Re: Babel text: Vilani 1.0

On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Kenji Schwarz wrote:
> >
> > Here's a roughish draft of the Yardstick into Vilani (as a refresher:
> > Vilani is essentially the form of Sumerian spoken by interstellar IRS
> > agents trying to pass themselves off as Aztecs).
>
> Eh?  Could you elaborate on this bizarre situation.  Summerian spoken by
> aliens trying to act like Aztecs?  Hunh?
I'll try -- but as an Essentialist Language Description, it was originally
meant as a flippant characterization, not an accurate analysis.

On the other hand, it's maybe not too far off.  Vilani was originally
named and provided a random word-generation system for the sci-fi
role-playing game Traveller, back in the early '80s -- it was the language
of an interstellar civilization that lasted from ~3000 BCE to 2200 CE
(IIRC), founded by descendants of Homo sapiens who were snatched up by the
mysterious Ancients and deposited on another planet, where they developed
a technologically advanced civilization before being crushed like bugs by
the Earthlings (us).

The original writer(s) about Vilani for Traveller apparently based the
naming language on a sort of Akkadian-Sumerian phonology; a few names
given in Vilani are Akkadian or Sumerian words (e.g., the provincial
capital nearest Earth was named Dingir).  Jokingly, a few people on the
Traveller email list suggested that the Sumerians were actually a 'lost
colony' of stranded Vilani.  I liked the idea, although the chronology
doesn't work so well.  There's still a fair amount of Sumerian inspiration
in the verbal morphology, and about 5-10% of the lexicon is Sumerianoid at
this point.

Since the Vilani were also described as arch-bureaucrats and the ultimate
company men & women, and had a stable (stagnant?) post-industrial society
for thousands of years, we've tried to work some of that 'feel' into the
language.  There is, for example, specialized technical vocabulary for
paperclips and envelopes, as well as for interactions in meetings and
correct protocol for routing memos.

At one point, in an attempt to de-Sumerianize it, I turned to classical
Nahuatl for some inspiration -- hence the Aztec comment.  I think most or
all of the Nahuatl influence has since been removed, but it's a useful
claim just for the sake of obfuscation.  (I've also created 'kook
linguists' of the future who argue about whether Vilani is actually
Hungarian or whether it's Basque; I'm going to write a rebuttal from the
point of view of someone claiming that Vilani is, in fact, a perfect
survival of Proto-Algonkian.)

Someday real soon now :|  I'll get current descriptions and examples up on
the web, but briefly, Vilani is:
* Ergative
* Inverse-marking (weakly)
* VSO order (loosely)
* Head-marking (mostly)
* N-Adj, N-Poss, N-Relative (usually)
* 'agglutinative'
* riddled with phonological improbabilities I really dislike but am stuck
with

Kenji