On tubers and how to translate them

 I've been playing a lot of xenoblade recently and have many thoughts about it, as can be seen on my reddit profile. As much as I like it, there's something extremely immersion breaking for me: taro is referred to as potatoes.

If I remember correctly, spongy spuds are first introduced around when the party's food gets stolen. At the very least I saw a bag full of them at some point in Maktha Wildwood and I recognized them right away as taro. Which was cool because taro is not a commonly seen plant, especially for westerners. It's only later on we get to the problematic part. See, Zeon's ascension quest is about growing crops, specifically "spongy spuds" for his colony. The name spongy spud itself is fine, it's a fictional world after all. However, they are also referred to as potatoes, taters and other less ambiguous names. This is despite both the tubers and the plants are clearly modeled after taro. Even the advice to harvest after the leaves start wilting is a taro trait (though potatoes do have similar advice. I wonder if cassava does as well, it might be a general root crop thing). So that was pretty frusterating.

Now, localizing taro as potato isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, most English speakers aren't going to be that familiar with taro. But it does become a lot worse when you're localizing something that has images along with the text, since even if you don't know what taro is it is pretty obvious that those aren't potatoes. It reminds me of the "jelly donut-onigiri" controversy from the Pokemon anime way back when. The idea of turning onigiri into jelly donuts to make it more relevant to the audience isn't a bad thing. Doing that when it is clearly referencing an image which is not a jelly donut is an issue. (Funnily enough, onigiri does play a minor role in Xenoblade 3 and its name is not translated). 

Anyway, I actually went to the Japanese version of the game to see what the original text called them. Spud, potato, tater, etc all seem to be used as translations for the same word imo "tuber". So while the original text doesn't seem to explicitly label it as taro (as far as I could tell), it doesn't explicitly call it potato either. Localizing this to a bunch of words for more variety is reasonable enough but again, the translators should've looked at what it was referring to before making some of these translations. 

You know what the worst part is? I seem to be the only person to notice this and care enough to complain! At least, I haven't encountered anyone else yet who was like "yep, that's clearly taro."

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In other farming related video game news Harvestella looks pretty awesome but I hope it doesn't neglect farming too much. And someone needs to make a farming sim that caters towards caters towards my desire for complex agronomy and agricultural markets while still maintaining the sort of whimsy often found in these games (that is, I want more realism but don't want to play John Deere Combine Simulator 2022: Deluxe Edition). Maybe I'll rant about that some day.

Antipassives, Ergative Verbs and Nominalizations in Kélojùù

I have not worked on this language for a long time. And then a little while ago someone was asking about someone else's conlang, specifically if the agent nominialization could fit on unaccusative verbs (something like that). And that got me thinking. Then a few days later I was looking up stuff on antipassives and learned that while they normally aren't in nom-acc languages, it does happen in some Nilo-Saharan langs. So I thought about how to shove it in mine.

Some base things to keep in mind. First of all, most transitive verbs in Klj are ambitransitive, but they are ergative verbs, even though in English they are often accusative verbs. Why? Such is life. Anyway, this means that the subject of an intransitive verb (well, detransitivized) is treated as the patient rather than the agent. So while in English we can do "He cooks food" -> "He cooks" the same process (simple deletion of the object) in Klj means "He is cooked/He cooks (like a cake does)". The next thing to consider is that Klj has two basic denominalization processes. One is the action noun (much like a gerund or infinitive in English) and the other is concrete noun. The concrete noun can work like an agentive/patientive/result, basically some sort of more concrete object or idea.  The interpretation of these is based on the role of the subject of the original verb, which is important because generally only intransitive verbs can take these in Klj. And so comes the need for the antipassive

