Thursday, July 24, 2014

Mr. Worf, Meet Mr. Whorf.


One thing you need to know about me before we go any further: I invented a language.

Yes, it’s true. Actually, "constructed a language" is a more appropriate phrase. There’s a whole world out there on the web (and off of the web, I suppose) full of people who get their kicks constructing, deconstructing, discussing and otherwise fiddling around with “conlangs,” as they are known. And I’m one of them, although I’ve kept the whole thing to myself up until now.

When I talk about constructed language, I need you to understand that it’s a bit more complicated than sitting down and compiling a list of odd-sounding words to substitute for English ones. That’s a perfectly acceptable pastime, don’t get me wrong. In fact, my little sister (about whom you will hear more later) invented a language called “Cha-Cha” back when she was about 8 or 9. Sadly, the promise of Cha-Cha was never fully realized, as the only vocabulary she ever developed, to my knowledge, was “dog dog dog” -- which means “ha ha ha.”




As it turns out, language creators do indeed spend a lot of time making lists of odd-sounding words, because a rich vocabulary is the nuts and bolts of any successful conlang. But the heart of the language, the real inner workings, is its grammar -- the rules that dictate how words fit together to form meaningful phrases, clauses and sentences – and it is on this that any reputable conlanger will expend the vast majority of his or her time and effort. It’s hard work, but I’ll save my grammar discussion for some future post.

My conlang is called Batai. (I've added a link to the grammar of Batai on the left sidebar of my blog.) For those of you familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation, this name might sound familiar, as I hijacked it from a character in episode 124, “The Inner Light” (maybe my favorite episode). If you haven’t seen it, go to Netflix and watch it. Now.

I’ll wait.

Good.

That name (Batai) was the first kernel of what was to become my conlang, and it is almost the only connection it has with the episode, aside from one two-word phrase I also pilfered.* I just simply liked the sound of the word “Batai.” (Of course, I was then forced to create a “back-story” for this word, and it became part of the vocabulary. Fun stuff!)

There’s another connection between Star Trek and Batai, although this one was as unintentional as it was painful for me to discover. You see, for some terrible reason early on in the creative process, I had decided that Batai needed to be an OVS language. I think I just wanted to challenge myself for some reason. (For non-language-geeks out there, OVS refers to the word order of a language, in this case Object-Verb-Subject. OVS languages are pretty much the reverse of SVO languages, such as English.) OVS languages are the rarest type of language (and probably least described, linguistically) on the planet, which may have added to my desire for Batai use this sequence. After all, I thought, if so few examples of OVS exist, then there were fewer linguistic rules to break. Plus, I assumed that fewer invented languages would use this word order, as it can be extremely challenging to work with. This freed me up to take risks with the grammar, and in a way it made things easier for me.

So it was a few years later when I realized to my dismay that one of the most successful and famous of all conlangs – Klingon – also uses the OVS sequence. This irritates me to this day on several levels. First, I felt I should have known that Klingon was OVS. I don’t know, it just seems like something I would be aware of. And second, I didn’t want anyone to ever think that I had copied that idea, should I ever want to publish Batai. “ghuy’cha’!” as a particularly angry and foul-mouthed Klingon might say.

But back to the actual story.

As I got well into the work of creating Batai, a question started to nag at me: “Who are the people who speak this language? What is their story?” Or, as the question soon became, “What are their stories?”

I had, for one reason or another, always thought of them as what we might call a primitive society, maybe human, maybe not, living a rather isolated existence in a tropical environment. It just seemed to simplify things. But I started to wonder as I sweated over grammar and vocabulary, just how much I needed to know about them, about their culture, before I could go any further. To what extent is their vocabulary predicated on what they know, or their culture, or how they see the world? And conversely, how does their language inform their way of thinking, and their ways of doing what they do? I found these questions intriguing, and not a little inspiring, but they were too much for me. After all, I was having fits just trying to figure out how a Batai speaker would form a dependent clause; I was not prepared to invent an entire ethnography!

But then I recalled a linguistics class I had in college, and I remembered that these questions had been asked before by numerous linguists, perhaps the most famous of whom was a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf. Here he is.

In the late 1930s, Whorf advanced a principle he called “linguistic relativity,” which proposed that differences in language reflect, and are reflected by, differences in people’s conceptions of the world around them. Also known as the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” this idea was greatly influenced by his work with the Hopi language. You can read more about it here.

Now, I know that Whorf’s ideas have been widely criticized by high-profile universalists such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, and many of his observations (most notably those of Hopi conceptions of time) have been refuted by later linguistic work. However, I find the notion that a people’s language and their culture/worldview could be intertwined to be an appealing, if not irresistible, one. And so I have let it influence my work on Batai, at least in the direction of culture influencing the language.

