Conlangers

I have done some Javascript coding recently. The results might be of interest to other conlangers, so I’m posting them here:

The Derivizer.
A simple tool that you can use while building/ expanding your conlang’s lexicon. You can enter (some of) your language’s root words and derivational affixes, and use this script to suggest a few random derivatives and/or compounds, for which you can then try to come up with nice idiomatic meanings. I’ve started writing this tool back in October 2012, and I’ve found it quite useful already. Of course, the exact degree of usefulness depends on the data you enter – I find it works best when you limit the input to a certain domain, e.g. only noun roots from a single semantic field, and only derivational affixes that can be attached to these nouns.

The Frequentizer.
I wanted to do a corpus-based phoneme frequency analysis for one of my conlangs today, but I couldn’t find a suitable online tool for this task in a quick round of googling, so I decided to write one myself. Even in the very first version, it can already (a) provide separate figures for vowels and consonants (and you can even define what counts as a vowel in your conlang), (b) handle user-defined di- and trigraphs correctly by treating them as single segments, and (c) arbitrarily combine different letters into a single phoneme, for instance accented and unaccented vowels. In a future version, the Frequentizer may also be able to assign the same grapheme to different phonemes depending on an orthographically predictable environment, but don’t hold your breath…

I hope these tools will prove useful to some of you. There’s not much documentation for either at this point, but I recommend taking a look at the example data (from Buruya Nzaysa btw) and testing some of the different settings in order to get a feeling for how they work. Have fun!

(Both of these are beta versions, so I can’t guarantee that the scripts always work as they should… )

[EDIT May 23, 2013]
I have just uploaded a new version of the Frequentizer. There are now separate grapheme fields for consonants and vowels which both work like the old Special Graphemes field. You can also choose what to do with characters that don’t appear in those fields. And of course, the most significant change: The tool now has a basic understanding of syllable structure, so it can give separate statistics for onset and coda consonants. By default, it will treat the first consonant of every cluster plus all word-final consonants as belonging to a syllable coda; if you need different rules, you can add a syllable divider character (by default, the MIDDLE DOT ·) to your text corpus in places where the built-in rules do not give the intended syllabification.

Didn’t I tell y’all there would be some Dothraki this season? Ta da! There it is!

If I may come to things out of order, I thought the VFX of the White Walker dying were outstanding. Must be pretty satisfying to stab something and then have it turn to ice, fall and shatter that way. Pretty cool! Of course, Sam should’ve retained his knife (what was he so afraid of? He killed it! No way you can come back from that!), but the action north of the wall has been replete with horror movie tropes, so it is fitting. For those who remember the specific action of the book better than I do, though, what was up with those birds?! I don’t remember that from the book. And why would they have been so excited about this encounter as to opposed to the others that we’ve seen in the series already? There were no crows in those scenes (or, at least, no literal crows). Oh, and one more question: Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that that White Walker is the exact same White Walker we saw in the season 2 finale?

I thought the scenes surrounding and during Tyrion and Sansa’s wedding were done very well. Reading those scenes initially, it was so frustrating how much Tyrion wants to convey to Sansa that he’s not a bad guy, and how miserably he fails to do so. I thought they captured that aspect of the books quite well in the scenes we saw here.

There has been a bit of controversy in some corners regarding the scenes on Dragonstone. I would like to go on record saying I thought they were fine. I have no complaints, and found everything to be in keeping with what ought to have been expected.

In today’s scene from Slaver’s Bay, we’re introduced to Daario Naharis, who looks nothing like I thought he would. You know who does look cool, though: Prendahl na Ghezn (played by Ramon Tikaram). Dude looks awesome! He’s even got the blue hair! (If there was any glare on your screen, you might not have noticed it, but his hair was dyed blue, I can assure you.) Alas, his role is a bit short-lived… It’s too bad. Honestly, I hope I see more of him in some other feature. He looks like a leading man, to me.

The main scene begins with Mero leading Prendahl and Daario into Dany’s tent. There is an exchange where Mero is even more insulting than Kraznys, and he provokes the incredible, invincible and indomitable Jacob Anderson, a.k.a Grey Worm, a.k.a Torgo Nudho, who says:

• Nya dare, beza unehtelas jaa engo ozy?
• “My queen, shall this one slice out his tongue for you?”

And for those keeping track, yes, that is a Dothraki-style hiatus there with jaa, in addition to Dothraki-style post-vocalic h in unehtelas, both of which he nails, because Jacob Anderson is a Golden God.

Anyway, Dany responds in High Valyrian:

• Bisi vali īlvyz zentyssy issi.
• “These men are our guests.”

The word vali was cut due to length, I’m guessing, but the result would still be grammatical (it would just mean “These ones [probably animate] are our guests”). If the form of the possessive adjective looks odd to you, then you’re really keyed in to the phonology of High Valyrian. As I mentioned somewhere at some point in time, adjectives in High Valyrian have a different form depending on whether they come before or after the noun they modify. In this case, the full form would be īlvyzy. The final y drops out if the adjective precedes the noun it modifies, though, and the z devoices unless the next word begins with a voiced sound. Since “guests” is zentyssy, then, the form of the adjective is īlvyz and not īlvys.