The antipassive (-nú) demotes the object of a transitive verb, while keeping the old agent in subject position. Consider the verb wííza "to break (something)". You might have a sentence like mọ́llééṃò zawíízajù "I broke the pot". To say "The pot broke" you could say  mọ̀llééṃò ìwíízajù or use the passive/reflexive/general detransivizer -ḍà giving us mọ̀llééṃò ìwíízadàjù "The pot broke/was broken". "I broke (things)" is zawíízánújù and "someone who breaks things" is wíízánúsaw but "a broken thing" is just wíízasaw with no passive required.
Other than nominalizations, when is the intransitive important? For one, the intransitive form of ambitransitive verbs in the present tense often has a habitual meaning. So (to use a slightly silly example), zawííza means "I break (apart) a lot". The antipassive allows us to keep the subject as an agent in these habitual clauses, zawíízánú "I be breaking (things)". Habitual intransitives can take a genitive complement to reintroduce the former direct object as in mọ̀òlleek zawíízánú "I be breaking pots" (had the singular been used there, it would mean "I keep breaking this same pot"). 
So what's even the point of having a passive (as seen above) if all the verbs are ergative? Well, a large part of it is to clarify that that action was intentionally done/caused by the agent. In the ergative (technically unergative?) form, no intention is drawn to the fact that it was caused or done. This implies either an accident or something causeless. Pots can just randomly break, yannow? A passive with a reintroduced agent complement (with the dative postposition) means that agent intentionally did the verb. Even one without a reintroduced agent could be taken as a volative act, though because it could also be reflexive or something else, usually an indefinite pronoun is brought in regardless. The next question is, "if the act was volative and the agent known, why use the passive and not the active voice?" Further research is needed, the likely answer has something to do with bringing attention to the patient/result of the action. So the difference between mọ̀llééṃò ìwíízajù, mọ̀llééṃò ìwíízadàjù, and mọ̀llééṃò zlàkọ ìwíízadàjù is something like "The pot (has) broke(n)/Somebody (accidentally) broke the pot" "The pot was broken (by someone)" and "The pot was broken by me!" respectively/

The antipassive works in the opposite (ish) way. An antipassive with a reintroduced patient (also in the dative) implies that the agent did the verb on accident. So while mọ́llééṃò zawíízajù means "I have broken the pot", mọ́llééṃò kọ zawíízánújù means "I accidentally broke the pot".

Pragmatically, this means that people, when accused of doing something, often reply with an antipassive. Mọ́llééṃò ìwíízajù! "You broke the pot!"(Note that this is technically ambiguous and could mean "The pot broke!") nẹẹh, zawíízánújù "It was an accident!" (lit. "no, I broke (something)"). This is a way of admitting fault while trying to absolve yourself of full guilt.

Obviously, there's still a lot to work out here/discover. But it is a work in progress and more progress I've gotten on this language than I have all year. Plus, it was like actual work combing morphology, syntax, and pragmatics, which feels good.

Knənʔtəəʔ: Ergativity and Relative clauses

So last night I realized that Knənʔtəəʔ is sort of ergative and I decided to go with that. So I needed to redo its relative clauses. And uh, I ended up getting exactly what I started with. Anyway, since relative clauses are interesting, I'll post my final explanation, where I basically justify what I already have. It's not all of my internal and external dialogue trying to figure it out, but it is something

"So I think I've figured out what was going on. There's two competing rules that I did realize I had going on until some analysis...Or maybe none of this makes sense and more research is need

anguishes

Let's analyze sentences together and see what happens:
bmis [so kaalbaa] dɨwõ kwiis
bmis so=k<aa>lbaa d<ɨ>wõ kwiis
man 3S=<REL>be.clean <CONT>eat seaweed
"the clean man is eating seaweed"
So we have a head which is the absolutive argument of the relative clause (which if not relativized would be kɨlbaa bmis "the man is clean". Since the relative clause technically takes a pronoun as its head, it works on a nom-acc alignment and fills the slot that would be occupied by the ergative pronoun, resulting in the pronoun preceding the relativized verb and everything being dandy. Let's work up to the next level of relative clause: non-stative intransitive verbs.

bmis [so lutɨhut] dwõ kwiis
bmis so=l<ut><ɨ>hut d<Ø>wõ kwiis
man 3S=<REL><PROG>sleep <PERF>eat seaweed
"the sleeping man has eaten seaweed"
Once again, the head is the absolutive argument of the relative clause, which free would be lɨhut bmis "the man is sleeping". Since the relative clause takes the pronoun as the head, it once again converts to nom-acc and fills the ERG slot(edited)

So far, so good. I've been maintaining the alignment (more or less :p) that I discovered yesterday