One brief example is the way Batai speakers talk about the weather: in Batai, one does not say, “It is raining,” or “It rains,” using an impersonal construction like we do in English; rather one says, wiši nokowa -- literally “she sends rain” (the “she” referred to being Kaila, the divinity associated with the sky and weather). It is the animistic religion of the people (Lalindu) who speak Batai that influences the way they relate to weather phenomena.

As I continued to add vocabulary and idiomatic expressions into Batai, I found that it was impossible for me to separate this process from my expanding ideas about the culture and worldview of the Lalindu. So the culture continued (or I should say, continues) to grow alongside the language. They are intertwined. For me, inseparable. And although, even after all this time (I first began work on Batai in 2007) my grasp on the culture of the Lalindu is often tenuous at best, I still cannot work on those dependent clause rules without thinking of the people who will be using them. Even if those people, and their beliefs, and everything about them, exist solely and entirely within my imagination.

*In “The Inner Light,” the common expression of farewell used by the people of Kataan is “go carefully.” The Batai expression is identical: nakwim tilam.





Wednesday, July 16, 2014

The Occasional Brilliance of Babble


I teach second grade in a fine public school district here in the Twin Cities, and I’ve done so for almost 16 years now. I love the kids dearly, don’t get me wrong, but I have to admit that I sometimes get tired of “little kid talk,” and yearn to be teaching older students, to exercise my vocabulary, to talk to someone who gets my jokes. And then there are those times when I encounter the brilliance of the 7- and 8-year-old mind that is as yet unfettered by social anxiety and the fear of “being wrong.” A mind that is still experimenting with language, and in which the imagination has not yet been squashed in favor of factual knowledge, curriculum, and testing strategies. My favorite all-time tale of “accidental linguistic brilliance” comes from my good friend Sally, who taught primary grades for many years in Minneapolis.

Sally was collecting papers from her first graders one day (I believe it was a permission form, of sorts), and she noticed that one student had not yet turned hers in. She called the student over to her desk to ask the girl where her permission form was. The girl slapped her palm to her forehead in dismay and groaned, “I for-keep-on-getting!”

  
Now, at first glance it might be easy to write this off with a “How cute! She mixed up her word order!” But I challenge you to look more closely to see what she really did. By splitting the word “forgetting” and placing the phrase “keep on” between the two parts, this youngster created what linguists call an infix (akin to a prefix or suffix, but appearing within a word instead of at either end). And English doesn’t really have infixes.* Or not, I should say, until now.

Look again. Not only did she insert “keep on” into the word “forgetting,” but she split the latter at exactly the right spot, between two morphemes, linguistically speaking. She might have said “I keep forgetting on,” or “I forget keep on-ing” or something like that, but she didn’t. She distinguished two recognizable parts of the verb: “for” and “get.”

It gets better. It turns out that the precise affix she chose (“keep on”) is one that is common to several other languages as either an infix or suffix, and has probably been in use, in one form or another, since human language began. It’s called a frequentative, and it is affixed to a verb to indicate repeated action (in other words, action that the doer “keeps on” doing.) The example I’m most familiar with is ancient Greek, which used the infix σκ (sk) with the imperfect tense to indicate repeated action in the past (e.g., “I used to study Greek and Latin”). Russian, Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian also use an affix (usually a suffix) to show repeated action. English has its own version of this, shown in words like “blabber,” “sparkle” and “chatter,” (from “blab,” “spark” and “chat”), but the sense of repeated action hasn’t really survived. (I would have loved to find out whether this girl had any ancestors who spoke a Slavic or Finno-Ugrik language, just to test the notion of cultural memory. I’m mostly kidding, but it is intriguing.)

Her creation (invention, what have you) has stuck with me, and over time I have begun to think of it as something more than accidental. After all, think of what this girl did with that “simple” rewording: not only did she create an infix by herself – one that was useful for her and, at the same time, could be immediately understood by her audience (no small feat!). And not only did she choose the “best” placement for this infix, but she also invented the English version of a useful form that already exists in other languages. It may not have much use outside of this one instance (“I re-keep-on-peating myself” just doesn’t have the same oomph), but that doesn’t detract from its brilliance. It is useful, and I have shared it with my students (who get it immediately). I also admit that I myself have uttered “I for-keep-on-getting!” in certain situations (with the requisite forehead slap) -- mostly with adults who know me well enough not to run away. Immediately.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: listen to children, especially when they are experimenting with language. You might hear something really cool. To quote a “Deep Thought” from Jack Handy, "The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.”

[*Actually, linguists would probably call this tmesis, like the ever-popular “fan-f***ing-tastic.” However, I would argue that it is as close to a true infix, in form, placement, and meaning, as you can get in English. So...nyah.]

Monday, July 14, 2014

So, if I have no words, why did I just create a blog...about words?

This is a test. I have just set up this blog, and I don't know what this is going to look like. I'm not even sure I want to do this. But here it is. A 50-year-old man joins the 21st century. (Woot.)