Re: This is not a conlang.

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


> Sally Caves wrote:
>
>> So, in rethinking your question, I think it would be very hard for even
>> the
>> toughest linguist, to say that this was nonsense.  If it is not a
>> recognizable language, one might assume that it is invented.
I'll qualify that again.  If it doesn't have a translation, it would be
difficult to determine that it was gibberish.  But try putting a translation
to it.  Then you would run into difficulties.

>>  Let me ask you
>> this, though:  did you write it down and practice it first?  Something
>> like
>> this is harder to produce spontaneously.  But I have often made written
>> exercise like this for myself!
>
> It was completely spontaneous.
Well I'm quite impressed!  I'll practice doing some intonation on my
gibberish.

> The metre I use when I'm reciting poetry in the same form lacks
> variety - I tend to use a metre and rhyming pattern based on that of
> "The Deserted Village" by Oliver Goldsmith. Perhaps I should try to
> branch out in this respect.
> If you're ever in Adelaide we'll have to practice on each other. I'd
> enjoy that :-)
HA!  Adelaide it is, next stop!  Maybe we could get Richard K. to come down,
too.  He likes to do this kind of thing, as I described.

> 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.
I think that your ability to improvise on the piano and improvise in
gibberish are talents that go together.  I can improvise, too, on the piano,
but in a more limited way than I can orally.

> > > 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 :-)
Adrian continues in another post (I was talking about Tenga Bithnua
("evernew tongue": a name for Philip, whose tongue was cut out nine times,
and nine times it grew back so that he could proselytize to the infidels), a
fifteenth-century Irish text with "angelic" gibberish in it.  I had said
that what inspired me to think that the text was nonsense was that hardly
any words repeated, and even though we had a Rosetta Stone in the
translation, it didn't help clarify the syntax of the "invented" language.

Me, in a cutoff sentence:
> > 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. :-)
Right, that is, if you believe in an "angelic language" with an
interpretable grammar, and words that have some kind of correspondence to
things of the Real World.  It's very appealing to think that the redactor of
this version of the Tenga actually worked out a linguistic system.  But as I
said, the absence of repeated function words, and the absence of a repeated
word for the Deity, convinced me that what was going on here was very
similar to the modern phenomenon of evangelical glossolalia: someone speaks
a string of nonsense words that are spiritually meaningful, and someone else
"interprets them."  In the Tenga:  Eui falia faste! Eui falia faste! Eui
falia faste! "I am a rod, twisted, faithless."  Nowhere else in the text do
you have "eui" or "falia" or "faste" representing "I am."  In a real
language with so many examples (fifteen), you would find some
correspondence.  It could be that the person writing down these words felt
that it didn't matter if they had no semantic content that we could
understand.  It is, after all, the language that Saint Philip said the
angels and the beasts and humans of the redeemed world would speak.
Therefore it would be utterly incapable of analysis.  Who was it said that a
bird could fly between the subject and the predicate of an angelic sentence?
i.e., God's language IS the things of the redeemed world.  No need for a
separation of signifier and signified.  Was it Aquinas?   Pseudo-Dionysus?

> 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.
Well, your former assumption, that it is a dedication of syllables to God
"in the same way that one can dedicate music or art to God," is just as
noble, isn't it?  Music can connote meaning (it's not semantic in the same
way that a language is) by suggesting or evoking certain emotions, and
western music has developed all sorts of agreed upon connotative
expressions.  In traditional classical music the minor chords represent
sadness and ominousness to a lot of people; the major chords combined with
certain tempos suggest upbeat feelings; it can be onomatopoeic: suggestive
of waves breaking, birds calling, soldiers marching, threat coming; and
other more subtle and subjective representations of feeling: wonder, doubt,
inevitability, sorrow, ein bittendes Kind, the Raindrop Prelude, Ode to Joy,
and so forth.  Remember that the speaker of glossolalia and the interpreter
in the service have a special spiritual connection, and nobody thinks,
really, that there is a one on one semantic relationship between the uttered
language and the translation.  It's a mystery.  It's a miracle.  It's
ecstacy.  It's the language of God, and who expects God or the angels to
speak as we do?

I said (I can't remember what the beginning of this sentence was:
> > 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.
Adrian said:
> 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!
How fascinating!  What an account.  Studies of glossolalia have shown that
in some cases the brainwaves of the utterer change when he or she switches
into glossolalia.  So it sounds as though your minister had some kind of
compulsion, or had developed some kind of transcendental state that came
upon him spontaneously.  Many people describe an altered state of mind, very
close to a kind of "rapture."  Maybe that was what I was feeling as a child.
It has since gone away, and my nonsense utterances are entirely willed, and
usually without much emotional content.  (I have other compulsions, though.
We come from a very compulsive, exuberant, manic family).

Paul Bennett wrote:
> I have something like Tourette's, and a common symptom of mine is the very
> same phenomenon. It's generally from the same large phoneme set, which I
> shall try to reconstruct for your entertainment...
>
> p p_h b m mb)
> t_j (or maybe c_+) t_j_>
> t_> t d n nd) r\ 4 r
> d` n` n`d`) r`\ r`
> c J\ c_>
> k_j
> k_> k g N Ng)
> q G\ N\ N\G\)
> l 5 K K\ K\d) K\_Gg)
> ?\ ?
> I i\ M u 7 @ V O A a
>
> Plus a variety of sibilants that are not easily distinguished using the
> IPA. There's all that slitted/slotted/grooved/whatever terminology in
> action.
>
> Syllable structure is CV, plus optional word-final C. "Words" are almost
> all polysyllabic, and often quite long. There might be a complex
> vowel-harmony scheme in existence (possibly back vs close, but it might
> not be that easy). I haven't really ever tried to analyse it before.
>
> I suppose it behooves me to try to make a language out of it, just in case
> my hind-brain is trying to tell me something.
:) This is interesting, Paul.  I like the idea of a "hind-brain."  Do these
episodes of speaking nonsense come upon you spontaneously?  I know very few
people with Tourette's, but I've read different accounts, and the variety is
amazing.  When you do speak using these sounds, do they inspire in you some
kind of feeling?

BTW, Thanks, Tom Weir, for the reference to the Scientific American magazine
with the Voynich article in it.  As a matter of fact, that is the article my
friend mentioned, but he couldn't remember the content of it.  I'll go check
it out at the library.  If it is gibberish, then perhaps it's "gibberish" on
the order that the Tenga is, but if I recall correctly, Enochian has
semantic content.  What if it's a version of Enochian?  Has any of the
scholars who associate it with Edward Kelly considered that?

To Adrian again:
> > 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.
You should listen to some of these musicians.  I especially like Ekova.

Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html