From 74774.157@compuserve.com Sat Dec 16 12:55:15 1995 Date: 16 Dec 95 04:19:41 EST From: Jeffrey Henning <74774.157@compuserve.com> To: BlindCopyReceiver: ; Subject: {A} MODLANG 7 - Part 1 MODEL LANGUAGES The newsletter discussing newly imagined words for newly imagined worlds ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Volume I, Issue 7 -- December, 1995 [If you receive two copies of each part of this issue, please let me know the letter id in brackets {} in the header of each copy and I'll fix it.] MODEL LANGUAGES ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB You can now review back issues of _Model Languages_ at the _Model Languages_ home page at: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jeffrey_henning A membership directory page there provides links to the home pages of fellow subscribers. It will become a great way to network with other people with similar interests and to find additional resources about model languages on the Internet. If you'd like your own home page to be listed there, send an e-mail with the subject header of "MODLANG LINK [your home page name] [your http address]" to 74774.157@compuserve.com, and I'll set up the link. Check it out! And if you like what you see, please link your own home page to the _Model Languages_ site. Thanks! FORMATTING CONVENTIONS ---------------------- This document looks best when formatted with a monospaced font such as Courier. Because this document is in ASCII, extended characters and formatting such as bold and italics are not available. The following conventions have been used instead: _word_ The word is in italics (used for emphasis and to indicate that discussions of a language's word involve the entirety of that word -- its sound, spelling and meaning). "word" the meaning of a word or possible word is being discussed, rather than the form. 'word' The spelling of a specific word is being discussed. /phoneme/ A phoneme is being discussed; e.g., /s/, the sound in _Sam_. [sound] A physical sound is being discussed; e.g., in Old English the phoneme /s/ was pronounced as either [s] or [z]. {ety.} Used to mark off an etymology in a dictionary listing. _wo^rd_ A circumflex (^) should be placed over the preceding vowel (i.e., 'o'). _wo_rd_ A macron (a bar) should be placed over the preceding vowel to indicate that it is a long vowel or long syllable. _wo:rd_ A dieresis or umlaut (two dots) should be placed over the preceding vowel; in German words, indicates the vowel has a fronted pronunciation (e.g., _scho:n_). _wo/rd_ An acute accent (/) should be placed over the preceding vowel or consonant; used in English (e.g., _re/sume/_), French, Serbo-Croat, Polish and Spanish, among others. _wo\rd_ A grave accent (\) should be placed over the preceding vowel; used in English to indicate a vowel should in fact be pronounced (e.g., _learne\d_). _man~ana_ A tilde should be placed over the preceding letter ('n'). _garc,on_ A cedilla is placed under the preceding letter (e.g., 'c') _-word_ The word is an italicized suffix. _word-_ The word is an italicized prefix. VOCABULARY SCOPE For my first model language, the Gnome Tongue (started when I was 13 or so), I created the vocabulary simply by making a list of English words I needed and coming up with what they would look like in the Gnome Tongue. For me, each Gnome Tongue word meant exactly the same as an English word. So _brekken_, "to break", had most of the varied senses of English _break_, including "smash, penetrate, violate, interrupt, tame, weaken, destroy and collapse". As I developed the language, evolving it into its daughter tongue, Karklak, I began creating more specialized words, for the most part centered on the war-like needs of its speakers. I had words like _razzen_, "to attack or kill with a blade, beak or talon"; _kirnen_, "to fight with a sword" (inspired by the archaic sense of English _skirmish_); and _dunor_, "thunder, hammer, the God of Thunder". Karklak even had words to distinguish between "to parry with a quarterstaff or pikestaff" (_krozzen_) and "to parry with a sword" (_krazzen_). Without realizing it, I had hit upon the need for creating specialized subvocabularies (in this case, around weaponry) to meet the unique needs of my model language's speakers. This is something that needs to be done for every model language. In the last issue, we examined semantics and how the words represented by different languages had varied meanings. Applying some of the principles of semantic components, we even developed KINDEEP, an elaborate system for representing different kinship terms. In this