Acta Lingweenie

Art and Conlanging

2012-01-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

If you listened to the out-takes from the most recent Conlangery Podcast you heard an out-of-context quote from an experience I had in college. I went to a show of performance art pieces put on by art students. One of the episodes involved a man walking out on stage with a boom box, turning on some industrial music, stripping naked and proceeding to duct-tape sausage to himself.

From time to time, both on the show and off, Bianca and I have amused ourselves by imagining how various schools of art would map to styles of language invention. But now I think we've been going at this backwards. There is nothing intrinsically confusing about an earnest, naked gentleman with kielbasa affixed to his person. The problem is that no one in the audience knew what language he was speaking. If he had passed out a grammar and lexicon first, the audience would have some idea of what he was trying to say.

So, my current idea is that conceptual art is actually a form of conlanging. People just don't realize it yet.

Maybe I can get a paper in Social Text about this...

And ACADEW, too: Tsolyáni

2012-01-08T11:45:00.000-08:00

While some of us invented our first languages without any idea others might indulge in this hobby, most of us come to it through exposure to some other conlang. Esperanto was the most likely for a long time, and many, many of us create languages in the Mirkwood-deep shadow of Tolkien's languages. Somewhat more recently, Klingon may be the first taste of invented languages, and now Na'vi and Dothraki are bringing a few to the hobby.

I don't remember if I had seen Esperanto when I started creating my first languages — puny relexes of English with hybrid German-Latin grammars, including the dative case before I even know what one did with it. The deepest influence on my languages, however, come from an author who never invented a single language, Frank Herbert.

When Herbert needed non-English touches, he grabbed historical human languages and made modest sound changes, largely to accommodate his editors, I'm sure. Arabic infuses the books (CHOAM = OPEC), and Romani makes a regular appearance. He even grabs Ancient Egyptian once. But Herbert's thinking about language is deeply influenced by General Semantics. In particular, he was always worried about the ways our use of language conceals from us our assumptions about the world. I don't think he ever has a character say, "the map is not the territory," but he might as well have.

Herbert was also preoccupied with how far human capabilities could be extended without the aid of advanced computing technology. The Butlerian Jihad was necessary to wipe computers and AI from his science-fiction world to allow him to explore this. (As a side note, how on earth are the psychotropics used through the works, of which the Spice is but one, not technologies?) Herbert imagines a future in which the ruling classes use many, many languages. Even the soldiers have to master the battle language of the House they work for. (Conlang as impenetrable code has been used by more than one language inventor, I'm sure.)

The language that haunts me to this day is mentioned in Dune Messiah. It is mirabhasa:

They were using a mirabhasa language, honed phalange consonants and joined vowels. It was an instrument for conveying fine emotional subtleties. Edric, the Guild Steersman, replied to the Reverend Mother now with a vocal hurtsy contained in a sneer — a lovely touch of disdainful politeness.

Now, I have never figured out what phalange consonant is supposed to be. I'm guessing he misremembered "pharyngeal" from perusing Arabic, but one never knows.

In any case, I have tried through the years my own variations on a mirabhasa language, with different focuses. The results are often fiendishly complex and not very usable. Then I step back and try something daintier, only to find it falling short of my own ideas about such a language. Herbert took the best course in never attempting to create the language, instead bringing it into the scene as a way to allow him to comment on the political, social and power dynamics of a conversation between four very powerful groups. I, however, keep trying.

I recently hunted down copies of M.A.R. Barker's two-volume documentation on the Tsolyáni language. I have the second printing of it, published in 1981, somewhere between two and four years before I undertook the construction of my first little languages. It is a shame it is not more well-known. It has far more complete than any of Tolkien's languages, more interesting and naturalistic than Esperanto, and easier to learn and better described than Klingon. The grammar is full of examples. A precis may be found here.

Tsolyáni, naturally, has three separate ways to encode emotional and social judgements about discourse topics — two on the nouns, and one on the verbs.

First, nouns may take "general attitude prefixes," which encode personal judgements, though the same slot takes a few prefixes locating a discourse topic in time (the accents are primary and secondary stresses),

shàrzakási "the captain whom I somewhat humorously despise" (kási "captain")
chiqèkbásrim "the comically inept man" (básrim "man")
hoqòkólumel "the future emperor" (kólumel "emperor")

Second, nouns may take "general attitude suffixes." While the prefixes above encode one's personal opinions, these mark general assessments. So, korùsskási "the captain whom I despise and hate" vs. kásigakoi "the (widely) hated captain." From the grammar, "... contains a large number of suffix elements (or perhaps 'secondary compounding stems?') which denote "objectively held" attitudes toward the noun. These items describe the status, rank, size, and other clearly perceptible qualities of the noun — including emotional attitudes towards the noun which are shared by others besides the speaker" (3.160).

Finally, verbs may take "attitude prefixes" containing "some twenty to thirty members." These indicate the way an action is performed in the opinion of the speaker,

ramissúm "to slay in a contemptible fashion" (missúm "slay")
lüchyiráu "to pilfer" (yiráu "steal", lüch- "to act in a petty, miserly, cowardly fashion")
tludímlal "to strike fanatically" (dímlal "strike, hit")
bashtaskótl "to advance loyally" (taskótl "to advance as an army")

So, here is Mr. Barker using techniques in the 1970s it would take me a good 20 years to get to myself. Tsolyáni is a good example of why conlangers should study (or at least read the grammars of) as many different kinds of languages as possible. Barker's dissertation was a grammar of Klamath, and he is clearly quite familiar with Nahuatl.

While it might have been nice to know about Tsolyáni when I was younger, I'm not sure how likely it is I would have been to able to keep the grammar when I was a kid. It has drawings of naked slave-ladies on the front cover of both the grammar and the dictionary.

Perceiving ANADEW

2012-01-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

One feature of Láadan that always struck me as odd was how it handled perception. There are no verbs for see, hear, taste, etc., rather there is a single verb láad perceive, which is used with an instrumental noun to clarify.

Bíi	láad	le	ne-th	oyu-nan	wa.
DECL	perceive	1SG	2SG-ACC	ear-INST	EVID
I hear you.

I was never clear what effect Elgin was aiming at with this, and it has always struck me as unnatural. I should know better, but if you had asked me last week if this would occur in a natural language, I would have said, "no." But no, it does occur — in one language, Kobon.

Kobon is known for having a very small number of verbs — on the order of 100, of which about 20 get regular use. It achieves clarity by combing the verbs with nouns, adjectives and adverbs. So, eye perceive for see, ear perceive for hear, etc. It heads off into territory even Láadan wouldn't enter, with sleep perceive for dream (Láadan ozh).

I really should know better by now.

Some people might enjoy A universal constraint on sensory lexicon, or when hear can mean 'see'? (PDF).

Misunderstanding Láadan

2011-12-29T19:12:00.000-08:00

With the help of a Christmas gift card, I got myself a copy of From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, which was released in November of this year, from Oxford University Press (emic review). It's a collection of academic papers about various language invention topics. See the review for more details.

After I read the introduction, the first thing I did was go to the index to look for languages I know about. Láadan gets two mentions (in the index it is misspelled Láaden, but the page numbers point to the right place). In chapter 8, Suzanne Romaine's Revitalized Languages as Invented Languages, page 215, we get this lengthy paragraph,

A similarity of purpose and motivation drives inventors of all new languages, whether in the real or fictional world. The perceived need for them arises from dissatisfaction with the current linguistic state of affairs. Recognition that language can be used for promoting or changing the social, cultural, and political order leads to conscious intervention and manipulation of the form of language, its status and its uses. In this sense then, the idea of a modern standard Hebrew as the language of a secular Jewish state sprang from the mind of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, no less than Klingon did from the imagination of its inventor Marc Okrand. Hence the planners of Néo-breton, Modern Hebrew, and other revitalized languages are no less inventors than are authors of speculative fiction like George Orwell or Suzette Haden Elgin, who conceive new languages consonant with their vision of a brave new world. The task is to invent and spread a language to encode it. The project of imagining a world without gender differentiation and inequality gave birth to Elgin's Láadan, invented by women for women, just as much as Modern Hebrew would be conceived as a vehicle for modern Jewish statehood and nationality in the creation of a new land by pioneers, and of a new Jew who would escape the confines of the shtetl. Speaking or narrating in a feminist woman-made language in Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) becomes a liberating force for women dominated by a patriarchal society in the twenty-thrid century, just as Irish became and continues to be a language of resistance in the struggle against British rule.

Ok. Seeing language revivification as an example of language creation should not be new to practiced conlangers who are likely to read this. I look forward to reading the rest of the chapter later.

