Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by LinguistCat »

I'm working on a set of stories about cat youkai (kaibyou). As a side project for my own fun and to add some flavor, I want them to have their own language (or at least dialect) related to Japanese. I don't need it to be 100% accurate, but I have been trying to learn how things changed generally from about Early Middle Japanese to Modern Japanese, as well as picking up my study of Modern Japanese again. (My knowledge at this point is really piecemeal when it comes to vocab, and my grammar is rusty, but that's always been the easiest for me to pick up in languages.) So, basically, I'm working out a basic direction for this language and still deciding how it will stay similar to Modern Japanese and where it will diverge.

I want it to sound more cat-like, which in my mind at least means more nasals or nasalization, more "hissing" phonemes, and maybe more trills (for example changing the rhotic in Japanese to more of a trill, or even having a distinction). Japanese already has length and I think that works well with cats. I might also want to make this tonal, but I'm not really very knowledgeable about them, and while it would definitely make it more cat-like to my mind, might take it too far from Japanese. As I understand it, (Late?) Middle Japanese had prenasalized voiced consonants which simplified to just voiced consonants later (with some exceptions, where they became nasal stops).

So, just from looking at Late Middle Japanese specifically, I have a way to add at least one trill, how to keep or add more nasalization, but I'm not sure what phonemes/allophones I could add to make it sound hissier, aside from having /p\ / do something odd, or /t/ and /d/ being realized as [ts] and [dz] before both /i/ and /u/. I'm not sure exactly if or how I would change the vowels. So I'm thinking a phonology somewhere around:

/a i u e o/ with all of these being approximate
/p mb t nd k Ng m n N\ / possibly either backing the velar consonants to uvular or fronting the uvular nasal to velar? I also might prefer to make the distinction "non-nasalized" vs "prenasalized" vs "fully nasal" and keep the distinction in germinated consonants. So the "non-nasals" could easily be voiced except in careful speech, or even just in general.
/s (n)z ts (n)dz / + whatever I do with /p\ /
/r j M\ / And if I decide to keep it, /l\ /

I think there would be some obvious vocabulary changes. (For example, since cats would rarely eat rice let alone have it as a staple, it would be odd for "gohan" to mean "rice" and "a meal" unless they were really strongly influenced by humans, and that would be another discussion.) I might want to throw in some of the "stereotypes" of how cats would speak Japanese as well, like using nya commonly as an emphatic particle or the like. This might even be an in story reasoning for these stereotypes: Cats carry them into speaking Standard Japanese quite often.

Sorry this is a bit long but 2 main questions: Would this be enough changes phonologically from Late Middle Japanese to consider it possibly a "Modern Cat Japanese". or would it work better if this were an earlier form and derive from there? Does anyone have any other thoughts on things to add, change or get rid of to make it more cat like from what I've already said?
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by Ahzoh »

That would be very amusing
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by Lao Kou »

Eartha Kitt as Grande-Duchesse! [B)]
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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You say that cats would not eat rice, which means you are suggesting that your speaking cats are in some ways similar to real cats. But how similar, and how different? This opens a real can of worms. Would your cats distinguish hands from feet? Would they eat noodles? Would they eat sashimi but no sushi? What would they call someone who can't drink hot drinks (this is nekojita, literally "cat tongue" in Japanese)? Would all words with 人 have to use 猫 instead (e.g. 猫事部 "feline resources department", 学校法猫 "legally incorporated educational institution", i.e. a juridical, corporate cat)? Would they have capitulated to Cat Commodore Perry and subsequently accepted a sudden influx of foreign, particularly Cat English, loanwords in order to modernize in an effort to combat western cat imperialism? The questions are endless.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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clawgrip wrote:You say that cats would not eat rice, which means you are suggesting that your speaking cats are in some ways similar to real cats. But how similar, and how different? This opens a real can of worms. Would your cats distinguish hands from feet? Would they eat noodles? Would they eat sashimi but no sushi? What would they call someone who can't drink hot drinks (this is nekojita, literally "cat tongue" in Japanese)? Would all words with 人 have to use 猫 instead (e.g. 猫事部 "feline resources department", 学校法猫 "legally incorporated educational institution", i.e. a juridical, corporate cat)? Would they have capitulated to Cat Commodore Perry and subsequently accepted a sudden influx of foreign, particularly Cat English, loanwords in order to modernize in an effort to combat western cat imperialism? The questions are endless.
Thank you for the questions. I found them a bit amusing but I'll try to answer seriously.

