According to this MSNBC article, symbols which heretofore have been interpreted simply as rock art, related in some way to heraldry, are likely to be a written form of language used by the Picts of ancient Scotland. I guess it just goes to show that sometimes it's really hard to recognize language when you're looking at it.
This is one of the reasons I speculate that recognizing a real alien language (at least without immediate social context) would be next to impossible.
Showing posts with label writing systems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing systems. Show all posts
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Designing an Alphabet or Writing System
I love alphabets. When I say this, I include writing systems generally (it just rings better if I say "alphabets," though). I started creating them when I was a kid, and have always loved looking at foreign writing. In high school I created at least two code alphabets that I used with various friends, and I used a Greek-alphabet transliteration of English to trade notes with one of my boyfriends. In college I asked a friend to teach me about Arabic, and I had yet another personal alphabet that I used in my journal to make sure no one could peek and read. I also discovered some alphabets I'd never seen before, such as the loopy script of Malayalam. Great stuff.
I've also encountered a goodly number of fantasy alphabets, including the elvish and dwarvish scripts of Tolkien, the Kzinti script of Paul Chafe, and numerous others.
After all of this, I thought I'd try to distill a few thoughts here that might be useful to would-be creators of alphabets and other character systems.
Thought #1: Before you start creating arcane symbols, decide exactly what it is you're representing.
Any alphabet that simply replaces the English alphabet is not really an alphabet in its own right, but a code. It's cool - and goodness knows I've made a lot of these - but it probably won't be the best match for a really original alien or fantasy language.
It's good to ask yourself whether your symbols will be representing sounds, syllables, or meanings. English roughly represents sounds, while the Japanese hiragana and katakana systems represent syllables, and the Japanese Kanji, like the original Chinese characters, represent meanings. Any one of these can work, but a system that represents meanings is going to require a lot more complexity than one that only represents sounds, because the sounds of a language are a finite list, while the meanings just go on and on.
Thought #2: Don't just ask what you're representing, ask also how this writing system will be used.
I bring this up because I think its important for language designers to consider how often, and how quickly, the symbols they create must be written. Japanese Kanji are brutally hard to dash off a quick note in, although people do it regularly. I've seen fantasy character systems so complex that I can't imagine how people would be able to write them in any practical fashion. Contrast that situation, though, with the writing system used by Ursula LeGuin in her novel, The Telling. That system was intricately related to a whole belief system and sacred meanings were part of it; a lot of time and effort can be invested in writing when the final product is believed to have greater than everyday significance. For dashing off quick notes, though, simpler is probably better.
Thought #3: Think through the basic visual elements of your script, including stroke types and points or axes of orientation.
The English alphabet uses a finite number of stroke types: vertical and horizontal lines; two types of diagonal lines; curves; and dots. It orients to a primary axis located at the bottom of all of the characters - "writing on the line," so to speak. The characters then vary based on which strokes occur in which orientations to one another, to the axis, and to three different distance points measured in the vertical dimension off that axis (the horizontal bars of "e," "t"/"f," and "I."
Why is it worth thinking this stuff through? Because for ease of writing, you probably want to minimize the number of stroke types, keeping maximal simplicity while at the same time maintaining maximal difference between the different characters. Put it this way:
If the characters are too complex, you get screaming - but if all the characters look the same? More screaming.
Okay, great. Now let's assume you've got the basic characters sketched out. Do you want to add additional complexity, like capitalization, or cursive forms?
Answer: maybe. Additional complexity has its uses. Cursive (I was always told) was designed for the sake of speed, and it certainly has a sense of style to it. Capitalization helps a lot because it provides visual orientation for a reader, effectively saying, "Look here! It's the beginning of the sentence!" or "Look here! It's a name!" In German, it says something different: "Here's a noun!" Similar to this, if greatly more complicating, is the use of Kanji in Japanese. Kanji say "Here's a piece of meaning!" And given that Japanese is written without spaces between words, that piece of meaning generally also allows a reader to separate the beginning of a new word from the function words around it, and from any suffixes appended to previous words. Arabic has a different kind of complexity in its script: the "letters" take different forms depending on whether they occur at the start, in the middle, or at the end of a word. Again, this provides orientation on a larger level - and it reminds me to point out that empty spaces between words are another highly useful feature of script, used for general orientation to the language being represented.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention punctuation, but I don't want to go into much detail there, except to say that it is another type of orientation device. It works on the sentence level, but also within the sentence, to help clarify syntactic structures. For more fun with punctuation I'll direct you to Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss, as she handles the discussion in much more depth - and far more amusingly - than I can.
At this point that I must bemoan the fact that it's so difficult to render a created alphabet into computerized blog form, because I would love to give examples. Suffice it to say that a character system with a deliberate balance between simplicity and complexity (differentiation), and one that uses appropriate cues to the beginnings and ends of words, will strike a viewer's eye as more "real" than one that doesn't. And just so I'm not completely without examples, I've written a sentence in Japanese for you:
日本語では一番簡単な字がひらがなとカタカナで、一番複雑のは漢字です。
I invite anyone who is able to speak a language using a different character system (and enter it into their computer) to volunteer examples in my comments area. I - and my readers - would love to see them.
I've also encountered a goodly number of fantasy alphabets, including the elvish and dwarvish scripts of Tolkien, the Kzinti script of Paul Chafe, and numerous others.
After all of this, I thought I'd try to distill a few thoughts here that might be useful to would-be creators of alphabets and other character systems.