What drives me ever so slightly bonkers is that this paragraph contains two deep misunderstandings about what Elgin attempted with Láadan. First, Láadan is not "invented by women for women." It is indeed invented by women, and intended to express the perceptions of women better, and is "for women" in the sense that it aims at this goal. But at no point has she said that it is for women only. In fact, she goes out of her way, in both the books and in interviews about Láadan, to explicitly deny this. It is for women and men to use. Romaine's account rather makes it seem like Láadan would not be open to use by men.

Second, "imagining a world without gender differentiation" is not part of Láadan's goals either. In A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan (Second Edition, 1988), Elgin lays out the inspirations for Láadan in the first chapter, The Construction of Láadan. The fourth item is,

I focused my Guest of Honor speech for WisCon on the question of why women portraying new realities in science fiction had, so far as I knew, dealt only with Matriarchy and Androgyny, and never with the third alternative based on the hypothesis that women were not superior to men (Matriarchy) or interchangeable with and equal to men (Androgyny) but rather entirely different from men. I proposed that it was at least possible that this was because the only language available to women excluded the third reality. Either because it was unlexicalized and thus no words existed with which to write about it, or it was lexicalized in so cumbersome a manner that it was useless for the writing of fiction, or the lack of lexical resources literally made it impossible to imagine such a reality.

Láadan, like Esperanto, is a kind of conlang Rorschach ink-blot test. Whatever they might actually mean, they are primarily the vehicles for people's preconceptions about what they are. Here, Láadan has been shoehorned into a thesis about language revitalization. I don't think the misunderstanding of it undermines the argument, but it is astonishing to see it so badly misinterpreted in an academic context, especially when material directly from Elgin is so readily available.

Kahtsaai Vocabulary: -(i)rwa

2011-09-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.¹

I am a great collector of lexical derivation methods. I ran across one a while ago — I wish I could remember where — which I immediately grabbed for Kahtsaai (PDF). This resulted in a minor lexical upheaval, but I'm very fond of the results.

The form is -rwa after vowels, -irwa after all consonants except r, l and ł, in which case it's just -wa. For now, it is only attached to verbs. It produces stative verbs meaning that something has the characteristic of causing or permitting the verbal action. That's a bit obscure. Some examples make it clearer:

łeit fear, be afraid of	łeitirwa scary
weir be sick	weirwa contagious
posé trust, believe	póserwa trustworthy, believable
tááít go to someone for help; seek sanctuary	tááítirwa messed up or dangerous beyond one's ability to cope with alone

Some of the resulting words are similar to English nouns in -able, but most are not. It seems very useful, and is so far doing a good job of taxing my ability to come up with English definitions for things. What, for example, would this derivation of kén urge, impel, set in motion mean? What about kitra tame, subdue? The notions seem useful.

¹ Given as a "Gowachin aphorism" in Frank Herbert's novel Whipping Star.

Natlang Inspiration: Navajo WOD

2011-09-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

I sometimes worry that I get too enthusiastic with derivational morphology. Then I read things like this, from The Navajo Verb System: an Overview, by Robert W. Young, and I feel like a derivational slacker. It's a long quotation (pp. 57-59), but it's worth it.

Note that in Athabascan linguistics, a "classifier" has nothing to do with the usual linguistic sense of that word, but has to do with transitivity. The null classifier is noted with Ø.

The "run" verbs provide classic examples of crystalized metaphor.

"Singular-run" verbs are derived from a root WOD (Perfective Stem), the base meaning of which is "flex, bend." With Ø-Classifier the Verb Theme ØWOD is produced and this Theme, in combination with adverbial 'ahá-: apart, derives the Verb Base 'ahá-øwod with the meaning "bend apart, become disjointed," as in shigaan 'ahááwod: my arm became disjointed (bent apart). With Ł-Classifier the "bend" theme is transitivized to acquire the meaning "cause to bend," and again in combination with 'ahá-: apart, the Verb Base 'ahá-̵łhod is generated, with the meaning "cause to bend or flex apart, break by flexing apart" as in béésh 'áłts'ózí 'ahááłhod: I bent or flexed the wire apart.

With L-Classifier the causative-transitive Theme becomes mediopassive, serving to derive constructions in which the subject and object are the same. LWOD and its Stem variants produce lexical constructions that describe the subject as "self-flexing" and this came to be used as a metaphor for "run," an action performed by flexing the legs. Thus 'ashkii 'ólta'dę́ę́' ch'élwod: the boy ran ("self-flexed") out of the school; 'ashkii 'ólta'di yílwod: the boy ran ("arrived self-flexing") to school, 'ashkii 'atiin góyaa yilwoł: the boy is running ("self-flexing") down the road.

The concept involved in running carries a connotation of "swift movement," a feature that opens the way to further extension of what began as a metaphoric mediopassive Theme. With the meaning "go swiftly" the "singular-run" verbs are applied to inanimate objects - contexts in which "Self-flex" plays no part, asi n chidí (dzi'izí, nááts'ó'oołdísii, kǫ' na'ałbąąsii) yilwoł: the care (bicycle, whirlwind, locomotive) is running along; k'aa' shighálwod: the arrow went through me.

Applied to conveyances, in Verb Bases that include the postposition P-ił: in company with P, the "transportation by fast vehicle" verbs are generated. Here the subject is the vehicle and the person transported is represented by the pronoun object of the postposition P-. Thus, chidí shił yilwoł: I'm riding along in the car (i.e., the car is running along with me; kintahdę́ę́' shił ná'oolwoł: I'm returning from town by (unspecified) fast moving vehicle (car, motorcycle) (literally, something unspecified is running back with me); Yootóodi shił 'ílwod, I arrived in Santa Fe (by unspecified fast moving vehicle). Other modes of travel are distinguished by other verbal roots, as P-ił (d)t'a: fly; P-ił Ø'éél: go by boat; P-ił idloosh: go by quadruped (horse, burro); P-ił (d)'na': go by slow-moving (crawling) vehicle (tractor, army tank, heavy truck).

"Run" is used idiomatically in expressions of the type: Pí-ka 'a--lwod: help P (literally "run away out of sight after P") as in shimá bíká 'eeshwod: I helped (ran away after) my mother; Pí-lák'ee ha--lwod: escape from P, as in 'awáalyaaí shílák'ee haalwod: the prisoner escaped from me (literally "ran out of my hand"), 'éé' biih --lwod: dress hurriedly, as in 'éé' biih yishwod: I dressed quickly (literally "ran into my clothes").

And finally, the "singular-run" Theme appears as a calque from English, functioning with the meaning "operate," as in naalyéhé bá hooghan yiyoołwoł: he runs a trading post, he runs a store (literally: he causes it to be running along).

The "run" verbs employ three distinct Stems, distinguishing number as singular, dual and plural (1, 2 and 3+ subjects).

"Dual-run," like "singular-run," is derived somewhat deviously as a metaphor - but here one in which the two subjects are described literally as "chasing each other."

An intransitive Verb Theme NI-ØCHĄ́Ą́' (Perfective Stem) and its modal variants carry the meaning "flee." as in tsé'ą́ą́ góne' yah 'anííchą́ą́': I fled into the cave; siláo yik'ee noochéé̵ł: he's fleeing from the police. Ł-Classifier produces a causative-transitive Theme NI-ŁCHĄ́Ą́': chase (cause to flee), as in łééchąą'í shinoołchééł: the dog is chasing me (i.e., causing me to flee).

When the direct object of the causative-transitive Theme is recoprical 'ahi-: each other, L-Classifier replaces Ł-, and the theme takes the shape 'ahi-NI-LCHĄ́Ą́': chase each other. It is this Theme that carries the figurative meaning "dual-run," as in 'ashiiké 'atiin góyaa 'ahinoolchééł: the two boys are running (chasing each other) down the road.

(Skipping some morphological trickiness not relevant here. —Wm)

Again, the connotation "swift movement" permits an extension of the "dual-run" verbs to include inanimate objects, as in chidí 'atiin góyaa 'ahinoolchééł: the two cars are running down the road; k'aa' naakigo shigháhi'neelchą́ą́;: two arrows went through me (literally "chased each other through me"). And "dual-run" verbs are used idiomatically in contexts of the type 'at'ééké bimá yíká 'ahi'noolchą́ą́': the two girls helped their mother (literally "they ran away out of sight after her"), 'awáalyaaí shílák'ee hahi'noolchą́ą́': they two prisoners escaped from me (literally "they chased each other out of my hand").

Kahtsaai: the Irresultative

2011-07-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

I recently ran across a line in reference to the mass of British politicians suddenly turning on Murdoch, "if you strike at the king you must kill him." That, and the slides from LCC4 about Dothraki, reminded me I needed to tackle the irresultative for Kahtsaai.