issue, we will continue to compare how the specialized subvocabularies of languages differ, looking at what your model languages may need to represent environmental terms, color terms, numerals, animal names, diminutives and augmentatives and words with different levels of formality. If you want to create a lexicon for your own model language, it is not enough to take a list of English vocabulary and translate it into your model language. Instead, you must invent words that describe the world the way speakers of your language see it. Now, if these speakers are similar to 20th-century English speakers, then many of the words may be comparable. On the other hand, if they are far removed in time or place, their vocabularies will be quite different. LANGUAGES' UNIQUE VOCABULARIES No language has the exact same vocabulary as another language. Each has words with certain meanings that cannot be expressed as succinctly in some other language. For instance, the model language Makata has a set of words that concisely describes another word's presence in the native speaker's language compared to other languages. For instance, a _makamaka_ is a meaning represented by words in Makata and one or more other languages (e.g., the sense "healer" is a makamaka, since it is expressed as _tala_ in Makata and _seli_ in Negasi). The other terms related to _makamaka_ are shown in the following table: MAKATA TERM "IN MY LANGUAGE" "IN OTHER LANGUAGES" ----------------------------------------------------- makamaka Yes Yes makasula Yes No sulamaka No Yes sulasula No No Incidentally, in Makata, the word _maka_ by itself literally means "voice, speech, words", while _sula_ means "silence". MAKAMAKA: WORDS IN ENGLISH AND OTHER LANGUAGES Makamaka are incredibly common, since most languages are related to other languages with very similar vocabularies. Any bilingual dictionary contains primarily makamaka, senses that can easily be expressed in a word or phrase in both languages. We'll examine just the most common makamaka here. The more frequently a word is used in English, the more likely it is to also be used in other languages. When Morris Swadesh and Robert Lees developed _lexicostatistics_ (a system for measuring the time of divergence of two languages' vocabularies), they created a core word list of 100 terms that they assumed would be common across most languages. Their word list avoids geographically biased words, such as names for specialized flora and fauna, and tries to limit culturally biased words. For some reason, it also omits the most common kinship terms: those for "father", "mother", "son", and "daughter". The word list is: I you we this that who what not all many one two big long small woman man person fish bird dog louse tree seed leaf root bark skin flesh blood bone grease egg horn tail feather hair head ear eye nose mouth tooth tongue claw foot knee hand belly neck breasts heart liver drink eat bite see hear know sleep die kill swim fly walk come lie sit stand give say sun moon star water rain stone sand earth cloud smoke fire ash burn path mountain red green yellow white black night not cold full new good round dry name - from David Crystal, _The Cambridge Encyclopedia Of Language_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 380. These are then the most common words in all languages and should probably all be present in your own model languages. MAKASULA: WORDS IN ENGLISH BUT NOT OTHER LANGUAGES Some languages lack words for basic English terms and therefore qualify as makasula (words in my language but not others): * Irish Gaelic and Chinese do not have a single word for either "yes" or "no". * Malay lacks a general word for "you". * Russian had no word for "efficiency" (not surprising!) until after the fall of communism, when the Russians borrowed the term from English. Few languages make the following distinctions that English does, relying instead on single words encompassing both meanings: * _childish_ vs. _childlike_ ("immature" vs. "innocent") * _continual_ vs. _continuous_ * _forceful_ vs. _forcible_ * _house_ vs. _home_ * _informant_ vs. _informer_ ("one who discloses information" vs. "one who squeals on others for money") * _masterful_ vs. _masterly_ * _national_ vs. _popular_ (a distinction lacking in German and Russian) * _sensual_ vs. _sensuous_. SULAMAKA: WORDS NOT IN ENGLISH BUT IN OTHER LANGUAGES In contrast to makasula, English itself lacks distinctions made by other languages. For instance: * French distinguishes between "knowledge that results from recognition" (_connai^tre_) and "knowledge that results from understanding" (_savoir_). * The Hindustanis have a word, _talanoa_, that describes small talk that helps to build relationships; for example, in the business world, _talanoa_ would be those casual conversations in the hallway or at the water cooler that help to forge friendships. * The Hawaiians have a word _kalokalo_, meaning "conversational prayer to the gods". Howard Rheingold has written a whole book studying sulamaka. These are my ten favorite words from his book, _They Have A Word For It_: _bricoleur_ {French.