Help me with semantic examples!

I’m working on my Lexipedia, and I’d like to have many examples of semantic divisions that are different from English.  Things like this:

• French doesn’t bother to distinguish ‘city’ and ‘town’, making do with ville
• Japanese divides ‘water’ into mizu ‘cold water’ and yu ‘hot water’
• Guugu Yimithirr speakers don’t point out things as left/right, but as north/south/east/west
• In some languages there are not four cardinal directions but eight (that is, directions like northeast have their own names not derived from the main four)

But the more examples I have the better, so if you have some, lay ‘em on me (markrose at zompist dot com).  Note that what I’m after is not just different words, but different categorizations of the world– places where a semantic field is mapped out differently (even if trivially), as in the above examples.

Naturally, I’ve accumulated quite a few examples already, from various languages, but they’re mostly things I’ve run into randomly, and you alert readers may well know some that I’ve never heard of.  (If it’s in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, however, I’ve heard it.)

 

Book news

Today I got through part of my book project: writing one-line summaries of the etymologies of 1500 common words.

Next project, I think, is to deepen this work by looking at other languages. The aim is to help conlangers by collecting ideas on how to form words.  So, the more languages the better.  (I think.  I don’t want to make the thing a juicy but unreadable reference.)

Also it’s fun to highlight the fascination of etymology, a field full of surprises. For instance, I love words like these with a near-baffling succession of meaning changes:

fast: OE ‘firm, fixed’ > ‘determinedly’ > ‘quickly’

fog: ‘grassy, mossy’ > ‘fleshy’ > ‘murky’ > ‘misty’

nice: Lt ‘not knowing’ > ‘foolish’ > ‘fine’ > ‘kind’

pretty: OE ‘tricky’ > ‘clever’ > ‘admirable’ > ‘pleasing’

At the same time, there are many many words that have virtually the same meaning today as they had a thousand years ago.  Not so surprising with two or brother or eye, but more so with dare, creep, hat, mean, rough, slide, stare, wild, yell.

Then there’s words that only date back to Middle English, when I’d have expected something older: ago, bad, boy, cut, grab, rabbit, smell, talk, whip, wrap.

And there’s words that I would have thought were homonyms, but turn out to be the same etymon: e.g. trip ‘stumble / travel’; lot ‘chance token / a bunch’; mess ‘serving / disorder’; might ‘power / possible’, fair ‘pretty / just’.  Or words where the original sense isn’t what I would have expected: dull was ‘obtuse’ not ‘blunt’, leave was ‘let remain’ not ‘go’, worship was ‘value’ not ‘praise’.

 

Conlanger for hire

Some time ago I casually mentioned doing some paid conlanging work, and a collective eyebrow seemed to be raised: you did what?  So I thought I’d talk a little about that.  I’m working on my fourth paid conlang now, and I may be starting #5 soon.  Though this is no way to get rich, it is fun to consider that I’m one of probably a handful of people in the world to make conlangs for money.

This adventure started in 2003, when a fantasy writer, Eric, contacted me to create a language for him.  His reasoning was simple: he’d tried conlanging himself but was dissatisfied with the results; why not go for the best?  So we worked out the details and I created a language called Thesolas.

The process went like this.  I gave Eric a little questionnaire on what kind of languages he liked, to get an idea of the sounds and style he was after.  I made some short (meaningless) sample texts to help refine the process.  And I asked him to tell me as much as possible about the people who’d be speaking the language.

Eric wanted a pretty accessible language, so I kept the morphology simple and didn’t introduce any difficult sounds.  To give it a distinct feeling, rather, I removed common English sounds: of the common stops p t k b d g, Thesolas has just one, t.

I think it turned out rather pretty.  Here’s a sample sentence:

Tis tiriel nisienin ren ai rus u nioth rus seniel.

The way that can be told is not the eternal Way.

As Eric described the speakers, they had a philosophical bent.  Evidentiality seemed like a good fit for that.  I also created a grammaticalized mind/body distinction– e.g. metis is ‘this (physical) thing’, metio is ‘this (non-physical) thing’.  This affected the derivational mophology too; e.g. Thesolas speakers distinguish mumon ‘the physical sensation of fear’ from mumo ‘the emotion of fear’.  A warrior could thus be advised to avoid mumo but ignore mumon.

Eric was happy with the results, and in fact this year he came back to ask for three descendants of Thesolas– that’s my current project, in fact.