But then things get rough

"the man who ate seaweed is sleeping"
The relative clause is headed by a pronoun, so it goes nom-acc and should look something like :
Lɨhut bmis [so dwõ kwiis] or (Sï̵) bmis [so dwõ kwiis] lɨhut so (topic marking way to do it)
l<ɨ>hut bmis so=dwõ kwiis and (sï̵) bmis so=dwõ kwiis l<ɨ>hut so
<CONT>sleep man 3S=eat seaweed or TOP man 3S=eat seaweed <CONT>sleep 3S

Anyway, the restrictions with the way pronouns work basically mean (since agent incorporation isn't allowed and there are no voices) that relativization like this is limited to subjects=agent, despite the ergativity in main clauses. I guess technically these transitive ones could be interpreted either way, but that is abnormal for the speakers. However, part of the ergativity means that the main interpretation of a possessed verbal noun is that the possessor is the patient which allowed for a nice work around of which there are many ways to do it, based on topicality:

Kɨlbaa kwiis dnwõ so räp bmis or Sï̵ kwiis dnwõ so räp bmis kɨlbaa so so on and so forth k<ɨ>lbaa kwiis d<nØ>wõ so räp bmis
<CONT>be.clean seaweed <NOM>eat from man
"the seaweed the man ate is clean"
Notice that the possessor has to be removed from the possessive phrase to make the argument of the main verb clear. Other wise it could be translated as "The man's eating of the seaweed was clean" or "the man cleanly ate the seaweed"

Well, there you have it, something I should turn into a blog post. And it was all for nothing since it ended up looking the same as what I had originally anyway"

As for other things with ergativity, I plan on having deleted arguments follow an ergative pivot (basically "I hit the man and died" would mean that the man died, not that I died).

Diachronic conlangs

Yeah, I've been really lazy about updating. Still doing plenty of conlanging, as can be seen on reddit, just not updating here. I've been working on a big "papualang" project. But I'm getting on to do a minor, inconsequential rant about conlanging.

One thing that many conlangers like to do is diachronics, so deriving languages from other languages. That's cool and all, especially when done a posteriori (and well) or for a conlang family. Even I'm part of a diachronics project. My problem isn't with diachronics.

No it's the whole thing where you create a proto-language for only one daughter language and even more the idea that this makes the daughter lang inherently better. Why does this bug me? Because it doesn't make the language actually more realistic, especially since many of the sound changes and grammatical changes found in the daughter langs might have been a stretch to occur naturally. Also it leads to this weird idea that proto-languages were more regular than daughter langs, which isn't actually true. The other thing that bugs me about this is that the proto-lang itself is still a conlang. It's not like you made the conlang less constructed. If you have no plan on making a language family, why do the protolang. You're getting all the features you wanted anyway, but now you are taking extra steps. Just make the language without those steps.

It's a minor gripe. I'm not going to discourage people from making proto-langs, not at all. It's mostly harmless. But I do wish more people understood that proto-langs are reconstructions and aren't what people actually spoken. Are they close? In many cases, yes, probably, at least somewhat. Of course there's dialects in real protolangs, something not often reflected in constructions, academic or otherwise (at least as far as I have seen). That's okay, it's difficult to do, but people gotta remember this.

The Problem of Polysynthesis

I hold many controversial opinions. One of them is polysynthetic is a bad term, not just because of it's vagueness but because of what it signals, especially in conlanging. Anyway, this argument with some people got out of hand (#selfexaminationhurts) (I said some dumb things too) so I never really got explain why it is bad beyond the vagueness.

Here's the first thing I never sent and then I'll follow up with some other ideas I've had since then:

"Anyway, my point is that even now, the languages we choose to label as polysynthetic (especially taking the large amount of morphemes approach) tend to fall on minority and especially disenfranchised groups. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if there was actually an agreed on definition for polysynthesis. But there isn't, because whenever someone tries to come up with something, other people get angry because their language gets excluded (the biggest example of this being Baker and his exclusion of Inuit languages) or because a language they don't consider polysynthetic is included. So we are left with a category that means "lots of morphemes and if feels that way". Which then brings us back to the point that "feels that way", for whatever reason, closely aligns with "languages spoken by minority groups". So we have a category that (like all morphological typologies, mind you) doesn't tell us really much of anything about the languages classified in it, except that 1) they have long words with multiple morphemes; 2) are not placed with the other languages for some reason.

And that's crux of it. The category doesn't tell us anything that synthetic (here being agglutinative and fusional) doesn't already tell us. Yet people defend it so viciously and want their language to be in the category. Why?"

