Artistic and Personal Mapmaking

General Semantics is a philosophical movement with self-help overtones that had its heyday in the 1950s. It had impacts in a few areas, including on science fiction authors of the era, but these days it mostly shows up among media ecology people like Neil Postman. I have neither time nor space to go into other aspects of General Semantics here.

One maxim of General Semantics that escaped into the popular consciousness, though, is, "the map is not the territory." When a general semanticist uses that phrase, they are often doing so metaphorically, where the territory is the human-experienced world and the map is human language.

I have a list in one of my notebooks with the title "What is Conlanging?" There are quite a few items on that list, but I think one answer to that question is "artistic mapmaking," where I mean "map" in the general semantics sense. In particular, this is a good characterization for a lot of my conlanging work, where I am interested in the contours that separate or group meaning in ways I find interesting or pleasing. My tendency to create the occasional word that has a complex definition in English is just a result of me drawing borders differently on, for example, my Kílta map of the human-experienced world.

Truth and Bird Baths

Because of my diary method of conlanging, I regularly have to create fairly mundane vocabulary for things I haven't yet talked about. That can sometimes lead to unexpected places. I recently wanted a phrase for "bird bath" for Kílta. I decided I was probably going to get that word out of something related to a word for "pond," in particular an artificial sort of pond/lake thing. But I didn't even have a word for that ready to go. So, I created a word for "pond" — paipa — and then I wanted to talk about a beaver pond as one of the examples. Naturally, I didn't already have a word for beaver. I'm even less likely to talk about beavers than I am bird baths, but here I am today, with a word for beaver — kiulon (which means something like "tree-associated red-brown guy") — and I still haven't gotten to "bird bath." Maybe today.

This sort of fairly routine vocabulary is where most of my creative time goes. Sometimes, though, concepts without simple English words get my attention. I've documented a few of them in Segments issue #4. Recently I have been exasperated by the lack of good words to describe things surrounding generative AI, in particular the "language" models, like ChatGPT. The core aspect of these that is so vexing is that they are bullshit machines. I am using "bullshit" here in the Harry G. Frankfurt definition, which defines B.S. as "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth." That is, these models have no meaningful relationship with questions of truth or falsity. ChatGPT just produces a stream of characters that is statistically likely given the prompt. Similar models are known to not always cope well with negation, for example, which is a fairly important thing to get right if you want to talk about the real world reliably. I will end my rant on these models here, and rely on what I've said so far to set the stage for some recent new vocabulary.

As you might imagine, I've been wracking my brains to come up with ways to talk about "true" vs. "false" in a situation where those concepts aren't particularly related to the real world, but are located within the weight matrices of these AI models. It's always nice if new words can be developed on existing models or metaphors, and, luckily, Kílta already has the word húrusakin "theory/worldview internal," an adjective for words, ideas, etc., which won't necessarily make sense to people unfamiliar with a particular theory or worldview. This is a compound of húr "border, boundary" and saka "idea, thought, notion." This immediately suggested húrutásin and húrusikkarin for contextually bounded ideas of "true" and "false," from already existing tásin "true" and ikkarin "false" (itself derived from ikko "to lack").

While the starting place for these words is my vexations when trying to talk about ChatGPT and related tools, these words, húrutásin and húrusikkarin, have application in other areas. We can use them to talk about true vs. false in computer programs, for example, or in any other sort of modeling technology or methodology. Something might be true in one system of formal logic, but not in another. Similarly, some more totalizing worldviews might have judgements about true and false that are at variance with the worldviews of others. These words will let me talk about truth judgements in particular systems that may or may not correspond to other systems, or my own ideas about the world (Kílta is somewhat optimized to make it easy for me to editorialize about things).

"Black Adam" - Kahndaqi Language

I was hired in 2021 to create two languages for the film "Black Adam," one for timeline-hopping wizards (called the Language of Eternity in the credits), one for Kahndaqi, Black Adam's language. The wizard language does show up in the film, but is somewhat masked by voiceovers, so I'm just going to say a few things about the Kandaqi language here, for those curious.

The nation of Kahndaq is imagined to somewhat predate the rise of the more familiar ancient Near Eastern civilizations of Egypt and Sumer. We discussed various options how to base the language, but I convinced them to go with a language isolate (i.e., a language not related to anything else), but which had also spent a lot of time living in close company with Sumerian and Elamite.

Languages that live next to each other a long time start to borrow things from each other — not just words but even grammatical tendencies. So, from time to time when creating a new Kahndaqi word for dialog, I would go take a look at a Sumerian or Elamite dictionary to see if there might be something reasonable to borrow (usually modified a bit, in either sense or phonology). For example, the Kahndaqi word for king, lúke (accent marks stress) hints at a relationship with the Sumerian word, which is usually romanized lugal. Mostly I picked a few core nouns for this sort of borrowing, since those are most easily borrowed. Most Kahndaqi vocabulary, though, I generated myself. 

As in Sumerian (and Hurrian), ergativity pops up in some parts of the language, though not identically to Sumerian. There are a few unusual features of Elamite grammar which I didn't feel I could get away with borrowing into Kahndaqi, the personal noun classes, especially. (One person on twitter asked about Elamite in particular, I'm guessing for exactly this fun part of the grammar.)

I'll give two examples for the linguistically inclined. This is the first bit of dialog I produced, and it appears in the second trailer (just after the 20s mark):

Soemel tilam.
soemi-el til=am
magic-2.POSS weak-COP.AN
Your magic is weak.

So, personal possession is often marked with suffixes, as in soemel your magic. I used an animacy-based noun class system, and soemi magic is grammatically animate, which is why the copula clitic is the animate form here.

