Bald-Faced Sloth People

[pyat]

Two successive nights of insomnia have left me feeling antisocial and unproductive. Also, weird dreams about walking through winter streets in Buffalo, NY, where I was responsible for building a sort of chain lift for cars on steep hills.

However, I did manage to hammer my social self into place long enough for a pleasant lunch with melskunk, who is newly returned from An Adventure on The Continent. There were Teutonic Knights, castles, and moonlit sword battles on the leaded roofs of Opera Houses.


So I assume, anyway.

Conversations with melskunk are always cool. Today, we talked about constructed languages. I asked her about one she'd created to write a poem gift for bard_bloom and beetiger.

Her: "It had colour modifiers to alter emotional context." (Or words to that effect)
Me: "So, it was a language for, like, octopuses or celaphapods?"
Her: "Oh, no, that was different. This was for a race of giant sloths with bald faces that could change colour."

***

I can tell it's going to be a bad summer. I'm already sticking my head in coolers at the convenience store, and craving enormous glasses of ice water. Smog alert tomorrow, too. Joy.

But, I am glad to be home. :)

Comments

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Melskunk's got an awesome tattoo there. Eagles are cliche, but Parakeets with the Wings of Liberty spread wide? Now that's just cool. Or is it a love bird?

I think a lot about constructed languages and how to make one that could pass for a natural language. Then I just figure, if I had to make a fictional language, I'd just swap the phonemes into something like Tamil because the grammar of that language is so weird compared to anything European it'd pass for an alien language no problem. There's also some interesting ideas from RL cognitive research. One paper I read detailed an experiment to test the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. The authors found a language that had no word for blue or green which instead had a word that meant something like blueish green. They sat some of the speakers down and had them do a sorting task with a pile of blue chips mixed in with green chips. Sure they might not have distinct words for the two colors, but surely these people have the visual cortex the rest of us do. They ought to be able sort chips of one color with their peers and sort the different color into a different stack. Turns out that they scored pretty much random in their performance. This indicates that anyone designing a language has to make a real attempt to see the world through the categories the language presents. There's another aspect of natural languages that writers don't consider enough. That's the "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" problem. In an Australian aboriginal language, there's a category that encompasses the aforementioned items. The speakers have no idea why they fall into that category, they just do. One hypothesis is that they once had orally transmitted tales and fables that explained this, but that overtime, they lost them perhaps due to colonialism. So natural languages have a lot illogical features. Then, on top of that, cultures have distinct modes of communication that cause native speakers to use language very differently than an outsider might. For instance, there are often taboo subjects or things that aren't spoken of despite the fact that the language has words for the concepts. I ran into this when I frantically tried to fill in some missing entries for a dictionary of Lucumi that I was working on a while back.