} The craftsman who follows his or her intuition, randomly experimenting, rather than executing tasks according to a formal plan. _carita/ pelosa_ {Italian, "hairy genorisity".} An act of generosity inspired by a selfish motive. _faux frais_ {French.} Expenses likely to be inadvertently omitted when preparing a budget. _fucha_ {Polish.} The act of working on company time or using company resources for one's own business. _nakhes_ {Yiddish.} The combination of pleasure and pride inspired in a parent by his or her child. _orenda_ {Huron.} The summoning of an individual's will power against the forces of fate. _plunderbund_ {Dutch.} An alliance of organizations or interest groups that exploit the public. _tartle_ {Scottish.} To momentarily forget the name of a person or object. _tsuris_ {Yiddish.} Grief and heartache caused to a parent by his or her child. _feierabend_ (fire-ah-bend) {German, "celebration evening".} The cheerful feeling at the end of the work day. - _They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon Of Untranslatable Words And Phrases_, Howard Rheingold (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1988) Each of these words say something about their speaker's culture. With an expression like _carita/ pelosa_ (an act of generosity inspired by a selfish motive), it seems only fitting that Machiavelli was Italian. A word like _bricoleur_ ("craftsman who follows his intuition rather than a plan") summons to mind French artistry. A word like _tsuris_ ("grief caused to a parent by a child") raises the image of a Jewish mother bemoaning the sorry state of her son. Every model language you design should have some sulamaka, as this gives your language personality and expresses the unique character of your language's speakers. The sulamaka are also the words that you will use even in the English translations you present of the speech of your characters. For instance, in _A Princess Of Mars_, Edgar Rice Burroughs does not bother to directly translate the terms _jed_ and _jeddak_, which only loosely correspond to "king" and "emperor" (as Burroughs finally translates them in the third sequel to _A Princess Of Mars_); a _jed_ is much less likely to be hereditary position than a king, with challengers who defeat the jed in mortal combat assuming his role and his rule, while an emperor is really "a jed of jeds", a cross between an overking (as in the Anglo-Saxon _Britwalda_) and an emperor. SULASULA: WORDS NOT IN OTHER LANGUAGES OR ENGLISH There's a word for it And words don't mean a thing There's a name for it And names make all the difference in the world Some things can never be spoken Some things cannot be pronounced That word does not exist in any language It will never be uttered by a human mouth. - Talking Heads, "Give Me Back My Name" As just seen, there are many concepts that cannot be succinctly expressed in English. Following are some more examples, drawn not from other languages, but from cracks in English's vocabulary. While German has the word _lau_ (rhymes with English _plough_) meaning "not really warm, not really cold" and used to describe food or spring winds, most languages have adjective to describe extremes (hot/cold, short/tall, empty/full) but not midpoints. Where is the word to describe when any object is at room temperature? Where is the word for the person of average height? Where is the word for the apocryphal half-empty/half-full glass? Some English words have outlived their roots. If you are not disheveled, should you be called _*sheveled_? If you are not ruthless, should you be called _*ruthful_? If you are not inept, should you be called _*ept_? (Actually, _inept_ is from _in_ + _apt_.) THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF One of the most comprehensive model languages published is a humorous extension of English, full of senses that had been sulasula before the new words were coined. The authors, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, described the philosophy of their neologisms succinctly in the preface to their dictionary, _The Deeper Meaning of Liff_ (a revised edition of _The Meaning of Liff_): In Life (and, indeed in Liff) there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no word exists. