Some Thoughts on Iljena

    Iljena is an alien conlang by Pete Bleackley, also the author of Khangaþyagon which I reviewed previously.

    The key conceit of Iljena is that all words encode both a nominal root and a verbal root--and based on both the grammar notes and the dictionary, there are no other parts of speech. All verbs are monovalent, and you construct large propositions by chaining together noun-verbs that describe what each participant is doing. It's sort of like the disambiguation strategy sometimes employed in natlangs where a transitive clause that lacks distinctive subject and object marking (like two neuter nouns in a positive-polarity Russian sentence, or nouns with equal animacy in a direct-inverse language) can be split in two with an antipassive clause and a passive clause--i.e., instead of "Bob saw Bill", "Bob saw, Bill was seen". Except that Iljena doesn't have a passive construction, it just has enough different verb roots to cover all the necessary meanings, whether one is an agent or patient or instrument or whatever in any particular scene.

    With the lack of any other parts of speech, however, it is unclear how boundaries between clausal constituents are determined, how attachment ambiguities might be resolved, or how references to events-as-things are made, and the only ordering constraint is that 

Word order is used to convey the flow of the action between the participants, and to bring together closely related participants.

    However, David Gil has shown us that you don't really need to formalize all that grammatical machinery all of the time, and the corpus of Conlang Relay texts in Iljena, which have been translated reasonably faithfully by following relay participants, demonstrates that it does work well enough. Pete's own documentation notes that Iljena could be considered a "verbless" language, based on the idea that verb roots could instead be interpreted as noun cases (which is one of the possible solutions to verblessness I discussed in my own article How To Not Verb), but he (and the fictional Leyen people who speak Iljena) prefer to think of the relevant open lexical class as verb roots, rather than case morphology--and I tend to agree. The complete lack of function words makes Iljena a decidedly non-human language, but that's fine--it's not supposed to be!

    As noted, Iljena does seem to work just fine as it is, so I won't presume to suggest improvements--but I think it would be neat to see a language that takes the one verb--one noun approach and embeds it in a larger system of grammatical function words for eliminating structural ambiguities. And it would also be neat to see some more detailed analyses of the existing corpus texts, beyond simple interlinear glosses, that might be able to extract more empirical rules about Iljena grammatical structure.

Some Thoughts... Index

Some Thoughts on Toki Pona

Toki Pona is a minimalist philosophical artistic language, not an auxlang. Nevertheless, it has attracted a fairly large and international community of users--enough so that it was possible for Sonja Lang to publish a descriptive book on natural usage of Toki Pona (The Toki Pona Dictionary)! Thus, while this should in no way be seen as a criticism in the negative sense of Sonja's creation, it seems fair to critique Toki Pona on how optimized its design is as an auxlang.

Toki Pona has 92 valid syllables, composed of 9 consonants and 5 vowels. Accounting for disallowed clusters at syllable boundaries, this results in 7519 possible 2-syllable words--far, far more than any accounting of the size of Toki Pona's non-proper-noun vocabulary, which does not surpass 200 words. In developing the toki suli whistle register, I discovered that some phonemes can be merged without any loss of lexical fidelity--so even if we wanted to additional restrictions like spreading out words in phonological space to eliminate minimal pairs, or ensuring that the language was uniquely segmentable, the phonetic inventory and phonotactic rules are clearly larger and more permissive than they strictly need to be. And a smaller phonemic inventory and stricter phonotactics would theoretically make it trivially pronounceable by a larger number of people. For example, we could reduce it to a 3-vowel system (/a i u/), eliminate /t/ (merging with either /k/ or /s/) and merge /l/ and /j/. More careful consideration in building a system from scratch rather than trying to pair away at Toki Pona's existing system could minimize things even further, but if we start there, and require that all syllables be strictly CV, then 7x3=21 valid syllables and 441 valid 2-syllable words. We could rebuild a lexicon on top of that with no minimal pairs and unique segmentation just fine, or choose to make the phonemic inventory even smaller--all while still reducing the average Toki Pona word length, since the current vocabulary does include a few trisyllabic words!

The grammar, on the other hand, I really have no complaints about. It is not quite as simple as it could be (e.g., li could be made always obligatory, rather than onligatory-unless-the-subject-is-mi-or-sina), but it's really quite good--and the minor complexities actually help add to its charm as an artlang.

I am not much inclined to actually construct a phonologically-optimized relex of Toki Pona, as what would be the use? But it is fun to imagine an alternate history in which Toki Pona was designed from the outset with usage as an auxlang in mind. Would it actually have become as successful as it is, had Sonja taken that route? Perhaps we need to consider another contributor to Toki Pona's popularity--Sonja's specific phonological aesthetic. As mathematically sub-optimal as it is, Toki Pona sounds nice. Would it still have become popular if its sounds were instead fully min-maxed for optimal intercultural pronoucneability, length, and distinctiveness? Maybe I'll build a Toki Pona relex after all, just to see if it can be made to sound pretty....

