Re: This is not a conlang.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon)" <dragon@...>


> This is not a conlang; it is utter nonsensical gibberish:
>
> http://web.netyp.com/member/dragon/say/gibberish1.mp3
I listened to it with interest.  What is really cool is the electronic buzz
behind it, as though it were an android talking.

> (I apologise for the quality of the recording but I have not found
> affordable equipment that will do better.)
I think it's cool!  But in the interest of naturalism the buzz should not be
there.

> However, utter nonsensical gibberish is a very worthy topic of
> discussion.
>
> I have learned that it is a skill few people have developed. Most
> people find it very difficult to divorce their speech organs from the
> semantic brain and produce truly nonsense speech that is not recited.
> However, any musician with experience in improvisation is acquainted
> with the method, the only difference being that here the instrument is
> the mouth and the domain is that of phonetics, not pitch.
>
> 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
bring tears to my eyes; it had emotional content.  As a result, I also have
an avid interest in glossolalia or Speaking in Tongues, and the psychology
and spirituality behind it.

> 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
publishing, and in papers I've given at conferences, I have closely examined
the medieval Irish manuscript Tenga Bithnua, "Evernew Tongue," and observed
that while the phonology is beautifully consistent, the words largely do not
repeat, even the small, seemingly functional words.  There are a few
exceptions, but they seem phonic rather than semantic.  There is a musical
quality to it.  It is "translated," of course in the manuscript--the
language of "angels" was a topic of interest to the medieval and renaissance
world--but the "nonsense" words of the Tenga exhibit no consistent
linguistic relationship to the translations, the clincher being that in the
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
translations are far longer than the angelic language.  The glossolalia and
the translations in this manuscript follow the contemporary tradition of
Speaking in Tongues where someone utters the language of God and someone
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.

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.

But really, my sisters and I would run around the back yard producing
foreign languages on the spot.  The trick for me now is to produce not only
words but phrases that repeat, that have a consistent sound to them (I can
switch into nasal languages, sublaminal, whatever), and that show some sense
of compounding, so that you're not just saying Eva kava lava maviba emby
mahava lava taky maky rehaba laky saka.  Rather: esi em avbam em hoda, hodi
anhodi em avbamas. Hodas esi em eletmas em bakmas, esi em besotmas.  Em
hoda, esi em avbam em hoda.   Now that's harder to do on the spot!  So if
you really want to fool someone, you have to start thinking in terms of
phrases and repeated function words, and then you're halfway towards
conlanging.  That's what really got me started, exposure to Spanish when I
was nine or ten, being the clincher.

I wish I had an MP3 recorder that worked.

Sally

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