Art and Conlanging

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Natlang Inspiration: Navajo WOD

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.

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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

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.