Some Thoughts... Index

The Year of Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson has never put a conlang in a book. But he is aware of them, and has done stuff with fictional languages and naming practices. Brandon Sanderson also speaks Korean; not only is he bilingual, but his second language is not just another European language. It's something very different from English which I might expect to have provided him with a greater degree of metalinguistic awareness than the average author, and raises my expectations for linguistic sophistication in his books.

In my review of Larry Niven's Grammar Lesson, I wrote

There are all sorts of other ways that this kind of grammatical quirk could be integrated into a sci-fi story that have nothing to do with exemplifying or manipulating the speakers' psychology. Brandon Sanderson actually gives a good example of this in the Mistborn trilogy... which is something I shall have to discuss after I get my hands on Secret Project Four and can do a Big Unified Sanderson Linguistics Post.

This is that post. Now, I have not read everything that Brandon has ever written, and I have forgotten some of what I have read, so this will not be completely comprehensive, but we can start with that example from the Mistborn trilogy. (<- Amazon Affiliate link.) A large portion of the plot in the later stages of the story revolves around the interpretation of an ancient prophecy, which is complicated both by magical interference that alters the records, and by actual linguistic drift. Whatever language they speak on the planet Scadrial (which realistically has just one standard language amongst its human inhabitants, given the global level of control exercised by the immortal Lord Ruler) in the Mistborn era, it evidently has an English-like system of strictly gendered animate pronouns, whereas the ancient language of the prophecy has an epicene (gender neutral) third person--a feature which Brandon may have been aware of from Korean! This complicates the process of translation, as any given translator must make a choice about how to render this pronoun in the modern language, which biases the interpretations of the modern characters in plot-significant ways. Good job, Brandon! The names are just.. eh, they're fine. But on the bright side, there is so little in the way of native names and non-English cultural terms that the field is wide open for any conlanger who might be hired to create a proper language--there's very little restriction imposed by the existing linguistic cannon!

The bulk of this review, as you can tell from the title, will focus on the four books from the Year of Sanderson: Tress of the Emerald Sea, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook, Yumi & the Nightmare Painter, and The Sunlit Man. (<- All Amazon Affiliate links.)

It turns out that The Sunlit Man has the most linguistic content to comment upon, so I'll be going through the books in reverse publication order. There is still little enough that I can do a nearly-complete listing of the interesting bits.

Starting on page page 2 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get this:

The man shook him, barking at Nomad in a language he didn’t understand.
“Trans . . . translation?” Nomad croaked.
Sorry, a deep, monotone voice said in his head. We don’t have enough Investiture for that.

which is packed with information: there is translation magic, it's not working right now so we'll have to actually deal with the consequences of a language barrier, but we should expect it to start working eventually because explicitly mentioning it here makes it a massive Chekhov's gun, so we won't be getting a language-learning montage.

Page 21 has two bits of secondary language representation, with usages of diegetic translation and contextual irrelevance:

Another of the officers nodded, staring at Nomad. “Sess Nassith Tor,” he whispered.
Curious, the knight says. I almost understood that. It’s very similar to another language I’m still faintly Connected to.
“Any idea which one?” Nomad growled.
No. But . . . I think . . . Sess Nassith Tor . . . It means something like . . . One Who Escaped the Sun.
...

Glowing Eyes gestured to Nomad. “Kor Sess Nassith Tor,” he said with a sneer, then kicked Nomad again for good measure.
A few officers scrambled forward and grabbed him under the arms to drag him off.

For all I know, this connects with stuff in the Stormlight Archive, which I haven't read yet because I'm waiting for the series to be complete, but since I know from his own public statements that Brandon has not created any full conlangs, I kinda suspect this is ad-hoc--but it works because there is little enough there that the possibilities for how to analyze it and justify the translation are practically unrestricted, and it's impossible to prove any inconsistency. But, we also know that whatever this language is, it is definitely not just a relex of English, because Brandon had enough awareness to not allow for a word-for-word matchup! (I'd guess that "nassith" is some kind of participle, but like I said, interpretations are pretty much unrestricted with this little data.) In the second instance, we could try to make some guesses about what "kor" means based on the surrounding contextual actions, but ultimately it just doesn't actually matter, except that the glowy-eyed guy is emphasizing something, which we get from the italics.

