Re: This is not a conlang.

Sally Caves wrote, quoting myself:

> > How many conlangers find it easy to produce nonsense syllables that
> > mean nothing in any language, real or invented, yet have the
> > appearance (e.g. the cadence and phonetical variation) of real
> > speech?
>
> I find it almost effortless.  I have been doing this for years.  I have sung
> to nonsense lyrics, making up the melody and words simultaneously as I go
> along ever since I was a small child.  Sometimes, the nonsense songs would
Me too, but not for as long (including the singing and poetry).
Certainly since I was a teenager.

As I've said, my experience is that the mental processes involved in
generating phonetic gibberish are pretty much identical to the mental
processes that a musician uses when improvising. The domain just
happens to be phonetic and not melodic. I love to improvise on my
electronic piano so I'm very familiar with the process.

Connections with conlanging are indirect. I've gotten a few words that
way - I think /jara/ for "desire" and /ji:/ for "time" were invented
that way - but more often I use it when deciding upon phonetic
constraints. If I'm ambiguous about whether I wish to introduce a
particular constraint, I'll try to produce gibberish that breaks the
constraint and see what I think.

> > Secondly, am I completely correct in my belief that the sample I have
> > given really *is* indistinguishable from real speech, or would an
> > appropriate statistical analysis of the phonetics probably reveal some
> > hidden unnatural features?
>
> It probably would.   But I'd have to analyze it again.  In an article I'm
I agree that the absence of repeating words would be a give-away in a
longer sample, but I think a 20 second sample would be too small for a
high confidence :-)

> Irish there is frequent use of the word God, but no repeated word in the
> angelic language that would suggest an equivalent.  Also, some of the
Devil's advocate (even though that's rather an ironic phrase in
context): an angelic language could very easily not express the
concept of God as a lexical item; the concept would more likely be
embedded in the grammar in less regular ways. :-)

Actually, the concept of speaking in tongues makes little sense to me.
I can understand the point of dedicating nonsense syllables to God in
the same way that one can dedicate music or art or whatever (i.e. as a
symbol of communication at a level that words cannot, even in
principle, express) but the idea of a special language capable of
translation into English strikes me as pointless.

> else interprets it for the congregation.  I live down the street from a
> Gospel Church and have observed this phenomenon.  Every glossolalist has his
> or her own "phonology," which echoes a real language and its phonic
> idiosyncracies, but semantically it is "empty" in the traditional sense of
> linguistic meaning.  And probably structurally formless, too.
I once knew a man (he was actually a minister) who said that although
he *did* speak in tongues, the idea of it didn't appeal to him,
because he was a logical sort of person to whom speaking in tongues
didn't make much sense as a concept. For this reason, he had actually
prayed more than once that God would *take away* the gift that he
didn't want, and every time he prayed this, he found that instead of
being removed altogether, the "language" of his tongues would be
replaced by a different "language" with a completely different
phonology!

> Are you familiar with the music of Ekova, the group designed by Deirdre
> Dubois?  She and Lisa Girrard sing musical glossolalia which sounds
> creditably like foreign languages.  So does Bobby McFerrin.  Deirdre even
> repeats words, or makes variations on the same set of syllables, so I'm very
> curious about her.
No, but it sounds interesting.

> I wish I had an MP3 recorder that worked.
I've made a number of other recordings:

If you want to talk slightly dirty without being caught then here is
the Gzarondan word for sex (I like it because psychophonetically it is
worlds away from the short, harsh and dismissive feel that "f**k"
evokes): http://web.netyp.com/member/dragon/say/alhlej.mp3

On another group there was a discussion a while back about whether
"decorative" had three or four syllables, so I made a recording that
demonstrates my own pronunciation in the context of a sentence (I
analyse said pronunciation as four syllables: [dEk.r\=.@.tIv]) and
contrasts it with the pronunciation of "lucrative", which of course is
definitely three syllables and not four. I apologise for the softness
of the recording - it was one of the first ones I made and I hadn't
figured out how to turn up the volume at that stage.
http://web.netyp.com/member/dragon/say/decorative-lucrative.mp3

Adrian.

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