the French 'j' and the Polish 'zi', make smooth hissing sounds. Similar sounds made in the back of the mouth like the German 'ch' the Russian 'x' and the French and German 'r' make rasping sounds.
Generally as far as smoothness or harshness of the language is concerned, initial consonants are less important than medial and final consonants.
The effect of reusing the same consonants over and over needs to be considered as well. Strings of b's and p's can be more awkward than harsh, as the famous 'baby buggy bumpers' demonstates. Lots of sibiliants run together can create tongue twisters like "She sells seashells by the seashore.
Beauty in speech, to steal a phrase, is in the ear of the listener. But there are definite qualities you can build into your language.
If you want have a language that sounds like Hawaiian you need to limit the number of consonants severely and have long and short vowels to help build your word roots.
If you want a language that sounds like French, you'll need gargled r's, nasal vowels, end stress and be careful about how words run together together in phrases.
If you want a language that sounds like German, you'll want lots of consonant clusters, particularly those using the characteristic 'ch' of words like Gesicht. A common prefix in 'ge' or 'ke' would also help.
If you want a language to sound like Spanish, you need trilled r's, mostly open syllables (in other words) mostly words and syllables that end in vowels, with a few final consonants like 'r' and 'l'.
If you want a language to sound like Japanese you need to stick to open syllables in orthography, but give hints that some short 'u' and 'i' sounds aren't fully pronounced. Suffixes on the order of -masu and -mashita at the end of words would help. Letting the reader know that none of the syllables of the words are stressed more than the other would help as well.
If you want a language to sound like Chinese you need to incorporate tone into the language.
Obviously it's easier to mimic a language you are familiar with. If you don't want to sound like any particular human language here are some tips:
The more open syllables you have the smoother the language will sound. The more closed vowels you have the more rough it will sound. Stops made with the lips, teeth, and the ridge just behind the teeth tend to sound chattering like a finger rubbed across a comb. (eg. baby, dentist), Stops made far back in the mouth and in the throat, including the glottal stop in English, German, and Arabic sound 'guttural' (eg. cook, gargoyle). Sibilants, like 's','z','sh', the French 'j' and the Polish 'zi', make smooth hissing sounds. Similar sounds made in the back of the mouth like the German 'ch' the Russian 'x' and the French and German 'r' make rasping sounds.
Generally as far as smoothness or harshness of the language is concerned, initial consonants are less important than medial and final consonants.
The effect of reusing the same consonants over and over needs to be considered as well. Strings of b's and p's can be more awkward than harsh, as the famous 'baby buggy bumpers' demonstates. Lots of sibiliants run together can create tongue twisters like "She sells seashells by the seashore.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Building Blocks
Sounds are what makes language come alive. The more natural languages you know the more you want to be able to pick and choose the sounds in any language you create, and the more you want the differences in sounds to show up on paper or on the screen.
There is no real need to go to great lenghs to find vowel and consonant sounds, even if you don't speak any language but English. I'm a native speaker of what's called the North Central dialect and accent of American English. It's the one that's heard the most on American TV and in American movies. I even had a friend from New York tell me in amazement, "You don't have any accent, at all!" Of course, like everyone else, I do. It's just one Americans are so used to hearing, they frequently don't think of it as an accent.
There may be 5 vowel letters and 2 other letters sometimes used as vowels or in diphthongs, but my dialect has 12 vowel sounds. Linguists like to pin down sounds with what are called minimal pairs. I'd like to show you a perfect set of all minimal pairs for the vowels I use all using the exact same context, but that's not possible. Here's an approximation
1. had
2. Hades
3. head
4. heed
5. hid
6. hide
7. huddle
8. hoed
9. hood
10. who'd
11. hod
12. hawed
If you don't pronounce each of the stressed vowels in the words above differently, obviously you don't have the same accent I do. But chances are you still have 10 or more vowels to work wtih. I pronounce the odd "command" Marry merry Mary! with all three words sounding exactly the same. You may well not. So each of us would like to show some distinction in the vowels we use in our own languages to say we want the vowels pronounced in a particular way.
Things are a bit simpler with consonants. With a few exceptions most English speakers pronounce consonants the same. Chances are that even if you do not pronounce the r in hard, there is a probably a vowel length difference between that word and the way you pronounce hod. Pronouncing the r itself in such positions may take some thought for many non-North Americans and Bostonian Americans as well. Americans can perfectly well pronounce schedule with an intial 'sh' sound, but we don't.