Earlier this year I worked on a language for a future video game, for a developer named Guilherme.  The speakers are dragons, so naturally it’s named Draconic.  Here’s a sample:

Ajekiño Xantolo< eɴqχana.
I sought the elixir alongside Sunfire.

The transliteration is much less English-like, because Guilherme liked the looks of my sample.

I had a lot of fun trying to make Draconic fit a non-human species.  Starting with the phonology: as dragons have no lips, they can’t pronounce labials (I don’t know how Skyrim’s dragons pronounce fus!), and as they have a long snout they distinguish four places of articulation (thus the basic stops are t c k q).  There’s a word-final phoneme made by snapping the beak shut.

Flame is phonemic: vowels can be produced with or without combustion.  In addition a word can be ended with a large burst of flame, transliterated <.

Creating the lexicon, I tried to think about how dragons would look at the world.  E.g. they’re enormous by human standards; as a result they don’t have separate words for many small plant and animal species… under a certain size it’s all weeds and vermin to them.  They’re armored, so though they often keep humans as pets or slaves, they have only one word for clothing, irtenîr ‘false skin’.  The natural stance of a dragon is to be on all four feet, which means that what we strange bipedal beings call the back is really the top of a dragon.

Flight also colors their whole way of thinking.  To fly (xi) is to go; to fly alongside (dranxi) is to be a friend or companion; to fly above (serxi) is a threat. There are basic words for the basic movements of flight (pitch, roll, yaw), and changes in direction must be assigned to the correct movement— e.g. you turn right by rolling right (tiŋke) like an airplane, not by rotating about your axis.

They don’t need words for the surface details that are important to creatures confined to a two-dimensional surface– words like bridge, island, path, wall.  To confine a dragon you need a three-dimensional enclosure.  Structures with roofs are thus deeply ambivalent for dragons: they represent both safety (you can’t be attacked from above) and threat (you can’t escape by flight).

If you’re wondering about business details, these projects are work for hire, which is fine with me as I have my own conworld for personal expression.  I asked Eric’s and Guilherme’s permission, in fact, to mention some details about these languages in this post.

(So when can you read more about these conlangs?  Well, that’s up to my clients.  Probably when their projects are further along.)

Is it difficult to work with someone else’s conworld?  Not at all, for me at least.  It adds some constraints, but artistically working within constraints can foster rather than inhibit creativity.  I’ve had fun working on all these projects.

If you’re wondering how you get this kind of work, well, I don’t know!  My clients are all people who have contacted me.

Does this make you want a Zompist Conlang for yourself?  If it does, contact me (markrose at zompist dot com) and we’ll talk.

 

 

 

Terrible title, neat blog

Geoff Eddy pointed me to an absorbing blog– bLogicarian, by A.Z. Foreman.  It’s right up my alley— a man with a passion for understanding foreign cultures, and with impressive erudition.  He seems to know (and can translate from) at least Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Hebrew.

Some highlights:

• A devastating takedown of the bogus Chinese elements in Firefly.  I regret not noticing this myself.  Supposedly the system is a fusion of Western and Chinese culture, and yet there is really nothing in it that’s recognizably Asian, except a few kanji and an entirely unaccountable and unmotivated bilingualism.  (Inara is kind of an Asian courtesan with a Buddhist worldview and an Arabic name, but this is a social role from the past— it’s as if Shepherd were depicted as a medieval friar.)
• A critique of Esperanto focusing on its strange unnatural morphology, which gives fascinating information on how the language has developed in the last hundred years.  (Of note: people have made lots of coinages to address some of the worst bits of the morphology and to use more recognizable pan-European words; the verbal system has gotten weirdly baroque and is developing a mediopassive; and native speakers have a tendency to bag the accusative.)
• A fun critique of the supposed linguistic realism of Mel Gibson’s Jesus film.
• A rant against Christianity, not itself very novel, but featuring a great discussion of how Roman pluralism worked.

Definitely a dude to check out.

 

ALC is out!

I got the final proof copy of Advanced Language Construction on Wednesday, and it passed my extensive tests on whether my name was spelled correctly.

So, it’s available now in print and Kindle editions!  Go get some!  Also it’s my birthday, so if you were wondering what to get me, the answer is, royalties.  Treat yourself to a copy of ALC, you deserve it!