Page 28 gives us a Failure To Communicate and a reminder of why translation magic isn't working, and that Nomad needs to be working on fixing that--i.e., reiterating that we ain't gonna see Nomad doing any monolingual fieldwork. After that, we get all the way to page 64 before we get some more metalinguistic description:

He said this in Alethi on purpose, which wasn’t his native tongue. Previous experiences had taught him not to speak in his own language, lest it slip out in the local dialect. That was how Connection worked; what Auxiliary was doing would make his soul think he’d been raised on this planet, so its language came as naturally to him as his own once had.

So, we get a name for a language that Nomad actually knows, we know that it isn't his native language (so maybe that'll come up later?), and we get some more details of how the translation magic actually works, which turns out to be probably the most sensible way to do it!  

Pages 71 and 79 tell us about the linguistic environment on this particular planet:

“Is this the stranger? What is his name?”
“I was not graced with such information,” Rebeke said. “He doesn’t seem able to understand the words I speak. As if . . . he doesn’t know language.”
Zeal made a few motions with his hands, gesturing at his ears, then tapping his palms together. He thought maybe Nomad was deaf? A reasonable guess, Nomad supposed. No one else on this planet had tried that approach.

So, apparently there is only one acoustic language on this planet (which turns out to be quite reasonable under the circumstances, as it was in Mistborn), and people are not generally aware that there can be other languages. However, there is also at least one sign language--so, yay for sign representation, and, wow, that implies quite a lot about this very tiny society that's struggling to survive. How the heck do they maintain a sign-using language community when there probably aren't that many deaf people around? But, moving on to page 79:

“I offer this thought: do you suppose he’s from a far northern corridor? They speak in ways that, on occasion, make a woman need to concentrate to understand.”
“If it pleases you to be disagreed with, Compassion,” Contemplation said, “I don’t think this is a mere accent. No, not at all. Regardless, there are more pressing matters.[...]”

it turns out that at least some people do have an awareness of dialect continua! Which, in contrast to the situation on Scadrial, absolutely should exist in this setting. 

On page 133, after getting his translation magic to work, Nomad manages to explain the concept of other languages to a local:

“Why do you do that?” Rebeke asked. “Talk gibberish sometimes?”“It’s my own language,” he said. “In other places, Rebeke, people speak all kinds of words you wouldn’t recognize.”

And then on page 175, we get an in-character acknowledgment of the underlying language barrier:

“Wait, how tall are these mountains?” Nomad asked.
“Tall,” Zeal said. “At least a thousand feet.”
A thousand feet? Like a single thousand?
At first, he assumed that the Connection had stopped working, and he hadn’t interpreted those words correctly.

Not much to say about that aside from, hey, any representation of someone actually having realistic struggles with a non-native language is a rare thing and it's nice to see it acknowledged.

On page 238, we get a little background on the Alethi language that Nomad knows but is not his mother tongue, and also a word in his actual mother tongue with diegetic translation:

They called themselves the Alethi, but we knew them as the Tagarut. The breakers, it means.

On page 290, we get a fun cultural note:

“You blessed fool,” Hardy said. “We’re all a group of blessed fools.”
Wait, the knight says. Is that fellow using the word “blessed” as . . . as a curse?
“It’s a conservative religious society,” Nomad said in Alethi. “You use the tools you’re given.”

This is a good acknowledgment that the common sources of curse words vary from culture to culture. The way that Quebecois French speakers swear is etymologically quite different from how the overlapping English-speaking Canadian community swears! It's also worth noting here that for the most part, Brandon uses a non-diegetic translation convention with dialog tags clarifying the diegetic language when it is other-than-standard to indicate the variety of fictional languages present in this setting.

Page 342 is a comparative gold mine, where we get some information about Nomad's mother tongue and about the local culture:

“It is the name I deserve. And it sounds a little like my birth name, in my own language.”
“Which is?”
“Sigzil,” he whispered. [...]
“Nomad,” Compassion said. “A wanderer with no place. That name no longer fits you, Sigzel, because you have a place. Here, with us.” She said the name a little oddly, according to their own accents.
...

“We name you Zellion,” Contemplation said. [...]
“It means One Who Finds,” Compassion said. “Though I know not the original language.”
“It’s from Yolen,” he whispered. “Where my master was born.”

So, now we know that, whatever the word for "nomad" is in Nomad / Zellion's mother tongue, it is phonetically close to "Sigzil"; and we know that the local language has at least slightly different phonological rules, such that they can only approximate it as "Sigzel"; and we've got a probable participle or relativized verb from from a third language, from a named planet so we can potentially correlate that with information from other books in the Cosmere. I really want to emphasize here that, although Brandon isn't being particularly innovative with interpretive techniques (we've just got straight diegetic translation going on), and there are no actual conlangs backing this up, Brandon is still managing to include references to realistic linguistic features that highlight differences that should exist between different fictional languages, which does a lot to add linguistic depth to the setting even without a fully constructed conlang or even a worked-out naming language.

