This will be an abbreviated write-up of my major WIP, "Hiding Waters Feayran." I've talked about it in threads across the forum, and Pirka finally bugged me to put together a thread about it. :) Feel free to reply with comments, criticism, or questions!
Design Goals:
Feayran is intended to be a naturalistic artlang spoken by a community of partly-humans who perceive the world in notably different ways than humans do. Since my major interests in conworlding are ethnography, sociolinguistics, and cognitive psychology, much of the drive behind Feayran is to create an interesting experiment in how different perceptions might create different conceptualizations of the world, and how this in turn could affect language.
Secondarily, I wanted to draw a lot of my inspiration from native languages of North America, so I researched languages like Lakhota, Oneida, Mohawk, Navajo, the Salish family, and Western Apache. The ideas I drew from these languages are rather vague, though, so Feayran is very much a priori and isn't much like a North American language at all.
Table of Contents:
Points of Interest. What I find most interesting about the Feayran language; a skimmable cheat sheet.
Setting. A very brief ethnographic sketch of Hiding Waters, highlighting points especially relevant to the language.
The Anatomy of a Predicate. The predicate is the workhorse of the language; this is a sketch of its morphology.
Scent-role Classifiers. Feayran's smell-based classifier system and how it is used for object reference.
Aspect, negation, and telicity. Some interesting behavior that arises from interaction between Feayran's aspect and negation systems.
Incorporation. A discussion of Feayran's most productive derivational device and its uses.
Aspect and Mood Interaction. Some brief notes on interaction between Feayran's aspect and mood systems (and in general, sequential interpretation of categories on the predicate.)
If your beings are sensitive enough to scent to have scent-based classifiers, you'll also other have morphemes that handle variables that affect scent: features that convey being upwind or downwind; characterizations of materials, things, surfaces, and conditions according to how well they retain scents; and I don't know what else. If your beings' sense of smell is markedly superhuman, what smells good or bad to them?
Do your beings create and/or distribute scents or scented things as an art form?
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” --Juan Ramon Jimenez
Ceresz wrote:Not really, other than maybe some glossed examples of in-world folk tales and myths or something like that .
I'm really looking forward to this.
Thanks! I'll definitely have to put in some folk tales; they're one of my favorite things about the language
cybrxkhan wrote:How about dialectal differences and diacrhonics (if you have those)?
Unfortunately, I don't have any yet...though I'm working on it. My self-education in diachronics remains entirely lacking, so I'm working through a few books before I'm ready for that project.
Ralph wrote:Definitely looking forward to this: Feayran looks really interesting from what I've seen of it!
Thanks!
Rainchild wrote:This looks great!
If your beings are sensitive enough to scent to have scent-based classifiers, you'll also other have morphemes that handle variables that affect scent: features that convey being upwind or downwind; characterizations of materials, things, surfaces, and conditions according to how well they retain scents; and I don't know what else.
Indeed! Unlike the scent-role classifiers, these are all handled lexically; but some of the most frequent directionals pertain to wind direction, marking, removing, and obscuring scents, etc. Lots of conceptual metaphors similarly involve the wind and other smell-related phenomena.
Rainchild wrote:If your beings' sense of smell is markedly superhuman, what smells good or bad to them?
I'm still working on this. I know that certain herbs are particularly prized for their smell, and body odor is not considered a bad smell unless the individual is sick.
Rainchild wrote:Do your beings create and/or distribute scents or scented things as an art form?
Yes! Ritual regalia is predominantly non-visual, based instead on scented oils. Production of scent oils is a highly-valued craft, and lodges and other belongings are often marked with them.
Thanks for the questions, you guys! Keep them coming!
This is just a quick rundown of the features of the language that I happen to find particularly cool. I'm not going to go into too much detail about them, since they'll be covered in later parts; this is just a quick cheat-sheet to point you in the direction of the tastier bits.
Cognitive/Perceptual Gigglery
The Hiding Waters language is spoken by a community of feayr—a species of shapeshifters from the world of Domhantir's far-northern continent. Feayr have two natural shapes: one human(ish), the other wolf(ish). In both shapes they have a phenomenally advanced sense of smell, very acute hearing compared to humans, and relatively lousy eyesight (including limited color perception). I wanted to play with how these physiological differences might change how the feayr conceptualize the world and how they frame it in language. Here's what I came up with:
There is an important difference in feayr cognition between the identity of a thing and its form. When I use the word "identity" here, I'm talking about what a thing is (as opposed to other usages of "identity," e.g. which one a thing is). A feayr in wolf-shape is a wolf, but not in the same way that a "true" wolf is a wolf, so feayr therefore cognitively track the form/description/nature of a thing separately from its permanent identity.
