Language Building and Gallifreyan
Language building is... interesting. Basically, you need to know how real languages develop if you intend to make one up on your own, never mind trying to bridge a gap between a written aesthetic and a verbal component. This little train of thought popped up via following links posted by friends. A friend-of-a-friend seemed to be in the midst of throwing together a written dictionary of Gallifreyan. Only, it didn't make the least amount of sense as any functional language.
And, it's coming out here now, because I've just had a strong coffee, it's one particular thought process I've been playing with, and I'm an insomniac.
So, a friend directed me to a great transliteration device for Gallifreyan. It takes the basic visual components of the fictional language, simplifies them, and then assigns English phonetics to individual aspects. It really is just for transliteration rather than any form of functioning, fictional language. It's simple, elegant, and logical. There is a reading pattern (counter-clockwise, starting from the bottom of eack contained circle), a system of phonetic representations, and a page from "the beginners' guide to reducing redundancy in visual language"-- replacing the hard "c" with a "k", and a soft, drawn "c" with an "s", which is a standard transliteration device.
And then, following links from another friend produced a "dictionary" of sorts covering this fictional language, built from the opposite direction. The author was approaching it in the most complicated manner: lexicon first. By doing this, the result was interesting, but messy. It wasn't simple, nor elegant, but it represented complete thoughts. Rather than starting with something familiar to a Westerner, it resembled more of a traditional Kanji sort of system (forgive me, I studied Japanese for my SOV linguistic backgrounds, so I'm not wholly familiar with the Chinese written language, and the comparison is made solely because the Gallifreyan author does not implement a guide for individual syllables, and attempted to begin the project with full thoughts and words represented by single images). This led to two immediate problems. One, it was too complicated to just pick up and play with, thus allowing it to be accessible to a wider range of people to help it evolve into a standard. And two, the aesthetic was lost because there is just no way to logically manipulate or simplify what was going on.
So, language building. It's very, very simple. Pick a sound, or series of sounds, and assign them a meaning. That's language. The verbal component develops first because... Well, we as a species like noise. It's how we communicate at large. And though illiteracy is slowly but surely getting stamped out, we're not passing notes to each other for day-to-day immediate communication.
The thing is, it's not that simple for written language. In written language, you need identifiers. A sound makes a syllable makes a symbol. A selection of syllables need to be represented in a logical order, and be easy enough to manipulate to evolve with the spoken language. We read left-to-right, on a horizontal level for English and its many sister languages. And even though English is fucking complicated (mainly because it's a thug language that survives by stealing the nearest, easiest sounds and words from everything around it) it's functional. The word "what" has survived in it's current form for millennia. It's a handy word. But the writing system... Holy fuck did that ever evolve. English didn't actually have one for ages, and when it finally adopted an alphabet, it stole the sounds and bastardized others. It's why I hate the IPA, I can't make heads or tails of it on it's own, but seeing it against an actual word, it makes sense. Present-day written English is just as stitched together as the spoken parts of it.
This is where the first example of Gallifreyan shines. It not only simplified everything to a series of repeated, easily altered symbols, it assigned single sounds to each one. It laid out how to read it first (start at the bottom, move widdershins), explained how to contain the single word (one circle), and then how to add the syllables (add or remove symbols within that circle). A single word is a contained set of syllables, and this Gallifreyan set up a way to contain and modify.
Since Doctor Who is sci-fi, and plays with theoretical physics, a lot,it makes sense that the visual language would mimic science. Circular pattern of a word is reused to contain the sentence. It's all a series of circles.
The second example is also a series of circles, but less defined. It's all very pretty at the level of individual words, but none of them allow for complete, contained sentences, and there's no room to modify it. There's no syllabic context-- sounds are not visually repeated, so there is no logic to the pattern. This is where the kanji comparison comes in. The author has created a visual representation for full concepts and words-- pictograms, really-- but has no way to string them together to match a spoken component. It's like reading hieroglyphs. You know and comprehend the symbol for what it's supposed to represent, but you need to have a course in how the sentences are formed. It's a perfect representation of a dead language. It's impenetrable by everyone else.
The first system builds from the ground up-- adapting a simple aesthetic system to a current spoken language. The second gets thrown together without any concept of where it's going or how it got there.