It's not that kaibyou do not eat rice or rice products ever, ever, EVER. But a vast majority of their food does come from meat and fish sources. Like youkai in folktales, they can take on humanoid forms; in some cases to interact peacefully and in others to trick or hurt humans. So having an understanding of how nearby humans talk would be helpful. But being cats, they prefer their cat forms, or at least a bipedal in between form. They would likely distinguish "hands and feet" but more as "front paws" and "back paws". They would rarely eat noodles, especially alone, and they would prefer sashimi to sushi. Some of them enjoy vegetables but too much is bad for them. Some even like fruit and things containing caffeine, and I base this on foods that cats I owned would try to steal. The one who liked coffee grounds we had to watch since a little caffeine can be very harmful to cats.

If they have to be in their more humanoid form for long periods, I was thinking they might tolerate more plants and stuff like caffeine in their diets than normal, but they'd still need more meat than humans do, probably even a majority of their protein from it.

I had the thought that cats don't particularly like hot drinks, preferring them closer to body temp. So it might be that cats who can stand drinks very hot are hitojita or ningenjita? :3 Changed for sound changes of course.

Though on that note, 人 might be repurposed (repurrposed?) and just take on the readings of 猫 for them, and 猫 would be used for non-kaibyou cats, generally, including normal house cats, wild cats, etc. Which would lead to interesting misreadings if they're trying to read standard Japanese. Otherwise, 猫 would be used in reference to all cats (kaibyou included) and 人 would be used for general "thinking beings" type beings

As far as the cats are concerned, unless the humans want to interact directly, what they do diplomatically with other humans isn't their problem. Any loan words they get from English would mostly have gone through Japanese first. (Maybe less so in modern times. There may even be kaibyou who have gone to America and learned English directly. There maybe also be cat-creatures from other parts of the world with their own languages, which may or may not be related to other human languages.)

But in any case, Commodore Perry arriving would affect them but only indirectly.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by All4Ɇn »

Everything about this could make a great anime
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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All4Ɇn wrote:Everything about this could make a great anime
If I were more of a visual artist than a writer, I'd make it one. But as it is I'm working on short stories and later, hopefully a novel.

Is there anything else to think about from the linguistic side?
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by Vlürch »

Word-initial aspirated geminate sibilants? Making every vowel followed by /i/ creaky-voiced with a rising tone, and turning the /i/ into a fricative? A little bit of sibilance in every /t/? Lowering /e̞/ to /ɛ~æ/ except when it's creaky-voiced with a rising tone? So, for example, 性的世界 (seiteki sekai; "sexual world") could be something like [sʰːḛ̌çˑtˢɛkʲi sʰːækǎ̰ʝˑ]. I don't know if that's more cat-like, though, or just sounds like the speaker has a mouthful of hairy genitals... [xD]
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by All4Ɇn »

LinguistCat wrote:Is there anything else to think about from the linguistic side?
Would there be any slang? Would some Japanese slang words be repurposed for their closest cat equivalents such as クサ becoming a term in black market catnip dealing?
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by Lao Kou »

Vlürch wrote:just sounds like the speaker has a mouthful of hairy genitals... [xD]
It might be more genteel to refer to that as "watercress". [B)] Too, cats are prone to furballs, potentially rendering almost any utterance into /kxa Xa kxa Xa xa/, which I daren't attempt in kana. Then again, if a kaibyou has a mouthful of watercress, perhaps they're in human form?
Spoiler:
The way this was set up, I automatically assumed it was an animé fan-extention. [:$]
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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Vlürch wrote:Word-initial aspirated geminate sibilants? Making every vowel followed by /i/ creaky-voiced with a rising tone, and turning the /i/ into a fricative? A little bit of sibilance in every /t/? Lowering /e̞/ to /ɛ~æ/ except when it's creaky-voiced with a rising tone? So, for example, 性的世界 (seiteki sekai; "sexual world") could be something like [sʰːḛ̌çˑtˢɛkʲi sʰːækǎ̰ʝˑ]. I don't know if that's more cat-like, though, or just sounds like the speaker has a mouthful of hairy genitals... [xD]
If anything, in my mind, they'd be more likely to keep vowels than have them turn into consonants. I do like the idea of adding sibilance to /t/s but not having /ti/ realized as [tʃi]. I'd also like to keep /h/s that Modern Japanese has lost or turned into /w/s and /j/s, possibly making those into /ç/s. Possibly, initial nasals could be palatalized to help differentiate them more from initial prenasalized stops. That could also give me in world reasons to throw in a lot of /nja/, /nju/, /njo/, /mja/, /mju/ and /mjo/ sounds. /nji/, /nje/, /mji/ and /mje/ might also appear, or there might be some affect from Japanese that stops them from being pronounced that way. But really I'd just have to decide how to write them if I choose to include them, and I think there's a lot of precedence in Japanese for how to do that.
All4Ɇn wrote:
doomie wrote:Is there anything else to think about from the linguistic side?
Would there be any slang? Would some Japanese slang words be repurposed for their closest cat equivalents such as クサ becoming a term in black market catnip dealing?
Yeah, slang (and to some extent, a different take on politeness) would be useful to at least think about. One word that would be important to the story I'm writing would be a (relatively common) poison derived from lilies. But I can come up with that myself and it might not even be connected to Japanese slang.
Lao Kou wrote:Too, cats are prone to furballs, which could render almost any utterance as /kxa Xa kxa Xa xa/, which I daren't attempt in kana.
Maybe with the changes to the phonology I have so far, it could be approximated with <きは っは きは っは は>? [:P]
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by clawgrip »