This shows up in the language in a couple of boring ways—there are separate aspects used to describe essential properties of things (i.e., properties of identity) and descriptive properties of things (properties of form), which turn out roughly like the ser/estar distinction in Spanish. There's a third aspect that's a little more interesting, which is used to describe properties of form which conflict with properties of identity ("that thing appears to be a bear but actually isn't").
A consequence of this distinction between identity and form that I find more interesting involves how Hiding Waters feayr refer to objects in discourse, which is also related to the way feayr sensory perception differs from humans'. Smell is the feayr's dominant sense, not vision, and it plays the primary role in their mental representations of things.
When you perceive an object via sight, you have access (typically) to features of its identity—when you visually perceive an apple, you perceive its color, its shape, its size, and other features that it has as an apple.
But when you perceive an object via smell, you have access (if you have a feayr's nose) to features of its context—skin oils left by the person who gave you the apple, traces of the bag where the apple had been stored previously, the health and location of the tree it came from, etc.
Since the latter is more prominent in feayr cognition than the former, salient context features rather than identity features are used to refer to specific objects. (As a rough example, where English says "Toss me that apple," Feayran says "Toss me that object-with-traces-of-fructose.") Identity features can still be established, but this is done descriptively and not (usually) for the purpose of reference. I'll talk about this more in my post about scent-role classifiers.
Nounlessness
As an additional spin-off of the identity/form/description idea, Feayran does not have any lexical category that can be easily/usefully set apart as "nouns." Instead, every semantically-heavy word in Feayran is a predicate (or "verb" if you want) describing either a situation or a property of some participants. The language manages to pull this off and still be functional through trickery with the scent-role referential system mentioned earlier.
Incorporation
As a less biological, more cultural trait, I wanted the Hiding Waters feayr to be very cognizant of geographical relationships. Where other polysynthetic languages tend to incorporate semantic objects into their verbs, Feayran incorporates up to two of four spatial arguments: ablative (indicating origin, starting point, cause, movement-away-from), vialis (route, course, method, instrument, movement-through), locative (site of event without motion, possessor, theme, movement-at), and lative (destination, goal, purpose, result, movement-toward). This process is used for a rich number of derivational processes that I find very fun.
Manifestations of Social Structure
Since feayr spend much of their time as wolves, I wanted to give their social structure some features of wolf packs. The most obvious manifestation of this in the language is stance; the language has different registers for speaking to (or about) people who are more dominant in the pack hierarchy and people who are more submissive in the hierarchy. In some cases this is similar to Japanese's keigo system, but Feayran stance runs deeper—in every conversation (minus a few special cases), one speaker must take leading stance, while the other(s) must take following stance.
In situations with a clear divergence of rank this is less interesting, and basically just a more ornate tu/vous distinction. But in interactions between people of equal or similar rank it gets much more interesting, because stance becomes fluid over the course of the conversation. Speakers can switch from one stance to the other as a means of signaling conversational focus, turn exchanges, and other fun pragmatic behaviors. Stance can also be used to signal topical expertise and territorial claims.
Storytelling
This is only sort of a feature of Feayran specifically; mostly it's a feature of how I have developed it and the associated conculture. I've made storytelling an extremely important part of Hiding Waters culture, so I've devoted a lot of work to developing their storytelling traditions, genres, conventions, etc. The significances and usages of different kinds of stories make for all kinds of fun times (such as in the way they interact with place names and parables).
The Hiding Waters language is spoken by a hunter-gatherer community of indeterminate size (I'm still deciding how big the main pack is, along with surrounding satellite packs). Their territory is centered at Hiding Waters Falls1, where the Nightsong River2 empties into Silent Bay3. The climate is cold and frequently overcast, with consistent rains in the summer replaced by heavy snow from autumn through spring. The falls is surrounded by a mixed forest, with deciduous trees near the coast fading into dense conifers in the foothills further inland. Herds of elk occupy the alpine valleys, and deer and small game are fairly plentiful closer to the falls, but the main staples are salmon, shellfish, and seal. The region is not conducive to agriculture, and there are few species of grains to be found.