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society. What follows are arguably the best ten words from the approximately 900 words that they coined: Abilene (adj.) Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow. Canudos (n.) The desire of married couples to see their single friends pair off. Dalmilling (ptcpl.vb.) Continually making small talk to someone who is trying to read a book. Dinder (vb.) To nod thoughtfully while someone gives you a long and complex set of directions which you know you're never going to remember. Epping (ptcpl.vb.) The futile movements of forefingers and eyebrows used when failing to attract the attention of waiters and barmen. Kelling (ptcpl.vb.) The action of looking for something all over again in all the places you've already looked. Lampung (n.) The daze which follows turning on the light in the middle of the night. Liff (n.) A common object or experience for which no word yet exists. Macroy (n.) An authoritative, confident opinion based on one you read in the newspaper. Oswestry (n.) The inability to find a comfortable position to lie in bed. Source: Douglas Adams & John Lloyd, _The Deeper Meaning of Liff_ Sulasula are those ideas that are waiting for you to create a model language capable of expressing them! WORD SETS When coining words for your model languages, you often have to look at words in the context of the subvocabulary they are part of, as we did with kinship terms in the last issue. Here we will look at environmental vocabulary, color words, animal terms, augmentatives and diminutives, and levels of formality. Future issues will occasionally profile other word sets, such as numeric systems. THE WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS Each language affects the perceptions of its speakers, and your model language needs to take this into account. In fact, this is a formal linguistic hypothesis, called the Whorfian hypothesis after its originator, Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf stated it this way in his book, _Language, Thought and Reality_: We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are partners to an agreement to organize it this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. Whorf proposes the notion of _linguistic determinism_: language determines how we think. Whorf went so far as to argue that it would be very difficult for speakers of two dramatically different languages (specifically Hopi and English) to fully understand each others' thinking. Few linguists would now go this far. After all, languages can be translated into each other and, even if Language X has one word for a concept requiring many words to explain in Language Y, that word can still be explained (as we explained the sulamaka and the sulasula above). Moreover, speakers whose language lacks a basic concept (the tense of verbs or detailed number systems) can still master the concept. A watered down version of Whorf's hypothesis is now accepted, which I call linguistic pathways: language influences how we see the world and how we remember what we saw. If our language has one word for "blue, green", we will have more difficulty distinguishing those colors than an English speaker would (see below). If we do not possess a specific subvocabulary, we will have difficulty forming detailed perceptions. If you don't know the names of different types of flowers, you will have a tough time recalling what the different flowers you saw on a walk through the woods looked like; if you don't know the names of different types of tools, you will have a tough time selecting the proper tool from a toolbox for someone else. ENVIRONMENTAL VOCABULARY Inspired by the apochraphyl story that Eskimos have 50 words for snow (more on this in a minute), I made sure that when I invented a language for desert nomads, I included a bunch of different words for sand. I reasoned that given that desert nomads inhabit a world dominated by sand, different types of sand would signify different things to them and that these differences would be important to them in everyday survival. With this in mind, I developed the following words for sand in my Mu/harafic language: _dhentara_ {< _sadhe dhentaran i-bidha_, "feet-biting sand".} A powdery sand that gives under foot and must be waded through; the sand that forms dunes. _fisa_ {< Ibrafamic _visa_.