Hello!

If you're new to these arts, this is the place to ask "stupid" questions and get directions!
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yaSBP
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Hello!

Post by yaSBP »

Hello, my name is Mike, and ever since I was young, I've loved worldbuilding. I've always mostly focused on the biological aspects of things, but I've always appreciated the cultural, and hence linguistic aspects of the beings I've created. However, I was a n00b, so things didn't work so well. All my first languages were Caesar ciphers of English, and with alphabets that differed only graphemically, not phonemically. There wasn't a day when I didn't think about worldbuilding. A few years ago I realized how unrealistic my worlds were, so I tossed them aside and started again with a much smaller-scale project focusing on just one race. They too soon fell out of my favor and I started from scratch once again. But I decided this time to think things through, and dream big. This wasn't going to be a small-scale project, this wasn't going to be just something I did in my free time, this was going to be calculated. And so I started yaSBP (yet another speculative biology project), for which this account is named. With the new aliens came new languages. So, without further ado, here it is:

https://sites.google.com/site/yasbp3/home

To get to any of the languages, click on one of the races, then click on the link next to where it says "predominant languages". I suggest you check out anything but the star people first. Their language was the first I designed, so its the least impressive.

(Note: some of the languages are more developed than others, and I have simple dictionaries for a few of them. However, I didn't want to upload the dictionaries just yet because I want to have a uniform way of doing it.)
Solarius
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Re: Hello!

Post by Solarius »

Wow. Your conworld is really cool! [+1]

On the subject of the languages, They all look interesting, but one good thing to keep in mind is that other species will have some very, very different grammatical features in them. For example, All human languages divide nouns up into experiencer, agent, and patient. Non-human languages need not work this way. For example, in Zompist's conlang Elkaril(found here:http://www.zompist.com/elkaril.htm#Case), Nouns are divided up into Experiencer, Purpouse, Causer, and Intender.
Another good way to make a language more alien is to take one or two features of human languages, and then push it to the limit, making it the most important part of the grammar. Another cool thing you can do is to take away certain featuresthat are omnipresent in human languages. In Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen (which can be found here:http://www.terjemar.net/kelen.php), there aren't really any verbs.

On the hermit language: I'm not quite sure that a smell-based language could work. There is no guarantee that the proper scent is going to get to the proper person in the proper order. This is especially important in an isolating language, which is what the hermit language seems to be. But if you can find a way around that problem, good luck! [:)]
yaSBP
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Re: Hello!

Post by yaSBP »

Thanks for the input! Regarding the variety of nouns, I'm aware of such systems, and I thought I employed them in titan, and to an extent in telepathy. Like in titan, what we would perceive to be the subject, they see as an instrument, or an agent. So, "I walked the dog" would be something more like "Walking is imparted upon the dog using me as an instrument to do so". However, I don't think I got this across well because I'm not all too familiar with the syntactic register. If you could tell me how to say that with more accurate terminology, that would be great.

As for the hermits, the same thing came to mind when I made them, but I figured if people need to talk, they're going to talk by whatever means necessary. Many animals employ simple communication through smells, so I figured there must be at least one alien out there that has extrapolated a more complex language from the same basic idea. Sure it's ineffective, and really slow, but there can still be conversations. But this comes across in their culture, as they only speak when necessary, and they certainly don't talk over each other, that would get confusing. It's also important to keep in mind that they never advanced much on their own, and their language had a part to play in that. Also, because smell-based communication is really inefficient, there are many situations in which writing is more advantageous. Hence, the writing system is very valuable to them and literacy rates are very high. But the "spoken" language persists, as nothing beats smell-poetry. And remember, each olpheme in a word is released simultaneously, and there are large gaps between words. Conversations are also rarely between more than two people, committees use writing to avoid confusion. I should probably also have it so that they wave their posterior antenna around to mix up the air quicker.
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Visinoid
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Re: Hello!

Post by Visinoid »

Amazing work, dude. Happy to see you here. You have a nice talent in drawing. I buy your smelling thing, seems to work the way you describe it.