On page 374, we get a couple more names of languages, including, finally, an identification of (a clear Anglicization of) Sigzil/Nomad/Zellion's mother tongue:

“Rosharan,” the man said in his own tongue. “Can we speak in a civilized language, please? Do you speak Malwish?”
Zellion shook his head, pretending not to understand and hoping they didn’t speak any of his native languages. At least he could honestly claim ignorance of Azish, having been forced to overwrite the ability to speak that with the local language.

And that is confirmed on page 413:

It was more of an Alethi thing actually, not an Azish one.

And there we have it: The complete overview of linguistic representation in The Sunlit Man.

Yumi & the Nightmare Painter has a very different approach to linguistic representation. Our two lead characters, Yumi and Painter (aka Nikaro) speak related languages (spoilers: one being a descendant of the other), and this is referenced to explain why they can understand each other, but there is no practical indication in the interactions between Yumi and Nikaro that there are any noticeable differences in the languages (thanks again to some magical translation shenanigans). There is a mention near the end of the book that people from Nikaro's city cannot understand those from Yumi's when the general populations finally meet, so they are in fact different languages, but for all that it impacts foreground character interactions, they might as well be speaking exactly the same language. Accordingly, there is much less material to catalog and analyze.

On page 3 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get an introduction to the term "hion":

After losing his staring match, the nightmare painter strolled along the street, which was silent save for the hum of the hion lines.

which is thoroughly described by the following several paragraphs. But then on page 10, we get introduced to the term "yoki-hijo", with far more ambiguous translation:

The Chosen. The yoki-hijo. The girl of commanding primal spirits.

Are these all different titles? Or does "yoki-hijo" mean "The Chosen"? Or does it mean "the girl of commanding primal spirits"? This gets resolved by implication on page 13, where we have an example of appositional translation:

Yumi was one of the Chosen, picked at birth, granted the ability to influence the hijo, the spirits.

OK, so "hijo" means spirits, so "yoki-hijo" probably means "the girl of commanding primal spirits". That's a lot to pack into the word "yoki" and the semantics of whatever construction is implied by the juxtaposition. Quite a potential challenge for any conlanger who might try to engineer a proper conlang compatible with the textual evidence. (Spoiler: I'd bet the "hi-" in "hion" and "hijo" are meant to be related.)

On the next page (14), we get explicit translation by the narrator (who happens to be Hoid):

Liyun, her kihomaban—a word that meant something between a guardian and a sponsor. We’ll use the term “warden” for simplicity.

Back on page 12, we get introduced to the word "tobok", with a definition implied by context in the process of getting dressed:

Then the tobok, in two layers of thick colorful cloth, with a wide bell skirt.

And explicit translation for the term "getuk":

Torish clogs—they call them getuk—feel like bricks tied to my feet.

"Kihomaban" and "getuk" appear nowhere else after they are introduced and defined, so they seem to serve the sole purpose of providing scene setting--they tell you something about what the language they come from sounds like, and Hoid providing definitions reminds you that these people Are Not Speaking English. "Tobok" gets reused throughout the novel as a borrowed-into-English cultural term for this specific type of clothing, but never in dialog or thoughts by the actual characters. This word is apparently inspired by "bok", the Korean word for "clothing", which backs up the general Korean-inspired aesthetic of the whole book.

Also on page 14, we get an explicit discussion of historical linguistics and grammar:

Yumi quickly rose. “Is it time, Warden-nimi?” she said, with enormous respect.
Yumi’s and Painter’s languages shared a common root, and in both there was a certain affectation I find hard to express in your tongue. They could conjugate sentences, or add modifiers to words, to indicate praise or derision. Interestingly, no curses or swears existed among them. They would simply change a word to its lowest form instead.

This obviously, and Brandon has publically admitted, directly ripped off from Korean and Japanese. But much like "kihomaban" and "getuk", we don't really see this surfaced in the text; instead, dialog is annotated with parenthesized "(lowly)" and "(highly)" where relevant. That's not really something I would've predicted would work, and the fact that Brandon is massively famous and popular already means that I can't really use this book as evidence that it's a good idea. Maybe it's a failed experiment. But, I haven't actually seen any complaints about it in any reviews so far, so maybe that's a positive signal. I probably need to do a survey about this--comment if you have thoughts!