Erentas ma'ate inger.
Eri-enta-s ma'ate i-nger-∅
people-1PL.POSS-ERG champion 3PL.ERG-need-3AN
Our people need a champion.

Here we have another example of personal possession as a suffix, our people. And a taste of ergativity, both in the subject noun marking and the verb. Transitive verb subjects are marked with prefixes. That apostrophe marks a glottal stop, ma'ate /mɑˈʔɑte/. 

Obsidian Words

A few weeks ago I added the word miusma obsidian to Kílta. I knew it would get some sort of metaphorical or metonymic meaning at the time, but hadn't settled on the details. I focused on the long use of obsidian as a weapon-making material—go take a look at a macuahuitl—to extend the meaning.

As of yesterday, miusma can be used metonymically to represent violence, organized violence in particular, though it doesn't have to be state-organized. It is normally used as an attributive:

Rëtu korá miusma vë kinta kwan uttimo.
many people obsidian ATTR night during die-PFV
Many people died during the obsidian night.

The phrase "obsidian night" refers to some sort of group violence that took place at night.

Orávës në miusma vë lár si mítët, kwál si salkësto.
fanatic TOP obsidian ATTR word ACC speak.CVB.PFV, riot ACC put.INCH.PFV
The fanatic spoke obsidian words and started a riot.

The implication of "obsidian words" is that they were meant to provoke violence.

This is probably enough baggage for the word for now, but I wonder if other ways of using it will present themselves.

Covert Grue

There is extensive literature on basic color terms. Since Kílta is a personal language for speaking in the modern world, it has a fairly wide color vocabulary, and does distinguish blue and green (pikwautin, ralin), unlike a grue (green-blue) language which unifies those colors under one term.

One thing I've done in Kílta, inspired in part by the articles in The Aesthetics of Grammar: Sound and Meaning in the Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia (Jeffrey P. Williams, editor), is to pay a lot of attention to how words are intensified. English of course has plenty of intensifying collocations — hopping mad, deeply concerned, etc. — but in Kílta there are quite a few intensifiers which only intensify. They have no independent meaning, and are often (apparently) root words.

A new intensifier I recently added is mó. It is only used with hichínin black, pikwautin blue, and ralin green. So, even though Kílta is not a grue language, I've hidden a grue tendency in the use of this intensifier.

Ummul në mó ralin no.
forest TOP deep green be.PFV
The forest is a deep green.

Mó hichínin mika në ël si alincho.
deep black stone TOP 3SG ACC shun
The jet black stone slipped from her grasp.

I extended mó in one other direction. Even though it is rather adverb-like, I permit it with kinta night to mean something like in the dark of night, for in a temporal adverb sense.

Ha në mó kinta otta si cholat oto vukai.
1SG TOP deep night sound ACC hear.INF fall.PFV DISAPPR
I happened to hear a sound at darkest part of the night.

Covert boundaries can be a useful way to think new things through.

Unknown Riches, Episode 3

I recently created a word for trout, mirëlcha /miˈɾəltʃa/ (no etymology). I probably don't need very many example sentences for food-related words — their usage is generally pretty clear — but examples for every new word is a habit now. I knew almost instantly that the phrasing of the obvious sentence was going to encode a distinction English doesn't make easily.

Ton në mirëlcha si chuvët akkalo tul?
2SG TOP trout ACC hunt-CVB.PFV capture-PFV Q
Did you catch any trout?

The center of the matter is the converb form of the verb chuvo pursue, hunt. In my part of the world, at least, people don't usually catch trout by accident, but have gone out specifically for trout. So, this sentence is able to encode that the speaker thinks the person they're talking to was out for trout, not just fishing in general. If I left out chuvo, the sense of the question would suggest that the trout was caught by chance, not the specific goal of the fishing.

By making Kílta primarily a V-language (according to the typology of Talmy), I set myself up for a pattern where events can regularly be decomposed a bit, with co-events or "activating events" encoded as converbs. Sometimes this leads to nuances that aren't simple to express in my native language, which is always fun.

Unknown Riches, Episode 2

I recently produced a sentence that made my friend learning Kílta ask which section of the grammar explained that use. Then I realized that not only was it not described in the grammar, I hadn't really thought about it explicitly.

Hakán ésamét kwan kwailo.
arm vaccine INST hurt.PFV
My arm hurts from the shot.

He wanted to know why the instrumental kwan was used here, when he would have gone for nós due to, on account of.

I have talked before about using a diary as a conlang tool. I am quite sure this sort of use of kwan started a while ago, but because the diary is handwritten, I can't easily search it to look for the first such use of kwan. Nonetheless, it was established early that kwan would indicate inanimate agents for passive verbs. The use of kwan in the example above is allied to that. It shows up in plenty of example sentences in the lexicon, chisanta kwan uttimo died from cancer, mata kwan atenko dissolved in the water, koska kwan haivo drown in shit, etc.

With a little thought it became clear that I was using kwan to indicate inanimate or indirect agents in patient intransitives (also known as "unaccusative verbs," an excessively cute and confusing bit of terminology). These are intransitive verbs where the grammatical subject doesn't have much agency in the situation, die, fall, be sick, happen, hurt, etc.

The detransitive suffix -is-o generally results in verbs with more patient-like subjects, so it, too, can take kwan in this sense, 

Chátis në mëtaula kwan kwitiso.
window TOP storm INST break.DETR.PFV
The window broke in (due to) the storm.

So here was a bit of Kílta grammar that was (probably) created in the diary, got used all over the examples, but hadn't been expressed explicitly until I got asked about what was going on. This is normal in the diary process. Certain use patterns develop because they seem right at the time, and over time take on semantics that can be hard to explain at first. In this case, I'm lucky enough to have someone ask me what I was up to with kwan. And now it's explained in the grammar.