"Sexual world"? Drug slang? You guys have some bizarrely specific vocab to use for your examples.
LinguistCat wrote:I'd also like to keep /h/s that Modern Japanese has lost or turned into /w/s and /j/s, possibly making those into /ç/s.
(They were never /h/; they were /ɸ/)
/nji/ ... /mji/ might appear
Japanese /i/ already palatalizes all preceding consonants, so /ni/ and /mi/ are [nʲi] and [mʲi]. This palatalization is what causes all the allophony before /i/ elsewhere.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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clawgrip wrote:
LinguistCat wrote:I'd also like to keep /h/s that Modern Japanese has lost or turned into /w/s and /j/s, possibly making those into /ç/s.
(They were never /h/; they were /ɸ/)
That's not what I've found while researching Classical Japanese generally and Late Middle Japanese specifically, but I also have to admit I haven't researched long, and when I've asked for resources (scholarly or otherwise) previously on the ZBB, I got nothing. So I've been going off the things I have found, some of which said /h/ is closer to what the phoneme probably was, others that said it probably varied by dialect and some that did say it was primarily /ɸ/. If you have resources that I could look at I'd really appreciate it; I have a personal preference for /ɸ/ generally myself, but acoustically to my ears at least both /ɸ/ and /h/ sound close to /ç/, and that's a main point to my question:

Would it be possible that where Late Middle Japanese had /ɸ/ or whatever other phonemes, my fictional cat people have /ç/?
/nji/ ... /mji/ might appear
Japanese /i/ already palatalizes all preceding consonants, so /ni/ and /mi/ are [nʲi] and [mʲi]. This palatalization is what causes all the allophony before /i/ elsewhere.
So does this mean that you are advising I keep that allophony from Standard Japanese.

Also I think a possible reason for the choice of example words and possible slang brought up earlier is a slang meaning for "neko" itself. If I'm wrong, Vlürch and All4Ɇn could spritz me with water.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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LinguistCat wrote:That's not what I've found while researching Classical Japanese generally and Late Middle Japanese specifically, but I also have to admit I haven't researched long, and when I've asked for resources (scholarly or otherwise) previously on the ZBB, I got nothing. So I've been going off the things I have found, some of which said /h/ is closer to what the phoneme probably was, others that said it probably varied by dialect and some that did say it was primarily /ɸ/. If you have resources that I could look at I'd really appreciate it;
I'm not sure what your sources are, but the general consensus is Old Japanese /p/ becoming Middle Japanese /ɸ/. This is also supported by 17th century Korean and Portuguese sources (at this point the beginning of Early Modern Japanese), which spelled it as ‹ph› or ‹hw› and ‹f› respectively (e.g. 初めて - 화시몌뎨, 拝受 - 화이슈 / 日本 - nifon, 初 - fatçu). It then became Modern Japanese /h/ word-initially before /a e i o/ (while remaining [ɸ] word-initially before /u/), and merged with /w/ word-medially, which subsequently was dropped in all places except before /a/.
I have a personal preference for /ɸ/ generally myself, but acoustically to my ears at least both /ɸ/ and /h/ sound close to /ç/, and that's a main point to my question:

Would it be possible that where Late Middle Japanese had /ɸ/ or whatever other phonemes, my fictional cat people have /ç/?
They're both fricatives, so I don't see a huge problem with that.
So does this mean that you are advising I keep that allophony from Standard Japanese.
I can't really advise you because I don't know exactly what form of Japanese your language is based on. But if you have other, more obvious allophony arising from this palatalization, like [ɕi] for /si/ and /t͡ɕi/ for /ti/ (I know you said you didn't want [t͡ɕ], then it would make sense to include this, and if you don't, then you will need some other reason for it to arise, if you wan it.
Also I think a possible reason for the choice of example words and possible slang brought up earlier is a slang meaning for "neko" itself. If I'm wrong, Vlürch and All4Ɇn could spritz me with water.
I don't know much about this anime or sex slang or whatever it is.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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Thank you @clawgrip for clearing that up. I'll consider any older forms as having /ɸ/ for my purposes, (unless it's a word that enters Japanese later or it works better for me for it to have /w/).