Consonsant that don't show up very well in English orthography are
sh as in nation
zh as in azure
th as in think
dh as in this
All tolled in my dialect there are 12 vowels and depending on how you define the word, between 21 and 28 consonants. All of which are supposedly represented by 26 letters.
There is no real need to go to great lenghs to find vowel and consonant sounds, even if you don't speak any language but English. I'm a native speaker of what's called the North Central dialect and accent of American English. It's the one that's heard the most on American TV and in American movies. I even had a friend from New York tell me in amazement, "You don't have any accent, at all!" Of course, like everyone else, I do. It's just one Americans are so used to hearing, they frequently don't think of it as an accent.
There may be 5 vowel letters and 2 other letters sometimes used as vowels or in diphthongs, but my dialect has 12 vowel sounds. Linguists like to pin down sounds with what are called minimal pairs. I'd like to show you a perfect set of all minimal pairs for the vowels I use all using the exact same context, but that's not possible. Here's an approximation
1. had
2. Hades
3. head
4. heed
5. hid
6. hide
7. huddle
8. hoed
9. hood
10. who'd
11. hod
12. hawed
If you don't pronounce each of the stressed vowels in the words above differently, obviously you don't have the same accent I do. But chances are you still have 10 or more vowels to work wtih. I pronounce the odd "command" Marry merry Mary! with all three words sounding exactly the same. You may well not. So each of us would like to show some distinction in the vowels we use in our own languages to say we want the vowels pronounced in a particular way.
Things are a bit simpler with consonants. With a few exceptions most English speakers pronounce consonants the same. Chances are that even if you do not pronounce the r in hard, there is a probably a vowel length difference between that word and the way you pronounce hod. Pronouncing the r itself in such positions may take some thought for many non-North Americans and Bostonian Americans as well. Americans can perfectly well pronounce schedule with an intial 'sh' sound, but we don't.
Consonsant that don't show up very well in English orthography are
sh as in nation
zh as in azure
th as in think
dh as in this
All tolled in my dialect there are 12 vowels and depending on how you define the word, between 21 and 28 consonants. All of which are supposedly represented by 26 letters.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Tools of the Trade
When working on language projects I like to work on paper. Computers are fine for writing text, but when you need space, and you're not sure where the next thing should go there is nothing like paper. I prefer to use wire-bound college-ruled notebooks. They stay reasonably neat and don't fall apart after a lot of use. The 5-subject size are big enough for making your own extensive dictionaries. The pens I use are pretty much determined by the paper. Until recently 'rolling-writer' and 'gel' ink pens made for nice, dark, readable text. But there has been a noticeable drop in the quality of the paper in brand of notebooks I've been buying. Bleed-through has gone from an occaisional problem with using both sides of the paper to one where there are sometimes marks on the next sheet. The older style ball-point pens like the Parker Jotters I used back in the late 1960's no doubt would work fine with the current paper. The ink in stick or throw-away ball points is a little feeble these days, but at least the Papermate brand pens I've been using lately are cheap and have a good supply of ink. Some brands of more expensive retractables have nicer ink, but run out of ink quickly.
Once you've chosen your paper and pens. The next thing to be concerned about is the alphbet you are going to use for your language. I say alphabet because other writing systems present problems for publishing unless you live in a country where a syllabary or writing with characters is the standard already. Using an alphabet like the Latin or Slavic will give you more possibility of using new letters borrowed from other languages. For my own language I use a modified form of the Icelandic alphabet. It has lot's of vowels and more consonants than are available on an English keyboard.
Doing preliminary work and even writing dictionaries in pen is fine, but it's very nice to be able to type on the computer once you start making texts. I don't know what kind of multi-language typing software is available at the moment. A few years ago the Transparent Language series of language learning software came with a program called Unitype Global Writer which allows you to type in scores of different languages including Chinese and Hindi. The program has a few bugs, but it still runs on PC's and I use it all the time.
Once you've chosen your paper and pens. The next thing to be concerned about is the alphbet you are going to use for your language. I say alphabet because other writing systems present problems for publishing unless you live in a country where a syllabary or writing with characters is the standard already. Using an alphabet like the Latin or Slavic will give you more possibility of using new letters borrowed from other languages. For my own language I use a modified form of the Icelandic alphabet. It has lot's of vowels and more consonants than are available on an English keyboard.
