Glaubaal

It took me days to come up with an acceptable romanization for Advaaz. I was disappointed to discover that URLs couldn’t contain unicode characters, so linking in the Phonetic Alphabet was out. Then I was frustrated to discover that most webservers wouldn’t preserve case-sensitivity in URL’s, so I couldn’t link in X-SAMPA, either. The necessity of romanizing upon me, I set out to create something which wouldn’t prove too distasteful.

Some of my phonemes were easy to romanize. /m/, /b/, and /g/ were all extremely straightforward, along with the vowels, /a/, /i/, and /u/. The three retroflex consonants were simple enough to convert as well, as long as retroflexation is understood by the reader. That left me with /G/, /N/, /B/, and /?/. Allophony between /B/ and /v/ prompted that straightforward choice. /x/ has an identical point of articulation as /G/, merely the voicing differs, and as all consonants are voiced I decided it was close enough for my purposes. As annoying as it is to see an apostrophe used for a glottal stop, it and a dash were all I could come up with, and if I’m sure to specify when I show my work to a new audience, the annoyance can be mostly ignored. That left me with /N/, and that phoneme is what took me so long.

While the decision to illustrate vowel length by repeating the vowel seemed a logical one, and one which wouldn’t come into conflict with my phonotactics, what to do with /N/ defied my attempts to romanize it neatly. At length, I thought of using “r,” for its resemblance to the other nasals, and because it followed the trend of dividing by two the number of humps each nasal possesses each time you move to a point of articulation deeper in the mouth, and I nearly went with my first palatable decision, but future use of rhotics in daughter languages gnawed at my conscience. Swapping an “l” for a future use of “r” left a bad taste in my mouth, and with much lamentation I cast aside my idea, deeming it worse than nothing and returning to the depths of hopelessness I had been in before it had occurred to me.

I came to my final conclusion by accident, reviewing a list of letters I had neglected to use. It came to me like a slow drip growing into a waterfall of obviousness, inspired by the visual similarity between “r” and “n” which had so captivated my earlier attempts. The letter “h” stood out to me, shining and pure, like a savior come to lift me up from the mire and show me the way to progress. “h” resembles “n” greatly, and not only was it unused, I intended for it to remain so into the foreseeable future. I had found my way, the path to my new wiki was open, and I am here today, writing this, because of the power and kindness of the letter “h.”

- Baalak called ‘H’ Friend.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. This is merely a rough draft- I have lots of ideas, but I’m not yet sure of their configuration or if I’ll even keep them all. That said, I think I will be well served by bouncing my ideas off my blag, where people can see them and perhaps comment. (more…)

I got the timing wrong, and a lot has happened since the first, but every day since then I’ve wanted to get to the explanation I sought to supply on the second, and every day I’ve found reason to let it wait. Not today, however. I’ve spent much of today reading through posts to the Zompist Bulletin Board, and it has me thinking linguistically. More specifically, conlinguistically. (more…)

I’ve been working quite a lot recently on a language to be spoken by a people on my conworld. I had intended to work more on the world itself, but I’ve made no progress there and inspiration has struck in a new direction. Rather than force myself to drink from a dry stream, I’m digging a new well. So far, I’ve come nearly to the point I was at with Glaubaal, and I’m more pleased with my work thus far than I ever was with Glaubaal. (more…)

It’s been a while since I posted a conworld update, and with good reason. There hasn’t been any progress, much to my shame. Well, I suppose that’s not quite true. I have progressed back to where I started, after losing ground to bad decisions, not listening to advice, and poor technique. Now, I hope to receive a renewal of advice, which I will listen to this time, and begin to take the first steps in the proper direction.
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This was the globe I was given by the elementary school I attended fourth and fifth grades in, before I got to it. It sat peacefully on my floor, occasionally being spun gently, for weeks after I received it. I spent my time working on my plan to convert it into a spherical chalkboard, and used another globe, a relief globe made of plastic, to test out the paint I purchased for the purpose. I’ve done many tests, allowing time between each attempt for the paint to dry, and I’ve come to some important conclusions.
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Yesterday was a disappointment.