A good bit later, across pages 44 and 45, we get the common nouns "kon":

“Six? A bowl normally costs two hundred kon.”
...
He laid a ten-kon coin on the counter,

Which in context is pretty obviously a unit of currency. After that, all the language evidence is in  proper names of people and places. For Yumi's time period (and thus Yumi's language), we have:

Personal Names: Chaeyung Dwookim Gyundok Honam Hwanji Liyun Samjae Sunjun Yumi
Places: Torio Gongsha Ihosen
Common Nouns: getuk kihomaban tobok

For Nikaro's time period, we have:

Personal Names: Akane Gaino Guri Hikiri Ikonora Ito Izumakamo Lee Masaka Nikaro Shinja Shishi Sukishi Takanda Tatomi Tesuaka Tojin Usasha Yuinshi
Places: Fuhima Futinoro Jito Kilahito Nagadan Shinzua
Common Nouns: kon hion

That's a decent corpus of words for a conlanger to start working with. The Nikaro-era names are pretty clearly Japanese-inspired, while the Yumi-era names are more Korean-esque, which implies a quite significant level of cultural changes in naming practices and and phonological shifts between Yumi's ancient language and Nikaro's modern one.

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England has some explicit paratextual discussion of linguistic issues, but otherwise not much of note. There are culturally-appropriate names for the simulated time period, which is neat and reflects a commendable research effort, but actually feels a little off given that the native-to-the-world characters speak essentially modern English, not the language in which those names would have been generated. There are a few other period-appropriate terms but for the most part they just get diegetically translated. There are two excerpts from the eponymous Handbook which directly address linguistic issues; on page 67 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get this explanation:

GUARANTEE TWO
The people on Great Britain will speak a language that is intelligible to modern English speakers. We chose our dimensional band specifically for this reason!

In other words, there's a darn good diegetic reason why there is no language barrier in this interuniversal travel situation!

And then much later on page 146:

UNINTELLIGIBLE DIMENSIONS
The population of the British Isles in these dimensions doesn’t speak a language intelligible to any known Earth language speakers. Perfect for linguists or those who want an extra challenge! Visit the speedrun section of our website for current records for full dictionary creation in the various language groups.

Which I like to point out just because acknowledgment of linguists makes me happy. On page 132, we have a situation where a proper language might become relevant, as our protagonist runs into some foreigners who do not speak I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-English; But then... it turns out that their leader does speak English after all. Oh well.

The most interesting thing about this book is the parallel between the exposition provided by excerpts from the Handbook and the more non-diegetic linguistic and cultural notes in Sara Nović's True Biz. With two examples of intercalated paratext, I've gotta think this is a solid expositional technique for linguistic information that deserves further attention. (And I've really gotta just write something up on paratext in general one of these days--especially the more traditional forms, like glossaries and pronunciation guides.)

Tress of the Emerald Sea has even fewer references to language, but there are a few. Starting on page 10 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get a bit of description that acknowledges the existence of multiple languages and writing systems on Tress's world:

As they ate, she considered showing the two men her new cup. It was made completely of tin, stamped with letters in a language that ran top to bottom instead of left to right.

And much later on page 254, we get the sole mention of the (Anglicized) name of Tress's language, and a reference to the translation magic that we also see used in The Sunlit Man:

“Are you even speaking Klisian?” Tress asked.
“Technically yes, though I’m using Connection to translate my thoughts, which are in a language you’ve never heard of.[...]"

And while I don't want to ascribe a character's statements to the author (I have no idea how much Brandon knows about psycholinguistics or translation theory, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt), I should point out for the sake of readers with less linguistic training that 

1. Not everyone thinks in language--which will be a big "well, duh" to some of you, and absolutely mindblowing to some others. This particular character apparently does, though.
2. Thinking in one language and then translating those thoughts into another language to speak is not a good way to think. It's very inefficient, and it's not how high-level speakers of adult-acquired languages work. Whether or not you perceive yourself as thinking "in" a particular language, for communicative purposes you should be aiming to encode your thoughts directly into the target language in a single step, not doing translation in your head. I have to assume that translation magic is being used sub-optimally in this case compared to its presentation in The Sunlit Man, and there's just sufficient power behind it to make the results seem competent and fluent anyway. 

On page 94, we get introduced to a deaf character (Fort) using an assistive device (acquired from off-world--Tress's planet has a far lower technological level) which transcribes speech for him and allows him to write his reponses. Brandon makes use of bold face to indicate writing on Fort's communication board to distinguish it from acoustic speech in dialog. But the fact that such a device is both needed and useful brings up all sorts of questions about the broader society on Tress's world, which are much more interesting than the mere fact of the typographical convention used to represent it in the story.

We are told that, before acquiring his assistive device, Fort relied on lipreading, despite its limitations (and we are warned about the actual limitations of strict lipreading, so good job dispelling popular misconceptions there, Brandon!), and that this was in his childhood--so he didn't acquire language and literacy, and then lose his hearing as an adult. The Coppermind page for Fort claims that he previously communicated with a mix of sign language and lip reading, but that's not actually supported by the text--the only explicit mention of sign language is on page 448:

And Fort . . . well, he understood. Not because he knew another sign language, but because of that same bond.