The irresultative is a bit of an odd beast — is it an aspect? lexical aspect? mood? Some languages are quite sensitive to telic irresultatives, such as Finnish which uses an irresultative construction for verbs of emotion, so that direct objects are marked with the partitive instead of the accusative. In English we have various ways to mark a failed attempt, such as the example above, "strike at someone," or the ever-popular, "she was talking at me."

For Kahtsaai, I'm less interested in lexical aspect, but wanted a way to encode an action that didn't quite work out, or didn't quite meet expectations. The most interesting formal marking for this I've been able to find is in Tariana, which repeats the verb with a suffix, -kane,

pi-na	wa-kalite-de	wa-kalite-kane
2SG-OBJ	1PL-tell-FUT.CERT	1PL-tell-IRRES
We will tell you (but not all of it)

I decided to go with an idiomatic expression, using the verb łom, a transitive verb which usually means "throw at, pelt." When suffixed to a verb, the resulting expression means either (1) that an act was attempted but somehow didn't succeed, or (2) that the speaker's expectations were somehow unfulfilled. So,

Yotásekłiitaal	tíkłe.
yo-tá-sekłii-taal	tíkle
3AN-1SG-sting-strike	snake
The snake struck me.

but,

Yotásekłiitaałłom	tíkłe.
yo-tá-sekłii-taal-łom	tíkle
3AN-1SG-sting-strike-IRRES	snake
The snake struck at me.

For a thwarted expectation,

Hekíísiłomtsi

he-kíísi-łom-tsi

3IN-rain-IRRES-EVID

It was supposed to rain (but didn't).

Finally, in irrealis or dependent clauses, the irresultative is more purely conative ("try to"), though with a strong sense that success is harder to come by. This let's me translate the sentence that started this all:

Toulta	matssekłiiłomne	matsłóúníír.
toulta	ma-ts-sekłii-łom-ne	ma-ts-łóú-níír.
lord	3INDEF-3SG-strike-IRRES-ADV	3INDEF-3SG-must-kill
If you strike at the king you must kill him.

The adverbial clause suffix, C-ne V-hte, means something "if, when" and the like.

Semantic Range

2011-06-20T17:48:00.000-07:00

A word's range, from a natural language, not an invented one:

č̓ix̣ʷ-, č̓ix̣ʷaˑ ghost, scary thing; dead person; worm, bug; penis (slang)

(Page 401 of Studies in Southern Wakashan (Nootka) Grammar — a substantial PDF).

Kahtsaai Word of the Day: Keilo'éík

2011-06-17T17:46:00.001-07:00

Ok, so I'm not going to start a series on Kahtsaai words just now, but I thought I'd share this one...

When I arrived home today I noticed that the poor, ratty poppy I planted two years ago finally outpaced the bunnies and produced a single bloom. I decided Kahtsaai needed a word for "poppy," and I immediately thought of the vivid Homeric simile, when Gorgythion is hit by an arrow,

μήκων δ᾽ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ᾽ ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ᾽ ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν.

His head fell to the side, just as a poppy, which in a garden
is weighed down with fruit and the rains of spring,
so his head nodded to the side, weighed down by his helmet.

(Please forgive the Old High Translationese. It is an occupational hazard of even the amateur classicist.)

So, the Kahtsaai word for "poppy" is keilo'éík, from keil soldier, fighter and éík head.

Kahtsaai: Devising a Practical Orthography

2011-06-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

All of my conlangs that do now or ever have existed are written in the Latin alphabet. I have from time to time tried my hand at inventing scripts, but the results are never satisfying. One of the first attractions to me about foreign languages was not the languages themselves, but the writing systems. I gave myself an intense early education in calligraphy in several scripts, which makes me a harsh judge of invented writing systems. I rarely find a conscript beautiful, or at least harmonious, and this applies doubly or triply so for my own. So, I'm stuck with Latin.

All my early languages aimed at a phonetic representation. Thus I was rather shocked the first time I encountered Dirk Elzinga's wonderful Tepa, which spells things like [tuɣu] as tuku and [yɨška] as yɨyka. But now that I've spent a lot more time staring at Native American languages — including plenty in the Uto-Aztecan family, which seems to be the inspiration for Tepa — I've come to appreciate phonemic writing systems a lot more. Changes in my habits of language construction drive this somewhat, too. So, here's an account some of the considerations that went into settling on the Latin orthography for Kahtsaai.

The Vowels

Here's the Kahtsaai vowel inventory:

i [i]	ii [iː]
e [ɛ]	ei [eː]			o [o] [ʊ]	ou [uː]
		a [a]	aa [aː]
			aai [aːɪ]

The first issue I had to deal with is tone. I'm very fond of tonal languages — more fond than typology would warrant — but there it is. The only practical way to indicate tone is with diacritics.¹ Since I stick with simple two- or three-tone systems, this is easy. In a two-tone system I use á for a high tone and no accent for low, and for a three-tone system á high, a mid and à low.

However, once I decide to use tone, I'm only really left with one option for long vowels, something else I'm fond of. In a non-tonal language, I use the acute accent for a long vowel. But, since I've already grabbed that diacritic for tone in Kahtsaai, I simply write the vowel twice to indicate length, a and aa, etc. (In the ancient times of ASCII-only terminals, that's how I always wrote long vowels.) In theory I could combine diacritics, and put accent marks above macrons, but I find that difficult to read and a real pain to write legibly or type. In Kahtsaai, each mora of a long vowel may have its own tone, leading to tone contours on long vowels, káar to save, to preserve having a falling pitch.

You will also note that the mid vowels aren't marked long in the same way. Phonemically, e and ei are just short and long versions of each other, but there was such a significant quality change that I decided to write them differently. This does work out in the phonological processes of the language. Noun stems that end in vowels lose a single mora at the end when they are incorporated. So, the noun kopi water becomes just kop- when incorporated, and éi tree has the incorporation form é-. This pattern also motivates the spelling of the single, long diphthong as aai. When final, the moraic reduction results in -aa, as in taraa- from taraai health, condition, status, weather. I think the switch from aai to aa conceals the stem less than a spelling change from ai to aa. The extra reminder that this is a long vowel diphthong doesn't hurt, either.

Finally, the phoneme /o/ has two realizations. In open syllables it is [o], in closed it is [ʊ]. The morphology of Kahtsaai ensures that underlying /o/ in a single root presents itself in both shapes frequently. For example, using the verb -wo to eat, te'ewo I ate it has no evidential due to the first person subject, and is pronounced [tɛ.ʔɛ.wo]. With the direct evidential, -ts, we get yonwots she ate it [jʊn.wʊts].

The Consonants

The consonants of Kahtsaai are much simpler. I decided not to follow the Americanist tradition of spelling /ts/ as "c", and just use ts. At morpheme boundaries t + s results in tss, so no ambiguity about stem boundaries arises from using this digraph. Since Kahtsaai allows coda stops, this could have become a minor problem.

Before voiced resonants (l r) or glides (w y) the stops (which includes ts for this discussion) are pronounced voiced. This change is not represented in the practical orthography, [kid.ɾa] to tame, subdue is spelled kitra. Again, this choice is motivated by not wanting the basic stem to be concealed in writing every time a new morpheme was added. Besides, the change is 100% predictable.

_____
¹ Ok, some languages use what look like coda consonants to mark tone instead of actual syllable codas. Hmong, especially, comes to mind. But I tend to favor moderately complex syllables, with actual coda consonants, so that could get very confusing.

A Little Kahtsaai

2011-06-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

I've been churning through sketches and modifications in the last year, resulting in the current rather full language, Kahtsaai. A lot of the work is based on Bixwá, which in turn was the outcome of several sketches. It became clear that Bixwá was getting cognitively unwieldy for my purposes, so I stepped back. I generalized some of the ideas a bit. In particular, I ditched the instrumental prefixes in favor of full-on noun incorporation, with instrumental significance one use available for that (Mithun's type IV NI). This cleaned things up a bit.

I dropped case marking altogether, with one marginal exception. Semantically inanimate nouns are marked when they are the subject of a transitive verb. The verb subject prefix for an inanimate noun is also different. So, in both case marking and verb conjugation, inanimates follow an ergative alignment (mostly), while animates are nominative-accusative:

he-nop

3IN-fall.over

it fell over

kí-tá-nop-im

3IN.TRANS-1SG-fall.over-CAUS

it knocked me over

The language is far enough along that I can complain about the recent weather and environmental conditions:

Ááni	tá-wime	he-tsaaiki-koh	to'pe-yo-se'á
lately	1SG-eye	3IN-itch-INST.APPL	spruce-LNK-wind
lately my eyes have been itching from allergies

Noun-noun compounds have a link syllable joining elements (an idea probably most recently inspired by Coast Tsimshian). Incorporated nouns are abbreviated in various ways, most regularly, but a few have particular incorporation stems. So, I could have rephrased things a bit:

Ááni	tei-wim-tsaaiki-koh	to'pe-yo-se'á
lately	1SG-eye-itch-INST.APPL	spruce-LNK-wind
lately my eyes have been itching from allergies

Notice that the incorporated noun, wime, has been reduced to just wim-. You will also see that Kahtsaai has an instrumental applicative to bring in a new argument. There is also a benefactive applicative, as well as a fossilized locative applicative that is not freely productive.