Thought #1: Before you start creating arcane symbols, decide exactly what it is you're representing.
Any alphabet that simply replaces the English alphabet is not really an alphabet in its own right, but a code. It's cool - and goodness knows I've made a lot of these - but it probably won't be the best match for a really original alien or fantasy language.
It's good to ask yourself whether your symbols will be representing sounds, syllables, or meanings. English roughly represents sounds, while the Japanese hiragana and katakana systems represent syllables, and the Japanese Kanji, like the original Chinese characters, represent meanings. Any one of these can work, but a system that represents meanings is going to require a lot more complexity than one that only represents sounds, because the sounds of a language are a finite list, while the meanings just go on and on.
Thought #2: Don't just ask what you're representing, ask also how this writing system will be used.
I bring this up because I think its important for language designers to consider how often, and how quickly, the symbols they create must be written. Japanese Kanji are brutally hard to dash off a quick note in, although people do it regularly. I've seen fantasy character systems so complex that I can't imagine how people would be able to write them in any practical fashion. Contrast that situation, though, with the writing system used by Ursula LeGuin in her novel, The Telling. That system was intricately related to a whole belief system and sacred meanings were part of it; a lot of time and effort can be invested in writing when the final product is believed to have greater than everyday significance. For dashing off quick notes, though, simpler is probably better.
Thought #3: Think through the basic visual elements of your script, including stroke types and points or axes of orientation.
The English alphabet uses a finite number of stroke types: vertical and horizontal lines; two types of diagonal lines; curves; and dots. It orients to a primary axis located at the bottom of all of the characters - "writing on the line," so to speak. The characters then vary based on which strokes occur in which orientations to one another, to the axis, and to three different distance points measured in the vertical dimension off that axis (the horizontal bars of "e," "t"/"f," and "I."
Why is it worth thinking this stuff through? Because for ease of writing, you probably want to minimize the number of stroke types, keeping maximal simplicity while at the same time maintaining maximal difference between the different characters. Put it this way:
If the characters are too complex, you get screaming - but if all the characters look the same? More screaming.
Okay, great. Now let's assume you've got the basic characters sketched out. Do you want to add additional complexity, like capitalization, or cursive forms?
Answer: maybe. Additional complexity has its uses. Cursive (I was always told) was designed for the sake of speed, and it certainly has a sense of style to it. Capitalization helps a lot because it provides visual orientation for a reader, effectively saying, "Look here! It's the beginning of the sentence!" or "Look here! It's a name!" In German, it says something different: "Here's a noun!" Similar to this, if greatly more complicating, is the use of Kanji in Japanese. Kanji say "Here's a piece of meaning!" And given that Japanese is written without spaces between words, that piece of meaning generally also allows a reader to separate the beginning of a new word from the function words around it, and from any suffixes appended to previous words. Arabic has a different kind of complexity in its script: the "letters" take different forms depending on whether they occur at the start, in the middle, or at the end of a word. Again, this provides orientation on a larger level - and it reminds me to point out that empty spaces between words are another highly useful feature of script, used for general orientation to the language being represented.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention punctuation, but I don't want to go into much detail there, except to say that it is another type of orientation device. It works on the sentence level, but also within the sentence, to help clarify syntactic structures. For more fun with punctuation I'll direct you to Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss, as she handles the discussion in much more depth - and far more amusingly - than I can.
At this point that I must bemoan the fact that it's so difficult to render a created alphabet into computerized blog form, because I would love to give examples. Suffice it to say that a character system with a deliberate balance between simplicity and complexity (differentiation), and one that uses appropriate cues to the beginnings and ends of words, will strike a viewer's eye as more "real" than one that doesn't. And just so I'm not completely without examples, I've written a sentence in Japanese for you:
日本語では一番簡単な字がひらがなとカタカナで、一番複雑のは漢字です。
I invite anyone who is able to speak a language using a different character system (and enter it into their computer) to volunteer examples in my comments area. I - and my readers - would love to see them.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Keyboards
I'm thinking about keyboards.
Many of you have probably heard about the design of the QWERTY keyboard. It was designed by trial and error by a man trying to minimize jamming of metal type arms on the machine he was using - essentially, to make typing slow, and to keep commonly used keys as far from one another as possible. One of many historical examples of necessity trumping our desire for a design of optimal efficiency.
The Dvorak keyboard, by contrast, was designed for ease of use - but it never really caught on, because the QWERTY was already so well-established. Somewhere out there is a land of alternative technologies we all missed out on by chance: the clocks that turn counter-clockwise, the betamax video recorders, the Dvorak keyboards... Mind you, there are those who use the Dvorak keyboard even now, but it's pretty clear who the winner was. I'm so accustomed to the QWERTY by now that I have a devil of a time with the alphabetically ordered key-sets that are often used on children's video games to type in the child's name.
I learned to type by taking a class when I was twelve. I remember at the time that my brother, who was just over a year younger, fudged his age to twelve also so he could enter the class (it was for ages 12 and up). Needless to say, he handled it just fine, and both of us can now touch-type. This is something for which I am constantly grateful (thanks, Mom!).
Now, my children are learning to use the computer. My daughter, who is not yet four, can point, click and drag the mouse, and she hunts and pecks the letters she knows (and touch-types the letters she doesn't know, in joyous profusion!). My son knows all the letters and is able to type his name, his logins and his passwords when necessary. My immediate thought?
I'd better not wait till they're twelve to teach them to type! By then it will already be far too late.