Well, a big part of it is what I call "fetishization of the exotic" (and I am guilty of it too). Polysynthesis is seen as something cool, so you want your language in it (especially for conlanging). It is seen as cool because it is different from IE (and especially English) therefore something you want to be. And that's where the underlying "racism" (for lack of a better term) comes in. It doesn't mean that the linguists/enthusiasts are being racist, but they are, because of the way the terms has been used, perpetuating stereotypes and signaling certain ideas (namely primativity/noble savage/north americanness) through the use of the term "polysynthesis". It is the "exotic" that really binds the different types of polysynthesis together, more so than head-marking, polypersonal agreement or noun-incorporation.

Why is this important? Well, the category "polysynthesis" hurts conlanging and reduces its diversity. How? First of all, since there is little if any actual tendencies that fit for polysynthesis, it isn't signaling features for the most part. Instead it signals that you want your lang to be North American-like, especially in a Salishanesque way. This is fine and all, but it further reduces the amount of languages people learn about and makes them think that polylangs actually have many binding features. It also means that they are less likely to learn about features not found in those languages. For example, I did an informal survey on switch reference (with a bunch of polylang enthusiats) and none of us could think of any conlang with a switch reference system (other than my own, in progress one). Why? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the primary references for polysynthesis don't have it, even though it is very common in polylangs in other parts of the world (like New Guinea) and even in the United States! In all this reduces the diversity of conlangs (I've seen one papualang (excluding my own) and none based on Australian langs, for instance) because people have an incomplete view of what "polysynthesis" really is and don't realize it.

Fetishization of the exotic aside, polysynthesis would be an okay term if it could be well defined, people agreed on a definition, didn't try so hard to fit every language into it and recognized its limits and unreasonability. It would be fine if the community used a wider variety (not just of Native American langs) of languages to act as references, showing the diversity in the term and maybe counteracting some (though not all) of the underlying marks/stereotypes within the term. But it doesn't and we don't have the self-awareness nor desire in the community to fix this. So I'm stuck ranting about it on a blog. Well the next time the inevitable "how do I polylang" or "I never see polylangs (cue 15 polylangs)" post comes up, I can link this as I try to raise awareness :p

Some minor thoughts on opening, closing, and doors

So I was walking home and thinking about how mesoamerican languages use body part symbolism in word formation and compounding. Or I so I thought; I can't seem to find any references to it now. From there I was thinking how TbKt would express words for things like "door", "open", and "close". I decided that door probably wouldn't be a body part compound, most likely it would be something like "opening/what is opened". From there, I thought how the word "open" would be. I figure that some sort of thing where opening is an extension of revealing. Ends up I already have a word meaning open, so I just stuck reveal on there too. I don't have a word for "close" yet, nor do I have one for "hide" so I'm combing them into one root. Then I decided that door would probably fit better as "somethings that hides/closes things" (kind of by analogy with lid).

Some important distinctions (from English):

1. If you hide something by covering it up (from above, with another object) you use a different root YHT. I thought for a while that maybe door could be related to this root but I decided against it because it mostly has to do with things that rest over other things (hats, lids, snow, etc).
2. We might say that someone has an open mind but in this language it would be "unbounded mind" (if the ideas it is open to are "good") or a "soft/wooly mind" (if the ideas aren't). By extension the opposites are a "bound mind" and a "hard/rocky mind" respectively. A "hollow mind" could also work, though it has the implication that that person is so open-minded that they believe anything, so more like gullible. Actually, as I think about this more, I think the underlying metaphor is that the mind is a field/farm, so I'm not sure how well "hollow mind" would work. Maybe a "fallow mind"?
3. This use of door refers to things that open and shut, that is covers for door-space. This can be gates, curtains, what we actually think of as doors, and so one. A door that cannot be closed (because it is a space in a wall) is the nothinging (nonexistent) part of a wall. A "door" fills the nothinging of a wall (on that note, that whole root works really weird for english speakers, I think. A whole root for not existing).
4. I'm not sure if analogy/metonymy with doors and metaphorical ideas would work like they do in English. Probably something else would work better, depending on the metaphor. However there probably are times it would work. So I guess it depends on the figurative speech in question.