So far I have omitted evidential marking, which is usually marked:

tówaar	mós	heweitaraa'ánméín
tówaar	mós	he-wei-taraai-án-mé-n
meanwhile	tomorrow	3IN-very-state-hot-FUT-EVID
it's supposed to be very hot tomorrow

Here we have a hear-say evidential, somewhat merged with the future marker (Kahtsaai is usually aspect obsessed, not marking tense except for the future). The discourse particle tówaar marks a discourse break, especially a change in topic.

Addicted to Dependency-marking

2011-05-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

The cycle of revisions I've been working on in the last year and a half or so is winding down to a fixed set of features that I really like. But I have found there's one thing I've had a hard time giving up: case marking. A hefty chunk of what I'm aiming for is inspired by various areal features of North American native languages, where case marking (and dependency marking in general) is not exactly common.

Removing cases gives me deep anxieties, even though I know intellectually a language is perfectly capable of working fine without them, even if you have a nonconfigurational syntax. I spent part of today working through the behavior of applicatives, and have finally reassured myself multiple objects without overt marking can work just fine. Thinking about reasonable discourse situations, rather than concocted grammar puzzles of the sort one finds in old Latin textbooks, is a better guide to where real ambiguities can arise.

Wardwesân

2011-03-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

In January of this year a Frenchman working under the pseudonym Frédéric Werst had a book published, Ward : Ier-IIe siècle. I first heard about it at Language Hat. It's a historical anthology of the Wards, an invented people, in an invented language, Wardwesân. I figured my library of conlang grammars (Láadan, Esperanto, Klingon) could use some Gallic company, so I ordered the book. It finally arrived, and I thought I'd give a quick overview of the language a bit. I haven't yet had time to read the main body of the text too much — my French is rusty, and literary French is much harder going for me than technical French — but I'll grab a few examples from it for analysis.

Sound System

The vowels are a, ā, e, ē, o, ō, i, y and u. Long ā has regional variantions, pronounced either [œ] or, apparently, as a long /a/ (ou commme un â français très marqué). For /e/ and /o/ sounds the ones with the macrons are tense, those without are lax, e [ɛ] ē [e], o [ɔ] ō [o]. The y is IPA [y], but is also usable as a consonant, [j]. The diphthong ae is [aɪ].

These consonants are as in French: b, d, j, k, l, m, n, p, ph, s, t, z; g is always hard, [g], r is "always rolled;" sh is [ʃ], kh is [x], gh is [ɣ], th is [θ], zh is [ð] (really!), x is [ts] and xh is [tʃ], q is [q], jh is the ich-laut, [ç].

Word accent is always on the first syllable.

There is no discussion of phonotactics or phrase accenting.

The Noun

Much loving attention was devoted to the morphology of the noun.

Most nouns do not have overt gender marking; inanimates never do, animates may, -a for masculine, -e for feminine: westa "king", weste "queen." There are some other minor patterns.

Plurals got quite a lot of work, though not all nouns get plural forms.

First, there is the common class of internal plurals which show some vowel change: gan "night" gaen, mazira "pheasant" mazōra. These seem quite common.

Second, some may have an internal vowel alteration, with or without additional change: thanor"pond" thōnar.

Third, some take a prefix al- or ar-: karz "child" alkarz. This may also involve vowel changes: barw "name" arbyrw.

Fourth, some take suffixes or other word-final alterations: rame "sister" rameth.

Fifth, nouns in -ael may form a plural in -aldon: zagael "young man" zagaldon.

Sixth, nouns starting in o- often have a plural in wo-: ora "plant" wora.

Finally, many nouns, abstract nouns especially, have no proper plural at all. But, if one is really needed, the postpositive particle amōn may be used.

Werst had fun with these many plural forms, with a number of lexical items with the same singular having different plurals: gem, gemazhan "cheek" (actually an example of the dual, -zhan) but gem, argym "cloud."

Vowel alterations are not only used for marking the plural. Agent nouns will convert an /a/ in the first syllable to /e/, and an /e/ in the first syllable to /o/: merwān "to manufacture" morwa "author."

There appear not to be adjectives, but nouns of qualification, which are joined to nouns with the appositive particle ab (which reminds me a lot of Persian ezafé). So, mega "something new", but mega ab magha "new god".

The Verb

The verb system is rather simple. There is a small collection of co-verbs which encode person and time, and participles which encode number. There are three active participles, and these are mixed and matched with co-verbs to produce quite an array of tense forms.

The co-verbs are regular: present wena (1st person), wega (2nd person), weza (3rd person masc.) and wetha (3rd person fem.), with er- replacing we- for the perfect, me- for the imperfect and wa- for the subjunctive.

The participles are -an (pl. -anōn) for present, -azan (pl. -azanōn) for past and -agō (pl. -agōn) for future.

A full conjugation for arbān "to write":

	Singular	Plural
1st	wena arban	wena arbanōn
2nd	wega arban	wega arbanōn
3m.	weza arban	weza arbanōn
3f.	wetha arban	wetha arbanōn

This strikes me as rather regular, but an interesting way to split the load. There is, however, a small number of verbs which have irregular — and fully conjugated — perfects (which I will not give here).

There is no passive conjugation, though there are passive participles in -ēnd, which are joined to their noun with ab: kamazh ab arbēnd "a written book."

There is a "gnomic" tense, which ends in -aoth. It has neither tense nor number, and indicates general activities, arbaoth "one writes, people write, it is usual to write." The ending may alter the final consonant of some stems.

The imperative is in -ax (pl. -axō): jarān "to come" jarax, jaraxō.

Prepositions

Prepositions have two forms, strong and weak. It is easiest to say that the weak forms are used whenever the governed noun is modified by another noun, and the strong in all other situations. For example (in order of weak then strong) az, azōn "with". First, strong forms:

azōn yarn "with a friend"

azōn yarn nēs "with my friend"

azōn yarn ab Xamōn "with (my) friend Xamôn"

Weak forms:

az Xamōn yarn "with Xamôn's friend"

az warma yarn "with a sick friend"

Note especially the last form: it causes the qualifying noun to act more like what we expect with an adjective, rather than the warma ab yarn we'd otherwise expect.

Particles

Indeclinable particles do a number of syntactic jobs. As we have seen above, there is the appositive particle ab. The genitive relation is handed with tha, as in barzha tha qaman "the destruction (qaman) of the building."

The particle zha means something like "which has," which can also be used to create the effect of an adjective, mazaraon zha kazhar "a certain dating" (kazhar "certitude").

Various combinations and particles are used for verb aspect (which I'll omit here).

Et Cetera

There are several particle combinations with na which combine evidentiality and judgement, na zant for opinion from experience ((se) dire), na qant to express certainty, etc (these are a little regular for my taste, all in C-ant).

There are several kinds of article and demonstratives.

The grammar as a good (though not huge) section on the syntax of the language, which I will omit here.

Small Examples

A sentence grabbed at random from the text part of the book.

Na warzawēr nama aw aexeth ren ab arkan em aw bamastan baratha ab eman. (Il et évident à tout le monde que l'oeil a pour fonction de voir, et pour utilité de regarder, p. 215).

na, nāz, "in the function of; according to"

warzawēr "all, everyone"

nama "evidence, spectacle"

aw (also ā, ō) aspectual particle, quant à

aexeth "use, utility"

ren "act, action"

arkan "vision"

em, emzhan "eye"

bamastan "utility, service"

baratha "action, movement"

emān "to see," here in the present participle.

More interesting, for the verse of the Wards he picked a system of assonance and alliteration (a few lines, untranslated):

dura meth math derw mez denan

ukan gōn garth ag urben ganta danagh

dwan jaen jar jarga darnan

zeman nāz naen nāz naba zeran...

A cute little word

2011-02-14T18:15:00.001-08:00

I have in the last few months been spending more time working on natural languages. In particular, a treasure trove of documents on Uto-Aztecan languages has been interesting. Unfortunately, the English translation of Michel Launey's "Introduction to Classical Nahuatl" keeps having its release date pushed back. I look forward to getting my hands on that. Most Nahuatl textbooks in English currently available make the old-fashioned philological approach I learned Greek with look like progressive language pedagogy.

