Philosolang

[Thnalk]

Hey, I thought I'd sketch out the development of a philosolang (strictly speaking, a collaborphilosolang because I am collaborating on this with someone else) called U'i. This particular lang is meant to be similar to traditional philosophical languages of the 19th/early 20th century: words whose general sentiment can be discerned at a glance and a heavily Romantic grammar. Here goes!

There ave only nine phones. Stay with me now! They are arranged in a 3x3 grid:

Code: Select all

p|a|t
@|n|i
k|u|?

(the orthography is identical to the xsampa except [@] -> o and [?] -> ')

As you can see, these are all deliberately chosen because of their extreme commonality in the languages of the world. I considered adding more sounds, but tbh I don't feel like expanding the grid. The syllable structure is hella easy: CV(C), VC(V). Note that the consonants are extremely restricted: to form a word, you must move horizontally or vertically on the grid. Thus, "kunokoni" is permissible but "puta" ( ;-) ) is not. As a nod to those old tyme conlangers who added irregularities to their philosolangs, stress is irregular and placement alters the meaning of the word (there's probably a shorter term for this but I forgot it) (stress is marked by an acute accent until I find a cooler one on the character map).

I'll get into the philosophical aspects of this language when I get my notes together. Smell ya later!

[Ricky]

Looks cool, but I can't say much more. This goes way over my head

[Jarhead]

I don't even know what a philosolang is :( I googled it, but to no avail!

[Ceresz]

I don't even know what a philosolang is :( I googled it, but to no avail!

It probably stands for "philosophical language", but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.

Anyway, there isn't really much to say so far.

[Thakowsaizmu]

It probably stands for "philosophical language", but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.

It's a pretentious way of saying conlang, because it has a 'philosophy'...

[Yačay256]

I would strongly suggest you use more phonemes in your project as even Rotokas has 11 phonemes and 6 consonants, which, BTW, are not distinguished like yours. Also, look atPirahã's phonology as it equals Rotokas's in size (or maybe has 1 fewer phoneme even.)

[Ollock]

I don't even know what a philosolang is :( I googled it, but to no avail!

It probably stands for "philosophical language", but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.

Anyway, there isn't really much to say so far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_language

One of the oldest forms of conlanging. And perhaps one of the more futile, but hey, most of it is a waste of time in some way! :P

[Ricky]

Enee updayts?

[Thnalk]

Okay, now we get into the philosophical aspects of word formation.

Now, as I said before, syllables are formed by moving vertically and horizontally on the grid.

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p|a|t
@|n|i
k|u|?

To form the word kú'in "sun", one need simply start at k and move along the grid. Directionality in the first syllable is important, as it describes the nature of the word in some way. Ku is a left-to-right syllable. The right side is superior to the left; it is the side of goodness, positivity, and productivity, and things made with the (right) hand are tangible goods. Thus LtR initial syllable nouns indicate things that are both positive and tangible. Note that the row this syllable draws from doesn't matter; atin could as easily have been used here.

For freedom's sake, however, syllables following the initial one are shorn of lexical meaning unless duplicated. Oninukuk, for example, starts with a LtR consonant, but a doubled RtL consonant reveals a hitherto unknown sinister aspect to the word, which in this case happens to mean "backstabber". To wrap things up: RtL is obviously the mirror image of LtR. It invokes evil, movement to the left-hand path. Those long ago philosophers would have appreciated this. Down-to-up (DtU) is similar to LtR in that it invokes positivity, but it indicates that the word is abstract, like the concept of ascension to Heaven. Up-to-down indicates evil, hostile emotions, abstract negativity, etc; this is a reflection of the fall of Satan. Any questions?

I don't even know what a philosolang is :( I googled it, but to no avail!

There are already so many conlang portmanteaus (even "conlang" itself") that I'd throw my own term in the mix. Hopefully it will catch on!

[Ricky]

Cool! Now I can see why you call it a philosolang. Very well thought-out. I'm impressed.