See, language builders are lazy. Incredibly so. It's why we constantly drop spellings, letters, and sounds. Living language evolves, constantly. New words are always added, and old ones are dropped away in favour of the simple (with a few backfires, since we never did recover from the loss of "ye"). Written language needs to allow for accents and dialects. Which is why the building blocks are simplified images for single sounds. Grammar comes later. But, when you do add in the grammar, it's more than just a way to link the individual concepts together-- grammar is, by far, the most mutable thing about any language, and subject to so, so much abuse.
Developing a fictional language needs you to think about only one thing once you've got a basic representation system: is it subject-verb-object or subject-object-verb? Do you want to write it as "I speak Gallifreyan" or "I Gallifreyan speak"? (and a note on that: given the history, origins, and development of Doctor Who, a SVO language is most likely-- particularly given the fact that the TARDIS translation matrix does seem to account for transliterations-- "River Song" vs. "Melody Pond")
If an author simply copies out verb tenses and a lexicon like it's from a school book, the language won't have a natural rhythm. I could easily recite the variations of "être" or "desu", but that doesn't mean that parroting it back is going to create a living, logical language. Never mind that the latter changes with station, use, context, and verbal grammatical markers.
In the Gallifreyan example, the first author works with a current language to develop the sound systems necessary. This allows others to build on the grammar (he omitted commas, so a friend and I created them within the confines of the rules already set down), personal aesthetic, and thus a regional or dialect method. The sounds are universal, and this system is a fun little building block exercise.
The second author gives a static language. Pretty when completed, but dead. With the unchanging dictionary format laid out already, there's no room to grow. Without any logical, repeated symbols to represent individual syllables and sounds, there's no taking personalization into account. It's finite, and only growing when the author deems it.
And that's just an undeveloped fictional language. Tolkien's "Tengwar" writing system encompasses three notable "living" languages, complete with individual variations to allow for culture, classes, dialects, and history. Never mind that the sounds represented are from a Proto-Indo-European mother language, and can therefore, technically, be used to write present-day English, Polish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Swedish, Esperanto, an probably a handful more from the same family. The cultured components between written Quenyan and Sindarin and beautifully developed, with specific, real-world bases for sounds and structure (Finnish-Greek-Latin for the former and a Welsh base for the latter). Yes, the man was a linguist by trade, but that is how you do it. It's still around, and used by fans. Tengwar-- a single writing system manipulated to cover two spoken languages-- makes sense. And learning it is like learning Latin. You can learn how to write the sounds before you learn the words.
Well, that was a nice tangent. But this is what happens when I read things like The Lexicographer's Dilemma for fun.
Language is awesome.
And, it's coming out here now, because I've just had a strong coffee, it's one particular thought process I've been playing with, and I'm an insomniac.
So, a friend directed me to a great transliteration device for Gallifreyan. It takes the basic visual components of the fictional language, simplifies them, and then assigns English phonetics to individual aspects. It really is just for transliteration rather than any form of functioning, fictional language. It's simple, elegant, and logical. There is a reading pattern (counter-clockwise, starting from the bottom of eack contained circle), a system of phonetic representations, and a page from "the beginners' guide to reducing redundancy in visual language"-- replacing the hard "c" with a "k", and a soft, drawn "c" with an "s", which is a standard transliteration device.
And then, following links from another friend produced a "dictionary" of sorts covering this fictional language, built from the opposite direction. The author was approaching it in the most complicated manner: lexicon first. By doing this, the result was interesting, but messy. It wasn't simple, nor elegant, but it represented complete thoughts. Rather than starting with something familiar to a Westerner, it resembled more of a traditional Kanji sort of system (forgive me, I studied Japanese for my SOV linguistic backgrounds, so I'm not wholly familiar with the Chinese written language, and the comparison is made solely because the Gallifreyan author does not implement a guide for individual syllables, and attempted to begin the project with full thoughts and words represented by single images). This led to two immediate problems. One, it was too complicated to just pick up and play with, thus allowing it to be accessible to a wider range of people to help it evolve into a standard. And two, the aesthetic was lost because there is just no way to logically manipulate or simplify what was going on.
So, language building. It's very, very simple. Pick a sound, or series of sounds, and assign them a meaning. That's language. The verbal component develops first because... Well, we as a species like noise. It's how we communicate at large. And though illiteracy is slowly but surely getting stamped out, we're not passing notes to each other for day-to-day immediate communication.
