Re: Tirelat vocabulary from one world to another

Hallo!

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008 22:10:03 -0400, Herman Miller wrote:

> I've been thinking about how to use Tirelat vocabulary and define the
> meanings of Tirelat words. As I've discovered, Tirelat is a Sangari
> langauge, but I don't know much about the Sangari world or culture. So
> what I'm thinking is that Tirelat words have a parallel set of meanings,
> one meaning relating to things and ideas in the familiar world, and
> another meaning as actually used by Sangari speakers. That way I don't
> have to be too precise about the Sangari meanings, but I can continue to
> develop the language by writing and translating texts about the "real
> world".
This works of course only as much as your world is similar
enough to ours.  It works well, for instance, with Tolkienesque
fantasy worlds that closely resemble Medieval Europe plus Elves
and dragons, but not so well with a bizarre world like H. S.
Teoh's Ferochromon where nothing is the way we are used to.

> For example, take a look at the basic color vocabulary. Tirelat as
> spoken by Sangari has words for colors based on the perception of
> Sangari vision, which ignores red but perceives ultraviolet.
>
> http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/new-tirelat-colors.png
>
> For the Human Tirelat vocabulary, I've revised the color words based on
> a red/green axis and a yellow/blue axis, which fits the way humans
> typically perceive color.
>
> http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/2008-tirelat-colors.png
A good solution.  Indeed, it is not easy to match colour
perception systems as different as those of human and Sangari,
but you have made a rather good job of it.

> Compare this with the older, more artificial decimal system of color
> that I used for Tirelat before the Sangari transition. This system was
> based on the internal encoding of colors in a computer file, and had
> little to do with human perception.
>
> http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/tirelat-colors.png
>
> Other aspects of the vocabulary could use a similar kind of rough
> correspondence of meaning. So I can continue using words like
> "squirrel", "guitar", or "pizza" in the Tirelat vocabulary, even if
> there aren't any exact counterparts.
This is, essentially, the same approach that Mark Rosenfelder
uses to gloss Verdurian words.  Verdurian is spoken in a world
that doesn't have the same plants, animals, foods and cultural
objects as Earth, but many have Earth near-equivalents, and
Mark uses the English words for those near-equivalents to gloss
Verdurian words.  Yet, there are things on Almea (Mark's conworld)
that have no counterpart on Earth, and Mark thus leaves the
Verdurian words for those things untranslated.

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