And that is narration, not attributed to Fort himself, and doesn't actually indicate that he does know any sign languages. There's an earlier oblique reference on page 293:

Fort didn’t fill the time with idle chitchat, and while you might ascribe this to his deafness, I’ve known more than a few Deaf people who were quite the blabberhands.

But again, that is the narrator talking, and Hoid does not actually say that Fort is capable of using sign language--only that he has met other Deaf people who do. 

So, we have a deaf guy on a pre-industrial world who knows how to read and write. His parents cared about him enough to ensure that he was not subject to language deprivation and could learn to lipread for as much as that is worth, and then to become literate. This indicates surprisingly progressive views about deaf people, and we can also infer from other dialog that deaf people aren't particular rare on this world (because someone once met a deaf dancer as well, who might have actually been a made-up stand-in for a deaf princess--but hey, deaf princess!) It's possible that Fort did grow up with sign language, but simply has to deal with a world full of other people who don't understand it themselves, so the board is useful--but given that no character other than narrator, Hoid, ever mentions sign, and Hoid does not mention sign when we are told how Fort actually communicates, it seems that there is not enough of a population of deaf people with the ability to find and interact with each other on this world to sustain a viable sign language community. That's a weird contrast with having the social support to learn lipreading, reading, and writing, and that being common enough that one character was able to meet two socially high-functioning deaf people in not-that-many years of traveling the world. Not at all inconsistent, just kinda weird, and an interesting contrast to the situation in The Sunlit Man, where there is an awareness of sign language despite the extremely small world and corresponding extremely small population.. Maybe everyone on Tress's world is actually a horrible audist and abused Fort into learning to interface with a language he could not perceive in its intended medium, but I kinda like the idea that everyone on Tress's world is just super supportive of deaf people while being completely ignorant of the concept of sign language.

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The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

How is Castlevania like Luca?

Remember when I reviewed Disney's Luca? It's an excellent example of how to screw up linguistic worldbuilding.

Well, I recently watched Castlevania: Nocturne on Netflix, and while it follows up on the first Castlevania series in not really trying to do anything particularly notable with language, there is one brief scene in episode 5 that completely breaks the setting for me.

Nocturne is set primarily in France, in the midst of the French revolution, with plenty of native French characters. We can thus assume that everybody is supposed to be speaking French, as there are no language barriers presented, and it would be ridiculous for all of the French people to be speaking anything else. This includes the main character Richter Belmont (a descendent of the Belmont vampire hunters we were introduced to in the earlier Castlevania series), who grew up in America and thus can be presumed to be a native speaker of English, but who, like everyone else, displays no difficulty in communicating with all the French people he now lives with.

Now, with all that background explained: at 10:45 in Episode 5, Richter Belmont says to a group of girls arranging costumes for the personifications of the revolutionary principles of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity", that, quote:

You have to be a man to be Fraternity. It means "brotherhood".

To which the reply is

"Sisternity", then.

Now, in English, that should be "sorority", if we want to parallel the derivation of "fraternity". But, I checked with some actual French people just to be sure, and my suspicions were confirmed: this is a conversation that just does not make sense in French, especially not in the historical sociological context in which it occurs. And it seems fairly obvious that the dialog was not originally written with French in mind; there are French audio and subtitle tracks available for the series now, but when I first watched it, the only options were English and Japanese. You can't even say "Fraternity means 'brotherhood'" in French, partially because a straightforward word-for-word translation comes out as the tautological "La fraternité signifie la fraternité." ("Brotherhood means brotherhood."), but also because... that's not actually what "fraternité" means. In fact, if you ask Google Translate how to say "sisterhood" in French, guess what it tells you? Fraternité! Not, incidentally, "sororité", which, while it is a valid French word, is a pretty darn rare one. "Fraternité" would be understood by everyone involved as a gender-inclusive term--besides which, "fraternité" is a grammatically feminine word in French anyway and the strictly female-coded Marianne is the artistic personification of the French Republic and all three virtues of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!

I asked several French speakers and actual French people how they would express this conversation in French if they absolutely had to, and none of them would do it, because it just seemed stupid. Since we do now have access to a French dub and subtitles, however, let's see how they officially translated that scene:

- Seul un homme peut incarner la fraternité. Ça vient du mot "frère".
- La Petite-sœur-nité, alors.

"Only a man can incarnate fraternity. It comes from the word 'brother'."
"The little Sister-nity, then."

(French people, is that actually any better than the original English? Update: Non.)