[eldin raigmore]

Edit: : I apologize for some of the things I said in this post. In retrospect, they were, at a minimum, way too strict.

The syllable structure is hella easy: CV(C), VC(V).

But VC(V) isn't a syllable structure. If VCV occurs it's two syllables; either VC.V or V.CV.

Are you meaning to say that your allowed syllable structures are CVC, CV, and VC?

Then you might have said "CV(C) and VC" or "(C)VC and CV": either of those would mean "CVC or CV or VC".

(Because "CV(C)" means "CVC or CV", and "(C)VC" means "CVC and VC".)

Or are you going to allow bare-vowel syllables?
"(C)V(C)" means "CVC or CV or VC or V". Is that what you meant?

...............................................................................................................................

In any case VC(V) is not a syllable-structure because it means "VC or VCV", and "VCV" is not a syllable.

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Cool! ... Very well thought-out. I'm impressed.

I admit I sort of halfway expect to wind up disagreeing with Ricky.
I have yet to see something that will convince me it's well-thought-out, or to see something that impresses me, about this philosphical language or any other.

Edit: : I just meant that it's not completely-thought-out yet.

For instance the following paragraph:

Directionality in the first syllable is important, as it describes the nature of the word in some way. Ku is a left-to-right syllable. The right side is superior to the left; it is the side of goodness, positivity, and productivity, and things made with the (right) hand are tangible goods. Thus LtR initial syllable nouns indicate things that are both positive and tangible. Note that the row this syllable draws from doesn't matter; atin could as easily have been used here.

For freedom's sake, however, syllables following the initial one are shorn of lexical meaning unless duplicated. Oninukuk, for example, starts with a LtR consonant, but a doubled RtL consonant reveals a hitherto unknown sinister aspect to the word, which in this case happens to mean "backstabber". To wrap things up: RtL is obviously the mirror image of LtR. It invokes evil, movement to the left-hand path. Those long ago philosophers would have appreciated this. Down-to-up (DtU) is similar to LtR in that it invokes positivity, but it indicates that the word is abstract, like the concept of ascension to Heaven. Up-to-down indicates evil, hostile emotions, abstract negativity, etc; this is a reflection of the fall of Satan. Any questions?

strikes me as dangerously close to New Age mindrot, to mystical writings by religious people whose religion I have not been trained since childhood to recognize as non-nutty, or to schizophrenic babbling.

Edit: : I apologize for that. I should have just said "the explanation is not yet clear and complete, to me. Could you clarify it?"

Sorry to come across so harsh; certainly I intend to give you and your conlang the benefit of the doubt and read what you post about it thoughtfully and considerately responsively.

But even if you succeed, what can you express in this language but positive vs negative, good vs bad or good vs evil, useful vs useless, concrete vs abstract, tangible vs intangible, man-made vs natural?

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For example;
Can you translate every three-letter English common concrete noun (like "cat" and "dog") into your language?
How about three-letter English verbs (like "eat" and "run")? Three-letter English adjectives (like "red" and "sad")?

Move on to four-letter words; and on to adverbs and pronouns and conjunctions. (It might be better to leave the prepositions aside for the time being.)

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Your writing so far suggests that if a speaker of your 'lang knows what concept s/he's trying to put into a word s/he can easily figure out which word would mean just that concept; and, vice-versa, if a speaker hears a word s/he has never heard before s/he can easily figure out what that word means.

Is that in fact one of your design goals for this conlang?

If it is I've yet to see any evidence you can even get close to that goal.

If it isn't you probably need to say something clearer than those two paragraphs I quoted above.

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Any questions?

Yes. What are your design goals?

Pirahã has eight (or seven, or nine) consonants and three vowels.

The range of resulting inventories extends from a low of 6 consonants to a high of 122. Rotokas (West Bougainville; Papua New Guinea) has only six consonants. These might be represented in a simplified transcription with the letters /p, t, k, b, d, g/ although the range of pronunciations heard in different word positions covers a considerably wider range of sounds than these letters suggest. !Xóõ (Southern Khoisan; Botswana) has 122 consonants, mainly because it has a very large number of different click sounds with which a word may begin.