When I was living in Japan, I once had an opportunity to visit the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. One of the most fascinating things I saw there was the old keyboards they used to type the newspaper.
Oh. My. God.
First let me note that there was a big battle about restricting the number of characters that could be used in the newspaper. The final conclusion of this battle, after many years, was to fix the number of characters at just under two thousand.
Imagine this keyboard. It had to be eighteen inches square at least, with an array of big keys - each containing as many as nine characters - and a small numeric keypad in the bottom right-hand corner. For each character to be typed, the operator would have to pick the character by typing first the number of the desired character, and then hitting the key upon which that character appeared. This thing required an operator who had not only complete knowledge of the character set, but also loads of training and experience.
Nowadays, the Japanese use word processors. First, you type in the sounds you want, either by romanization or by fixed location of the syllabic character on the keyboard. Then you press the space bar, and the computer automatically brings up a list of all the possible characters that can be substituted for the sounds you've typed. All you have to do is pick the one you want, either by typing the number beside it or by scrolling down to it and hitting return. This is a real help, but at the same time it has made it so easy to pick the correct character, that often Japanese young people are able to recognize characters without actually being able to write them from memory.
I think it's really interesting how technological changes can affect behavior.
Now, imagine the technology of your fantasy or science fiction world. If you have a created language, the appearance of script is going to depend a lot on what kind of technology is used for writing. A keyboard has certain kinds of restrictions. It doesn't lend itself well to cursive - but on the other hand, if it is connected to a computer rather than to a piece of metal type, it can have more flexibility. I think it would be safe to guess that Arabic word processors are able to provide the correct form of the character - word-initial, word-medial, or word-final - simply by computer logic. The way that a keyboard works will influence the way that people conceptualize their alphabet and their literacy. Type generally implies the common availability of text, for example.
It's getting late, so I'll leave you all at this point to theorize about how to use this further. Let me just say this: type might be under the radar, or seem unimportant - but it might just provide a pungent detail to make your alien world and language seem more real.
Many of you have probably heard about the design of the QWERTY keyboard. It was designed by trial and error by a man trying to minimize jamming of metal type arms on the machine he was using - essentially, to make typing slow, and to keep commonly used keys as far from one another as possible. One of many historical examples of necessity trumping our desire for a design of optimal efficiency.
The Dvorak keyboard, by contrast, was designed for ease of use - but it never really caught on, because the QWERTY was already so well-established. Somewhere out there is a land of alternative technologies we all missed out on by chance: the clocks that turn counter-clockwise, the betamax video recorders, the Dvorak keyboards... Mind you, there are those who use the Dvorak keyboard even now, but it's pretty clear who the winner was. I'm so accustomed to the QWERTY by now that I have a devil of a time with the alphabetically ordered key-sets that are often used on children's video games to type in the child's name.
I learned to type by taking a class when I was twelve. I remember at the time that my brother, who was just over a year younger, fudged his age to twelve also so he could enter the class (it was for ages 12 and up). Needless to say, he handled it just fine, and both of us can now touch-type. This is something for which I am constantly grateful (thanks, Mom!).
Now, my children are learning to use the computer. My daughter, who is not yet four, can point, click and drag the mouse, and she hunts and pecks the letters she knows (and touch-types the letters she doesn't know, in joyous profusion!). My son knows all the letters and is able to type his name, his logins and his passwords when necessary. My immediate thought?
I'd better not wait till they're twelve to teach them to type! By then it will already be far too late.
When I was living in Japan, I once had an opportunity to visit the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. One of the most fascinating things I saw there was the old keyboards they used to type the newspaper.
Oh. My. God.
First let me note that there was a big battle about restricting the number of characters that could be used in the newspaper. The final conclusion of this battle, after many years, was to fix the number of characters at just under two thousand.
Imagine this keyboard. It had to be eighteen inches square at least, with an array of big keys - each containing as many as nine characters - and a small numeric keypad in the bottom right-hand corner. For each character to be typed, the operator would have to pick the character by typing first the number of the desired character, and then hitting the key upon which that character appeared. This thing required an operator who had not only complete knowledge of the character set, but also loads of training and experience.
Nowadays, the Japanese use word processors. First, you type in the sounds you want, either by romanization or by fixed location of the syllabic character on the keyboard. Then you press the space bar, and the computer automatically brings up a list of all the possible characters that can be substituted for the sounds you've typed. All you have to do is pick the one you want, either by typing the number beside it or by scrolling down to it and hitting return. This is a real help, but at the same time it has made it so easy to pick the correct character, that often Japanese young people are able to recognize characters without actually being able to write them from memory.
I think it's really interesting how technological changes can affect behavior.
Now, imagine the technology of your fantasy or science fiction world. If you have a created language, the appearance of script is going to depend a lot on what kind of technology is used for writing. A keyboard has certain kinds of restrictions. It doesn't lend itself well to cursive - but on the other hand, if it is connected to a computer rather than to a piece of metal type, it can have more flexibility. I think it would be safe to guess that Arabic word processors are able to provide the correct form of the character - word-initial, word-medial, or word-final - simply by computer logic. The way that a keyboard works will influence the way that people conceptualize their alphabet and their literacy. Type generally implies the common availability of text, for example.
It's getting late, so I'll leave you all at this point to theorize about how to use this further. Let me just say this: type might be under the radar, or seem unimportant - but it might just provide a pungent detail to make your alien world and language seem more real.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
A complex model of writing development
This entry is a response to Colin's comment on the last post, and anyone who would like to see the details of his question can look in the comments. He began by asking about naming, and then went on to tell me a little about a project he's doing. These two are actually separate issues.
