telepaths, sound changes, age changes, v changes, and lexicon
| From: | Muke Tever <alrivera@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 7:25 |
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> From: "Tim Judge, Erion Telepalda" <judget@...>
> Subject: illithid phonetics
>
> I am toying with the idea of a language for use in fantasy
stories/roleplay.
> It will be spoken by Illithids or Mind Flayers, ot those not familiar with
> them (I didn't just think them up) they are humanoid amphibian like
> creatures with immense psionic (psychic) powers.
Ooh, they have those in Final Fantasy Tactics. Only but they wrote it
'Mindflare'. There's a lot of fun transliteration differences in that
game... I set myself to find the sources for most of the monster names
(names of individual monsters, not of species). Most of them are pretty
transparently Greek, only transliterated without distinguishing
aspirated/unaspirated stops, or long vowels, and l/r differences to be
expected in a translation from the Japanese: Persepone for Persephonê,
Garateia for Galateia... some are more difficult: Ribentina < Latin
_Libentina_ 'Venus', Rukoprone < Lykophrôn? ...Sorry, this is way
irrelevant ;)
> From: jesse stephen bangs <jaspax@...>
> Subject: Re: illithid phonetics
>
> Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:
>
> > On a not very related note, Piers Anthony suggests in _Omnivore_ (okay,
> > it isn't the greatest SF, but it's better than a lot of his more recent
> > stuff) that a telepathic species would actually have a *dis*incentive to
> > "invent" (spoken) language.
>
> I've always thought that, myself. However, any real scientific theory of
> telepathic species would actually imply a "mental language". The
> telepathic signal would take the form of electromagnetic pulses,
> presumably, and there would have to be some form of input/output protocol
> within the species, which would ultimately be the same thing as a
> language. The only difference is that it would be transmitted through a
> different medium.
And there'd possibly be reasons for spoken language anyway, depending on the
nature of the telepathy in question: it may have a short range, it may not
be 'broadcastable' to more than one person at a time, or whatnot. (I know
the first limitation my Terras people have, and I'm pretty sure but not
entirely so about the second..)
A related 'handicap' is that their telepathy is not recordable (at least,
not currently; I don't know about later) and so a written language is
useful..
> From: jesse stephen bangs <jaspax@...>
> Subject: Re: Digest 2 Apr
>
> Muke Tever sikayal:
> > > I like phonology, but I don't know enough about historical phonology
to
> > > be entirely comfortable with the sound-changes I devise.
> >
> > Hehe. My langs tend to have regular but likely-implausible sound
changes.
>
> I don't know. There's some pretty weird stuff out there, like s > r,
> which is attested multiple times, but which I can't justify in my own
> mind.
I believe that it passes through 'z' first usually (s > z > r), although I'm
not sure that's much better ;) Hadwan has that change, itself, actually.
What I meant though is that though they may be regular they're not all
systematic, in the sense that you could make rules like "all voiced stops
become voiced fricatives", or "all palatals become affricates" (for
example). Although I do have a bunch of rules built that way, sometimes
strange changes happen: for example, IE velar *gh becomes Proto-Hadwan *š
(/S/), although a reflex like 'y' /G/ (or whatever the 'gamma' sign is)
would be expected; or the various expansions of proto-hadwan syllabic
sonorants in Hadwan (m=, n=, r=, l= > em, in, ur, ul)... It just doesn't
seem 'neat' enough to me, but I amn't going to change them.
> From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> Subject: Gendered Language (was Re: Digest 2 Apr)
>
> > Actually, I already had in mind that for one of my future planned
conlangs
> > (what starts out conculturally as an invented "children's language")
that at
> > least two age statuses [...stata? statorides? states?] would be
> > morphologically involved.
>
> That would be complicated. Would the child have to completely change
> the way he talks when he reaches a certain age?
Possibly the child would 'grow out of' the language and move on to talking
the regular language adults use. Or, if not that, he may speak in 'adult
voice' when he doesn't wish to be regarded as a child any longer.
The system might not in fact last very long... All I know now, anyway, is
that the language will have been invented; I have not yet discovered what
kind of destiny it has ;) It is in fact set too far in the future to tell
from what I have now.
> From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: Digest 2 Apr
>
> That reminds me--how/why, insofar as the question is answerable, did
> Latin v [w] go to v [v] in the Romance languages (or most of them, I
> think)? A friend of mine who sings (ecclesiastical) Latin sometimes and
> has had Spanish was wondering and I don't know the answer.