When vowel qualities are counted in this way in the sample of languages surveyed for this chapter, the average number of vowels in a language is just fractionally below 6. The smallest vowel quality inventory recorded is 2 and the largest 14. There are 4 languages in the sample with only two contrasting vowel qualities; these are languages in which only the height of the vowel has any distinctive function according to at least one possible interpretation of their phonetic patterns. An example of this extreme is Yimas (Lower Sepik-Ramu; Papua New Guinea). Only one language in the sample, German, uses 14 vowel qualities and only 2 make use of 13, namely the variety of British English included here and Bété (Kru, Niger-Congo; Côte d'Ivoire).

You'd probably do better with at least 5-6 vowel-qualities (height or closeness, backness or frontness, rounded or not), perhaps (or perhaps not) augmented by vowel length, and/or vowel nasalization, and/or diphthongs.
You'd probably do better with 19-25 consonant phonemes.

(You might want to shoot for 2.75 to 4.5 times as many consonants as vowels. That's about average for natlangs. Or maybe trying to be average for a natlang isn't one of your design goals?)

If you're going to arrange your consonants on a grid and use it, you probably want to have more than two dimensions. If you had 3 dimensions with 3 values each that could be 27 consonants. If two dimensions had 3 values and the other dimension had only 2 that could be 18 consonants.

"Manner of articulation" by "point of articulation" by "voicing" is already a 3-dimensional grid, if you want to use it; but only two manners-of-articulation (namely, fricatives and stops) have voiced-vs-mute distinctions. (Well, there's also the lateral fricatives, but they occur only at the alveolar PoA. You'll want those that occur at 3 or more PoAs; fricatives (mute and voiced), plosives (mute and voiced), nasals, approximants, lateral approximants, and trills.)

With 8 PoAs (alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, bilabial, uvular, labiodental, and glottal) occuring at three-or-more combinations of MoA and voicing, and 6 MoAs, you could arrange the PoAs into a 2*2*2 grid or a 4*2 grid, and the MoAs into a 3*2 grid, and wind up with a
(4*2) * (3*2) * 2 five-dimensional grid (not all cells of which would be non-empty).

Of course, maybe (probably?) you don't want to make the philosophical grid you use correspond exactly to the IPA chart. But if you have three dimensions with three values each (negative, neutral, positive; or A, ground, B; or whatever), that's 27 consonants. And even with four dimensions that's only 81 consonants, and !Xóõ has half-again that many; it could accommodate a 4*3*3*3 grid, since it has more than 108 consonants.

Also, IMO, you'd do better with a (C)(C)V(C) syllable-structure, where the second (C) in the onset has to be a sonorant (a "glide" (semivowel), a liquid (lateral or rhotic), or a nasal).

There are several more "glides" than just /w/ and /j/; maybe your 'lang will include them all? (Or maybe not). And there's more than one lateral approximant (pretty much synonymous with "lateral liquid"), though natlangs ordinarily have just one. And there's more than one rhotic (r-like liquid), though natlangs ordinarily have just one.

If your 'lang had them all the (C)(R)V(C) syllable-structure (where "(R)" denotes an optional sonorant) could lead to quite a few possible syllables, especially if you have lots of vowels, or nasal vowels, or long vowels, or diphthongs, or tones.

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Gary Shannon published a list of 218 sentences to stress-test the morphosyntax of your conlang; if you can translate all of them into your conlang you've probably covered most of the parts of its grammar with possibly the exception of a few very-rarely-used features.

I think it's URL was published here on this bboard sometime in the last six months.

Look it up.

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Find a Lojban grammar, and/or an Esperanto grammar, and/or a B.A.S.I.C. English grammar, and see whether you can translate everything in that grammar into your conlang.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_language
One of the oldest forms of conlanging. And perhaps one of the more futile, but hey, most of it is a waste of time in some way! :P

What Ollock said.
If you're just having fun then this is a good way to do it.
So don't let my doubts stop you.

