Re: Tirelat vocabulary from one world to another

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> 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.
The reality of the Zireen and Sangari worlds is fundamentally very
similar to our own in the basics of physics and chemistry at least.
Impossible Gates between worlds do exist, but as they are so rare, we
could be living in a world with Impossible Gates and not even know it.
Biology is carbon-based, and the basics of metabolism are likely to be
very similar.

Actually I think in a bizarre world like Ferochromon it's even more
important to have a familiar set of words to get a handle on the alien
ideas, even though the equivalence can only be very rough; starbursts,
whirlpools, rivers, fountains, and so on. Even in our own bizarre
worlds; in quantum physics, particles have "spin", which has some
rotation-like properties. There's the famous example of the science
fiction story that was copied word for word from _The Last of the
Mohicans_, which was said to have taken place in some fraction of a
second on the surface of a neutron star. That's obviously an extreme
example (probably contrived to make a statement about how non-alien much
SF writing actually is), but how would you describe hypothetical life on
the surface of a neutron star any other way? The vocabulary doesn't exist.

>> 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.
Well, it's a rough approximation at best. We describe the sky as "blue",
which I've translated "nuri", while they would describe our sky probably
as "žuli", as there's a lot of UV light in the sky color. "Zaari" is a
more precise word for the color of the sky in both interpretations of
Tirelat vocabulary, but it's not a basic color word.

>> 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.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
>
I imagine there will also be Sangari Tirelat words that I'll leave
untranslated, like going into the specifics of the different kinds of
dragons, or aspects of their social life, just as there are will be
specific Human Tirelat words that aren't a part of the Sangari language
(e.g., the word for "red" -- maybe they use "infrayellow" or something).