I was going to do some sentences and examples, but I don't think I will today. Just plain lazy and I ant to chase another post doing stuff on the metaphor of the mind being a farm.  Since that was a coolish sort of idea I had.  Metaphors are fun!

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Toúījāb Kīkxot

Here's a translation for the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human rights. The first set of translators notes have to do with the translation itself, the second set more with the theory behind why I did things. Btw, check out this site

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Toúījāb Kīkxot:
Khōhim úīkmo¹ vit akhxōm qal cōroj² dumlūzō ūmpa lipha tāsah ī cāyap³ vit fnoxi⁴. Cānu mamaxīrosasā⁵ mocīph⁶ ī ahrōsh ⁷ ūmpa ziūsiwk⁸ olúīg-alúag zāraz dūchhawāx.
IPA:
[ˈk'oːʔɪm wiːkŋɔ ʕɪt ək'ʃoːm q'əl tsoːrɔdz dʊmluːtʃoː uːmpə lɪp'ə tɑːsəʔ iː tsɑːjəp ʕɪt ħnɔʃɪ. Tsɑːnʊ məməʃiːrɔsəsɑː mɔtsiːp' iː əʔroːs' uːmpə tʃjuːsɪɹk ɔlwiːg-əlwəg tʃɑːrətʃ duːts'əɹɑːʃ]
Translators notes

1 The word literally means "human, person, mankind", but has a connotation of "civilized people" (that is, only their civilization). Using "úīkmo" instead of "vīggo" (human, tribe, people, mankind, barbarian etc) reflects their values that they are superior and have greater rights compared to everyone else.

2 Úīkmo Kīkxot find the idea of people being born "free" strange. Instead the phrase "enter the world" is used. Means the same thing, but fits their sensibility better, since the verb born usually has reference to a mother, but there is none here.

3 Literally means "entitlement". Úīkmo Kīkxot don't have the same views as us regarding rights. People can feel that they deserve something, but those are based on merit, wealth and caste, not ideals.

4 Means the same, equal or even balanced. While this construction is perfectly acceptable, xenophobic Úīkmo Kīkxot would probably interpret this to mean that each person's rights (entitlements) are equal or in accordance with their individual dignity (honor, standing) and not that all people have the same rights and dignity.

5 The habitual/frequentive/gnomic aspect is used to emphasize that people are always given the following things. Takes a locative applicative suffix to show that the subject is the recipient, not the patient. While no agent is specified, the ditransitive is still used and people can understand from context that the following nouns are patients, not agents.

6 Literally means "mind, place of thoughts" but can mean reason too

7 Literally means "doing righteous acts" but like many verbal nouns, has a more abstract meaning of "knowing what is right" or conscience

8 Means "must" but uses the imperative prefix to soften it to "should". This shows that pragmatically the imperative prefix makes orders more polite and in the case of an imperative verb, still makes it more polite


A) The IPA represents the standard dialect as I have it so far. But I may add more assimilations/sadhi effects/liaison and the like so don't take it as the final say.

B) So I was looking at different translations of the UDHR while I was doing this (having already decided that I didn't want to use the word for birth (see the note above)) and it ends up that Sundanese seems to use a similar phrasing: "Sakumna jalma gubrag ka alam dunya...". My Sundanese is pretty shabby and my dictionary is still in Ethiopia, but gubrag ka alam dunya means "[something] to the natural world" and I'm pretty sure gubrag means "enter". So I'm not the only person to come up with this sort of way for translating it.

C) You may get the feeling that this culture is a culture of lawyers.  Well, it really is. Their religion's big schism is over the interpretation of a religious holiday. Lawyering and loopholes is built into their national being. Just look at their views on slavery. And a translation of a document like this would definitely be written by lawyers. So that's why there's lots of weasel words and ambiguous phrasings that they can take advantage of. "Oh yes, we treat all civilized people in balance with their deserved honor. In fact, we are the most humane civilization around."

D) Caste is a big deal for the Úīkmo Kīkxot. Of course they would write the translation to fit that, rather than trying to change their culture.

E) In retrospect, I think that the verb mamaxīrosasā should probably be mamaxīrosaī (which in turn would be probably pronounced something like [məmʃiːrɔsiː] but I haven't figured out all the assimilation stuff yet) since I've really shifted to having the benefactive also be a recipient marker and the locative being more only for physical locations. Especially since it benefits the person getting reason. So I may eventually change this up.