Doing preliminary work and even writing dictionaries in pen is fine, but it's very nice to be able to type on the computer once you start making texts. I don't know what kind of multi-language typing software is available at the moment. A few years ago the Transparent Language series of language learning software came with a program called Unitype Global Writer which allows you to type in scores of different languages including Chinese and Hindi. The program has a few bugs, but it still runs on PC's and I use it all the time.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Dune and Pronunciation
When she gives you a Fremen son, you begin with him, Liet-Kynes, and the other children, teaching them ecological literacy, creating a new language with symbols that arm the mind to manipulate an entire landscape, its climate, seasonal limits, and finally to break through all ideas of force into dazzling awareness of order - Frank Herbert, Dune.
This sentence not only gives us a creepy feeling about Arrakian politics, it spells out the kind of grandiose ideas we can get about language particularly the ones we make up. Also it talks about symbols as enablers, opening new worlds for people, which can certainly be true. But familiar symbols can also lead us astray.
Frank Herbert put a lot of color into his novels through his technical terminology and naming and renaming of characters within the story. He gives us the feeling of having a lot of different languages operating just out of view. Yet on the surface everyone speaks the same general language. We have a system that produced terms like delightfully smooth Bene Gesserit and the delightfully awkard Kwisatz Haderach; and produced names like Atreides, which begs to be pronounced as if it were Greek, the Finnish looking Harkonnen, the blatantly Germanic term Landsraad and the Arabic-flavored Mu'ad Dib. Herbert even tells us about multiple Battle Languages in his appendix, although we never really get to hear one. Clearly the universe of Dune is a blend of cultures we (at least collectively) are somewhat familiar with.
In Dune, besides the common language, we also see bits and pieces of a constructed language that has a distinctly Slavic origin.
Ima trava okolo!
I korenja okolo!
Jessica translated silently: These are ashes! And these are roots!
(Those versed in Slavic will read the passage as 'There is 'grass' around, and roots around,' and not be much surprised by Jessica's/Herbert's version save the word 'ashes.')
One problem with mixing cultures like this is that pronouncing all the various names and terms becomes a difficult challenge for the reader. Herbert pretty much assumed we could figure it out for ourselves. I know from discussing the book in person with a variety of people that that didn't work out very well. Whether Herbert cared, I don't know.
The Sci-Fi Channel's 2000 version of Dune, used pronunciations that mostly agreed with my guesses, using 'continental' vowels and English consonants. I've always pronounced name of Paul's love interest, Chani, to rhyme with 'Johnny.' So did most of my acquaintances who came up with a variety of 'interesting' versions of Kwisatz Haderach. I think even the awful, gawdy De Lorentiis, 1984 movie verison called her that. But the 2000 mini-series decided it should be pronounced 'Chainy.' I don't know how Herbert wanted it pronounced, but 'Chainy' grated on me every time I heard it.
The first rule of orthography in language construction is that no matter what you do to make things easy to pronounce, someone will always mispronounce everything. It's something we have to live with. Not everyone knows what 'continental' vowels sound like and vowels in English, as we know, are pronounced in strange and mysterious ways.
This sentence not only gives us a creepy feeling about Arrakian politics, it spells out the kind of grandiose ideas we can get about language particularly the ones we make up. Also it talks about symbols as enablers, opening new worlds for people, which can certainly be true. But familiar symbols can also lead us astray.
Frank Herbert put a lot of color into his novels through his technical terminology and naming and renaming of characters within the story. He gives us the feeling of having a lot of different languages operating just out of view. Yet on the surface everyone speaks the same general language. We have a system that produced terms like delightfully smooth Bene Gesserit and the delightfully awkard Kwisatz Haderach; and produced names like Atreides, which begs to be pronounced as if it were Greek, the Finnish looking Harkonnen, the blatantly Germanic term Landsraad and the Arabic-flavored Mu'ad Dib. Herbert even tells us about multiple Battle Languages in his appendix, although we never really get to hear one. Clearly the universe of Dune is a blend of cultures we (at least collectively) are somewhat familiar with.
In Dune, besides the common language, we also see bits and pieces of a constructed language that has a distinctly Slavic origin.