As far as I can tell with my limited French competence, that's about the best you can do to render the intent of the original English is a way that doesn't come across as nonsenical in French, but it still turns out to be factually wrong. Women have portrayed Fraternity, and "Fraternité" does not come from the word "frère"--it comes from the Latin "frāter", which is also the origin of the word "frère", and does mean "brother"... but it also means "sibling", and the two words "fraternité" and "frère" developed independently from their common root (never forget, Etymology Isn't Destiny!)

There is really only one way to save this scene--assume that Richter is, in fact, not merely a non-native French speaker, but also an idiot, who is actually just wrong, and the women he is talking to are just humoring him because they don't feel like getting into an argument with an idiot. In that case, the use of the neologism "La Petite-sœur-nité" kinda makes sense, as it subtly highlights through non-parallelism with the Latinate "frater-" that "fraternity" does not in fact derive from "frère" just as the rarer-but-valid "sororité" does not derive from "sœur" (sister). 

But if we are generous and assume that that was in fact the intended interpretation... the writers did not do the work to properly set that up or make it obvious to the audience. Don't be like them. More precisely: don't try to do clever things that exploit etymologies and translation-equivalents of English words to imply things about some other language and culture. Even if you are using a pure-English translation convention, you've got to look into the culture that you are portraying-in-translation enough to know how their language and values will influence how they would talk about things. Sometimes you can get away with, say, using English puns and just assuming that the implied translator did a really good job of replacing an equivalent pun in the diegetic language, but when the entire content of the conversation is just dumb in the cultural context in which you have set your story... that doesn't fly.

Update: Someone asked how this is handled in Spanish, and it turns out... it's even worse:

- Debes ser hombre para ser Fraternidad. Significa hermandad.
- ¿Y eso qué tiene que ver?

See, "hermandad" is explicitly gender-neutral in Spanish, where the words for "brother" and "sister" share the same stem "herman-". Which makes Richter's statement so completely bizarre that the "sisternity" comment would itself be nonsensical--and so it is replaced with "What does that have to do with anything?" Which is honestly kind of an improvement, as it makes it seem like the characters are acknowledging that Richter is being an idiot, rather than us audience members having to infer it.

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The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

Some Thoughts on Gripping & Backtile

Gripping and Backtile are languages (or language sketches) by Sai, with collaborators, in the tactile modality--i.e., communicated through the sense of touch.

Gripping, developed in partnership with Alex Fink, is by far the more fully developed of the two. Sai documented the development of the phonology in two YouTube videos, Phonology of a gripping language, part 1 and Phonology of a gripping language, part 2, and Sai & Alex gave an introductory talk on the language at LCC3 (slides available here to follow along). There is also a reference grammar.

Backtile, developed in partnership with Nai Damato, is a language sketch, for which the linked Google Doc is the entirety of available documentation.

My initial approach to relating to either of these languages is to compare them with how natural tactile languages operate. There are not many of those, but between nat-tact-langs, Gripping, and Backtile, we can define a fairly large field of potential design space for tactile languages, which is pretty exciting from the point of view of providing inspiration for other conlangers. Unfortunately... I don't actually know a whole lot about natural tactile languages! In fairness, not many people do--the literature is sparse--but Sai and their collaborator for Backtile, Nai, at least have considerably more personal experience in that area (where "considerably more" means "any at all", and Nai actually has a relevant university degree). Fortunately, the Backtile document does explain its naturalistic inspirations, and Sai, Nai, and Alex have all been available to provide additional context.

I want to be annoyed at the limited documentation for Backtile, but it is admittedly just a sketch, and I can't fault the creators for not feeling like developing it further; if that's all there is to document, then that's all there is to document. As it is, Backtile intersects with some of the coding strategies used in actual Tactile ASL / Protactile. There is, however, also a smidgen of artificiality in the use of braille, with finger and palm pressure used to communicate the dot pattern of a braille cell for spelling. In fairness, this is something that is actually done in Deaf-Blind communities, but importing braille feels to me like importing oral spelling into English--it's a distinctly technological process, tied to the idea of writing, and as such goes against my own intuitions about what is "natural to the medium". Alex has expressed similar feelings, though neither of us can precisely identify which features make it feel artificial, aside from its history as a designed system. But hey, if real life Deaf-Blind people actually do that already, then clearly it works, so you might as well use it! The other aspect in which Backtile feels somewhat artificial is in the extremely restricted articulatory space--it's articulated exclusively on the upper back/shoulder blade (hence the name). However, this feeds into some desirable properties of the system--being less tiring than hand-following, less socially awkward than more high-contact tactile signing, easily accessible, and allowing full duplex communication between two people with hands resting on each other's shoulders.

