Re: Tiki vocabulary

On 4/8/06, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> I have some issues with Tiki vocabulary that I need to resolve. One is
> that, since I wasn't thinking about the fictional background when I
> started working on the vocabulary list, some of these words are going to
> be hard to fit into the history. One possible scenario (although I
> haven't decided for certain) is that the author of Tiki was a Volapük
> supporter who was dissatisfied with the direction of the reforms to
> Volapük that eventually led to the creation of Idiom Neutral (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom_Neutral) and decided to produce his
> own language as an alternative. The inclusion of Japanese words in the
> Tiki vocabulary could be an attempt to give the language less of a
> specifically European flavor (most Tiki words are of Germanic or Romance
> origin).
>
> But I've got a few words that are colloquial English in origin. One
> that's giving me a bit of trouble is "kulu". As I go over the basic
> vocabulary I try to create distinct entries for different meanings even
> if the word is the same in English. So the main entry for "cool" is just
> "pi kalu", which is the diminutive of "cold". But I also wanted an entry
> for the other meaning of "cool" ("awesome", "rad", "wicked") in English,
> which isn't easy to find a non-English equivalent for in dictionaries.
> And this is especially tricky if Tiki was created in the late 1800's -
> early 1900's! Could it be a modern invention, created by a recent
> English-speaking Tiki enthusiast to fill a gap in the vocabulary? But
> why didn't the original vocabulary have a suitable word then?
Did English of ~1900 have a word for the concept we now call "coolness"?
If not, there's no particular reason an auxlang developed at the time
would have it either (unless it did exist in some other of Tiki's
source languages).  I reckon the easiest solution is, as you suggest,
to say that the Tiki you present is a slight modification of the original
Tiki, made in the 1990s or early 20th century of this alternate history;
thus "kulu", "jaki" etc.  To explain "jaki" you would need to posit some
mildly unwieldy word for "dirty" in the original Tiki; or perhaps "jaki"
was added as a poetic alternative with additional connotations
("disgusting", "reprehensible", "despicable"...?) -- like some
Esperanto words such as "povra" for "malricxa/kompatinda".

> French, Dutch, Japanese, and other languages that are sources for Tiki
> vocabulary frequently use suffixes to derive new words. It occurred to
> me as I was creating a word for "fragile" that a word derived from
> "break" would be more recognizable with a suffix; something like
> "bekeba" could be remembered by associating it with the Dutch word
> "breekbaar". But then a 3-syllable word ending in -ba could be
> misinterpreted; "maliba" (marimba) could be analyzed as "mali-ba"
> (likely to be a husband?). Different stress patterns might help, but
> with both suffixes and prefixes in the language, I'd need to distinguish
> between the three possibilities "ma-liba", "mali-ba", and "maliba"
> somehow. Perhaps all suffixes could be two-syllable roots ("beke-bale"
> for "fragile").
Neither Volapük nor Esperanto nor, as far as I know, any other early
auxlang had self-segregating morphology; all of them had problems
like the one you describe to some extent (it was pretty bad in
the original Volapük; Arie de Jong's 1931 revision fixed some
specific ambiguities but didn't solve the underlying problem).
So in short, Tiki would be a typical late 19th/early 20th century
auxlang if you leave these ambiguities alone.  If you fix them
by coming up with a self-segregating morphology, then Tiki
becomes even more of an anachronism, perhaps, but still
explainable with a smidgen of conhistory (Magritte was particularly
annoyed by the ambiguous compounds of Vp and after
a lot of thought and experimentation worked out his self-segregating
morphology scheme to eliminate it).

(Zamenhof made some efforts to reduce the probability of
compound ambiguities by modifying the forms of root
words to avoid apparent suffixes -- for instance, "planed/o"
instead of *"planet/o" to not look like "plan/et/o" -- but he
wasn't consistent enough with this to eliminate all possible
collisions, only the most likely ones.  And since any Esperanto
speaker can coin new words by borrowing whenever they like,
and there was no official rule about the phonotactics etc,
there was no way to prevent other people from coining words
that would be ambiguous.)

Does anyone know what the first conlang with self-segregating
morphology was?  Maybe the original Loglan, but perhaps
something earlier...

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm

Reply