I had intended to get to Sherwin Williams early enough to spend a $10 gift certificate on painter’s tape, but apparently they close early. Not just on Sunday, but every day. It seems it wasn’t meant to be, so I asked Noah to stop by and pick up some tape for me on his way to work this morning.

I did manage to spray a coat of green chalkboard paint onto my 16″ relief globe, but without the painter’s tape I couldn’t go back and see if a coat of black over the tape would pull up neatly or look terrible. Hopefully Noah will bring me the tape, and that will allow me to make some progress with my 16″ test globe and paint my final chalkboard globe with its first coat of green paint. Assuming the test globe goes well, I can begin to move forward on that front. Here’s a photo of the test globe with its paint drying:
See the way it’s dripping? I’m worried I’ll have to put the final chalkboard globe’s paint on in sections, and hope that there isn’t any drip or marks in the paint when it dries. If the globe could spin while it dried, that would probably help eliminate drip and let me paint the whole thing at once, I just have no idea how to make a globe spin perpetually without touching it.

On my other project front, I spent a few hours last night sanding the northern hemisphere of the 12″ globe I have. It was very, very mildly reliefed, so it took a lot of sanding, and I haven’t even gotten to the Himalayas yet. I’ve found that the equator was a raised stripe because it was a piece of tape, holding the two separate halves of the world together. I’ll have to use some sort of apoxy to fuse them together. They’re made of cardboard, so it shouldn’t be hard to find something which can bond them. I just hope I line them up properly. It should take at least another hour to finish the northern hemisphere, and probably three or four to sand the southern half, but I want the surface roughed up so that the spackle will stick to it. Plus, if I sand it white, I can draw on the surface first, to help determine where I’ll put my continents and mountains and such.

I’ll make another update when I have more progress. Hopefully I can make up for lost time over the week.

- Baalak Nalzar-aung.

“So, you want to make a conworld?”

This is the question I answer here. Yes, I do. But I don’t want to make something like what has come before. Anyone with enough time and disregard for geology and climatology could build a world like Azeroth, but it takes more love, devotion, and attention to detail to make a world which is internally consistent. That is my aim, and I’m determined to create something beautiful.

Wonderful words, but now the questions become much harder to answer. I suppose the first to try is “Where do I start?” That question had kept my stumped for months before I realized I was standing on the answer. The earth, or, more specifically, the stone beneath my feet. Despite what some people say, the world is old. Really old. The world that we see has been shaped by incredibly powerful forces for so long that much of the evidence has been erased by time. It took humanity a long time to truly start to grasp the events which gave us the world we have today, and to make the forces at work. Erosion and Plate Tectonics have carved the face of the earth which we are now familiar with, and if I’m to create a world as deeply moving and awe inspiring as the one we inhabit, I must unleash these forces upon my imagination just as they’ve been unleashed here.

I started correspondence with Chris Wayan, who has created many worlds of his own, and even created physical models of them by painting and sculpting on old globes. He has proven to be a wonderful source of inspiration, suggestion, technique, and drive, and I’m thrilled that he enjoys writing back to me. I asked him initially to build me a world, but we soon came to realize I wanted him to teach me to do it myself. Through this process, he has given me progress toward my goals, and I’m grateful for it. The first exercise is to make a world from scratch without thinking about it, to practice the technique and to allow my mind’s eye to create without being censored. While this will be terribly helpful in the long run, and Chris is a wonderful resource for me, his worlds have been shot from the hip, without the level of rigor I’m hoping to employ, so while he can help me with many aspects, he can’t help me with everything, so he isn’t the only answer to my creative problem.