First, naming. Establishing naming conventions isn't hard - really, it's fun! I've discussed this in a number of places, and my first suggestion is to take a close look at what you know about your planet and people. Physiology can give you some hints as to the sounds they might use. You can also look for inspiration in animal sounds or in existing world languages. Just try to keep the names consistent in sound. There are some sounds that evoke emotions in a hearer, and many of these associations are culturally based, though the principles of onomatopoeia are more universal. Posts to look at in my archives might include:
Does your world/universe include names?
Nicknames
Bow-wow, boom, smash: onomatopoeia
The Feel of a Language
Ideas for Languages: animal sounds
How articulatory phonetics can help you
How morphology can help you
Now, onto the next issue, which is really a question of writing systems. Colin describes a situation in which "runes," which express whole word meanings, resemble letters and can be mistaken for them. It took me some thinking to reconcile these two ideas, in part because historically, rune systems did represent sounds, and because meaning-based writing systems (ideographic systems) and sound-based writing systems (alphabetic or syllabic systems) are so different. But if the Japanese can take the ideographic Chinese system and adapt it into a syllabic system that is then used concurrently with the ideographs (and they do!), anything is possible, right? :-)
My idea was to think of this as a process of language history. Maybe the people originally used an ideographic writing system to express their ideas. Symbols for the names of virtues would have been part of this system. (I do suggest these not be called runes, however, because the automatic associations with the word "rune" could confuse readers.) Then, something happened. Maybe there was an invasion, or perhaps an opening of trade with another country which used similar implements for writing (thus the visual similarity) but instead functioned using an alphabetic system. Or perhaps the opening of trade led to the idea of an alphabetic system and some person of note decided to adapt a set of core ideographs into an alphabet. The ideograph-users as a society would probably see the attractiveness of a system that reduced the education burden for literacy, and while there might be some initial objections, let's say they adopt the new alphabetic method of writing. Generations go by, and the knowledge of the ideographs became more and more esoteric. At a certain point one would see a situation in which ideographs would not be recognized as bearing their original meanings, and might instead be construed as resembling similar symbols from the newer alphabetic system. I'd also suggest that both the systems should have their own names, and the symbols should have identities that are not borrowed from Latin symbols if there is no real connection between them and Latin. Use descriptions of the symbols, and words for the symbols that you create, that you can fit into the same sound system as the names of people and things as mentioned above.
Thanks again for the question!
You might also want to check out Tom Waters' interesting discussion of language building:
link
First, naming. Establishing naming conventions isn't hard - really, it's fun! I've discussed this in a number of places, and my first suggestion is to take a close look at what you know about your planet and people. Physiology can give you some hints as to the sounds they might use. You can also look for inspiration in animal sounds or in existing world languages. Just try to keep the names consistent in sound. There are some sounds that evoke emotions in a hearer, and many of these associations are culturally based, though the principles of onomatopoeia are more universal. Posts to look at in my archives might include:
Does your world/universe include names?
Nicknames
Bow-wow, boom, smash: onomatopoeia
The Feel of a Language
Ideas for Languages: animal sounds
How articulatory phonetics can help you
How morphology can help you
Now, onto the next issue, which is really a question of writing systems. Colin describes a situation in which "runes," which express whole word meanings, resemble letters and can be mistaken for them. It took me some thinking to reconcile these two ideas, in part because historically, rune systems did represent sounds, and because meaning-based writing systems (ideographic systems) and sound-based writing systems (alphabetic or syllabic systems) are so different. But if the Japanese can take the ideographic Chinese system and adapt it into a syllabic system that is then used concurrently with the ideographs (and they do!), anything is possible, right? :-)
My idea was to think of this as a process of language history. Maybe the people originally used an ideographic writing system to express their ideas. Symbols for the names of virtues would have been part of this system. (I do suggest these not be called runes, however, because the automatic associations with the word "rune" could confuse readers.) Then, something happened. Maybe there was an invasion, or perhaps an opening of trade with another country which used similar implements for writing (thus the visual similarity) but instead functioned using an alphabetic system. Or perhaps the opening of trade led to the idea of an alphabetic system and some person of note decided to adapt a set of core ideographs into an alphabet. The ideograph-users as a society would probably see the attractiveness of a system that reduced the education burden for literacy, and while there might be some initial objections, let's say they adopt the new alphabetic method of writing. Generations go by, and the knowledge of the ideographs became more and more esoteric. At a certain point one would see a situation in which ideographs would not be recognized as bearing their original meanings, and might instead be construed as resembling similar symbols from the newer alphabetic system. I'd also suggest that both the systems should have their own names, and the symbols should have identities that are not borrowed from Latin symbols if there is no real connection between them and Latin. Use descriptions of the symbols, and words for the symbols that you create, that you can fit into the same sound system as the names of people and things as mentioned above.
Thanks again for the question!
You might also want to check out Tom Waters' interesting discussion of language building:
link
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The appearance of text and script
This post was inspired by the internet discussion that has prompted my latest surge of visitors - welcome, all of you who've never visited before! It is also quite relevant to my language design workshop (fortunately!).
I'm talking about letters. That is, how a language is written down. In previous posts about designing languages (see the label "designing languages"), I've talked about how different writing systems correspond to different sounds, so today I'm going to come at it from a different angle - what those characters look like, and how to discuss the appearance of text, letters and script in a story.