So, currently, unless I need to add changes to account for more modern additions, I think I'm looking at:

/p mb m t nd n k ng ɴ/
/s nz (ts) (ndz) ç/
/ɺ j ɰ/
/a i u e o/

with /ts/ and /ndz/ technically being allophones of /t/ and /nd/ respectively, but if I can I might add sound changes to make them more widespread. And /p/ might be a marginal phoneme itself. I should maybe think about this more after sleeping.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by Vlürch »

LinguistCat wrote:That could also give me in world reasons to throw in a lot of /nja/, /nju/, /njo/, /mja/, /mju/ and /mjo/ sounds.
What if every /ja/ became /ɲa/? That'd be the easiest way to include lots of "nya", although it'd probably sound annoying and with words like 脈 (myaku; "pulse") and 略 (ryaku; "abbreviation"), there'd be word-initial /mɲa/ and /rɲa/, which are pretty difficult to pronounce, at least for me... of course, the easiest solution to that would be to keep words like that unchanged; they already sound pretty cat-like, anyway, I think.
clawgrip wrote:"Sexual world"? Drug slang? You guys have some bizarrely specific vocab to use for your examples.
Well, I'm kind of a pervert, and it was phonetically the perfect example to demonstrate what I suggested. [:P]
LinguistCat wrote:slang meaning for "neko" itself
Since it already has the specific slangy meaning of "catgirl" in certain contexts, for example extending it to include all cat people in the mouths of humanoid cats makes sense. Switching it to mean "girl" or something, though, would be confusing unless it was a recent change in meaning and the cats watch a lot of anime, read a lot of manga and/or spend a lot of time on the internet, and even then the obvious question would be: what are guys called?
clawgrip wrote:I don't know much about this anime or sex slang or whatever it is.
I for one don't even watch any anime anymore, so I mostly know some anime-specific terminology from imageboards. It'd take way too much of my time that I prefer to spend on making music being depressed over having a shitty new laptop that I can't really use to make music because it's a shitty laptop, conlanging while listening to music and also trying to learn various languages. I do watch a lot of Japanese porn, though. TMI...?
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by Edahsrevlis »

I was thinking about a Japanese-influenced language for a furry race given all the anthropomorphic animal characters in manga/anime. It's a smart idea.
The main conflict is probably that cats don't make a lot of choppy staccato sounds and Japanese is like that.

Long meow sounds = nya, mwa, mya, etc.
Trilling purr sounds = tongue, uvula, and lips, (maybe even unvoiced, thought that's less mammalian)
Throaty hiss sounds = kh

If possible, replace all vowels with meow sounds and call them "meowels", cause that'd be hilarious.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by LinguistCat »

Where did the polite -masu/-masen verb endings come from? And/or when did they come into use? I haven't been able to find this specifically. I've found quite a bit about verb conjugation in Middle Japanese but nothing about how the levels of politeness came about.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

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It seems like the consensus is that it comes from the Middle Japanese 参らす mairasu, a humble verb meaning "to give; to present; to offer" which was slowly whittled down to masu, with influence from 申す mōsu, a humble verb meaning "to speak; to say".

The fact that the negative -masen uses the distinctly Kansai-style negative -n rather than something like -masazu or -masanai suggests that this form came into use before the Edo period, when the centre of culture and government shifted from Kyoto to Edo.
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Re: Nyango? (working title for "Cat Japanese")

Post by LinguistCat »

Thank you. This has been very helpful, and I might also find a use for 参る mairu in some way separate from 参らす mairasu. Especially since I don't think cats would end up using 下さい kudasai outside of speech with humans, and even then...

Anyway, I'll be working on this until I have at least an "early" version, focusing on verbs mostly, maybe just translating nouns as needed. I'm thinking it'll be a bit conservative after the cat sound changes and some specific changes in word usage, so aside from adding in more modern words and some grammatical tweaks from interacting with irl/Modern Japanese, the early variant will probably be very similar to the modern form, I'm thinking. Unless I find reasons for it not to be. [:3]
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