As an experiment, I started working on a new language back in October, not using my normal methods of notebook-then-webpage, but straight into LaTeX. The results certainly look more impressive once the major sections start to fill out. The cross-referencing is nicer, too. I think I need to work on a few more style tweaking macros. In any case, the language, Tsariku, started off as a cross between inspiration from Uto-Aztecan languages and ancient Greek. However, it has evolved somewhat from there. I realized last week that I had snuck in a variant on split-ergativity, with the split working along animacy. Inanimate subjects of transitive verbs get a case marker, -s, but are unmarked as the direct object of a transitive verb or the subject of an intransitive.

aiku-s tsi-nepá-n
this-ERG 3IN-hurt-1SG
This hurt me.

aiku ni-nepá-h
this 1SG-hurt-3IN
I hurt this.

sé tsi-lemya aiku
not 3IN-function this
This didn't work.

Note that the conjugation, obligatory for both subject and object in transitive verbs, is still nominative-accusative alignment.

In any case, a tasty little tidbit of vocabulary. A noun recently concocted is kwehtsa, fear and uncertainty in response to sudden and uncertain social or political developments. This is less interesting than a recent compound, kwehtsulatú the sudden hush that comes over a conversation when an unexpected person approaches because one is uncertain of their loyalties.

If Zamenhof had been Cree

2010-10-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

In the last few days there has been a few posts on the conlang-l list about conlangs based moribund or dead languages. Since Native American languages were named, it reminded me of thoughts that have rolled around in my head from time to time over the last year or so.

I don't really deal in auxlangs, but it a moment of musing it occured to me that the only real chance one has of being widely adopted in the U.S. is if Native Americans one day get sick of conducting their inter-tribal business in English and decide they need something else. No existing Native language would probably really work for several reasons. First, an auxlang should be a lot easier than a natural language to learn, and there not a single Native language easy enough to reasonably fill the auxlang role. Second, there would be political problems — there are standing tensions between some tribes, some of which go back very far indeed. For example, there are probably very few Hopi or Navajo who would be willing to learn each other's language (you can google their land dispute on your own).

I'm not actually going to concoct a North American Native auxlang, but I offer here some of my thinking about how one might go about such a thing, with a few hints of what this might look like were I to do so.

Easier — not Easy. Any NAN-auxlang would have to take into consideration the fact that large numbers of Native Americans are now monolingual English speakers, but I don't think a goal should be to make the language familiar to speakers of European languages. There are very widespread areal features in North American languages, and as much as possible these should be drawn on in creating the language. I would, for example, include regular conjugation of verbs, very probably by prefixing. I've been using WALS to verify commonalities in N.A. languages.

The Stock. Taking inspiration from Lojban, as a practical matter I'd draw on the largest language families — Na-Dene, Algonquian, Uto-Aztecan, Siouan and Iroquoian. The Salish family might belong in there, too, as well as Kiowa-Tanoan and Muskogean. For the many isolates, we'd have to rely on areal similarities.

Phonology. A simple, 4 or 5 vowel system. I would, sadly, omit tone, and, more happily, nasalization.

For the consonants I would at the very least include /p/ /t/ /ts/ /k/ /s/ /n/ /m/ (maybe only one nasal) /w/ /y/ /ʔ/ /h/ (which could be [h] or [x]) and /l/. I would probably include /ɬ/. That's less common the further east you go, but occurs even in the Muskogean family. I was prepared to omit ejectives at first, but now I think I'd consider including them. Thanks to Na'vi, I know that most L1 English speakers can learn them pretty easily, and they really extend pretty far east, too.

I'd keep syllable structure simple or at most moderately complex, allowing, say, syllable onsets to have /w/ or /y/ as a second element (if not, I'd add /kᵂ/ to the base inventory), maybe a nasal coda. Accent strictly initial or final.

Grammar. In favor of Esperanto's gender system, I'd differentiate by animacy. I'm still not sure if I'd include 4th person/obviation mechanics.

Rather than tense, the verb would be more preoccupied with aspect, by regular suffixing. A future tense adverb might sneak in.

Nominative-accusative alignment, but no case marking. Subjects of verbs would be person prefixes; not sure about objects, but I could be talked into putting those into the verb, too.

Plenty of North American languages have some sort of classifier system. I'm not sure that I'd add those, or if I did it'd be a very simple and regular system, attached to numbers only (i.e., I would regretfully lay aside the verbal encoding that goes on in so many languages).

At the very least, reportative evidential. Maybe inferential.

I probably would include adjectives as a word class, maybe with special marking for predicate adjectives.

Haven't decided on word order, probably SVO with SOV a strong contender.

Vocabulary would be churned through some automatic system to find any mnemonic cross-family similarities there might be, and ensure equal representation.

Old High Coochy-Coo

2010-10-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

Of those few conlangs that reach a pretty well-developed state (beyond 1500 words or so, a reasonable corpus), a good number will have well-defined formal and literary registers. Part of this is probably yet another lingering influence of Tolkien, though for most people a literary conlang may be the first they encounter. In my own Vaior I created syntax and a good dose of parallel vocabulary for fairly common words used only in the poetic register (raie was the normal word for star, emme poetic), as well as poetic syntax (animate direct objects of perception verbs are in the genitive, not accusative).

One thing I've never seen in a conlang is baby-talk. How different cultures talk to children isn't exactly universal. Some people don't talk directly to children until they have something interesting to say back, without apparently causing developmental problems. But it's a pretty common practice. What I would not have suspected, until I read about it a few days ago, is that it is fairly common for people to use baby talk — or something much like it — when speaking to animals.

A few things are common to baby talk —

Reduplication is very common (in my own family, a bottle is either a ba or a baba).

Much wider pitch range, and a tendency to stay in higher registers.

Simplified grammar (not a surprise).

Vocabulary that exists only in the baby-talk register ("binkie" for "blanket"; in Nootka, paapash "eat!" for adult ha'ukw'i).

Particular patterns of phonological deformation (not exactly simplification, but nearly so).

The word deformations are most interesting to me, and in Native American languages dovetail with some interesting things that happen in story telling registers. In Cocopa, for example, the onset consonant of stressed syllables is turned into a /v/, while other consonants are fronted. Adult kwanyúk "baby" becomes kanvúk. Cocopa uses a very similar register with animals, with different informants finding the register appropriate for speaking to cats, dogs, horses or even chickens. In this register, every word gets a palatalized lateral fricative, /łʲ/, inserted or substituted into every word.

In Quileute certain prefixes might be used when speaking to people with particular characteristics, /s-/ for a small man, /tł-/ for someone who is cross-eyed. But certain characters in traditional stories also have their language altered in particular ways. Raven prefixes /ʃ-/; Deer prefixes /tłk-/ and turns all sybilants to laterals. Coyote, of course, speaks inappropriately and often in highly distorted ways all over the West.

One of the great things about using formal registers is that it becomes that much easier to be rude and impolite. So I was delighted to read that in Nootka, the word deformation for Raven — /-tʃx-/ inserted after the first syllable of the word — is also used to speak of greedy people. But not to their face.

I'll have to try out some of this in some future project.

The Bixwá Verb: Part the Third

2010-08-25T17:58:00.001-07:00

If the multiple layers of affixing on the verb stem aren't enough, there are also three slots for preverbs in Bixwá. The idea for these comes from the Algic/Algonquian languages. In those the preverbs are actually affixes, too, but in Bixwá these are separate words. I did this for two reasons. First, Bixwá has more phonetic flexibility at the end of a word than it does at internal syllable codas. Second, I didn't want to deal with noun incorporation — inanimate direct objects come between a verb and its preverbs, while inanimates do not.

Tense and Mood

The leftmost preverbs have to deal with tense, sequencing and mood. The tense preverbs aren't much used, though the future, ivi is most likely to be seen of the bunch. Much more frequent is wil, which indicates sequencing, "and then, and next" and the like. Two of the preverbs are involved in conditional sentences, which I will save for a different post.

Adverbial One

After the tense and mood preverbs come a set of preverbs with various adverbial senses. One I pilfered from, I think, Wiyot, is diwáa on arrival:

be	né-l	wil	diwáa	ho-xod
3SG	1SG-DAT	next	on.arrival	PFV-speak
Then when he arrived he spoke to me.

Another good one of this set is haaz, which indicates senses like in vain, it isn't so, it didn't really happen. In the perfective, it indicates a thwarted expectation:

haaz	ho-síis
in.vain	PFV-rain
It was supposed to rain (but didn't).

One of this set, sa' has branched out into interesting territory. It's base meaning is of proximal deixis, in time, place or discourse, here, thus, there. It has developed to also assert narrative integrity, asserting that the statement fits into the conversation. This is useful for propping up unexpected information.

be	wil	sa'	áka-n	ka'a-ho-dal
3SG	then	thus	book-ACC	by.hand-PFV-toss
Then she threw the book (really!).

Note in the example above the location of the direct object, ákan. If she had tossed something animate, it would occur before wil.