When I was designing my Varin world, I actually designed the language after I drafted the novels for the first time, and I had to go back and look for every instance in which I mentioned the appearance of the text. Lucky for me, this didn't involve instances of naming letters so much as places where people were looking at books or handwritten notes. So I sat down and designed a single-sound-based alphabetic character system with a print and a cursive form.
The trick with designing alphabets is that you want them to be simple enough to duplicate, and yet distinct enough for them to be easily recognized. The alphabets I created as a kid were almost always too complicated to duplicate with any reasonable degree of speed, as are some of the character systems I've seen used in published fiction. I've also seen many character systems in published fiction in which the characters were not easily distinguished from one another. Tolkien's Elvish/Mordor script is of course wonderful - you see it and you immediately think you're looking at a foreign language, but that it's a language.
Another factor to consider is what tools your people use to write. If they just use pens, then you're pretty flexible. If they use a reed stylus and clay, then the form of the characters will be influenced by that.
Back to my Varin alphabet design story. The Varin alphabet (which is written with pens) has the basic elements of dots, vertical lines, horizontal lines, and diagonal lines. No curves or circles, unlike our writing system. Instead of orienting itself at mid and high distances from a single line at the bottom of the text, the Varin text orients itself along a central axis. The curves come in when people start writing in cursive. So when I went about describing it in the context of the story, I used these elements. Examples: "He stared at the note until it became just meaningless dots and lines sprayed across the paper." "He had gorgeous handwriting, with axis serifs at the end of each word."
That will take you some distance toward solving the problem - but suppose you want to deal with particular characters, as when a child learns their ABC's? I have several recommendations here:
1. Unless your people actually speak English or another language that uses the Latin alphabet, don't use the appearance or name of the letters we use.
2. Don't try to list out the entire alphabet and the names for all the letters. Keep the description general or appearance-based and restrict yourself to naming two or three, maybe four of the letters.
3. Make sure that the names of the letters are short, easy to pronounce and remember.
4. Make sure that the sounds of your letter-names match the phonological system of the names of your characters. A made-up word for a letter will always stand out, but it may stand out more than you want if your character's name is Aramia and the first letter is called grixbat. Not that this is impossible linguistically, of course - but the contrast will be noticed. So take a look at the sound characteristics of the words you've already created, and match them with one another and with the names of the letters (I have already made posts on sounds; see articulatory phonetics).
I hope you find this helpful. Please feel free to comment or ask questions.
I'm talking about letters. That is, how a language is written down. In previous posts about designing languages (see the label "designing languages"), I've talked about how different writing systems correspond to different sounds, so today I'm going to come at it from a different angle - what those characters look like, and how to discuss the appearance of text, letters and script in a story.
When I was designing my Varin world, I actually designed the language after I drafted the novels for the first time, and I had to go back and look for every instance in which I mentioned the appearance of the text. Lucky for me, this didn't involve instances of naming letters so much as places where people were looking at books or handwritten notes. So I sat down and designed a single-sound-based alphabetic character system with a print and a cursive form.
The trick with designing alphabets is that you want them to be simple enough to duplicate, and yet distinct enough for them to be easily recognized. The alphabets I created as a kid were almost always too complicated to duplicate with any reasonable degree of speed, as are some of the character systems I've seen used in published fiction. I've also seen many character systems in published fiction in which the characters were not easily distinguished from one another. Tolkien's Elvish/Mordor script is of course wonderful - you see it and you immediately think you're looking at a foreign language, but that it's a language.
Another factor to consider is what tools your people use to write. If they just use pens, then you're pretty flexible. If they use a reed stylus and clay, then the form of the characters will be influenced by that.
Back to my Varin alphabet design story. The Varin alphabet (which is written with pens) has the basic elements of dots, vertical lines, horizontal lines, and diagonal lines. No curves or circles, unlike our writing system. Instead of orienting itself at mid and high distances from a single line at the bottom of the text, the Varin text orients itself along a central axis. The curves come in when people start writing in cursive. So when I went about describing it in the context of the story, I used these elements. Examples: "He stared at the note until it became just meaningless dots and lines sprayed across the paper." "He had gorgeous handwriting, with axis serifs at the end of each word."
That will take you some distance toward solving the problem - but suppose you want to deal with particular characters, as when a child learns their ABC's? I have several recommendations here:
1. Unless your people actually speak English or another language that uses the Latin alphabet, don't use the appearance or name of the letters we use.
2. Don't try to list out the entire alphabet and the names for all the letters. Keep the description general or appearance-based and restrict yourself to naming two or three, maybe four of the letters.
3. Make sure that the names of the letters are short, easy to pronounce and remember.
4. Make sure that the sounds of your letter-names match the phonological system of the names of your characters. A made-up word for a letter will always stand out, but it may stand out more than you want if your character's name is Aramia and the first letter is called grixbat. Not that this is impossible linguistically, of course - but the contrast will be noticed. So take a look at the sound characteristics of the words you've already created, and match them with one another and with the names of the letters (I have already made posts on sounds; see articulatory phonetics).
I hope you find this helpful. Please feel free to comment or ask questions.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Will humans ever outgrow spoken language?
I suspect it would take something pretty drastic.
Humans have language built into their DNA. Steven Pinker talks about the "language instinct", and while I might disagree with him on fine points, there's definitely something built into us.
Even profoundly deaf babies will begin to babble at the same age as hearing children - the difference is that without the ability to hear spoken language around them, they soon stop vocal babbling. When they're with adult speakers of sign language, though, they start babbling with their fingers! And of course this then develops into full-fledged sign language as the children mature.