F) Verbal nouns probably make up one of the most ambigious, least consistent, hardest to translate and most fun form for TbKt. I really haven't done enough with them, showing all the different paths that things can take for it.

G) I thought for a long time on how to express "should". I already had an imperative, and in normal speech probably only the imperative would be used, I think, but in something more formal like this there had to be something seperate. So it made some interesting effects on the pragmatics of commands, which is cool.

H) I always love when one of my reduplications gets used. I had so much fun thinking them up and figuring out how they'd be use. It was actually one of the big things, in my opinion, that help TbKt move away from its Indonesian and Arabic roots.

I) In retrospect, it might be best that olúig takes the instrumental suffix, which would empahsize that the manner is a (compound noun) and the subject is using that noun to do the verb. Also, I'm not sure if the adjective agreement is necessary here since it could be a compound noun.

J) Conjunctions in TbKt (the one concession I give to logic!) would make for an interesting article. But I think I want to get some profiles and work on other languages up first. But maybe not, because the patient is marked already...it's all confusing. Maybe a preposition should be added.

As for the literal translation, it would be something like "All civilized beings which enter the world are independent and they have honor and entitlements which are equal. They are given a mind and sense of good doing and should treat each other in a brotherly manner."

I should do a gloss but I'm real lazy so this is good for now.

What is love? A Valentine's Day special

Yeah I'm a couple days late. Actually I didn't even start this post until after Valentine's Day. Didn't even have the idea until afterwards. But it's what I would have done had I not been swamped up in homework.

Anyway, in honor of that special day I detest so much, let's look at words for love in various conlangs I've made. I'll basically only deal with Toúījāb Kīkxot because I think that's the one I have the most info on this for, so maybs not various conlangs. It's not a topic I spend much time on, yannow?

The basic root for love is XYS (I) which is all things relating to the liver (think Indonesian hati, if you happen to know Indonesia). Of course in actual use it rarely is used to refer to the actual liver (xīyso) and generally means "the place where emotions are". While this could mean any emotions, the úīkmo Kīkxot use it almost exclusively to refer to love. If the heart is the base noun, love itself is xoyīs, though in informal and everyday speech many people will simply use xīyso (or given that the standard is different from most varieties, probably something like xīso or sisu or something else like that). This love is more or less equivalent to the English word "love", covering a wide semantic space. In Indonesian terms, xoyīs is kasih, cinta, and sayang all wrapped in one word, which is a bit unusual since this language usually cleaves with Indonesia pretty well, being based of it after all.

TbKt (I need to think of good abbreviations) is a language that loves compounding and this is no different when it comes to love. Xīysoāb Kīkxot (lit. "God's heart") is "charity" or the Greek "agape". It's the love that God (well, not our understanding of God, but I'll use the translation regardless) feels towards his worshipers. More metaphorically it represents an unconditional (strangely enough, considering that Kīkxo's love may seem pretty conditional to a westerner) love, a care and affection so deep that it can't be gotten rid of no matter how awful someone is. It's not pity though (that's kāral), it's a deeper understanding felt towards someone, yannow? Familial love is usually represented in two ways: with a liver+owner compound (ex: xīysoāb mīznot- "motherly love") or with a nominialzation of the roots transitive verb (ex: micna "motherly love). Usage really depends on context and user preference, the first being more likely to be used in a sentence like "Motherly love is so important" while the second in a sentence like "Motherly love makes my children happy."

Verbwise, XYS can be used in the transitive or intransitive and always has a human agent (though some particularly bigoted úīkmo kīkxot would consider it improper to use with a vīggo (tribesman) agent). Intransitive ūxiys has a general meaning of "to have strong emotions/love" and is usually used with a preposition to mark the recipient. This can be used with non-human/inanimate recipients, especially in informal registers, though the more inanimate the recipient the stranger it sounds. Without any compliment, it usually carries a meaning like "in love", "unstable", "crazy (indonesian "gila" or "tergila")" or "overcome by emotions". The transitive verb form xiysa can only be used with a human patient/recipient. It almost always takes the benefactive suffix -ī (the bare stem has a causitive meaning, which is a whole nother can of worms but would have a meaning like "X makes Y fall in love" or more naturally "Y fell in love with X", but it isn't a common construction). Like many verbs of emotion, the habitual form "C(a)-" is used, so xaxiysaī is the most common way of saying "X loves Y". Being a fairly intimate verb, "I love you" would be Yān xaxiysaī ōdan (or xaxiysaīōd) in most cases.

