Old High Coochy-Coo

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.

In the Shadow of Tolkien

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.


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¹I misspelled that word view the first time through.