Ima trava okolo!
I korenja okolo!
Jessica translated silently: These are ashes! And these are roots!
(Those versed in Slavic will read the passage as 'There is 'grass' around, and roots around,' and not be much surprised by Jessica's/Herbert's version save the word 'ashes.')
One problem with mixing cultures like this is that pronouncing all the various names and terms becomes a difficult challenge for the reader. Herbert pretty much assumed we could figure it out for ourselves. I know from discussing the book in person with a variety of people that that didn't work out very well. Whether Herbert cared, I don't know.
The Sci-Fi Channel's 2000 version of Dune, used pronunciations that mostly agreed with my guesses, using 'continental' vowels and English consonants. I've always pronounced name of Paul's love interest, Chani, to rhyme with 'Johnny.' So did most of my acquaintances who came up with a variety of 'interesting' versions of Kwisatz Haderach. I think even the awful, gawdy De Lorentiis, 1984 movie verison called her that. But the 2000 mini-series decided it should be pronounced 'Chainy.' I don't know how Herbert wanted it pronounced, but 'Chainy' grated on me every time I heard it.
The first rule of orthography in language construction is that no matter what you do to make things easy to pronounce, someone will always mispronounce everything. It's something we have to live with. Not everyone knows what 'continental' vowels sound like and vowels in English, as we know, are pronounced in strange and mysterious ways.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Codes 2
Before leaving codes I feel like I should mention something that will be a theme throughout.
Keep track of what you've done.
There is nothing like the feeling of going back a year later, rereading a passage of a story you've written, coming to the point where you inserted your snippet of your own language and suddenly realizing you don't know what it means because you forgot to put some sort of explanation in the text or you thought it would be perfectly obvious when it was not. You must either write in a translation or write in a response by someone in the story which will make what you said obvious. This is particularly important with simple codes because you absolutely will not remember, unless you've used the same words over and over through your story.
When studying linguistics we were told over and over that real language is spoken language. This was partly because written language sometimes will give you a false impression of the current spoken language, partly because there is far more to make a linguistic study of in spoken language than in written, But on the other hand lasting language is written language. We have better ways of preserving spoken language than ever before. But the things we'd really like to preserve from ourselves are those we've thought about for a while and written down. Oral epics like the Odyssey and the Kalevala are grand. But they are extremely rare, and they don't tell us a thing about all the stories of ancient Greece and Finland that have been lost over ages. Hittite and Tocharian exist today because people took the time to write things down.
In creating your own language you must write things down. You must save things you will never possibly remember more than a few days.
If your only alien word in your story is a cry of anguish, then you had better let your reader know that's what it is. And better yet, use it more than once so that your reader will remember it for the rest of the story.
Keep track of what you've done.
There is nothing like the feeling of going back a year later, rereading a passage of a story you've written, coming to the point where you inserted your snippet of your own language and suddenly realizing you don't know what it means because you forgot to put some sort of explanation in the text or you thought it would be perfectly obvious when it was not. You must either write in a translation or write in a response by someone in the story which will make what you said obvious. This is particularly important with simple codes because you absolutely will not remember, unless you've used the same words over and over through your story.
When studying linguistics we were told over and over that real language is spoken language. This was partly because written language sometimes will give you a false impression of the current spoken language, partly because there is far more to make a linguistic study of in spoken language than in written, But on the other hand lasting language is written language. We have better ways of preserving spoken language than ever before. But the things we'd really like to preserve from ourselves are those we've thought about for a while and written down. Oral epics like the Odyssey and the Kalevala are grand. But they are extremely rare, and they don't tell us a thing about all the stories of ancient Greece and Finland that have been lost over ages. Hittite and Tocharian exist today because people took the time to write things down.
In creating your own language you must write things down. You must save things you will never possibly remember more than a few days.
If your only alien word in your story is a cry of anguish, then you had better let your reader know that's what it is. And better yet, use it more than once so that your reader will remember it for the rest of the story.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Codes
The simplest way to create a language for your writing project is to create a code. Essentially you disguise the fact the you are still using English. This is good enough when you just need a word or two of alien dialect, just to set the tone.