After many more insults and a scene between the three Second Sons, we see Missandei bathing Daenerys. Though this scene was, of course, planned, this bit of dialogue was added by Dan Weiss very late in the game (he asked for the translation in mid-September). Personally I think it’s kind of a meta joke since this is literally the only Dothraki that appears in the entire season. What he did was he gave me the English line and asked if I could get athjahakar (the Dothraki word for “pride”) at the end of the sentence. Ultimately this is how I did the translation:

• Zhey Drogo ast me-Dothraki thasho h’anhaan ven anha ray yol mehas. Me azh maan atjakhar.
• “Drogo said I spoke Dothraki like one born to it. It gave him great pride.”

Those who know Dothraki will note that this line features the (somewhat) rare invocative use of zhey (i.e. bringing to the listener’s attention a person who hasn’t yet appeared as a topic of discussion). You’ll also note that athjahakar is misspelled. Indeed, this little exchange was supposed to reveal that Dany was never as good at Dothraki as she is, of course, with High Valyrian or Common. And the specific word is a call-back to episode 103, I think it was, where Dany’s handmaiden Jiqui (or Zhikwi) Irri is shown teaching Dany Dothraki by teaching her to say the word athjahakar.

Looking at the above Dothraki line, you’ll note that Dany mangles it pretty badly. That was the intention, but personally I think Emilia went a little too far. Neither Dany nor Emilia was ever that bad! Of course, if Dany hasn’t really been speaking Dothraki much, I can see her getting out of practice (perhaps Jorah is the only one that speaks to the Dothraki now [or, actually, now Missandei can too]). She puts together a rather grammatically complex sentence, though. Pretty impressive for a second language learner!

Second Sons was a little light on language, so to add some girth to this, here’s the full declension for vala, the High Valyrian word for “man”:

Oh, also I wanted to mention that the word for “son” from our title comes from Twitter user @Tracee2ez, who was my 3,000th Twitter follower! The word is trēsy, which is nicely symmetrical with the word for “daughter”, which is tala. Both are lunar words, but tala is first declension, and trēsy second. There are a number of dualities that work this way, where two words which are intended to be in some sort of semantic relation to one another differ either solely in declension class or gender, but in systematic (or semi-systematic) ways. This word, then, turned out to be quite the fortuitous coining, since I already had the word for “daughter”.

Also, for those in the Bay Area, I will be at BayCon this Sunday. If you’re in the area, stop by and say M’ath!

Oh, and one more also (consider this a public service announcement): The penultimate episode of this season of Game of Thrones will not be airing a week from yesterday! I guess due to a ratings slump on Memorial Day, HBO is skipping a week, and episode 309 will air on June 2nd. Perhaps I can put together a post next week trying to answer some questions. Or I can take a break and enjoy the weekend. We’ll see.

Fonas chek!

Let’s have a word of the day from Tmaśareʔ:

cona (v.) ‘promise, swear, vow’

Natohnęʔ kwe na conapǫkse otweʔną hąse enętaʔi yaśe.
na-tohną-eʔ kwe na-Ø cona-pǫ-kse otweʔną hąse-Ø eni-ɴta-ʔi yaśe-Ø
1SG.POSS-father-ERG but 1SG-ABS promise-SENS-3>3.VII next_year horse-ABS be_equipped_with-1SG>3.II-IRR PROX.VII.SG-ABS
“But my father has promised me that I will get a horse next year!”

cona is a ditransitive verb with three mandatory arguments, which has the interesting implication that you cannot simply say that you promise something, but you always have to say who you’re promising it to.

The word also has a fascinating etymology: It is ultimately derived from the Proto-Western root *dzači ‘say, speak’, extended with the adjectival prefix *dłũ- ‘long’, i.e. ‘say something which will be valid for a long time’. (There’s a precise cognate in Empotleʔá tlonátsé.) After several centuries of sound change, the reflex of this verb had become */tsonatʃi/ – and at that point, people started dropping the last syllable of the stem. Why? Well, a verb like ‘promise’ is very frequently used in the first person with future reference, that is, indicating a self-commitment along with a wish that one may be able to live up to this self-commitment. This wish may very well be made explicit by inflecting the verb for the optative mood, similar to how English speakers might add ‘want’ as in ‘I want to promise you…’. And as it happens, Tmaśareʔ has an optative suffix whose form is exactly the same as the last syllable of the regular reflex of *dłũ-dzači, namely -ći (itself derived from the Proto-Western verb *čiye ‘want’). It is no surprise that some confusion arose, and in the end the /tʃi/ syllable was left off when the verb was used in non-optative circumstances, leading to reanalysis of the stem as just /tsona/.