In the case of pidgin languages, or languages that come to be used by people of different language groups when they are forced together by circumstance (like Russian-Japanese pidgin, for example), the pidgin itself will have a small vocabulary and rudimentary grammatical system - but once a second generation is born in this language community, the language gets fleshed out by the children and becomes a creole language.
There's something about people - they always want things to mean something. They may not always categorize concepts or objects the same way, but they will categorize. And once categories are fixed, people will automatically try to assign unknown things to known categories. There's a logic to this. If there were no prototypical concept for "apple," then how would we be able to recognize all the different types of apples, and know to eat them? Think of the vast variation in the concept for "dog."
So take a hypothetical situation where people become telepathic suddenly. Will they stop speaking aloud? If the telepathy is effective enough, this seems possible. Will they stop thinking in terms of auditory and visual signals? That's tougher. If the telepathy simply involves the ability to transmit signals directly from one brain to another, I think it would be very likely that the brain would interpret those signals in terms of auditory or visual signals, because those pathways are already primed and have meaning. I struggle to imagine a way that the telepathy would not make use of preexisting patterns of brain activity, especially if it were to be such an effective means of communication that it would supplant spoken language.
Telepathy also has its drawbacks, because I'm not sure if it would be as widely usable in communication with objects, as with programming computers or auto-open doors or other similar technologies. How would you design a receiver for telepathic signals? Or would you rely on written symbols for such communication? The written word is always the slowest to change, as evidenced by the peculiarities of English spelling. We've got letters in the word "knight" that have been around for hundreds of years, long after the sounds they once corresponded to have disappeared.
In language as in technology, there is a tendency for very ancient patterns to persist once they have optimally matured. I would expect that the ancient elements might be difficult for "current" users to distinguish from more recent ones, but I suspect they would still be there, even a thousand or more years into the future.
Thanks to Dave Steffen, known on the forums as steffenwulf/steffenwolf, for suggesting this topic. He blogs at steffenwolf.blogspot.com
Humans have language built into their DNA. Steven Pinker talks about the "language instinct", and while I might disagree with him on fine points, there's definitely something built into us.
Even profoundly deaf babies will begin to babble at the same age as hearing children - the difference is that without the ability to hear spoken language around them, they soon stop vocal babbling. When they're with adult speakers of sign language, though, they start babbling with their fingers! And of course this then develops into full-fledged sign language as the children mature.
In the case of pidgin languages, or languages that come to be used by people of different language groups when they are forced together by circumstance (like Russian-Japanese pidgin, for example), the pidgin itself will have a small vocabulary and rudimentary grammatical system - but once a second generation is born in this language community, the language gets fleshed out by the children and becomes a creole language.
There's something about people - they always want things to mean something. They may not always categorize concepts or objects the same way, but they will categorize. And once categories are fixed, people will automatically try to assign unknown things to known categories. There's a logic to this. If there were no prototypical concept for "apple," then how would we be able to recognize all the different types of apples, and know to eat them? Think of the vast variation in the concept for "dog."
So take a hypothetical situation where people become telepathic suddenly. Will they stop speaking aloud? If the telepathy is effective enough, this seems possible. Will they stop thinking in terms of auditory and visual signals? That's tougher. If the telepathy simply involves the ability to transmit signals directly from one brain to another, I think it would be very likely that the brain would interpret those signals in terms of auditory or visual signals, because those pathways are already primed and have meaning. I struggle to imagine a way that the telepathy would not make use of preexisting patterns of brain activity, especially if it were to be such an effective means of communication that it would supplant spoken language.
Telepathy also has its drawbacks, because I'm not sure if it would be as widely usable in communication with objects, as with programming computers or auto-open doors or other similar technologies. How would you design a receiver for telepathic signals? Or would you rely on written symbols for such communication? The written word is always the slowest to change, as evidenced by the peculiarities of English spelling. We've got letters in the word "knight" that have been around for hundreds of years, long after the sounds they once corresponded to have disappeared.
In language as in technology, there is a tendency for very ancient patterns to persist once they have optimally matured. I would expect that the ancient elements might be difficult for "current" users to distinguish from more recent ones, but I suspect they would still be there, even a thousand or more years into the future.
Thanks to Dave Steffen, known on the forums as steffenwulf/steffenwolf, for suggesting this topic. He blogs at steffenwolf.blogspot.com
Friday, September 5, 2008
Worldbuilding: foreground or background?
Say you've got this gorgeous world - you've slaved over it, crafted its tiniest details with care, placed characters in it, and now you're ready to tell a story about it. How do you get the world to appear in the background without overwhelming the story?
Let's start with geography.
Some authors can get away with having a page or more of scenery or setting description, while for others it can seem like needless information. Well, if your characters should happen to be on a quest (for example!), traveling through this scenery, then that gives you some opportunities to describe it, but those descriptions can stick out, or be set into the foreground, as digressions.
On the other hand, if the scenery is active in the plot and the inner lives of the characters, it will suddenly be extremely relevant. This can be done with plot events, like in Tolkien's The Hobbit when a thunderstorm leads the characters to take cover in a cave, and they end up getting kidnapped by goblins.
Or when a character-internal deeper point of view is involved, that person's observations of a scene can be colored by, and demonstrate, the emotional state that is about to drive him or her onto the next section of the plot. I'm reminded of agent Donald Maass at the Surrey International Writers' Conference, talking about a lengthy scene description from Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. It was a description of a boat dock after a severe storm, and it was long. Some of the details were even wrong - but it was riveting, in part for its acute observation of detail, but also because it said so much about the character who was walking through it.
