(no subject)
Ah, spring. You know, at Truman I learned that Russian has four seasons: osen, zima, besna and leto. But the truth is, they're really best referred to as sneg, lyod, gryaz and pyl. Current season: lyod. ::notches falls 6 and 7 on the year::
But that's not what I wanted to post about today. In revenge for yesterday's meaningless posts, I wanted to repost a comment I made on the NaNoWriMo boards to a person trying to build a model language for some dinosaur-based aliens. Only...the post disappeared. I suspect it was deleted because of degenerating debate over the OP's story idea, but I liked my own ideas so much I want to repost them here. Because I have an ego like that. And I've totally not been reading about R'lyehian.
For any language spoken by things that aren't basically humanoid (with the very human traits of a larynx, pharyx, oral cavity, tongue, etc.) you have to question the entire basis of its phonology. It also puts a conlanger in a position of creating a language she herself can't pronounce. H.P. Lovecraft just threw consonants at the page and kept going, but for someone more nerdy about the subject, like me, it's possibly to make some informed conjectures based on physiology.
I'm going to start by assuming the dinosaur in question is basically Velociraptor-like, even though Wikipedia tells me that everything I learned from Jurassic Park is wrong. :'-( (Apparently it was Deinonychus that was the super badass pack-hunter. Though they both had feathers. I guess feathers are cool.) This gives the dino a distinctly different vocal tract from humans, in the following ways:
1. Lips. Even if dinosaur lips were as flexible as human ones, they have an awfully long way to go around that wide mouth. So one one hand, they would quite likely be incapable of producing rounded vowels. On the other, this allows for some interesting potential coarticulation if they close their lips 'round the front but leave them open to the sides. (A dino trying to imitate humans would have to keep those lips tightly closed along the sides--their equivalent of talking with your lips puckered, I guess.)
2. Teeth. Nasty, pointy teeth. There is a reason why other primates have big teeth and humans do not--we would be in constant danger of slicing off segments of tongue while we talked. (I don't know how vampires do it, honestly.) A talking dinosaur that didn't want to give up the fangs would have to omit anything even approaching a dental point of articulation. On the other hand, those teeth wouldn't be as efficient a barrier to airflow as ours, so they might be able to produce a nifty fricative by hissing through them.
Yes, I did just try that. It sounded like "vrlt."
3. The elongated oral cavity helps make up for the teeth thing, though. It gives a dinosaur all kinds of potential extra points of articulation that are just impossible on humans, or are least which co-occur rarely in human speech. And since their palate had a higher arch to it than ours, that's a higher potential vowel space, and even without lip rounding it's no shorter. On the other hand, we have to question how flexible their tongues were--did they have the agility to do something like a retroflex articulation, where you kind of bend your tongue around backwards? What about laterals, like the sound of /l/? A stiff, narrow tongue that's got to dodge nasty pointy teeth might actually have trouble closing flush against the palate, in which case the dinos would be unable to pronounce stop consonants! Talk about reptilian speech--with nothing but fricatives and sonorants, it'd be like Parseltongue.
4. And then we come to the issue of the larynx, in two parts.
PART THE FIRST: Did dinosaurs even have them? Not all modern reptiles do, and birds (those crazy dino-cousins) have one but don't generally use it for phonation. Birds instead have a syrinx, which is located in the fork of the windpipe and has damn near magical qualities. In parrots, it's agile enough that they can imitate speech with it; in songbirds, it can produce two tones at once (a potential bonanza to a vowel-tone system!) A dino-alien with a syrinx could potentially use all kinds of crazy voice pitch and quality variations, but the downside would be a high pitch that makes them kind of non-threatening. Or maybe not. I was freaked out by Skeksis as a kid.
PART THE SECOND: If they do have a larynx, where is it? This is actually an important question. In most animals, the larynx sits high in the throat, where it can close flush against the nasal cavity during swallowing; that means there's very little risk of choking, since the esophagus and the windpipe aren't sharing an opening. In humans and a few other animals, though, the larynx is lower in the throat, and it's often argued that this is good for language since it lengthens the vocal tract. (Of course, dolphins and deer have descended larynxes, too, and probably not for linguistic reasons.) A high larynx means the vocal tract stops basically at the soft palate, but the long oral cavity might still allow the dinos to form the mid-ranged vowel sounds.
5. I haven't been able to find any information about dinosaur nasal cavities--if they had them and, if so, if they're wired up the same way a mammal's is. To create nasalized vowels and consonants, you have to be able to drop your soft palate (velum) and send air through your nose and mouth simultaneously; I don't see any reason why dinosaurs wouldn't be able to do this, but then again, until I started looking into it for the person on the NaNo boards, I didn't realize that crocodiles have no larynx.
N. So if I had free time (HAHAHAHAno.) I might actually try writing up a phonology for the dino-aliens. Assuming, of course, I could find out about the larynxes and the nasal cavities and stuff. Just for fun. Because I got a degree in a subject I like and someday I will live in a cardboard box.