The broader tribe consists of smaller packs, each with their own territory within the wider Hiding Waters area. Feayr have an annual estrus in late winter, which results in stark generational divides. Kinship is determined by generation and pack membership rather than by individual bloodlines, and children are raised cooperatively. These traits are reflected in the language's kinterms:
Nanh* - female of an elder generation and like pack membership
Tamh* - male of an elder generation and like pack membership
M*nhe - female of same generation and like pack membership
M*ke - male of same generation and like pack membership
Mìin* - female of younger generation and like pack membership
Mìik* - male of younger generation and like pack membership
Tamh*nhe - female of different pack membership
Tamh*ke - male of different pack membership
. Major decisions within the pack are made by the dominant female in each pack, and tribe-wide decisions are made by a council of the dominant females from each pack. Authority on a finer scale is determined by stance relationships, which can be challenged and established via traditional contests.
1. Usulsixásinaw, "the waters where she was hiding"
2. Ùurunuxolskisháhinokw, "he was singing beside it all through the night"
3. Sulhásniìlmuìw, "the waters are silent"
Oh, right—Feayran roots are circumfixed around their inflections. In the citation form of roots, the asterisk shows the divide between the "pre-stem" and the "post-stem."
For example, Usulsixásinaw comes from the root us*w, "hiding."
Oh, right—Feayran roots are circumfixed around their inflections. For example, Usulsixásinaw comes from the root us*w, "hiding."
Why do you analyze it that way, instead of saying that inflections are infixed?
Because then the infix insertion position for each root would be lexically specified and thus unique to that root. Defining roots as bipartite avoids this extra layer of description.
My pronouns are <xe> [ziː] / <xym> [zɪm] / <xys> [zɪz]
Mmmmmmmm...I wanna try my hand at a root-based language now....maybe for Gskcar. hope you don't mind me stealing the circumfix idea >_>
I'm interested in this lang, I'll give you that
Nūdenku waga honji ma naku honyasi ne ika-ika ichamase! female-appearance=despite boy-voice=PAT hold boy-youth=TOP very be.cute-3PL Honyasi zō honyasi ma naidasu. boy-youth=AGT boy-youth=PAT love.romantically-3S
Pirka wrote wrote:
Yay!
What do the asterisks mean?
Oh, right—Feayran roots are circumfixed around their inflections. For example, Usulsixásinaw comes from the root us*w, "hiding."
Why do you analyze it that way, instead of saying that inflections are infixed?
Micamo nailed it. Infixation rules typically insert inflections into a particular location, say, "after the first metrical foot" of the word. There isn't any such pattern that I've found in Feayran roots. In some cases one of the pre-stem or post-stem is null, even, so a bipartite-root analysis is simpler.
Chagen wrote:
Mmmmmmmm...I wanna try my hand at a root-based language now....maybe for Gskcar. hope you don't mind me stealing the circumfix idea >_>
The pre-stem and post-stem are the two parts of the root, which are circumfixed around the inflection.
STANCE indicates the speaker's hierarchical stance toward the listener(s). The two major stances are used in the vast majority of cases; the remaining three are restricted to very particular circumstances.
Leading (major stance) indicates a dominant position, a territorial claim, relative expertise in the topic of discourse, etc.
Following (major stance) indicates a submissive position; the reverse of the leading stance
Romantic (minor stance) is used exclusively with one's mated partner
Companion (minor stance) is used exclusively with a very small number of very close friends
Challenging (minor stance) is used to signal confrontation, when multiple speakers try to take leading stance at once and do not back down.
INCORP1 and INCORP2 are the two sites where roots can be incorporated into the predicate. The first is either an ablative or vialis argument, and the second is either a locative or lative argument.
AGENT and PATIENT indicate the scent-role class, stance, and number of the predicate's core participants.
NEG allows the verb to be internally negated. (More details later.)
ASPECT carries one of eight morphemes that indicate aspect, some modality distinctions, and the predicate's role in narrative structure. (More details later.)
Stative, for indicating incidental features of form (as opposed to features of identity).
Essential, for indicating inherent features of identity (as opposed to features of form).
Equative, for indicating features of form which conflict with features of identity ("appears to be but actually isn't")
Perfective, for completions of telic roots and changes of state in atelic roots
Imperfective, for processes progressing toward completion in telic roots and gradually changing states in atelic roots
Climactic, for punctual events and changes of state of highest narrative saliency
Conjectural, for things which are assumed to be the case based on available information
Confident, for things which are known to be the case with high certainty
MOOD indicates causativity and one of eight modalities:
Indicative, for plain realis predicates
Subjunctive, for most irrealis predicates including protases, apodoses, and certain components of complex phrases.
Imperative, for strong commands (usually only used when in leading stance) and, in certain structures, obligations.
Precative, for soft requests (replaces the imperative in following stance, used in leading stance for endearment).