In a sense, maybe "background" is the wrong word, because it implies that something should fade or disappear. In a case like this, the scenery is highly obvious, but it has a purpose other than being scenery. It is serving the larger purposes of the story.
When a piece of world information is at its most relevant, that's when you want it to appear. Maybe you've designed this great alphabet for your language - but since you're writing in English, you don't get to use it to write the story! My instincts would tell me that such information shouldn't be explained, as such, but subordinated to other things. When might people have an opportunity to look at text? And when would its form be important to the story?
In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo sees letters on the ring, he says "It's some form of Elvish - I can't read it" and Gandalf replies, "The language is that of Mordor, which I shall not utter here." Even if we couldn't see the writing itself, we would still know not only that it's in a foreign language, but that the language is related to Elvish! Sure, Tolkien's having Gandalf explain to Frodo instead of explaining to us, but he's also managed to sneak in the fact that he's designed his world with language families. And that Mordor is bad, and that it will loom large in Frodo's future.
Last - but not least, for me anyway - is social status. The downtrodden are popular subjects for stories, in science fiction as well as fantasy. Support the underdog, because revolutions are fun!
The difficulty is expressing people's low status without having an oppressed character step forth and announce, "The Madugans are an oppressed minority and everybody mistreats them."
That's not how people talk about their own status, because it's too distant and external. Where would a member of this oppressed minority learn the words "oppressed minority"? Maybe from a social worker, if this world has them - but even then, he or she would probably say "We Madugans are an oppressed minority and everybody mistreats us." And who would this person be saying it to? Not to anybody in the oppressed group, because their status is such a normal part of their existence that the statement would be ludicrous in its obviousness.
So switch the announcement into plot form for a minute. To demonstrate that the Madugans are oppressed, take one of them and put them in a social situation where someone trips or hits them, and then insults them. It's better - but not necessarily optimal. The question is, is this a normal experience for a Madugan? And how does the character react?
If the experience is not usual or normal, then think about adding the extra dimension of avoidance. Have the Madugan see the incident coming (they would recognize the signs) and try to get out of it. Then have them try to suppress their own indignation in order to keep out of worse trouble.
If the experience is normal, the Madugan may still see the incident coming - may even expend effort trying to avoid it - but will probably not go into a full-blown rage. Full-blown rage, or even suppressed anger, is stressful and indicative of something that becomes too much, but can have dire consequences.
So what's the result? If you want to portray an oppressed person in a way that suggests they are mistreated constantly, don't actually have them get mad. Have them brush it off compared to what happened last week, or what happened to their friend, or just go "There goes Baron Rompert doing his thing again. Oh, well, better get to work." It will have a very different effect on the reader.
Upcoming posts at TTYU: metaphor, "Show not tell" exposed
Let's start with geography.
Some authors can get away with having a page or more of scenery or setting description, while for others it can seem like needless information. Well, if your characters should happen to be on a quest (for example!), traveling through this scenery, then that gives you some opportunities to describe it, but those descriptions can stick out, or be set into the foreground, as digressions.
On the other hand, if the scenery is active in the plot and the inner lives of the characters, it will suddenly be extremely relevant. This can be done with plot events, like in Tolkien's The Hobbit when a thunderstorm leads the characters to take cover in a cave, and they end up getting kidnapped by goblins.
Or when a character-internal deeper point of view is involved, that person's observations of a scene can be colored by, and demonstrate, the emotional state that is about to drive him or her onto the next section of the plot. I'm reminded of agent Donald Maass at the Surrey International Writers' Conference, talking about a lengthy scene description from Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. It was a description of a boat dock after a severe storm, and it was long. Some of the details were even wrong - but it was riveting, in part for its acute observation of detail, but also because it said so much about the character who was walking through it.
In a sense, maybe "background" is the wrong word, because it implies that something should fade or disappear. In a case like this, the scenery is highly obvious, but it has a purpose other than being scenery. It is serving the larger purposes of the story.
When a piece of world information is at its most relevant, that's when you want it to appear. Maybe you've designed this great alphabet for your language - but since you're writing in English, you don't get to use it to write the story! My instincts would tell me that such information shouldn't be explained, as such, but subordinated to other things. When might people have an opportunity to look at text? And when would its form be important to the story?
In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo sees letters on the ring, he says "It's some form of Elvish - I can't read it" and Gandalf replies, "The language is that of Mordor, which I shall not utter here." Even if we couldn't see the writing itself, we would still know not only that it's in a foreign language, but that the language is related to Elvish! Sure, Tolkien's having Gandalf explain to Frodo instead of explaining to us, but he's also managed to sneak in the fact that he's designed his world with language families. And that Mordor is bad, and that it will loom large in Frodo's future.
Last - but not least, for me anyway - is social status. The downtrodden are popular subjects for stories, in science fiction as well as fantasy. Support the underdog, because revolutions are fun!
The difficulty is expressing people's low status without having an oppressed character step forth and announce, "The Madugans are an oppressed minority and everybody mistreats them."
That's not how people talk about their own status, because it's too distant and external. Where would a member of this oppressed minority learn the words "oppressed minority"? Maybe from a social worker, if this world has them - but even then, he or she would probably say "We Madugans are an oppressed minority and everybody mistreats us." And who would this person be saying it to? Not to anybody in the oppressed group, because their status is such a normal part of their existence that the statement would be ludicrous in its obviousness.