Actual book in its native habitat (my desk)

This is the most thoroughly vetted book I’ve done yet… the total number of pre-publication readers of the LCK (besides myself) was one; of this book, twelve.  Plus I’ve paid a lot more attention to typography, as it trips up some readers.  I changed the text font to Linux Libertine, which looks nice and more importantly supports all the very many Unicode characters I use.  (There may well be some embarrassing errors left, but I’m hoping they’ll be obscure, at least.)

I was kind of dreading the Kindle conversion, as every illustration has to be redone as a GIF, but before I could even finish whining about the process, it was done.  (In more detail: I created the illustrations in Adobe Illustrator, and that’s all that’s needed for the print version.  But Kindle wants JPG or GIF.  I think it used to accept only JPG, so this is an improvement.  Also, it can’t handle embedded fonts, so some bits that used Almean fonts also had to be converted to illustrations.)

As I write, the Kindle version is #7 in the Linguistics category.  Which doesn’t translate into a very high actual number, but it’s still cool.  I’m beating Lakoff & Johnson, man!  (Lakoff can console himself with being #4 as well.)  Also beating Particle Physics, which is presumably about how particles behave when smashed onto the ends of words at near-lightspeed.

I may have a slightly biased viewpoint, but I’m really happy with the book.  It ended up with a focus on morphosyntax, which was covered fairly breezily in the LCK.  It’s a pleasure to cover topics like morphosyntactic alignment, aspect, and polysynthesis in the detail they deserve.  Plus there’s new stuff that I think will interest experienced conlangers, such as predicate calculus, pidgins, ongoing sound change, and Sign.

I showed the proof copy to my parents, and I think it scared them.  But don’t let that stop you!  They think that about quantum mechanics too, and how hard is that?

BTW, in case it’s not obvious, the giant robot is making one of the signs from the book. Also, I think there’s kind of a clever pun in the lower left illo.

 

Koth King

There’s a new TF2 map out, Koth_King, set in the back alleys of a Chinese city.  I explored it a bit alone— it’s really pretty.  I’ve only had one chance to play it, and it’s a hell of a pyro map.

But the important question, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is, What do all the Chinese signs say?  Let’s find out!

Honk if you love Hóngsè

It’s cool that the mapmaker did it right— all the shop signs make sense:

The fact that they translate ‘Reliable Excavation [&] Destruction’ makes me think there’s an equivalent sign ‘Builders League United’, but when I was grabbing screenshots I assumed that the red and blue signs were identical.  (Many are— e.g there are blue signs reading ‘Red Hotel’.)

 

Sound change: Who are the culprits?

I just finished William Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors, which is a detective story.  No, really.  You don’t expect a linguistic tome to have the literary quality of suspense, but this book does.  It’s organized around the central puzzler of historical linguistics: why does language change?  Why do people bother with sound changes, especially when everyone agrees that they’re destructive if not positively evil?  It takes the whole book to create a framework to answer the question.

This is mostly because Labov details his methods, his data, and what he does in the dark with statistics.  He mostly works with surveys he and his students have done at the University of Pennsylvania, though he references similar work that’s been done all over the world: New York, Detroit, Montreal, Cairo, London, Belfast, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Hong Kong, and more.

One hypothesis we can immediately reject: that people imitate the leaders of society.  Bluntly, people don’t come to talk like the king, or Congress.  All of the ongoing sound changes that have been identified are divergences from the standard.  Labov calls this change from below; other sociolinguists speak of covert prestige.  One obvious example is AAVE, the speech of urban American blacks, which more or less completely ignores both standard General American and the local dialects of northern whites.  Blacks and whites in the US don’t want to sound like each other.  (This isn’t a universal– Jamaican Londoners talk like everyone else, which Labov confirmed by playing recordings of them to white folks; they couldn’t tell that the speakers were black.)

In order to address how sounds change, Labov focussed on whose speech is changing.  The community doesn’t advance uniformly.  His findings:

• The leaders of sound change are almost always women; they’re often a generation ahead of the men.
• Women keep advancing a sound change in a linear fashion; men’s advance is stepwise.  The obvious interpretation is that men don’t pick up the change from their contemporaries, but from their mothers.
• There’s a typical curvilinear function of class: neither the lower class nor the upper class are in the forefront of change, but those in the middle– even more specifically, the upper working class.
• Nonstandard variants often peak in adolescence.  So older speakers may retreat from a change.
• There’s only a very small contribution from ethnicity or neighborhood (except to the degree that these correlate with class).
• A phoneme doesn’t change all at once; some words are leaders, some laggards.  For some reason, the tensing of short a in Philadelphia strongly affected the word planet, while Janet remained lax.  (This is reminiscent of the effect of Trojan horse words in gender change.)