I think a good project is to translate the nursery rhyme "This is the House that Jack Built" into your conlang. To me, that's fun.

You should also consider all of the Translation Challenges posted in the Translations sub-forum. If you can get all of them that's a good test of your conlang; if you can't, you should have a good explanation.

In your conlang, can you order lunch? Can you reserve a room at a hotel?

Can you negotiate the services of a hooker? (Remember "English is what happens when Norman French soldiers try to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids".)

Edit: : I apologize for some of the things I said in this post. In retrospect, they were, at a minimum, way too strict.

[Ricky]

I may echo some of eldin's concerns with uncertainty. I do wonder how one would be able to have a normal conversation in this language, using all the little words like 'and' and 'if' and words like that. If this is possible, I'd love some lessons!

[Ricky]

When I said it was well thought-out, I was referring to the word formation principles you outlined in your last post, Thnalk. This whole concept seemed very clever to me.

[Ear of the Sphinx]

That's because the language is not for communication, but for taxonomy itself. ;-)

Up-to-down indicates evil, hostile emotions, abstract negativity, etc; this is a reflection of the fall of Satan. Any questions?

This reminds me a bit on Solresol.

[Xing]

Gary Shannon published a list of 218 sentences to stress-test the morphosyntax of your conlang; if you can translate all of them into your conlang you've probably covered most of the parts of its grammar with possibly the exception of a few very-rarely-used features.

I think it's URL was published here on this bboard sometime in the last six months.

Look it up.

http://fiziwig.com/conlang/syntax_tests.html

[eldin raigmore]

http://fiziwig.com/conlang/syntax_tests.html

Thanks!

@Thnalk;
Have you considered how to gloss the words of the Swadesh list into your 'lang?

But in line with your idea of dimensions of variation, how about the "commonplace topics (or topoi) of invention" of classical rhetoric?
General vs specific?
Whole vs part?
Essential vs accidental? ("subject vs adjunct" if we're talking about language)
Similarity vs difference?
More vs less?
Cause vs effect?
Antecedent vs consequent?
Possible vs impossible?
Past vs future?
Sign vs signified? (semioticians among us have just got to love this one)
Just vs unjust?
Good vs bad?
Worthy vs unworthy?
Advantage vs disadvantage?
Noble vs base?
Virtue vs vice?

Note that only the last six of these fifteen sixteen opposed pairs would fit at all into your valuation scheme.
Or, perhaps, they would fit, and I just didn't see how; in which case, could you explain and clarify it? Perhaps by some examples?

[lsd]

Okay, now we get into the philosophical aspects of word formation.
(...) invokes evil(...)
(...) ascension to Heaven. (...)
(...) fall of Satan.(...)

philosolang OR churchlang ?

[eldin raigmore]

I edited my June 23rd post.

Some of the things I said in it now strike me as too harsh; and I can't understand why that wasn't obvious to me at the time, but it wasn't.

I have stricken them, but not removed them.

I apologize for them. I inserted different-colored notes next to the things I know to apologize for, to say that I so apologize.

[TBPO]

A very original idea; I wouldn't come up with something like that... But what about the syntax? You've described in detail how words are formed, but how do you put those words together into sentences? For example, syntax may have to do with your concepts of good-evil-heaven-satan.

Edit: As for these concepts, they seem too related to Christianity to me. What about other religions? What about atheists who don't believe in any religion (only science)? And besides, you included religious expressions in the conlang. Is being associated with religion a design goal of your language?

[Arayaz]

A very original idea; I wouldn't come up with something like that... But what about the syntax? You've described in detail how words are formed, but how do you put those words together into sentences? For example, syntax may have to do with your concepts of good-evil-heaven-satan.

Edit: As for these concepts, they seem too related to Christianity to me. What about other religions? What about atheists who don't believe in any religion (only science)? And besides, you included religious expressions in the conlang. Is being associated with religion a design goal of your language?

Considering that the last post in this thread was made in July 2011 (when I wasn't even a year old yet!), I doubt you'll get a response.