Date: April 26 2014 7:47 AM Title: Bonus Chapter: Nephilim Dictionary
@zumi: It's good that you mentioned phonology (a language's rules of sounds). Here's some more linguistics:
There's a variety of speech sounds in all human languages. They're classified based on where and how they're formed. Bilabial sounds are produced with two lips (m b p). Labiodental sounds are produced with the lower lip and upper teeth (f v), and so on through the mouth and into the throat. Read about the International Phonetic Alphabet to see the whole system.
Phonemes are the sounds that a language recognizes. Phonemes often include multiple sounds. This means that the languages considers a group of sounds to be all one sound, and the different sounds are allophones of each other. For example, there are different ways of pronouncing t. In water, t is a sound called an alveolar tap, which is where the tongue stops the air at the ridge behind your teeth, faster than any other sound. In stop, however, the tongue spends more time stopping the air at that ridge, resulting in an alveolar stop.
Then there's stress. Different languages have different rules about which syllable is stressed. It could be the last syllable, the first syllable, the second syllable, or the second-last syllable. There are different ways of stressing syllables, too. They can be louder and longer (English does this), or a different pitch.
Author's Response:
Your two reviews combined have at least a semesters worth of ligustics information in it. Have you considered teaching the subject?
And since the giants are virtually identical to humans I suppose the international Phonetic Alphebet will work here. The Nephilim language does tend to use a lot of rolling "r" sounds and I'm not even sure its physically possible to pronounce some of the words with them in there. I'll have to investigate this further. Maybe add pronounciations for each word.
Date: April 24 2014 8:20 PM Title: Bonus Chapter: Nephilim Dictionary
Yes! Love it that you're inventing a language to accompany your fantastic world! I've always found such great pleasure in seeing and exploring the wonderful little treasures that languages are, and you seem to be doing a great job with yours so far. :)
As far as any advice I can give, I've never been to terribly adept at syntax, tenses, and stuff like that, but I do enjoy phonetics quite a bit and might be able to help you some there. Even though while your language is probably going to be exclusively in written form, if you're interested in the topic I'd suggest further exploring the topic regardless. :)
Now for the advice: each and every language has a flow and feeling to it (or lack thereof if made improperly). This flow is an expression of culture, social mentality, and emotional tendencies. I'd suggest then you make a standard alphabet of sounds for your language and come up with rules on certain combinations of sounds that are pennies. For example, a gutteral consonant must always follow a long vowel. Once you come up with rules that meet the flow you're looking for, or one that reflects how you are trying to portray your culture, you can just follow the rules and make a consistent (beautiful) sounding language.
Again, great story! And good luck with the language!
Author's Response:
I'm glad you enjoyed the story, and the little treasure that comes with it ;D
On the subject of phonetics, the giants in the story have no written language. Thus the language has to be a believable spoken one.
The idea of pronounciation rules is something I could probably look into. I have a good idea of the giants culture and everything else so all I need to do is make it happen.
thank you for the advice
Date: April 24 2014 6:24 PM Title: Bonus Chapter: Nephilim Dictionary
I like the line about positive and negative words. There's a concept in linguistics called phonaesthemes. It's an idea that a sound or pair of sounds can be related to meaning. For example, glisten glimmer gleam glare and glow are all related to light, and all start with gl.
I'd recommend adding suffixes for inanimate objects, and making gender markers optional.
You should have a word or prefix/suffix that means "not". You could also have one that emphases that something is the case.
The subject of a sentence is the thing doing the action, and the object is the thing the action is being done to. In "I saw the car", I is the subject, saw is the verb, and the car is the object.
When coming up with syntax, the first question I would ask is: what's the word order? There are nine word orders, each combination of Subject Verb Object. In English, the subject comes first, then the verb, then the object. We call that SVO. Other languages have subject-object-verb, or SOV.
Another question is how flexible do you want the word order to be? English is very rigid with word order. This is because the subject and object are indicated by their position in the sentence. If you changed "I saw the car" to "The car saw me", you would change the meaning of the sentence.
Other languages, however, are very flexible. In Latin, you can put the words in any order you want, and they'll still mean the same thing. This is because Latin (and a lot of other langauges do this) indicates the subject and object by the way the noun end. Femina is a woman who is the subject of the sentence, and feminam is a woman who is the object of the sentence. Their meaning doesn't change if you rearrange the sentence, but it will change if you change the word's ending.
These are called cases. The nominative case is the subject. The accusative case is the direct object, and there's a dative case for indirect objects. In "I gave the book to you", I is the subject, the book is the direct object, and you is the indirect object. Indirect objects often appear in sentences about giving (datum is Latin for giving). This is a massively simplified account of Latin grammar, by the way.
How many cases can a language have? Finnish has 16. Most of those cases are about location. Think of it as merging a preposition with the word it modifies (this is a process that can make new cases). When making a language, you can think about how many or few words it'll use. You can use separate prepositions and have a lot of words (English is like this), or you can use a pile of prefixes and suffixes (or infixes - the one and only English infix is fan-fucking-tastic).
There are numbers you can use beyond singular and plural. Some languages have a dual number, for pairs or for two things. In Sanskrit, deva means god, devau means a pair of gods, and devaa is many gods. Other languages have a paucal number, for a few, and a trial number, for three.
With verbs, you can have a built in subject. Many Indo-European languages do this with verb endings. In Polish, mam is I have, masz is you (singular) have, ma is he/she/it has, mamy is we have, macie is you (plural) have, maja is they have.
You should think about verb tenses, aspects and moods. You have tense. Aspect is whether something is completed or not. A simple aspect distinction would be completed vs ongoing. Moods include the indicative (a statement of fact), the subjunctive (hypothetical statements - English equivalents include "Let us do this" or "Were is possible..."), or the optative (for wishes).
I need to stop sometime, before I write a new linguistics textbook.
Author's Response:
Well now, this is quite a lot of information. I thank you for taking the time to write this.
First off, thanks for informing me about phonaesthemes; I didn't realize that was what it was called. Now that I know I'll probably be applying that idea more in the language. Since it is a primative language it will most likely apply only to universal constants and things that appear quite often and are related.
I'd like a bit more information on adding the suffix for inanimate objects. Do you mean a word that can be combinded with another to indicate an inanimate object? or something like the connector suffixes which for now only include past, future, and present tense? Also on the subject of gender markers; they are optional, and exist primarily for words associated with people.
A "not" word is a good idea. I could make it mean just "not" when alone and "opposite" when used in a compound word. This would reduce the total number of required words by simply allowing me to indicate when something is the opposite.
The final word order I had in mind is basically everything first then the subject. At least for now. Its hard to explain what my idea is, so I'll just post a couple of sentence examples with translation in the dictionary chapter. For now here's a basic compound word to give you the general idea. "Skiŕ’Kala" translates literally to "Foreign person". the word describing the person is in front, and the subject is in the back. If a gender marker needed to be added it would be behind "Kala" thus modifing it. Finally, "Voeŕ Skiŕ’Kala" translates to "kill foreign person" (kind of a brutal example I know). So, i guess the word order, or one of the word orders is... "Verb,object,subject". I need to think about this word order thing for a while. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
After writing this example I might just remove "Sha'Kala" entirely. It seems to create more conflict than it solves. I also already have a term for "me", which I could just expand to cover all they ways to refer to one's self. What do you think about this?
Lastly, the dual number idea is a good one. the giants are just like humans in that they have two eyes, two genders, legs, arms, etc etc. A concept to indicate duality might make a good addition to the language. Though I'm not sure about the triple number. Perhaps I could use that one, although the idea of a word to indicate duality seems like it'd be much easier to integrate.