Well, it went to [B] in Spanish, IIRC, which is basically simply changing
the approximant [w] to the fricative [B].
But yeah, Latin v > Spanish v. In fact I think that etymology is the main
way to tell which should be used in (what I guess is the majority of)
dialects of Spanish that don't differentiate <v> and <b>.
An example if you need one, L 'vita' > Sp 'vida', L 'ventus' > Sp 'viento'.
> From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: Conlanging techniques
>
> Forgot to mention this--Rosenfelder's sound change program (it can be
> found at
http://www.zompist.com) is useful for brute-force application of
> sound changes, though I find the fact that it can't handle digraphs
> unless you write up special rules yourself annoying. If my programming
> were any less rusty I would try to write a version that *could* handle
> strings instead of just single letters.
> I keep conlang notes/files in notebooks or as WP files or in HTML.
> (Hard-coding tons of line breaks is a pain, but my computer is a Mac and
> the one I use that's internet-connected is a Win98 PC---not to mention my
> next computer may be a PC--so the idea was the HTML would be platform
> independent but more formattable than text/ASCII.) If I had any sense I
> would write my own very basic Chevraqis-tailored database program
> (perhaps one that could even handle vertical words...). Elsewhere,
> Shoebox has been mentioned (I think you have to pay for it, though) and
> someone on the list (sorry! don't remember who) wrote a conlang-database
> program called Kura (?) though I don't remember what platform(s) it's for.
Kura's cross-platform, you can use it (presumably) on any computer with a
Python installation (and qt, and a few other things it needs). I'm able to
run it here on Windows 95.
There's also the old LangMaker program (somewhere at langmaker.com) which
has a feature like zompist's sound program, although it does allow digraphs
in sound changes (but not variables, unfortunately...).
> From: "Tim Judge, Erion Telepalda" <judget@...>
> Subject: lexicon
>
> Hey does anyone know where I can find out the minimum of words I need for
a
> "complete" language. English Dictionarys are useless for this (and much to
> big), and I don't know any other language well enough for me to determin
> exactly how usefull the words are.
Here's a short list:
I
You [2nd person singular]
Someone
Something
People [people in general]
This
Two
Many
Word
Move
There is
Alive, living
Big
Small
Now
Here
Can
Not
Very
Maybe
The same/the same as
Another
One/one of
More
Want
Feel [undifferentiated between 'physical' and 'emotional']
See
Hear
Happen/happen to
Good
Bad
When (at a time, etc)...
Before
After
A long time
A short time
Where (in a place, etc)...
Under
Above
Far from
Close to/near
Inside
Part/part of
Kind/kind of
Like
If
Because
If...would
All
Some/Some of
Think
Know
Say
Do
This is apparently a functional list of Anna Wierzbicka's lexical universals
(invariant, basically indefinable concepts represented in all languages
researched). [Different languages don't necessarily have to treat the words
the same way English does; they may use a noun where we use a verb, for
example. They may possibly only express some by an affixed morpheme or
somesuch.] She _says_ that any concept can be explained in terms of these
words. This is an idea I'm not entirely sure of, but may be possible, even
if it would be hideously complicated for some ideas. The list may not be
'current' or 'complete', it's just the copy I have on hand. I do know some
of the terms have changed over time (ISTR in the past 'imagine' and 'world'
were on this list).
Hmm, I wonder if a conlang would be feasible with just those words in it. I
don't know what the corresponding grammar for it (that is, based on the same
principle) would look like, though.
> From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: lexicon
>
> On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Tim Judge, Erion Telepalda wrote:
>
> > Hey does anyone know where I can find out the minimum of words I need
for a
> > "complete" language. English Dictionarys are useless for this (and much
to
> > big), and I don't know any other language well enough for me to determin
> > exactly how usefull the words are.
>
> You can find a claim to a composite 2000-word "minimum" at the Landau
> Universal Vocabulary:
>
>
http://pages.prodigy.com/kankonia/luv.htm> From: David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
> Subject: Re: Verb order in Montreiano
>
> In a message dated 4/3/01 4:30:50 PM, yl112@CORNELL.EDU writes:
>
> << (that's the IPA symbol I
> can *never* remember, darnit! and my browser refuses to play the sounds
> this time...) >>
>
> It looks like a lower-case "c" with a thingy on the bottom, like in the
> French name "Francois". I'd write it out, but I hear those symbols don't
> show up on everyone's screen, so "c" she remains.
'c' with cedilla. 'c' by itself, BTW, is the palatal stop.
*Muke!
--
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/
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