Adventures in economizing: I am out of detergent. Tide is available here (and in fact some of my students thought the word "tide" translated as "порошок") but it is expense. You know what's not expensive? BARF.
...what? In Persian it means "snow."
But that's not what I wanted to post about today. In revenge for yesterday's meaningless posts, I wanted to repost a comment I made on the NaNoWriMo boards to a person trying to build a model language for some dinosaur-based aliens. Only...the post disappeared. I suspect it was deleted because of degenerating debate over the OP's story idea, but I liked my own ideas so much I want to repost them here. Because I have an ego like that. And I've totally not been reading about R'lyehian.
For any language spoken by things that aren't basically humanoid (with the very human traits of a larynx, pharyx, oral cavity, tongue, etc.) you have to question the entire basis of its phonology. It also puts a conlanger in a position of creating a language she herself can't pronounce. H.P. Lovecraft just threw consonants at the page and kept going, but for someone more nerdy about the subject, like me, it's possibly to make some informed conjectures based on physiology.
I'm going to start by assuming the dinosaur in question is basically Velociraptor-like, even though Wikipedia tells me that everything I learned from Jurassic Park is wrong. :'-( (Apparently it was Deinonychus that was the super badass pack-hunter. Though they both had feathers. I guess feathers are cool.) This gives the dino a distinctly different vocal tract from humans, in the following ways:
1. Lips. Even if dinosaur lips were as flexible as human ones, they have an awfully long way to go around that wide mouth. So one one hand, they would quite likely be incapable of producing rounded vowels. On the other, this allows for some interesting potential coarticulation if they close their lips 'round the front but leave them open to the sides. (A dino trying to imitate humans would have to keep those lips tightly closed along the sides--their equivalent of talking with your lips puckered, I guess.)
2. Teeth. Nasty, pointy teeth. There is a reason why other primates have big teeth and humans do not--we would be in constant danger of slicing off segments of tongue while we talked. (I don't know how vampires do it, honestly.) A talking dinosaur that didn't want to give up the fangs would have to omit anything even approaching a dental point of articulation. On the other hand, those teeth wouldn't be as efficient a barrier to airflow as ours, so they might be able to produce a nifty fricative by hissing through them.
Yes, I did just try that. It sounded like "vrlt."
3. The elongated oral cavity helps make up for the teeth thing, though. It gives a dinosaur all kinds of potential extra points of articulation that are just impossible on humans, or are least which co-occur rarely in human speech. And since their palate had a higher arch to it than ours, that's a higher potential vowel space, and even without lip rounding it's no shorter. On the other hand, we have to question how flexible their tongues were--did they have the agility to do something like a retroflex articulation, where you kind of bend your tongue around backwards? What about laterals, like the sound of /l/? A stiff, narrow tongue that's got to dodge nasty pointy teeth might actually have trouble closing flush against the palate, in which case the dinos would be unable to pronounce stop consonants! Talk about reptilian speech--with nothing but fricatives and sonorants, it'd be like Parseltongue.
4. And then we come to the issue of the larynx, in two parts.
PART THE FIRST: Did dinosaurs even have them? Not all modern reptiles do, and birds (those crazy dino-cousins) have one but don't generally use it for phonation. Birds instead have a syrinx, which is located in the fork of the windpipe and has damn near magical qualities. In parrots, it's agile enough that they can imitate speech with it; in songbirds, it can produce two tones at once (a potential bonanza to a vowel-tone system!) A dino-alien with a syrinx could potentially use all kinds of crazy voice pitch and quality variations, but the downside would be a high pitch that makes them kind of non-threatening. Or maybe not. I was freaked out by Skeksis as a kid.
PART THE SECOND: If they do have a larynx, where is it? This is actually an important question. In most animals, the larynx sits high in the throat, where it can close flush against the nasal cavity during swallowing; that means there's very little risk of choking, since the esophagus and the windpipe aren't sharing an opening. In humans and a few other animals, though, the larynx is lower in the throat, and it's often argued that this is good for language since it lengthens the vocal tract. (Of course, dolphins and deer have descended larynxes, too, and probably not for linguistic reasons.) A high larynx means the vocal tract stops basically at the soft palate, but the long oral cavity might still allow the dinos to form the mid-ranged vowel sounds.
5. I haven't been able to find any information about dinosaur nasal cavities--if they had them and, if so, if they're wired up the same way a mammal's is. To create nasalized vowels and consonants, you have to be able to drop your soft palate (velum) and send air through your nose and mouth simultaneously; I don't see any reason why dinosaurs wouldn't be able to do this, but then again, until I started looking into it for the person on the NaNo boards, I didn't realize that crocodiles have no larynx.
N. So if I had free time (HAHAHAHAno.) I might actually try writing up a phonology for the dino-aliens. Assuming, of course, I could find out about the larynxes and the nasal cavities and stuff. Just for fun. Because I got a degree in a subject I like and someday I will live in a cardboard box.
Adventures in economizing: I am out of detergent. Tide is available here (and in fact some of my students thought the word "tide" translated as "порошок") but it is expense. You know what's not expensive? BARF.
...what? In Persian it means "snow."