Gripping is in some ways much more artificial, although it has some of the aesthetic of hand-following tactile signing. It is meant to be a covert communication system for couples in situations where it would not be weird for them to be holding hands in public. Though neither Sai nor Alex were aware of this when constructing Gripping, it has some similarities to Somali Tactile Livestock Negotiation Code, in that involves one hand from each person, communication by pressure on particular points of the receiver's hand, and is meant to be covert--although in the case of Somali Tactile Code, only the message is covert, not the fact that communication is occurring in the first place, and Gripping is considerably more elaborated and flexible! (Note that the linked article refers to the Somali system as a "language", but it's really not--it is a highly context-restricted code with limited expressivity.)

I mentioned above the concept of "natural[ness] to the medium", a useful concept which I was introduced to by Sai. I'll just quote, because they describe it at least as well as I could:

I have a conception of "natural to the medium", which has only a coincidental relationship with "is similar to natlangs". All natlangs are natural to their media (barring some bad conlanging by authorities), but not all things that could be natural to the media are found in an extant natlang, because the latter is by no means a covering set of the possibility space. There are things they just don't happen to have evolved to, but which could occur — and among those, there are both ones that could occur by derivation from extant/historical natlangs, and ones that could not occur from them because the founder effects plus diachronic changes wouldn't reach some part of possibility space.

This is a useful concept to have around for critiquing all sorts of conlangs, but especially for critiquing conlangs in media for which there just aren't a lot or (or any) natural points of comparison. And while Gripping does seem very artificial with things like Tactile ASL and Tactile Auslan as one's basis for comparison, I don't think it can be said that it isn't natural to the medium--and given that it has radically different design goals, I don't think we should expect it to look "naturalistic" with regard to natural tactile sign languages. Indeed, Sai's phonology videos go to great lengths to explain how it is natural to the medium, by detailing the extensive experimental work that Sai and Alex did to find sets of contrastive features that were easy to articulate and easy to perceive, which is really a rather unique opportunity available in this particular medium, because it still uses the human body, just in a new way. That kind of interactive experimentation with a new communication medium is considerably harder to pull off for, e.g., alien languages using senses and articulators that humans don't have, like my own Fysh A language.

One particularly interesting feature of Gripping is that the phonology is asymmetrical--the person whose thumb is on top in the grip produces signs differently at the articulatory-phonetic level than the person whose thumb is on bottom. This is to get around the fact that switching positions is awkward and slow. However, if one were to eliminate the secrecy requirement, a different solution inspired by four-handed Tactile ASL signing presents itself--you could use a double grip for a full-duplex communication, where each participant has a dedicated receiving hand and a dedicated sending hand! There's an idea if any other conlanger wants to pick it up. (Also note that there is a lot more phonetic space available to explore if you drop the requirements for secrecy, so if you want to experiment with your own one-pair-of-hands tactile language, don't assume Gripping has already covered the entirety of available phonological options!) Sai and Alex did not pursue this route for several reasons, in addition to the obvious loss of secrecy:

1. You can't move around easily while clasping both hands--this would make it a converse-in-place system. However, that's not too different from what actually happens with natural Deaf-Blind tactile communication, so it's not a deal-breaker if someone else wants to run with the idea.
2. Clasping both pairs of hands is considerably less comfortable in a relaxed position, and more effortful in an un-relaxed position.
3. Full duplex communication is absurdly mentally challenging, so while having the option is neat, lacking it really isn't a problem. Full duplex really just allows you the option to interrupt and talk over your interlocutor. (But perhaps this could be used as the basis for some linguistic sci-fi--imagine an alien species which does have the mental capacity for full duplex communication, and a medium that supports it!)

As-is, with the single-grip setup, Gripping is somewhere between half- and full-duplex on the phonological level, similar to audio languages in which it is possible to talk over people. Unlike audio languages, however, certain combinations of subordinate and dominant articulations are actually physically impossible to pull off! The half-duplex system currently documented is already an improvement over what is possible with, e.g., Tactile ASL, which does require repositioning to exchange the roles of sending and following hands. On the other hand, Protactile communication does allow for limited back-channeling (e.g., "ACK", "uh-huh", "yeah", etc.), and Sai has speculated that a similar level of discourse-management simultaneous communication could be added to Gripping using the subset of phonology that can be simultaneously articulated and perceived, though they have not yet tried it.

Additionally, just as oral languages can be partially lip-read and ALS signs can be felt, Gripping articulations are useful outside of their primary modality. Sai has given the example using Gripping as a very restricted sign language with no hand motion, for covert hand signals--which is very similar to the "small motion" Atreides sign language that David Peterson developed for the latest film adaptation of Dune.

Some Thoughts... Index