Some Thoughts on Machi Languages

Machi and Bogomol are a pair of alien languages created by Terrance Donnelly for the mantis-like inhabitants of Amaterasu, a fictional Earthlike planet of Epsilon Indi (who are also called machi).

The machi's vocal apparatus acts much like a flute, producing 15 distinct notes per individual. The machi have a limited ability to actively adjust their vocal tract length to vary their fundamental frequency (useful when singing to bring different individuals in tune). Nevertheless, the range of fundamental frequencies available to a given individual varies as they grow (and thus as their vocal tract grows), and between individuals--thus, Terrance accurately realized that, just like human speech which must be produceable by a wide range of differing human vocal tracts, and unlike engineered languages like Solresol, machi languages could not be based on specific absolute pitches. Humans recognize phonemes despite varying absolute frequencies by comparing the ratios of multiple resonant formants. Similarly, machi languages use multi-note "syllables", which can be reliably identified by the ratios between successive notes; the eponymous Machi language uses two-note syllables, with the syllable count increased by allowing for staccato vs. legato articulation and the use of rapid triplets in place of individual notes. In contrast, Bogomol words are structured as sets of three-note syllables, with no distinctions of articulation type.

Unfortunately, Terrance seems not to have been able to fully commit himself to the idea that individual syllables could be disambiguated on their own. In the description of Machi, it states

Since a machi can theoretically have any fundamental pitch, it is customary for strangers to precede at least the first few utterances with a "reference" syllable consisting of the speaker's lowest pitch, first in long, and then in short, duration.

And for Bogomol:

Instead of a formal, established syllable, Bogomol machi simply precede their utterances when necessary with a long note at their fundamental tone as reference.

This seems very forced an unnatural to me. Even in the absence of simultaneous frequency ratio information, as when interpreting lexical tone in a register-tone language or when listening to single-formant whistled speech, humans are quite capable of inferring the appropriate baseline for a given speaker from a short series of successive notes, and never have to consciously communicate about that baseline. I would expect that aliens who are physiologically restricted to something roughly like whistled speech would only get even better at that. If we take the in-world premise of the documentation seriously, however, the surface level evidence of this cultural practice of the machi can, I think, be saved, by interpreting the human documentarian as an unreliable narrator who misunderstands the purpose of these simple utterances--they could be simple paralinguistic utterances, e.g. for floor-claiming or introduction, which entirely by chance happen to be useful to English and Russian-speaking investigators for identifying individuals and their individual scales.

The grammars of Machi and Bogomol are quite different--although, the surviving documentation on Bogomol grammar is quite sparse, such that I might call it a "fictional language" rather than a "constructed language", especially since the in-world documentation (which states that research on Bogomol is extremely difficult due to the remote environment in which its speakers live) supports the hypothesis that its grammar may have never been worked out in detail in the first place. What is documented for Bogomol, however, is a very neat conceit; all Bogomol content words are highly polysemous, but, rather than expecting the correct meaning to interpreted from discourse context, Bogomol sentences are always concluded with a "rank" specifier, which retroactively specifies the correct set of meanings to activate. This similar to an idea I've had bouncing around for a while to use pre-posed "domain specifiers" to reduce lexical ambiguity, but by choosing to shift that function to the end, Bogomol universally gains an implicature effect similar to what can be done with Fith by choosing to float arguments on the stack. I don't find it particularly realistic, as I doubt any intelligent species would put up with the necessity for that level of poetic processing in every single utterance, but as a sci-fi conceit it is neat.

Machi is a verbless language using the relational-tagging strategy, using special label-words to identify all of the roles played by all of the participants in an event without needing a distinct verb phrase to specify the event itself. Objects and labels are the main parts of speech (so it is clearly not a monocategorial language), and it also has a heterogenous class of syntactic function words, which it calls "parsers", for coordination, listing, and subordination. Overall, by not going all the way to monocategoriality, and maintaining the lexical-functional distinction, but instead inventing new lexical parts of speech slightly different from what is common in human languages, I feel like Machi does an excellent job of looking like a plausible alien language in grammar as well as phonology.

Some Thoughts... Index