Optative, for speaker-wishes
Volitional, for participant-wishes
Potential, for possibilities and capacities
Permissive, for things not forbidden by pack rules
Examples:
Usulsixásinaw
us<u-lsi-x-á-s<i>na>w
hiding<LEAD-FEM.FOLLOW.S-STAT-IND-WATER<LOC.FOLLOW>> The waters where she was hiding
Pre-stem: us
Post-stem: w
Stance: u (leading)
Incorp 1: (none)
Agent: lsi (feminine scent-role, speaker in following stance toward referent, singular number)
Negation: (none)
Aspect: x (stative)
Patient: (none)
Incorp 2: sina (water-scent-role classifier, locative case, speaker in following stance toward referent)
Ùurunuxolskisáhinokw
ùur<u-nux<o>s-lki-s-á-in<o>kw>
singing<LEAD-nighttime<VIA.INAN>-MASC.FOLLOW.S-IMPF-IND-side<LOC.INAN>> He was singing beside it all through the night
Pre-stem: ùur
Post-stem: Ø
Stance: u (leading)
Incorp 1: nuxol ("nighttime," viative case indicating duration throughout, stanceless/inanimate referent)
Agent: lki (masculine scent-role, speaker in following stance toward referent, singular number)
Negation: (none)
Aspect: s (imperfective)
Patient: (none)
Incorp 2: inokw ("side of something," locative case, stanceless/inanimate referent)
Feayran tracks the different players in a depicted situation via scent-role classifiers. In a typical noun class system, class is inherent to the identity of the noun—when you talk about a table in Spanish, you use the feminine article because you are talking about a table. In Feayran, however, class is not inherent to the identity of referents, but to salient scent traces they are carrying. So, while "object-with-traces-of-fructose" can apply to apples, it can also apply to people who have been picking apples, and bags that have been used to store apples.
This results in some fun behavior, because any given object at any given time has a number of different smell traces on it. So, speakers pick the most salient trace on a particular object, "tag" it with that scent-class, and then use that classifier to reference that particular object until the classifier is reassigned. In discourse, this mechanism is a powerful force for disambiguation, since each salient object within a conversation can be assigned its own scent role. This has an effect on discourse structure—predicates at the beginnings of conversations are used to assign scent roles, which are used to refer to objects thereafter rather than reiterated predicates. In a way, it's basically a grossly baroque pronoun system where pronouns are distributed as necessary for disambiguation and can be reassigned for convenience.
Previously Feayran had a more limited selection of scent classifiers, but I've since decided to expand the system considerably as my research on olfaction continues. Here are a few of the classifiers available.
Unfamiliar smells, foreign smells
Familiar smells, kin smells
Traces of small prey animals
Traces of large ungulates
Traces of male hormones and pheromones
Traces of female hormones and pheromones
Traces of pheromones indicative of estrus
Traces of hormones and pheromones indicative of emotional distress or agitation
Traces of hormones and pheromones indicative of aggression
Traces of certain esters found in particular edible fruits
Traces of certain esters indicative of fermentation
Traces of certain terpenes found in particular woody herbs including bay
Traces of certain terpenes found in particular pungent herbs including lemongrass
Traces of certain terpenes found in particular pungent herbs (including a con-plant similar to ginger)
Traces of certain terpenes found in certain sweet herbs including lavender
Traces of certain terpenes found in certain pungent plants like juniper
Traces of certain amines found in freshwater fish
Traces of certain amines and proteins found in shellfish
Traces of certain amines found in rotting flesh
Traces of certain amines found in feces
Traces of certain acids and proteins indicative of fungal infection
Traces of certain ketones, especially those found in blood
Traces of certain proteins indicative of blood infection
Traces of sickness in general
Traces indicative of old age
Traces of bacteria common in standing water
Traces of compounds associated with fresh water
Traces of certain alcohols found in common brush plants
Traces of certain lactones found in maple sap
Traces of certain aldehydes found in ripe fruit and herbs good for smoking
Traces of freshwater fish
Traces of noncompetitive predators (including other feayr)
Traces of competitive/dangerous predators
Additionally, there is a collection of classifiers which are not explicitly smell-based. These include classifiers for the 1st and 2nd persons (although these can also be applied to possessed objects, so in a way they are smell based), a general classifier for signs or traces (such as markings, tracks, etc.), a very broad classifier loosely applying to sources of information (used for the wind, certain birds, words, and certain thoughts), and a classifier for objects which have no smell or are abstract (although many abstract ideas are subsumed under metaphorical extensions of the other classes).