(no subject)
Jan. 8th, 2004 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaxjediI want to get back to Sinnish. I seem to have hit a bit of a slump on it, getting distracted by Elvish and D'ni, linguistically speaking. But Sinnish is still probably the most original artistic endeavor I've ever taken.
There is a part of me that regrets the fact that it will never really be much more than something to keep my mind busy. I see Tolkien's work and wonder what it would be like to have spawned such a phenomena.
Anyway, details on Sinnish:
Sinnish has several different ways of expressing it. The first, and most central, of course, is the verbal mode. It's the phonemes. utterances are the key point of language - I know in the linguistics courses I have taken, I have heard the instrutors say pretty much that linguistics ignores how languages are written for how they are said.
The most common sounds in Sinnish are frictatives - s, z, sh, zh. I like the sound of them, especially the zh sound. I have a lot of the x sound (the ch in Loch), but I may need to futz with that. There are a few places it sounds too much like Arabic or Yiddish. I've been considering adding new sounds to it, but I'm not certain.
The next version is the alphabetic written version. I have my script, which I am fond of. I need to come up with some punctuation - marking questions, exclamations and quotations.
I have another font, a 'block' version of the language, in my head. I need to get it down on paper and into a font. I think it looks vaguely like Russian.
I also need to work out how to write numbers. I think numbers will look a little like Tengwar. I'll sketch a bit.
The third mode is the logographic, or glyphic form. Each word is a symbol, or series of symbols, like Chinese. I'm going to be using a radical root system, similar to Chinese. Essentially, each symbol is a combination of a root symbol and a modifying radical symbol. The root will correspond to two or three consonants. The vowels depend on the radical. For example, a root would indicate the consonant combination, d-zh. The radical determines if the word is dazhu, dazhi, dezho, dezh, edezh, edezhu, etc.
However, the radical doesn't directly indicate which vowels. There isn't a "use a and e" radical. The radicals are loose semantic category hints. For instance, if I have the root above, I can specify that the root without radical means dazhu (to recognize). When I combine that root with the 'water' radical, it means a word with those consonants that has to do with water somehow (dazha in this case, to evaporate). I would use the same radical with the root for l-k to get elake (ocean). Words longer than three syllables will either be compounds, in which you just use the symbols for the elements of the compound, or just long words, in which you'd have to use multiple roots for multiple consonant combinations and a single radical.
These symbols are only for the words themselves. Syntactic markers, prefixes and suffixes, while added to the word when spoken, would be an addition symbol.
I enviosn currently that each word would have three parts - the root glyph, then a radical (either above the root or to the left of the root) and then a syntactic marker below the radical/root pair to mark it's role in the sentence.
Now I just need the symbols. I'm really bad at this. Any artists out there want to help me with it?
The last version of Sinnish is a tactile version. This is done with hand movements on a person's skin. I envision it being one-handed (insert joke about talking one-handed here). I think there will be a set of motions for each possible syllable and you 'spell' out your sentence by syllable instead of by letter.
I think there will be a rest state (flat palm, no movement). Each motion will be in two parts - one that starts from a flat palm to some state and another that starts at a state and returns to a flat palm. If I were to have 50 motions for each segment, that would give me 2500 possible syllables - and I only need around 1500-1600 to represent all of Sinnish's syllables. That leaves me room for getting rid of motion pairs that would be ambiguous.
That's where I am for uttering the language.
I am still in desperate need of vocabulary. I just need to sit down and slog through it, a little a day. It just takes so much energy and my free time is very fragmented.
My syntax is pretty flexible. I still need to be able to describe it to others though. My primer still goes slowly. I wonder if I should just post the few chapters I have so far.
There is a part of me that regrets the fact that it will never really be much more than something to keep my mind busy. I see Tolkien's work and wonder what it would be like to have spawned such a phenomena.
Anyway, details on Sinnish:
Sinnish has several different ways of expressing it. The first, and most central, of course, is the verbal mode. It's the phonemes. utterances are the key point of language - I know in the linguistics courses I have taken, I have heard the instrutors say pretty much that linguistics ignores how languages are written for how they are said.
The most common sounds in Sinnish are frictatives - s, z, sh, zh. I like the sound of them, especially the zh sound. I have a lot of the x sound (the ch in Loch), but I may need to futz with that. There are a few places it sounds too much like Arabic or Yiddish. I've been considering adding new sounds to it, but I'm not certain.
The next version is the alphabetic written version. I have my script, which I am fond of. I need to come up with some punctuation - marking questions, exclamations and quotations.
I have another font, a 'block' version of the language, in my head. I need to get it down on paper and into a font. I think it looks vaguely like Russian.
I also need to work out how to write numbers. I think numbers will look a little like Tengwar. I'll sketch a bit.
The third mode is the logographic, or glyphic form. Each word is a symbol, or series of symbols, like Chinese. I'm going to be using a radical root system, similar to Chinese. Essentially, each symbol is a combination of a root symbol and a modifying radical symbol. The root will correspond to two or three consonants. The vowels depend on the radical. For example, a root would indicate the consonant combination, d-zh. The radical determines if the word is dazhu, dazhi, dezho, dezh, edezh, edezhu, etc.
However, the radical doesn't directly indicate which vowels. There isn't a "use a and e" radical. The radicals are loose semantic category hints. For instance, if I have the root above, I can specify that the root without radical means dazhu (to recognize). When I combine that root with the 'water' radical, it means a word with those consonants that has to do with water somehow (dazha in this case, to evaporate). I would use the same radical with the root for l-k to get elake (ocean). Words longer than three syllables will either be compounds, in which you just use the symbols for the elements of the compound, or just long words, in which you'd have to use multiple roots for multiple consonant combinations and a single radical.
These symbols are only for the words themselves. Syntactic markers, prefixes and suffixes, while added to the word when spoken, would be an addition symbol.
I enviosn currently that each word would have three parts - the root glyph, then a radical (either above the root or to the left of the root) and then a syntactic marker below the radical/root pair to mark it's role in the sentence.
Now I just need the symbols. I'm really bad at this. Any artists out there want to help me with it?
The last version of Sinnish is a tactile version. This is done with hand movements on a person's skin. I envision it being one-handed (insert joke about talking one-handed here). I think there will be a set of motions for each possible syllable and you 'spell' out your sentence by syllable instead of by letter.
I think there will be a rest state (flat palm, no movement). Each motion will be in two parts - one that starts from a flat palm to some state and another that starts at a state and returns to a flat palm. If I were to have 50 motions for each segment, that would give me 2500 possible syllables - and I only need around 1500-1600 to represent all of Sinnish's syllables. That leaves me room for getting rid of motion pairs that would be ambiguous.
That's where I am for uttering the language.
I am still in desperate need of vocabulary. I just need to sit down and slog through it, a little a day. It just takes so much energy and my free time is very fragmented.
My syntax is pretty flexible. I still need to be able to describe it to others though. My primer still goes slowly. I wonder if I should just post the few chapters I have so far.