Beyond this, Labov was able to identify individuals who were in the forefront of sound changes in Philadelphia.  Interestingly, they shared several characteristics.  They were upper working class women, with a strong nonconformist streak.  Perhaps most interestingly, they were what Malcolm Gladwell calls Connectors, people who were not only intensely involved with their neighborhoods, but had strong connections to other areas as well– the perfect people to spread ideas.

This tends to falsify notions that sound change is due to ignorance or laziness; the leaders are bright and upwardly mobile.  Sound changes are also not due to isolation; they’re centered on the most social people.  The paradox is that these women are just rebellious enough to fight social norms, but not enough to be dissipated or burned out.

So what happens, exactly?  Labov outlines the steps like this:

• Some phoneme P has asymmetrical neighbors in phonetic space: there’s a farther gap between its near neighbor N and a farther neighbor M.  Phonemes are realized with a certain amount of spread; as there’s more room in the direction of M, outliers in that direction are heard as valid instances of P.
• New languages learners thus move the phoneme in the direction of M– in effect, they mishear the outliers as normal tokens.
• The change is taken as characteristic of younger speakers and less formal speech.  It’s preferentiallyl taken up by nonconforming young women.
• Upwardly mobile women spread the change to higher and lower social classes.
• Men catch up to women in the next generation, as they pick up the now advanced sound change from their mothers.

Now, all this is unconscious.  These are not overt markers like a regional dialect– people are generally unaware of these changes, and if they’re pointed out the speakers are typically apologetic.  If a change does reach public awareness, it’s stigmatized.  It may continue to advance (it still has appeal as a marker of nonconformity), or it may just be retained as a long-term class marker.  (E.g. there’s some evidence that the pronunciation of -ing as -in’ goes back for centuries.)  If a local language variety is losing ground (generally to the standard language; this seems to be common in Europe), the leaders in this process also tend to be women.

A corollary is that people are lousy self-reporters.  Labov played people recordings of words showing different stages in different sound changes; invariably people reported themselves as much closer to the standard than they were, and even claimed that “no one talked like” the more extreme variations.  This should be a note of caution for linguists who rely on people’s evaluations of grammatical correctness!

Another curious fact: the closest analogue to sound change may be fashion, which is also driven by the preferences of middle class, highly social women.

 

Weirdifying your future Englishes

I’ve been reading William Labov’s book on social factors in sound change, and I’m finally getting to the good bit: where he starts explaining who are the leaders in change.

But more on that later.  For now, I realized that future Englishes should really incorporate the completed Northern Cities Sound Shift.  In particular, the “Stannud” of the Incatena should be Stennud or even Stiynnud.

 

LCK2 Info

I’ve put together a propaganda page for the LCK sequel, Advanced Language Construction.  (If you’re curious, calling it anything starting with Language Construction would screw up my Kindle reports page.  It’s already a hassle checking the page since I made the Language Construction Kitlet.)

I think this illo for the cover turned out well, so here’s a zoomable version.

Smile knowingly to yourself if you know what that glyph is.

 

LCK2: Scripsi

Edit: I’ve gotten a  lot of responses– thank you!  I am rushing through one more read-through so I can get it out to people, hopefully tomorrow night.

Not long ago I felt I’d written about all I had to say in the LCK2 (Advanced Language Construction), but I had only 250 pages, and I was aiming for 280.  Well, problem solved!  The section on modality added about 10 pages, and I just finished a short chapter on logic and loglangs.

Can you buy it?  Er, not yet!  I still need to spell-check it, index it, order a proof copy, draw the cover, and all that.  But you can read it, maybe!

I need a handful of readers, whose chief characteristic is a willingness to read a whole PDF and make some comments, and not take too long either.  (Although I have some weeks available, the earlier I get feedback the better, especially anything that requires research.)

Different ability levels are welcome; though I’d love to have readers who can find inaccuracies, I’m most interested in knowing what’s confusing or what’s missing.  You don’t have to have read the LCK, but if you’ve read nothing at all linguistic it’ll probably too hard.

So if that sounds like you, contact me (markrose at zompist dot com).