geckat.conlang.orgHëw Nestirez - Language Creation and Philosophy Blog

Projects Tutorial Papers About Me IPaCCA subscribe Hëw Nestirez A blog on language creation and philosophy. 11 Aug Meadow by Geckat in Linguistics , Sociolinguistics No Comments Meadow is an artistic MMO-lite, more of a forum in game’s clothing” according to its developers. It’s interesting from a design perspective because it focuses entirely on exploration and socialization, with a complete lack of competition, and gameplay limited to the collection of items for brownie points. Most of the time, people are engaged in looking for these items, some of which (obelisks”) require multiple pl ayers to be engaged. I was just playing it whilst thinking about my conlang, and realized that there’s a good bit that might be gleaned about how players in Meadow communicate. In Meadow, you are an animal, plain and simple, and like an animal, you are unable to speak. There is no typing, no words in gameplay, only symbols representing basic ideas — emoticons, essentially — such as happy”, flower”, or climb”. With a relatively recent patch, you can say two of these at once, in one order or the other. This has given rise to a sort of syntax, from what I’ve seen in my hours of playtime. For example, a conversation between three animals might go like this: Badger: Cave – ?” Frog: ? – Cave” Lynx: Cave – X” Lynx: X – Obelisk” Translated (and it’s astonishing how quickly this form of communication can be picked up): Badger: Should we go in the cave?” Frog: Where’s the cave?” Lynx: Let’s not go in the cave. There are no obelisks in there.” Along with this, some interesting semantics can take place. A question mark might be literally used just as a question mark, or to say one does not understand, or in place of a WH-word. The group” symbol becomes more complex: It can mean let’s group up”, or it can mean wait for the group”, or, we need more with us”, depending on the context. 20 Jul New Sehali Alphabet by Geckat in Uncategorized 2 Comments The more I looked at my present alphabet for Sehali, the more I didn’t much like it. It’s neat, but it’s busy. It has a connector like devanagari script, but why? A third of the full glyph is taken up by the vowel, even though the language only has four. And ultimately, it just didn’t give that snakey” feel I really wanted to have. Now, it was only my second script I’d created since actually getting into conlanging, so in the end it was just an experiment, and I wouldn’t call it a failed one. It is a pretty script, just not what I want for my lizard-pirate species. I’ve been dwelling on this for quite some time and finally, over my birthday, sat down and started creating another, inspired by Arabic and Mongolian. I wanted something that would still have that sometimes mind-numbing complexity and alien oddity to it, but with funny scripts like the two mentioned existing in the human world I wasn’t entirely sure how to do that. Finally I considered, what if the script was cursive, but with breaks in the cursivity, and that’s where the consonants were? And thus the current snakey script was born. It was quite the trouble creating my first ever cursive script, but I’m relatively happy with the result. It can use some cleaning up, but I’ll have to learn how to do that efficiently first. 13 Dec Taðýric Abugida by Geckat in Conlangs , Fonts and Keyboard Layouts , Major No Comments Taðýric finally has its own writing system. It took me a few tries to find something I liked, but finally I realized I need some sort of aesthetic commonalities between all these glyphs. The commonality I went with is a little radical, but none of the strokes are allowed to curve upwards. The result is something that looks to me like a lawn of twisted grass, or to others like rows of dancing ghosts. The abugida is something of a cross between an abugida and a syllabary, as the glyphs for syllables with /e/ and /i/ as their nuclei are slightly irregular: Rather than consistent diacritics, certain strokes in the base glyph are doubled. I therefore needed to create both a font and a keyboard layout. Here is the result! This is my translation of Hávamál 93-95. I think it was worth the hours of effort. 14 Oct Hávamál 93-95 by Geckat in Conlangs , Fonts and Keyboard Layouts , Major , Site No Comments I finally decided (tentatively) on a text to translate. It has a couple different persons, some neat moods and reflexivity, various places for case or adpositions to be applied, and a little aspect (but no tense). It also happens to just be a really nice few verses. I’ve gone ahead and translated it, and then also typed it out in the latest version of the Sehali script. 9 Sep Swadesh List by Geckat in Conlangs , Linguistics , Minor No Comments So here’s the deal: I haven’t been working on languages as of late because I’ve been working on natural ones. Very gradually learning French, trying to pick Swedish back up, picking up German a little too to amuse some new friends I’ve made. But I’ve also still been hard at work on what I’m doing here. Anyone perusing my projects will notice that while I’m fairly good at getting the grammatical stuff that I need down and all that good stuff, I’m absolutely terrible at actually coming up with words. Indeed, there are some projects where I’ve formulated the phonology, got some solid phonotactic rules down, figured out how the syntax and morphology work, what grammatical systems are in place, churned out numbers and particles and then…wait, you need words to have a language? Dang. Eh, I’ll do it later. I do this in language learning, too; ask me anything about Japanese grammar and I’m your textbook, but hell if I can remember more than fifty words in it. So I’m trying a different route in my art: I looked around for a while for a list of words that essentially every language should have in some form. Of course there are the Swadesh lists, but those tend to be rather short, contain a lot of grammatical terms like pronouns, and generally be unsuited to the purposes where the language in question is of, say, a race of bipedal lizards with no teeth. And then there are frequency lists, which can be much longer, but again, lots of grammatical words, and also lots and lots of culturally, geographically, and technologically specific terms, which also makes them unsuitable. In both cases, they tend to be culturally biased. So I’ve gone out and painstakingly created (see: still creating) my own big long Swadesh list. At the moment it has 754 words, and is made up of me taking the 1,000 most used words in written English, Chinese, Swahili, and Arabic, omitting all the synonyms, grammatical words, names for animals, technologically specific, geographically specific, and culturally specific terms, armed with my knowledge of Blackfoot, which loves its derivation and compounding, to omit unnecessary words. So far it’s quite well-appreciated in the conlanging community and should, once filled in, make for a language that is about 60% complete”. That is, you can speak it and say whatever it is you want to say about 60% of the time, with most of the rest of the stuff being reliant on the technology, culture, and geography that your conculture may or may not have. Have a look . 4 Sep Elder Scrolls Online: Runic Syllabary by Geckat in Conlangs , Minor No Comments It’s not exactly common knowledge that the runes one uses in enchanting in The Elder Scrolls Online are actually made up of a syllabary, but a couple people before me have noticed this and done what they can to figure out which lines mean what. A few weeks ago, I took the time to draw up a nice little chart . Not a huge deal, but hey, it’s something, right? As for original projects, I’m working on something very slowly that should help me come up with worthwhile words to translate. More to come! 11 Jul Zhuori by Geckat in Conlangs , Major No Comments I’ve been commissioned by Elmer Johnson to create a language for a novel he is intending to write. We are collaborating on it, and thusfar it has a...