Adverbial Two

This is a more motley set of adverbial senses, and I anticipate more appearing over time. Many of these describe path and location: cháa for horizontal motion, kwee apart, separating, zót away, but more exotic senses appear as well, such as e'ar leaving a detectable trace or path.

jó-né	bé	zha'o	ho'-áán
PL-1	back	unwillingly	PFV-go
We returned against our will.

One of my current favorites is chaash, which says that an action took place out in precipitation,

ko	ivi	chaash	mi-'o'éé
2SG	FUT	in.weather	IPFV-labor
You will be working in the rain/snow.

The exact nature of the weather will depend of course on the season. I have also been giving metaphorical extensions to some of the simpler senses. For example, ta'ii means to completion, fully, to exhaustion, but has been extended to be practically a marker of attitude, conveying weariness.

Bixwá by Foot

2010-08-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

Right now both Bixwá and Tsrai are in a phase of moderate vocabulary growth. I'll ponder a few days, the bang out a few dozen words in a short time. Apart from creating a number system (which I always dread), creating vocabulary is always the most trying task of language creation for me.

As part of my campaign to avoid orthogonality, I have been making an effort to use analogy more. This has lead in interesting directions with the instrumental prefix zu-, which has the base meaning of by foot, with the foot. For example, tik means fall (over), and zu-tik means to knock over by foot (remember, using the instrumental prefixes always results in a transitive verb).

I decided that zu- could also be used to indicate mob violence of some sort, by way of the idea of trampling or stampeding over people. For example, from dó'a rule, custom, tradition, we get zu-dó'a impose a political or social regime on people. From there I went to zu-bayí subjugate, oppress from bayí endure, tolerate.

A few days ago zu- completed its march into the political realm when it encountered gísa be silent. With help from the detransitive suffix -óó I got zu-gísa'óó self-censor.

A Gallimaufry

2010-08-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

Na'vi

I've managed to get myself on a panel for a local con this fall to chat about the science of Avatar. In theory, I'm there to talk about language. We'll see how many people in the audience are interested in that.

Tsrai

Tsrai now has nice set of postural verbs. I'm still thinking about the semantics of these, especially in verb chains, but I'm ridiculously pleased to be able to say this,

we	or-ta	blas	rabbë	dzwai
3SG	drink-PST	beer	get.horizontal	happen
He drank so much beer he ended up on the ground.

Inspiration

I recently got myself a copy of The Languages of Native North America by Marianne Mithun. What an astonishing diversity of languages this continent used to have. Language inventors will find so much inspiration in this book.

The Bixwá Verb: Part the Second

2010-07-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

In the previous post on Bixwá's verb system, I talked about grammatical affixes, aspect and valency. This post will cover affixes that are more lexical, though the direction prefixes are used for some aspectual refinements. The verb so far:

Aspect - STEM - Voice

Instrumental Prefixes

I got the idea for the instrumental prefixes, once again, from Native languages of North America, though not Athabascan for a change. Instrumental prefixes are fairly common in unrelated languages across a wide area, from Haida in British Columbia to the Siouan languages of the plains. The Bixwá set is larger than some, but is by no means the largest.

The instrumental prefix comes to the left of any aspect prefix. The instrumental prefix will be separated from the verb stem by any aspect prefix, and I use a dash in the lexicon as a reminder, ró-má read (from ró- by/with words, language and má see).

In Bixwá the instrumental prefixes can cover a range of meanings, not all of which are really instrumental. For several of them, such as kwí- by thought, by contemplation, by planning, the significance can be pretty metaphorical, as in kwí-'ééz rage from ééz burn.

All verbs with instrumental prefixes are transitive (a habit sometimes seen in natural languages with these). Any noun stem is converted to a verbal meaning when taking one of these prefixes.

A lot of fun lexical derivation can go on with these:

olo-'éke bore someone to tears	olo- by falling, by dropping, éke head
olo-míír to cast a shadow, shade something	olo- by falling, by dropping, míír shadow, shade
nóó-ját write	nóó- by color, by dye, ját sign, mean
ró-nó'ó interrupt someone speaking	ró- by language, speaking, nó'ó to break off
thahe-nó'ó burn, cauterize something off	thahe- by fire, heat, nó'ó to break off
xaa-nó'ó cut off	xaa- by edge, by blade, by arm, nó'ó to break off
bii-vích spit something a distance	bii- by mouth, vích to take flight, to enter the air
thahe-vích to rise into the air from heat	thahe- by fire, heat, vích to take flight, to enter the air

Direction and Mode

To the left of any instrumental prefix come the direction prefixes. Most of the time they are oriented to the speaker, but the focus of orientation can shift in a narrative. Bixwá has the usual set, chu- for away from the speaker and ní- towards the speaker. These give direction to basic verbs of motion, such as áá which without other marking can mean either go or come.

These prefixes interact with the aspect prefixes to give some refinements. With stative verbs (which do the job of adjectives in Bixwá), chu- with the perfective ho- gives the inchoative, né chuhochis I got sick (from chis to be ill, weak). With any verb type, ní- with the conclusive perfective isii forms the experiential perfect,

né	maa	áka	ní-ró-'isii-má
ISG	that	book	away-by.language-CONCL.PF-see
I have read that book

The prefix lii- is a deictic marker that situates the action in some communications technology, usually some online social sphere. It goes into the same slot as the direction prefixes. Rarely it can co-occur with one of them, and will be to the left, but more likely it will drive any direction prefix away.

jóné	ová'	lii-ho-xod
1PL	together	online-PFV-speak
We talked together.

The Verb Template

After all of that, the full template for verb affixes is:

Direction - Instrumental - Aspect - STEM - Voice

Next I'll cover the preverbs, which will always occur before the verb complex I've given above. They're not counted part of the affix chain, since their phonology precludes their use as prefixes.

The Bixwá Verb: Part the First

2010-07-20T16:51:00.001-07:00

In general I devote a lot of loving attention to my languages' verb systems. Nezhan, the sketch that led to Bixwá, produced things like this:

né-wíi-x-máá-di

1sg.SUBJ-NO.CONTROL-2sg.OBJ-see-PFV

I happened to catch sight of you.

This was a little too much like Athabascan languages, so I pulled back a bit. I no longer cross-reference the subject and direct object in the verb, but I still manage to pack a lot into the verb. Like Nezhan — and the Athabascan languages — a great deal of the verb's morphology is by prefixing, though Bixwá does mark valency and control changes with suffixes.

The Verb Stem

Most Bixwá root verbs are single syllable roots, though two-syllable roots are also well-represented. There is a small set of common transitive verbs which have two forms, one for animate direct objects, one for inanimate direct objects. For example, má is see for inanimate DOs. For animate DOs, you must use deezh.

né	kora-n	deezh
1SG	dog-ACC	see.AN
I see a dog.

né	áka	má
1SG	book	see.IA
I see a book.

Note that inanimate direct objects often do not take accusative case marking. A sentence like né áka deezh, using an animate verb with an inanimate direct object, would be an outright error, not implying anything.

Transitivity

Bixwá is quite fastidious about verb transitivity, and requires overt marking to covert valency. The detransitive suffix is (')óó. The transitive suffix, which is also the causative, also makes an animacy distinction in the direct object, with -(')azh for inanimates, -(')azhe for animates. These suffixes have the additional effect of converting any noun they are attached to into a verb, as in báá'óó be angry from báá anger.

After much going back and forth, I finally decided to give Bixwá a passive. Unlike the English passive, though, it can only be used when there is no agent at all. If the agent is named, you have to use a focus construction in the active. A stem is made passive with the circumfix di-V-e, though the final -e part has various realizations if the verb ends in a vowel. Again, animacy must be considered: né dideezhe I am seen, not *né dimáa.

Aspect

There are three layers of prefixes for the verb, and that's not including the raft of obligatorily pre-verbal particles. The innermost set, that will always occur immediately before the verb root, marks aspect. There are six aspect prefixes, the imperfective, the perfective, the habitual, the inceptive, the continuative and the punctual (or conclusive) perfective. Note, though, that there are other aspects available (in particular, the inchoative for stative verbs) that involve a mix of aspect prefixes and other verb morphology. I'll cover those in a later section.

a'é	ko	be-n	ho-deezh
Q	2SG	3SG-ACC	PFV-see
Did you see him?

be	lé'é-zatán	éne-xod
3SG	very.much-extremely	HAB-speak
He always talks too much.

Coming Soon

Next time I'll talk about the powerful and very common instrumental prefixes as well as the direction and mode prefixes, before moving on to the complexities of the preverbs in yet another post. In the last post (four in total), I hope to talk about the ways I've used combinations of prefix types and the preverbs for refinements of aspect, syntax and pragmatics (discourse effects).