As for your knowledge, no worry, practice languages with us here, and you'll get new knowledge in no time, you'll then be able to use it in latter creations. :)

Do you speak anything more than English? We've got sections for other languages if you wish to express yourself. :)
yaSBP
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Re: Hello!

Post by yaSBP »

Meh, sadly I only speak english and russian, and badly at that. I'm fluent in the IPA though, which comes in handy when I'm bored in class and I want to write conversations with myself for no one else to read... which put in those words sounds like something a serial killer would do. The problem is I have a knack for memorizing things, but when it comes to actually recognizing patterns and figuring out solutions in real time, I fail major. Hence, linguistic theory is fun, but when it comes down to legitimately learning a language so as to speak with other people, I'm not so good.
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Pirka
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Re: Hello!

Post by Pirka »

yaSBP wrote:Meh, sadly I only speak english and russian, and badly at that.
Oooh, Russian!
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Micamo
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Re: Hello!

Post by Micamo »

yaSBP wrote:The problem is I have a knack for memorizing things, but when it comes to actually recognizing patterns and figuring out solutions in real time, I fail major. Hence, linguistic theory is fun, but when it comes down to legitimately learning a language so as to speak with other people, I'm not so good.
This is the exact same problem I have. I can become good enough with a language to take written down paragraphs in front of me and decipher them effortlessly, but the second a native speaker says something to me it all just melts away and becomes jibberish. At best I can get a foreign language as a math problem, but fluency is always far, far away.
My pronouns are <xe> [ziː] / <xym> [zɪm] / <xys> [zɪz]

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cybrxkhan
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Re: Hello!

Post by cybrxkhan »

Hello, newcomer! :D

Those species on your page look... creepy. :)
I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

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Re: Hello!

Post by Maximillian »

With so many Russians here, I wonder if we have to overthrow Aszev and establish communism here... :roll:
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Re: Hello!

Post by xijlwya »

Without having read your aticles about the smell-language, I just came up with the following:

What if smell allows you to "speak" a sentence simultaneously. That means that the information is encoded in the relative mass of the different smelling molecules per volume - and not over time. If you had enough different molecules you could make up almost infinitely many combinations of those, like this:

Example "smell cloud":
12% methane (ouuu, stinky)
3% smell of flour
43% smell of stone getting rained on in summer
42% smell of parrafin
--> Could mean: I'd love to have some of your delicious cookies. [:O]

A problem I see there is that these molecule distributions change when they move and get stirred - but I'd see it like our sound language being distorted by noise. To a certain degree it should be possible to decipher the meaning from context...

I hope you get the idea.
yaSBP
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Re: Hello!

Post by yaSBP »

xijlwya wrote:Without having read your aticles about the smell-language, I just came up with the following:

What if smell allows you to "speak" a sentence simultaneously. That means that the information is encoded in the relative mass of the different smelling molecules per volume - and not over time. If you had enough different molecules you could make up almost infinitely many combinations of those, like this:

Example "smell cloud":
12% methane (ouuu, stinky)
3% smell of flour
43% smell of stone getting rained on in summer
42% smell of parrafin
--> Could mean: I'd love to have some of your delicious cookies. [:O]

A problem I see there is that these molecule distributions change when they move and get stirred - but I'd see it like our sound language being distorted by noise. To a certain degree it should be possible to decipher the meaning from context...

I hope you get the idea.

Yeah, but the way I see it, there are only so many combinations of a set of chemicals, and only so many smells an organism can evolve to consciously release. I figured there could be about 40, which gives an ample number for a dictionary, but I fear not for a sentence-ionary. And what if the olphemes of different words overlap? so lets say dog is "abc" and walk is "def", but then if the totalitarian government is "abd" and rebel is "cef", then you wouldn't be able to tell people that you're walking your dog without being exhiled. Additionally, I don't think people would keep track of percentages too much, just as most languages drop vowel length (though I have noticed I extend nasals if there's an implied voiced stop of the same point of articulation, so pin is [pɪn], while pinned is [pɪnː]).
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