} Sand, perhaps the type of sand used by a priest in rituals. (Usage: the exact meaning of _fisa_ is unknown, but it appears to be a ceremonial word with strong religious connotations.) _fisalbeli_ {< _fisa salbeli_, "blessed sand".} Sand in the dry bed of a river. _fisalu/thi_ {< _fisa salu/thi_, "cursed sand".} Sand that had been wet but has since baked dry and hard in the sun. _khulbilah_ {< _khulbir_ + _-il-_: "swallower".} Quicksand, sand along a river bank, sand near a spring. _sade_ {< Ibrafamic _sadhe_.} Sand. (Usage: archaic.) _sadelin_ {< _sade_, "sand" + _-lin_, (diminutive).} A fine, granular sand. _sadelsith_ {< Ibrafamic _sadhe ol-sit_, "sand of God".} Sand marked with the breath of Alsith, showing the ripples of the wind. _sederiti_ {< Ibrafamic _sedhe_, "sands" (< _sadhe_, "sand") & _rithi_, "blessed variety".} Sand, desert. (Usage: sand in all its splendor, a general term for any and all types of sand.) _u/bu/lo_ {< unknown origin.} A sand comprised of small pebbles. The Eskimos, it turns out, only have about 17 (!) words for snow -- the Eskimos have separate words for "falling snow", "drifting snow", "melting snow", "snow on the ground", "snow christened by a dog", etc. (Well, I made the last one up.) The Eskimos also have a unique environmental vocabulary of about 90 words related to ice: 50 words for sea-ice topography, 23 words for the movement of ice flows and 16 words describing ice in terms of its age or thickness. The people who do have almost fifty words for snow are the Laplanders, who have 41 words for snow. The Laplanders also have 20 words for ice, 11 for cold and 26 verbs to express freezing or thawing. (How many words for icy conditions do Western skiers have, I wonder?) Clearly, a culture needs to develop words that enable it to make useful distinctions between things. When a people dwell in a harsh environment and must forage for food, it becomes critically important that they can navigate safely through that environment. For an Eskimo, it is much easier to say, "Watch out for that _salogok_ over there", then "Watch out for that thin, black, freshly formed ice, the kind seals sometimes poke their heads through to breath and the kind that won't support your weight". Without a word like _salogok_, you're drowning in the freezing sea. *** Besides snow, other areas where languages often make fine distinctions include camels (Arabic), sand (Arabic) and even holes (Australian aboriginal languages). If your model language speakers live by the ocean, they might have many words for waves; if they live on Mercury, they might have many words for solar flares; if they live in your lower intestine, they might want to move elsewhere. As Howard Rheingold imagines in the conclusion of his book, _They Have A Word For It_, "Following the reasoning that extreme and specific environments can generate large numbers of environmental nouns, is it possible that Angelenos someday will have the need for nearly as many words to describe freeway traffic conditions [as the Eskimos have to describe ice]?" In fact, we already have many environmental nouns for highways; where an American sees three lanes, a shoulder, a median strip, an on-ramp and an off-ramp, an Eskimo sees a road. We name what we need to see to survive. COLOR WORDS They looked up, astonished, for they had heard no sound of his coming; and they saw a figure standing at the rail, looking down upon them: an old man, swathed in a great cloak, the colour of which was not easy to tell, for it changed if they moved their eyes or if he stirred. -- J.R.R. Tolkien, _The Two Towers_, "The Voice Of Saruman" We see the world through the filtered glasses of our language. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the different ways different languages discriminate between colors. Healthy humans the world over have the same basic ocular mechanism for perceiving color, and color is something that can be objectively measured (even reduced to a set of numbers), yet human languages express different ways that different peoples perceive those colors. The Welsh color words for _green_, _blue_ and _gray_ are not one-for-one identical with these English words: while the Welsh word _glas_ can be roughly translated as "blue", it also is used to refer to bluish shades of green and bluish shades of gray, with the words for neighboring colors, _gwyrdd_ ("green, except for bluish green") and _llwyd_ ("gray, except for bluish gray"), having more limited scope than their English counterparts. In Zuni, the word _lupz-inna_ roughly corresponds to English _yellow_ and _orange_, although the beginning and ending of the color range are subtly different. The Navajo system is very