In the Shadow of Tolkien

2010-07-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

When I was about 16 or 17 I happened to run across a copy of The Monstors and the Critics, a collection of essays by J.R.R. Tolkien. Much of it is devoted to English literature, but it also includes the essay The Secret Vice, about constructing languages. So, I got exposed to a manifesto in defense of this hobby at a fairly impressionable age.

A few years ago I noticed that I had somehow not only inherited from Tolkien a justification for the hobby of creating languages, but my languages seemed to reflect a world view¹ to which I myself do not subscribe. In particular, my languages tended to be technophobic, if not actually indulging in the Romantic Weltschmerz that afflicts Tolkien's Elves, and my languages, even ones I never publish, tend to be remarkably chaste and polite. I've been trying to get away from these tendencies, especially the technophobia which was quite entrenched for a long time.

I have not been content to simply add words like "computer" and "cash machine" to my languages, but I've played with various ways of integrating technology, especially communications technologies (i.e., computers), into the language in a more fundamental way. One sketch language from a few years ago, Onju, had six noun classes, one of which was for things humans build and related tools, and one was just for e-things. The class marking was partially lexical, and you could take word for "tree," sor which normally fell into the ër plant class, and drop it into the e-thing class giving orí sor, which refers to any of the branching abstractions computer science people call "trees."

Onju was set aside due to some design flaws, but many ideas were recycled into Nezhan. Nezhan dropped the classes, but did include a demonstrative pronoun set just to describe things online, with lhidhaal effectively referring only to an online representation of a human being, what's usually called an avatar. Plenty of natural languages include derivational affixes you can tack onto a verb to mean "go somewhere in order to VERB." In Nezhan, I had that, but also -mál which meant "go somewhere online in order to VERB."

Nezhan was also quickly abandoned, but is the direct ancestor of Bixwá. Bixwá picks up the "go online to X" verb affix (-lobi), but did not import the online deixis markers. Instead, any verb can be situated in an electronic, communications or virtual environment with the verb prefix lii-, which falls into the same slot that verbal direction marking goes.

jó-né	ová'	mi-'omí
PL-1	together	IPFV-hang.out
We were hanging out together.

vs.

jó-né	ová'	lii-mi'-omí
PL-1	together	ONLINE-IPFV-hang.out
We were hanging out together (online).

I've had less obvious success in getting rid of the air of Victorian discretion from my languages. Even the language I've worked on the longest, Vaior, has very little in the way of cursing. I tend to add vocabulary by semantic field (one idea leads to another). Just last week I finally added a little sexual vocabulary to Bixwá, and I actually used the Latin mons veneris in one definition! I don't swear a whole lot in my daily life, but I certainly do from time to time — what Unix sysadmin does not? — and once in a blue moon I can indulge in some pretty serious vulgarity. I like to save it for special occasions, for more impact. I have no philosophical reason to exclude these from my languages.

The biggest difficulty in cursing language is that it's as much a matter of culture as language. Modern English tends to stick with sexual and other biological terms, but in some places blasphemy is still the way to get really angry (I'll always remember a Spanish curse involving the 24 testicles of the Apostles). In this one matter I haven't ever followed Tolkien — I don't create cultures to go with my languages. I've always been more interested in my languages for my own purposes, but sometimes it is easier to get over some language design questions with at least the hint of a culture to go with it. Vaior got a vague cultural dusting to help it along. I suppose Bixwá may too, eventually. I'd rather not resort to English just to curse.

_____
¹I misspelled that word view the first time through.

How to handle Tsrai compounds?

2010-07-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

I tend to worry about lexical expansion early in the creation of a language. It's entirely possible for me to have several bits of derivational morphology tested and ready before I've even started seriously with, say, the verb system. I favor rather complex derivational systems (see the madness of Vaior's derivational system), but in Tsrai I'm trying to be more restrained. So, there will be much more compounding using root words and little or no bound morpheme use. I'm currently thinking I'll follow the Vietnamese practice, and write each element of the compound separately.

Since Tsrai so far has been head-initial for noun phrases, it seems best to use head-initial compounds (although the typology on this isn't so clear-cut). The big question now is — how to mark plurals? Since most noun plurals are marked with the suffix -ne, do I tack that onto the compound head, or the full phrase? What if the head noun reduplicates for plurals? Using syur person (pl. sisyur), véu study; inspect:

syur véu student (person-study)
?sisyur véu students?
?syur véune students?

Right now I'm leaning toward sisyur véu, but I'll worry about this for a few more days before deciding. Hopefully it won't take as long as Bixwá's relative clauses took — I worried about that for longer than a month before making a decision.

And I'm not even ready to worry about verb compounds. Do they keep the same headedness pattern? Right now I'm inclined to make N-V compounds follow that order, verb last, dli word, ba see:

?syur véu ba dli a student reads
?syur véu dli ba a student reads

And verb compounds will have the same puzzle for plurals. Again, for now I'm inclined to make the plural and tense marking go into the original V element, wherever it ends up in the compound.

Embracing Redundancy, Ambiguity and Nonorthogonality

2010-07-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

Even though I have never created an auxlang (i.e., an auxiliary language, like Esperanto), there are still certain habits its easy for conlangers to fall into which seem to be more suited to auxlangs. The longer I create languages, though, the less I'm willing to tolerate some of these things.

The first habit is efficiency, the avoidance of seemingly redundant things, such as multiple forms of agreement. No human language is perfectly, or even partially, efficient. Indeed, redundancy in a spoken language is a positive benefit, since language happens in a noisy medium. Nonetheless, nearly all my languages avoid certain features. For example, I typically use either strict head marking or strict dependent marking. Rarely do I allow overlap, which is somewhat unusual.

At this point Bixwá is not going to chage in this regard, but I decided in Tsrai that I will mark the plurality of the subject in both the subject and the verb.

Gad kóis A man sleeps
Órói këskóis men sleep (reduplication for the verb, and the plural of man happens to be irregular, órói)

This double-marking of plurality is quite redundant — but also quite common in human languages.

The second habit is the tendency to avoid ambiguity. In beginning (or engineered) conlangs, this commonly presents itself in the form of perfectly identifiable word classes. Every derived adverb in Esperanto, for example, ends in the same letter, -e. In Láadan all the speech act morphemes begin in the letter b-. In one of my earlier languages, Mavod, all the tense markers begin with the sound sh-, and other word classes exhibit the same patterning. I've been getting away from this habit, which I now find rather dull, and in Bixwá I have evidentials I would once have felt slightly uncomfortable about and avoided. They are suffixed to the clause, usually landing on the verb:

-aazh	obvious, "of course, as we know"
-sh	direct perception
-xw	supposition, inference
-jin	report
-jíín	report from untrusted source

Only the two report evidentials show any family relationship. Further, there are plenty of verb stems that end in -sh and -xw, a situation I would once have avoided.

The third habit I call "orthogonality," which presents itself in multiple guises. I'm abusing the mathematical concept of orthogonality, but by this I mean the tendency to ensure maximal distinctiveness in whatever feature we happen to be working on at the moment. For example, we might mark all tenses using the same morphological pattern, or we might fill out all the possibilities of tense and aspect if we've decided a language needed that. Some natural languages do work this way, but plenty do not. Navajo, for example, is most preoccupied with marking aspect rather than tense. Nonetheless, it does have a future. For Tsrai, I've decided the verb has only past and non-past tense marking.

In Bixwá I have deliberately mixed aspectual marking among different sorts of morphology. For examples, the aspect "begin to" is marked with the aspect prefix koo-, but if you want to talk about a stative verb (what English uses adjectives for) entering a state, one uses a mix of the perfective prefix ho- and the outward direction prefix, cho-. For example, jed is be cold. To say "it got cold," you use chohojed (cho-ho-jed out.away-PRF-be.cold).

I have also mixed up certain matters of syntax and pragmatics in different places in the language. For example, Bixwá does have some conjunctions that work as in English, but it also has some preverbs that do jobs much like conjunctions (preverbs are mostly adverbial particles that must occur in a fixed relationship to the verb, and which don't participate in other morphology). For example, the preverb wil indicates continuation, "then, and then, next,"

Né wil kora-n ho-deezh.
1SG PREVERB:then dog-ACC PFV-see.
And then I saw the dog.

I have also grabbed the preverb sa', thus, there, at that time, for a discourse function — it asserts narrative integrity, that the statement is related to the current discourse. This is useful when something surprising or unexpected is being said, but I find I use it a lot in any narrative. I've also grabbed the preverb jééx, which carries "emerging, up and out" ideas, to be yet another way to indicate an inceptive or inchoative sense for transitive verbs (distinct from the stative verb cho-ho- pairing).