Chris Wayan wings his geological processes, and quite compellingly, but I want to know my world’s geologic history. This brought up a new problem, however. “How do I model these forces, in terms I can understand and reference for later?” The answer eluded me for months and it was driving me crazy. I dove into the forums I frequent, the ZBB and conworlds.info, looking for help. It came in the suggestion of a dry-erase globe.

I had never thought of such a thing, but I immediately realized that it was a key to my progress. I searched online and found a company which made dry-erase globes of the earth, but they refused to sell me a blank one. I searched and found my options were few and far between. Then, it was suggested to me that Chalkboard Paint might be what I was looking for. It comes in two colors, green and black, and with the proper painting and taping, I may even be able to have a black globe with green lines of longitude and latitude.

I ran out and bought the paint. Luckily, my local walking-distance hardware store happened to carry cans of both colors. All I needed were globes, and acquiring that took me even longer. However, now I have not only a globe to begin Chalkboarding, but a smaller globe to spackle and paint for Chris Wayan’s exercise. Granted, I’m not quite ready to produce, but I’m entering a testing phase which should help me to learn the limits of my materials, without destroying them.

Painting the globe will take time. The first coats, in green, will have to go on in sections, to keep the paint from dripping and pooling on the bottom This can only be done once I’ve made measurements of the surface of the globe, to know where to put my lines of longitude once the green paint dries. The stand has markers for the lines of latitude, so adding those should require less measuring. What it will require is small concentric rings of painter’s tape, which seems rather difficult to come by. I am planning on going to Sherwin Williams tonight to try to pick some up. I may have to cut strips from wider rolls of tape, or perhaps find a way to affix a non-porous strong to the surfaces. Many options are available.

On Chris’ exercise, I’m hoping to mount a smaller 12″ globe on the frame a 16″ diameter topographical globe I acquired came on, but to do that I’ll need a hollow metal tube to run through the globe, and insert onto the pegs on the 16″ stand. That will allow me to move the globe in any way I want, while having more room than I could possibly need for topography.

More updates when I have progress.

- Baalak Nalzar-aung.

I have had a needle in my brain for some time now. That needle is creativity, and it’s burning hot. As one might imagine, it’s been irritating me incessantly for ages, this need to pry out the needle of creativity, and let my mind be at peace. I may have found a way to do just that.

I’m very interested in conlanging. I find the mere concept titillating. To create something so complex and so simple at the same time, to make a tool and use it for something as fundamental as communication, it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve come to realize, though, that a language cannot exist in a vacuum. Words only exist as they are spoken. To be spoken, you need a speaker.

Creating a culture from scratch is terribly difficult and time consuming, but it seems the only way I can conceive of building the foundation a language needs to be anything other than either random and haphazard, or uninspired and derivative, is to know the culture which speaks it. I have heard that the language you speak alters the way you view concepts in your mind. For instance, it is difficult for a Japanese person to think of siblings without also imagining the temporal relationship between them, because the words used to describe them are broken up that way. This concept is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

However, I have come to realize that a culture cannot exist in a vacuum either. The world in which a culture lives, nay, the mere small geographic area, has an indescribably immense impact on the peoples and their interaction. To describe a culture is to describe living in the area they live in, and to divorce one from the other is to leave the culture half explained, half buried in mystery and uncertainty. To describe a people, you must describe a world.

Fortunately, worlds do exist in a vacuum, so I needn’t pull much further back than this. However, as an underachieving perfectionist, I feel it is unconscionable of me to birth merely a region. Instead, I have come to realize I must build an entire world, from scratch, if I am to have the foundation upon which to build the ideas which inhabit my subconscious. The needle in my brain is merely one of many, and there is a secret order to pulling them out if I’m to have anything but a bowl full of messy needles when I’m through. I believe, strongly, that this project is the first step in the process. The first needle I need to pull out, ever so gently.

All I am left with, is a cooling needle, and the desperate need to find a way to make this happen.

- Baalak called World Builder, May 13th, 2008.