unusual. There are two words for black, to distinguish between "darkness" and the black of items, such as soot. The words _lichi/i/_ and _lico_ have their boundary between _red_ and _orange_/_yellow_. Navajo uses one word for "blue" and "green" and another word for "brown" and "gray". English parcels out colors into 11 basic or atomic categories: white, red, pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, gray and black (in approximate order of wavelength). While artists, house painters and others have many different terms (_Canadian forest green_, _pearl white_), such additional words are not atomic according to Berlin and Kay, but are usually defined with these eleven as references: _turquoise_ is "a greenish blue" and _fuchsia_ is "a purplish red". The words we have for colors do color how we see the world. The Navajo, who use _lico_ to mean "orange-yellow" do have difficulty distinguishing between the colors of our orange and yellow. Academic research has removed some of the mystery from color vocabularies, suggesting that most languages' color systems do follow a set pattern. B. Berlin and P. Kay proposed the following scheme in 1969: white < red < green < blue < brown < purple black < < yellow pink orange gray All languages have terms for "white" and "black" (some New Guinea Highland languages have only those two color terms, which should probably be translated as "light" and "dark"). For any language, find the term it has furthest to the left. This term should be a single morpheme (e.g., not _sky blue_), should be in regular use (e.g., not _fuchsia_), should be generic (e.g., not _blond_, which is specific to hair in English and, in German, to beer) and should not represent a color contained completely within another color (e.g., _scarlet_ as a subset of _red_). You can then assume that that language has every term to the right. For instance, Hanuno/o has a word for "green"; therefore it also has words for "white", "black" and "red". Latin had no words to the left of "blue". Romance terms for "brown" and "gray" are innovations and vary from language to language (French _brun_, Italian _marrone_ and Spanish _pardo (castan~o)_). Of course, the Berlin-Kay scheme was based on an analysis of just 98 languages, less than 1% of all human languages currently spoken, which makes it too small a sample to rule variations out. While "white" through "gray" are considered the 11 basic color categories, some argue there are more, though most other terms are expressed using one of the basic categories. Russian distinguishes between two blues, _sinij_, "dark blue", vs. _goluboj_, "sky blue", giving it 12 categories, apparently. The English color scheme is dramatically different than it used to be, for it did not used to fit the above scheme at all. Modern English's color scheme evolved under heavy influence from Norman French. The Anglo-Saxons had their own unique color scheme, focusing not on hue (wavelength) but on chroma (saturation, a mixture of lightness or darkness). Old English even divided what hues it had differently: their "red" (_re_ad_) being what we would call "yellowish". Many of the Old English terms describing shades of gray have survived in Modern English: _black_, _bleak_, _bright_, _dark_, _dun_, _dusky_, _fallow_, _gray_, _light_, _murky_, _sallow_, _swarthy_, _wan_ and _white_. These words may be hard for us to picture in our mind's eye, because we do not principally think of color this way. Even more befuddling, many Old English words that used to refer to saturation no longer do. I refer you to the words of an expert in Old English, Stephen Barney in his book _Word-Hoard_: Adding to the confusion are OE [Old English] terms which then referred to chroma (e.g., _bru_n_ and _hwi_t_, meaning bright, shining), used of BURNished metal (< _bru_n_) whose reflexes now (BROWN, WHITE) refer to hue or intensity. The group of OE [Old English], Romance, and ModE [Modern English] words connected with black, for instance, has not yet been straightened out (_blaec_, _bla_c_, _blac_ (?), _bli_can_, _bla_ecu_, BLACK, BLIK, BLINK, BLAKE, BLEAK, BLEACH, BLOKE, BLANK, BLANC, etc.): they seem to refer to black, white, pale, dark, shiny, like the colorless all-color of Moby Dick. As you set off with harpoon in hand to hunt your own color scheme for your model languages, you can follow the Berlin-Kay scheme if you are striving for a natural language, or you can glare hard at the "colorless all-color of Moby Dick", seeking to understand its patterns in some new way. Or block out the voice of Saruman and look not at his ever-shifting cloak.