It must have been some summer, perhaps before the Spanish class I mentioned yesterday. My brother and I decided one evening to come up with a language just for ourselves. We made up 10 to 15 words, thought up names for ourselves and laughed and laughed about how clever we were. We promised each other we'd do some more on our language the next evening after our summer jobs. Not too surprisingly, by the next evening we were both off thinking about things that had nothing to do with a language for ourselves.
What little we did was a form of code. You replace an English words with a gibberish words and no one who doesn't know the code can make heads or tails of what you are saying. The problem with such an unstructured code is that without a codebook somewhere that everyone involved with the code can reference, it is next to impossible to keep track of the vocabulary.
The US government was certain for a decade after World War Two that it's use of Native Americans and their tribal languages was a big secret. The fact is that too many Americans saw them communicating and after the war the word spread. The Soviet Union spent an unbelievable amount of resources on scholars learning and studying Native American Indian languages so that they could never be used against them. The effort was, of course, wasted. The Native languages were only used in situations where the information sent was used almost instantly, such as in artillery support. This is the sort of instance when almost any code no matter how simple will work as long as the folks at both intended ends are absolutely fluent in the code, and the enemies who are directly intercepting the messages are not. Just ten minutes spent by the enemy getting the coded message to their code breaker, figuring out the message and alerting the right people would be way too much time. The Army insisted on using coded words in the Native languages as well. The code words were real Native American words and not that hard to remember. The languages themselves were never unravelled during the war, so the extra coding was something of a wasted effort, as well. But since real languages were being used, that was the only part of the "Code Talkers" that lived up to their name.
More tomorrow
It must have been some summer, perhaps before the Spanish class I mentioned yesterday. My brother and I decided one evening to come up with a language just for ourselves. We made up 10 to 15 words, thought up names for ourselves and laughed and laughed about how clever we were. We promised each other we'd do some more on our language the next evening after our summer jobs. Not too surprisingly, by the next evening we were both off thinking about things that had nothing to do with a language for ourselves.
What little we did was a form of code. You replace an English words with a gibberish words and no one who doesn't know the code can make heads or tails of what you are saying. The problem with such an unstructured code is that without a codebook somewhere that everyone involved with the code can reference, it is next to impossible to keep track of the vocabulary.
The US government was certain for a decade after World War Two that it's use of Native Americans and their tribal languages was a big secret. The fact is that too many Americans saw them communicating and after the war the word spread. The Soviet Union spent an unbelievable amount of resources on scholars learning and studying Native American Indian languages so that they could never be used against them. The effort was, of course, wasted. The Native languages were only used in situations where the information sent was used almost instantly, such as in artillery support. This is the sort of instance when almost any code no matter how simple will work as long as the folks at both intended ends are absolutely fluent in the code, and the enemies who are directly intercepting the messages are not. Just ten minutes spent by the enemy getting the coded message to their code breaker, figuring out the message and alerting the right people would be way too much time. The Army insisted on using coded words in the Native languages as well. The code words were real Native American words and not that hard to remember. The languages themselves were never unravelled during the war, so the extra coding was something of a wasted effort, as well. But since real languages were being used, that was the only part of the "Code Talkers" that lived up to their name.
More tomorrow
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
First Things
I was still in high school when I first got the idea of making up a langauge. The moment when it became something of a genuine hobby was when my Spanish class was asked to read an article about Esperanto from a Spanish version of Reader's Digest or something similar.
Our lunch period was scheduled for a break in the middle of Spanish class. This gave us some time to talk about things with our Spanish teacher, Mr Rauch. He was a fine teacher and was willing to talk about all sorts of things that were not too far off into the deep-end of teenage nonsense.
I think there were two of us who spoke with him about Esperanto before class started again after the break. I don't think any of us was terribly interested in Esperanto, itself. But the idea of creating a language sounded interesting. I think it was Mr Rauch who suggested that one of us students could make up a language if we really wanted to. That was the kind of challenge I always liked.
Our lunch period was scheduled for a break in the middle of Spanish class. This gave us some time to talk about things with our Spanish teacher, Mr Rauch. He was a fine teacher and was willing to talk about all sorts of things that were not too far off into the deep-end of teenage nonsense.
I think there were two of us who spoke with him about Esperanto before class started again after the break. I don't think any of us was terribly interested in Esperanto, itself. But the idea of creating a language sounded interesting. I think it was Mr Rauch who suggested that one of us students could make up a language if we really wanted to. That was the kind of challenge I always liked.
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