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.

11/29/08

I dreamt about conlangs, sorta. (more…)

I have more words to add to my lexicon. I worked on pronouns, more verbs, and parts of the body. Important stuff which may have been overlooked if it weren’t for the Swadesh List. I’m very grateful I found that.

I’m trying out some new formatting. Hopefully this way will be more clear. It was a lot less work on my part. (more…)

I’m running my head into a wall. For some reason, I’m cursed with a desire to discover order amongst chaos. Where I can’t discover, I’m compelled to create. To that end, I find myself continually trying to establish an artificial order to my lexicogenesis. Give each letter a meaning, make vowels in nouns short and verbs long, place a plosive before a nasal in a syllable coda to mark an adjective… It’s artificial! English doesn’t do these sorts of things, so why should I?

English has words of many complexities, and even simple concepts can have long and complex words. We have holdovers from older linguistic systems, very evident in our irregular verbs. What there isn’t, though, is an underlying structure to the base words themselves which allows you to tell what sort of word any given word is merely by looking at it. Why is “run” a verb, “rum” a noun, and “red” an adjective? It seems random, and to make a language which is naturalistic, I’ll have to do the same. It feels so dirty, being random, and I know I’ll hate the results initially, but it seems what I need to do.

- Baalak called Frustrated.

A language is not a language without words. While words alone cannot be a language, all the grammar in the world won’t help you if you don’t have words to put into phrases to assemble into sentences. Because of this, I’ve given myself the goal of coining five words every day this month. I’ve already failed at the every part, but I feel that it’s a good plan and hope it can keep me coining new words. (more…)

I started off trying to explain phonotactics and syllable structure, but I realized that so few people read this, and even fewer who do A, don’t already know what I’m talking about and B, couldn’t figure out what I’m saying from context, that I needn’t bother with definitions. Phonotactics are what they are, and I’ve been giving them a lot of thought lately, with regards to the language I’m creating. (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…)

I’ll admit, I haven’t been keeping up with my sonority work. Shame in me. I’ve been busying myself with other things, cooking a lot, trying to keep things remotely neat. However, I did have the opportunity to discuss language with the guys, and they brought up some interesting ideas.

Having one ‘And’ for joining noun phraises, “You and I,” and one for joining clauses, “I’ll go and you’ll meet me,” is fine and good, but it was pointed out that ‘And’ isn’t the only conjunction. The most common ones I’m forgetting, and with School House Rock I’m surprised I could forget, are ‘But’ and ‘Or.’ These deserve multiple forms, which are related to the forms of ‘And’ in their usage. It was also pointed out that there’s another kind of ‘Or’ I hadn’t thought of.

In English ‘Or’ can be inclusive, as in the example:

“Do you have Coke or Pepsi?” “Yes, which would you like?”

This is fine, but ‘Or’ can be used exclusively as well, and it is rarely seen this way in English:

“Do you have Coke or Pepsi?” “No, I’m sorry, we have both.”

I’m not sure I’ll use it, but it would be an interesting distinction to draw which English ignores.

I’ve also been spending some time thinking about greetings. Every language has a few of them, and Glaubaal needs a way to say hello which makes sense based upon the language and the culture which speaks it.

One hello for greeting those with status above you, probably said in the passive voice, something like “You are greeted by me.” One hello for those of lower status who you wish to be polite to, something like “I acknowledge your presence.” And finally, one hello for those who’s status and level of danger you are unsure of; someone you don’t want to be seen looking up or down to would be greeted with a cautious neutral greeting. I would imagine that this would be rather offensive to those who feel their superiority is obvious.

- Baalak nalzar-aung.

It’s Monday, and you know what that means. It’s time for a weekly linguistic update.

I’ve had terrible difficulty in creating a lexicon for Glaubaal. This is most of the reason the language has stalled and isn’t finished yet. I have many ideas about syntax, and some about morphology, but semantics eludes me, because… Well, I’m not completely sure why, to be honest.

I wanted to create roots; that is, basic core word concepts which could be added on or to otherwords to create a varied lexicon which is internally consistent. If, to use an English example,”Bi” means “Two” then a “Bi-cycle” is a “Two-cycle,” and that can be inferred by understanding its name. This was such an appealing concept to me that I locked my intentions in and refused to budge from this idea, even when I couldn’t find a suitable list of example English
roots from which I could take ideas. I stalled, and I needn’t have, because that certainly isn’t the only method of creating a lexicon.

Since then, I’ve decided to take a different approach. I’d still love to work with roots, but it seems it will have to be something I go back and create after the fact, perhaps not even with Glaubaal but a daughter language I craft some time in the future. For now, I want to simply make up words and roughly assign them to the concepts in Ogden’s Basic English; after modifying them to fit in better with Glaubaal, of course.

To accomplish my goal, I need to create all those words, and while I can churn out a whole bunch of monosyllabic words in Glaubaal simply via an intuitive understanding of the language’s phonotactics, (brusk, talz, madzh, tshralntshk, etc.) I find I tend to favor certain phonemes over others, innately, and I don’t want Glaubaal to be the simple thing which exists in my head, but the complex and vile sounding mess it could become. To this end, I need a way to include the phonemes which I don’t use very often (th, dh, kh, zh, h) and to reduce the frequency of the phonemes I feel I use too much (l, r, o), and the best way I can see to accomplish this is with a program.

Now that I have a program I wish to write, I have a reason to actually learn to program! Fancy that. While I am advised on the ZBB that it is a waste of time to recreate functionality which exists elsewhere, I still want to do it. I want to create a word generator, which conforms to Glaubaal’s phonotactics and sonority hierarchy (a term I only truly came to understand last night, thanks to Wikipedia) to create its words, and then to list the words according to how frequent I want each phoneme to be in the language. Different phonemes may even have a different frequency when combined with other phonemes, and all phonemes will have a different frequency when they appear before a vowel (onset) or after a vowel (coda). Once I have the words which appear most frequently, I can map them to the semantic meanings which also occur most frequently, and that will give me the beginning structure of my lexicon.

This leaves me with the issue of learning to program, but I think that is tangential to my purposes here, so I don’t intend to go into it in this post. What I am interested in discussing is Glaubaal’s sonority hierarchy. I’m still trying to figure out how sonorant hierarchy works, and how to best describe it. I want it to differ noticeably from English, but still be easy for me to say. I want it to be complex, but not so complex that it becomes hard to keep track of. Above all, I want it to be consistent, mostly, and to be intuitive for me. Guess I’ll have to do some research to figure this all out. Thankfully, as I discovered last night, Wikipedia has lots to say about the subject.

- Baalak nalzar-aung.