Some years ago Jesse Bangs posted to the conlang mailing list The Conlanger's Rant, which suggested among other things conlanging schools and conlang criticism, himself being a devotee of the "naturalistic" school. Along with a lot of conlangers, I was rather turned off by this idea. Among other things, I've never aimed at perfect naturalism in a language. I certainly had no desire to belong to a Naturalistic School of Language Creation, and still do not. But my tastes in how a language I'll find interesting ought to be constructed have changed, with the surprising result that I've been pulled more in the naturalistic direction, not from a desire for naturalness, but from boredom.

A Taste of Bixwá

2010-07-01T18:27:00.000-07:00

One idea I keep coming back to in my conlangs due to a throw-away notion from one of the Dune books of Frank Herbert. In Dune Mesiah, he refers to mirabhasa languages:

They were using a mirabhasa language, honed phalange consonants and joined vowels. It was an instrument for conveying fine emotional subleties. Edric, the Guild Steersman, replied to the Reverend Mother now with a vocal curtsy contained in a sneer - a lovely touch of disdainful politeness.

Now, it's never been clear to me what a phalange consonant is supposed to be. Regardless, I've made several attempts at my own personal mirabhasa. I've never really succeeded. For Bixwá I decided not to focus on emotional subtleties per se, but to combine a sensitivity to social and political power (of all sorts) as well as a substantial set of words to allow a speaker to make complex commentary on what is being said.

The sound system of Bixwá owes a lot to Athabascan languages — the apostrophe really is a glottal stop, e is [ɛ] and the accent marks a high toned vowel. I avoided the "joined vowels" Herbert mentions.

I'm out of control

The first way Bixwá obsesses over power dynamics is in the pronouns. Plenty of languages have the idea of a "control" feature in verbs. For example, "I caught sight of him" can just be a low control variant of simply "see." On the other hand, "look at" can be a high control version. Bixwá pronouns encode control, but specifically social control, and always of the speaker. For example, the neutral control first person singular is né, while the low control version is nawe and the high control version is thón:

né chaash zuho'áá'óó I walked out in the weather (of my own will)
nawe chaash zuho'áá'óó I walked out in the weather (due to circumstances outside my control)
thón chaash zuho'áá'óó I walked out in the weather (entirely of my own accord)

(The preverb chaash indicates an action was performed out in snow or rain.)

Without further context it's not clear how much the speaker of nawe considers themselves to have been forced or obligated. They could have been ordered out by their boss, or their sweetie may just have decided they wanted hot buttered rum and it seemed prudent to go out to get the ingredients. So, the social control can be pretty slight.

There are neutral, low control and high control variants for first, second and animate third person pronouns.

Editorializing freely

The other thing Bixwá does is allow a speaker to comment in some detail about how they feel about the state of affairs they are describing. This is handled with what I'm calling "commentary particles" these days (not only has the idea been revised often over the last few years, but so has the name). They are in many ways quite like ideophones. In particular, they are "syntactically aloof" — they don't participate in most of the heavy morphology Bixwá otherwise favors, and they can be added to or removed from a statement without changing the meaning of the propositional content at all. They are so like ideophones that I recently decided to give them morphology to let them be used as ideophones.

Normally a commentary particle comes before the constituent being commented on:

Kája eme nél mixod He was speaking to me.

(né-l 1sg-dat, mi-xod impf-speak)

Here the commentary particle kája says the speaker finds something boorish, rude or imposing about the state of affairs. The word after it, eme is the low control variant of the 3rd person animate pronoun (remember: control is with respect to the speaker), so I've given the additional spin that I'm being spoken to boorishly by someone who has some degree — perhaps slight — of social control over me at the time. On the other hand, you could use the commentary particle iyé instead of kája, which would indicate amorous intent on your part with respect to whoever eme is.

Bixwá's normal word order is SOV, but a commentary particle may follow the verb to comment on the entire state of affairs, without singling out any particular constituent,

Maa áka nél dan ye láá I don't have that book

(maa that, áka book, né-l 1sg-dat, dan not, ye exist; the verb ye with the dative indicates possession instead of a verb "to have")

Here the particle láá indicates the speaker thinks there's nothing to be done about the situation.

The commentary particles have to go into a statement. If you want to utter one on its own, to comment on an event or something just said, there is a way to produce predicate ideophones using reduplication (you can see the rules for that morphology in the grammar).

Káajokája! How rude!
Áa'iyé ooh-la-la! (or whatever you say on seeing an attractive person)
Láasholáá (some expression of profound resignation)

Though these reduplicated forms can take subjects, they are also pretty syntactically aloof. They don't don't take any morphology, including aspect marking, and they aren't used with adverbs. They are words for the moment or context immediately at hand.

The Birth of Tsrai

2010-06-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

The World Atlas of Language Structures is just a wonderful way to spend hours. One thing I realized while reading some articles is that in my years of conlanging I have systematically avoided using certain features of language that are very common across the world. I tallied up a list in my mind of things I've avoided, and sure enough, the outlines of a new language started to appear — Tsrai.

I have only rarely used reduplication, a process that is ubiquitous in natural languages. For Tsrai, I decided to use reduplication to indicate number, as a marginal process for nouns but the most common way for verbs.

I strongly favor very simple sound systems for my languages. Even if I have a large inventory of sounds, I keep the syllable structure quite simple and open, at most allowing resonant codas. So for Tsrai I've decided to use a moderately complex system, with a few more complex onset types allowed. This means my decision to use reduplication has resulted in some hefty tables of behavior. Of course, a recent exposure to Squamish may also have something to do with that. The big question was how to reduplicate syllables with complex onsets. I decided that since the second element of any complex onset is either an approximant or a resonant, to impose sound changes similar to Ancient Greek for such reduced syllables. For example tyar reduplicated is tityar (< *tytyar).

Other tendencies of the sound system are inspired by the Nobiin language.

I tend to favor VSO or SOV languages, so Tsrai is solidly SVO. I am also very fond of case marking, but for Tsrai I've gone isolating, using word order for syntax. I've taken inspiration from Yoruba and Vietnames (also SVO languages) and used certain particles to mark focus for fronting behavior, as in —

Lë ba gad dai I see this man.
Gad dai fë lë ba I see this man. (fë is the focus particle)

I decided to step away from my aspect obsession. Verbs are marked only for tense — a past vs. non-past distinction only in verb morphology — letting adverbs and verb auxiliaries take up the slack.

I briefly considered using some sort of ablaut change in verbs to make ergativity a lexical category, a la Classical Chinese. But that got too messy for other plans for the language, so I tossed it. The idea may reappear for transitivity matters.

I do want to include verb chaining, but this presents some interesting design questions. At the moment a verb's form may be changed in two ways. First, reduplication for plural subjects, as in këskóis from kóis sleep. Second, it may take the suffix -ta to indicate past tense. The suffix is prone to assimilation, so that the verb varag choose, select may appear as vëvarag (pl.), varakka (past) or vëvarakka (past pl.). The syntax questions right now for verb chaining are (1) do all verbs need to be marked for number and tense and (2) if not, would the first or the last verb set the number and tense for everyone else in the chain.

Airenen! Sózil! Howdy!

2010-06-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

I've been inventing languages for a long time. The first one happened after my first encounter with Latin. I was probably 14 or 15. I never really stopped, though there have been slow times when other things occupied my time. For example, work on Vaior, the only language of mine other people have tried to learn, pretty much stopped when I got focused on Ancient Greek. But even then, I might create a quick sketch of a language on a few scraps of paper while awaiting to be called for the tender ministrations of a dental hygienist.

Recently I've been involved in the community of people trying to learn Na'vi that exploded after the film Avatar came out. For the first time in my life I was seeing people eager to know about verb aspect and ejective consonants. I like to encourage that sort of thing, so I've been happy to help them. This has also resulted in me getting back to language invention of my own. Rather than fill my old blog, currently mostly devoted to ancient Greek, I decided to start a new blog just for my conlanging musings. Creating languages is a pretty obscure hobby, and not a populous one, but I hope there will be a few people who find my agonies of deciding between different ways to form relative clauses interesting or instructive (if only as a caution).

Right now, as I start this new blog, I have two quite different projects in development. The first, Bixwá, bears many signs of my recent attempt to learn an Athabascan language, Navajo, along with a few Algonquian touches. It is much further along, and right now is mostly in the arduous vocabulary-creation phase, though much syntactic fine-tuning remains. The second, Tsrai, is what happens when I decide to deliberately step away from old habits, with a little help from the WALS, and create a SVO language with no declensions and more features common across the world's languages.

From time to time I suppose I'll comment on the odd political or social developments among conlangers.

aiku-s	tsi-nepá-n
this-ERG	3IN-hurt-1SG
This hurt me.

sé	tsi-lemya	aiku
not	3IN-function	this
This didn't work.