So switch the announcement into plot form for a minute. To demonstrate that the Madugans are oppressed, take one of them and put them in a social situation where someone trips or hits them, and then insults them. It's better - but not necessarily optimal. The question is, is this a normal experience for a Madugan? And how does the character react?
If the experience is not usual or normal, then think about adding the extra dimension of avoidance. Have the Madugan see the incident coming (they would recognize the signs) and try to get out of it. Then have them try to suppress their own indignation in order to keep out of worse trouble.
If the experience is normal, the Madugan may still see the incident coming - may even expend effort trying to avoid it - but will probably not go into a full-blown rage. Full-blown rage, or even suppressed anger, is stressful and indicative of something that becomes too much, but can have dire consequences.
So what's the result? If you want to portray an oppressed person in a way that suggests they are mistreated constantly, don't actually have them get mad. Have them brush it off compared to what happened last week, or what happened to their friend, or just go "There goes Baron Rompert doing his thing again. Oh, well, better get to work." It will have a very different effect on the reader.
Upcoming posts at TTYU: metaphor, "Show not tell" exposed
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Writing your language down
Bill Moonroe over at the Analog forum asked me to talk about writing systems, so I thought I'd do a bit of that tonight, starting with the linguistic characteristics of writing systems, moving through a few real world examples I'm familiar with, and finally taking a look at fitting writing systems to a created language and writing technologies. It's quite a list, so here goes.
Some peoples don't write their language down at all. Those who do tend to use one (or more!) of the following three strategies.
1. An alphabet. The symbols of an alphabetic writing system are intended to depict the sounds of a language. Alphabets generally start out as systems with roughly one-to-one correspondence between sounds (phonemes) and symbols - but anyone who has struggled with English spelling knows that this correspondence isn't always clean. This is due primarily to two factors: first, the fact that language sounds change more quickly than written spellings, and second, the fact that languages borrow words from other languages that may not be easily rendered in the alphabet (but must be rendered somehow!).
2. A syllabary. The symbols of a syllabic writing system are intended to depict chunks of sounds, usually the syllables of a language (though in the case of Japanese, the unit of sound that corresponds to a character can actually be less than one syllable). What I said about language change applies here too, but at least in the case of Japanese, there has been official reform of the syllabary to try to bring "spelling" more into line with sound.
3. A set of pictographs or ideographs. The symbols of an ideographic writing system are intended to depict units of meaning rather than units of sound. Chinese is the classic world-language example of such a system, where there is a character for "I" and another for "you," etc. Complex concepts can be depicted in such a system by putting two characters together, such as "electricity" and "talk" for "telephone." And in this case, since no correspondence between sound and meaning is expected, changes in sound and changes in the character system occur independently.
On to examples. Alphabets that I know about include the Roman alphabet used in different permutations for English, French, Indonesian, Dutch, and many others; also the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, etc. Feel free to comment listing any others you know about, and if anyone has further questions about alphabets do let me know. But for now I'll assume this is a type of writing system anyone reading my blog has to be pretty familiar with.
The syllabaries I know best are those of Korean (Hangul) and Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana). Hangul is actually more properly representative of syllables than either of the kana systems. Interestingly, each character is made up of subparts that represent sounds - but they're arranged as parts of a single more complex character. Korean symbols can show either open syllables like "a" and "ka," or closed syllables like "kan", just by including one, two, or three sound parts in a single character. The Japanese kana symbols represent only open syllables like "a" or "ka" and have two separate symbols that are used for closing syllables (one doubles the following consonant, and the other is roughly "N"). The reason there are two types of kana has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with function; hiragana is used for core Japanese vocabulary, and katakana for foreign-derived words.
In the realm of ideographs I'll look at the Chinese symbols, because they are used by the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Japanese. Many of these symbols began as pictographs, or picture-symbols of recognizable objects, and then became abstracted and complicated over time. In much the same way as Hangul, they have recognizable subparts that can be recombined - but all these subparts are meaning-based, and none sound-based. In a language with the non-conjugating structure of Chinese, such a system can be used alone. But in Korean and Japanese, both of which have conjugations and small function words, they can be extremely inconvenient.This is where the "one or more systems" part comes in. Korean uses both Hangul and Chinese characters, while Japanese uses both kana systems and Chinese characters - all mixed together by function.
Okay, now for created languages. Most created languages I have seen use alphabets, but if you're going to put your language in written form, I'd encourage you to think through three things.
1. While you're free to pick any type of system you want, it's helpful to consider language structure, as I mentioned for Chinese above, in choosing which system to use (unless you want to design more than one!).
2. If you're going for an alphabet, you'll get a much more alien or world-local feel if you work directly with the sound system of your language, assigning symbols directly to sounds rather than using a code that corresponds roughly to the Roman alphabet.
3. Consider writing technologies when you design your symbols. Also known as, not everybody uses pencils! Cuneiform was written with a reed on clay; runes were scratched on stone and wood; Chinese and Japanese began with brushes of bamboo and horsehair. People will first begin to write with the materials available to them, on the materials available to them, and this will have an enormous influence on the appearance of the symbols. I challenge anyone with a bioluminescent species to think about how that species would first begin to make recordings of its language (Wow, that's tough - and cool!). Real world writing systems generally need to be written relatively quickly, the symbols should have systematic design and parts, and they should be easily differentiated from one another.
That's it for now! I'll try to come back to worldbuilding tomorrow.
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