The thing is, it's not that simple for written language. In written language, you need identifiers. A sound makes a syllable makes a symbol. A selection of syllables need to be represented in a logical order, and be easy enough to manipulate to evolve with the spoken language. We read left-to-right, on a horizontal level for English and its many sister languages. And even though English is fucking complicated (mainly because it's a thug language that survives by stealing the nearest, easiest sounds and words from everything around it) it's functional. The word "what" has survived in it's current form for millennia. It's a handy word. But the writing system... Holy fuck did that ever evolve. English didn't actually have one for ages, and when it finally adopted an alphabet, it stole the sounds and bastardized others. It's why I hate the IPA, I can't make heads or tails of it on it's own, but seeing it against an actual word, it makes sense. Present-day written English is just as stitched together as the spoken parts of it.
This is where the first example of Gallifreyan shines. It not only simplified everything to a series of repeated, easily altered symbols, it assigned single sounds to each one. It laid out how to read it first (start at the bottom, move widdershins), explained how to contain the single word (one circle), and then how to add the syllables (add or remove symbols within that circle). A single word is a contained set of syllables, and this Gallifreyan set up a way to contain and modify.
Since Doctor Who is sci-fi, and plays with theoretical physics, a lot,it makes sense that the visual language would mimic science. Circular pattern of a word is reused to contain the sentence. It's all a series of circles.
The second example is also a series of circles, but less defined. It's all very pretty at the level of individual words, but none of them allow for complete, contained sentences, and there's no room to modify it. There's no syllabic context-- sounds are not visually repeated, so there is no logic to the pattern. This is where the kanji comparison comes in. The author has created a visual representation for full concepts and words-- pictograms, really-- but has no way to string them together to match a spoken component. It's like reading hieroglyphs. You know and comprehend the symbol for what it's supposed to represent, but you need to have a course in how the sentences are formed. It's a perfect representation of a dead language. It's impenetrable by everyone else.
The first system builds from the ground up-- adapting a simple aesthetic system to a current spoken language. The second gets thrown together without any concept of where it's going or how it got there.
See, language builders are lazy. Incredibly so. It's why we constantly drop spellings, letters, and sounds. Living language evolves, constantly. New words are always added, and old ones are dropped away in favour of the simple (with a few backfires, since we never did recover from the loss of "ye"). Written language needs to allow for accents and dialects. Which is why the building blocks are simplified images for single sounds. Grammar comes later. But, when you do add in the grammar, it's more than just a way to link the individual concepts together-- grammar is, by far, the most mutable thing about any language, and subject to so, so much abuse.
Developing a fictional language needs you to think about only one thing once you've got a basic representation system: is it subject-verb-object or subject-object-verb? Do you want to write it as "I speak Gallifreyan" or "I Gallifreyan speak"? (and a note on that: given the history, origins, and development of Doctor Who, a SVO language is most likely-- particularly given the fact that the TARDIS translation matrix does seem to account for transliterations-- "River Song" vs. "Melody Pond")
If an author simply copies out verb tenses and a lexicon like it's from a school book, the language won't have a natural rhythm. I could easily recite the variations of "être" or "desu", but that doesn't mean that parroting it back is going to create a living, logical language. Never mind that the latter changes with station, use, context, and verbal grammatical markers.
In the Gallifreyan example, the first author works with a current language to develop the sound systems necessary. This allows others to build on the grammar (he omitted commas, so a friend and I created them within the confines of the rules already set down), personal aesthetic, and thus a regional or dialect method. The sounds are universal, and this system is a fun little building block exercise.
The second author gives a static language. Pretty when completed, but dead. With the unchanging dictionary format laid out already, there's no room to grow. Without any logical, repeated symbols to represent individual syllables and sounds, there's no taking personalization into account. It's finite, and only growing when the author deems it.
And that's just an undeveloped fictional language. Tolkien's "Tengwar" writing system encompasses three notable "living" languages, complete with individual variations to allow for culture, classes, dialects, and history. Never mind that the sounds represented are from a Proto-Indo-European mother language, and can therefore, technically, be used to write present-day English, Polish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Swedish, Esperanto, an probably a handful more from the same family. The cultured components between written Quenyan and Sindarin and beautifully developed, with specific, real-world bases for sounds and structure (Finnish-Greek-Latin for the former and a Welsh base for the latter). Yes, the man was a linguist by trade, but that is how you do it. It's still around, and used by fans. Tengwar-- a single writing system manipulated to cover two spoken languages-- makes sense. And learning it is like learning Latin. You can learn how to write the sounds before you learn the words.
Well, that was a nice tangent. But this is what happens when I read things like The Lexicographer's Dilemma for fun.
Language is awesome.