While xoyīs describes a variety of different sorts of love, the verb forms pretty much exclusively refer to romantic and sexual love. This is especially clear with the intensified form, which basically translate to "lust". To say that you love someone in a non-romantic sense, the transitive form of the family roots are generally. Now there is some ambiguity, as these verbs could mean "to consider [patient] a Y (with the implicit "love [patient] like a Y" built into this)" (a semi-causative in nature) or "to care for [patient] in a Yly role". It most cases, agent focus is the second translation while patient focus is the first translation, but as always context rules.  As examples, Yān dichha ōdan would probably translate to something like "I care for you like a sibling" (or more likely "I'm babysitting you/I admire you" depending on the relative ages of the speakers) while Ōdan dadaxichha yān  would be "I love you (like a sibling)" (lit. "You are considered a sibling by me"). Just like other verbs of emotion, these often are in the habitual aspect, but unlike XYS, do not take the benefactive. Unlike the familial love verbs kikxa is always treated like a causative. Humans are considered unable to love someone like God loves someone, so it would be absurd for the verb to ever mean "to love someone like God loves people". Kikxa means "to consider someone God" or more regularly (and less blasphemously) "to adore someone". It is usually in patient-focus, because why would God(-like beings) not be the focus of the sentence. Therefore Ōdan kakaxikxa yān would mean "I adore you" or "I love you fully (and unconditionally)" or even "I love you in the most platonic and totally non-romantic way" (Also, kakaxikxa is quite the mouthful considering it has only two consonant phonemes). These constructions are fairly informal (and highly intimate, though as seen previously not necessarily romantic (though it usually is despite coming from the root for God)) in nature and form a nice contrast with the intensified xiysa-xiysaī, "to lust after someone".

The normal word for "boyfriend/girlfriend/lover" is xāyas and this word is rarely used to describe one's spouse. Instead one's spouse is usually referred to as a ōmazhnzō/ōmazhnzun, which literally means "reflection". Increasingly, this is used by unmarried lovers to describe that person they just /know/ is the one, and it is also highly common for any description of a "lover" in literature and poetry. Xāyas can also mean "loving" as an adjective, and in this case is used with spouses. Which can lead to sentences like Ōmazhnzō xāyas mōnak nazinitra-nitra omazhnzunmā "A loving husband shouldn't beat his wife", though a wife saying this to her husband might use fis or even mavox instead of -mā, depending on the circumstances. One final bit of (naughtier fun). A vulgar slang word! Sasās means "horny", coming from a dialect that indicates intensity with a back reduplication (xāyas-xāyas -> saxāyas), and has sound rules that go something like this: x->s and deletion of y between the same vowel āya->ā. So saxāyas->sasāyas->sasāas->sasās. Pretty cool, huh?

I think that is enough for the valentine's special. Really makes me think about how little my conlangs care about this topic. Also, be glad that I didn't go all anthropological and talk about the complex courtship and marriage customs of the úīkmo kīkxot. Let alone their opinions on PDA.

Adventures in Indonesian translation pt 1

What I perceived as a very poor translation on Facebook has lead me to start submitting translations for Google again (it's interface is more userfriendly than facebook's. Also, it lets me do Indonesian to English, which they might need more than english to indonesian. But I like to do both) and I've been submitting translations for English from Indonesian.

For those that don't know, the way this works is I am given a phrase or sentence (with no context) and then asked to give a translation. Not having context can make it pretty hard, and man do I get some funny things. What follows is some funny ones I've got, or ones that provide good translation notes.

• "Hidup bebas di dalam air laut dan tawar."
• I can't tell if this is some sort of saying or word of wisdom or if it is information about a fish. Is it an advertisement offering a way to free yourself from the perils of water? I eventually decided it was probably about a fish.
• "Berita tertangkapnya tuyul tersebut membuat banyak orang penasaran."
• Tuyul, a small spirit of the familiar sort. Where does Google get these to translate? Tuyul can't even be translated into english without a translator's footnote, imo. Penasaran is an interesting word too. Here (and most other places) it is being used like an adjective, even though the wordform itself is a noun. I translated as curious (since that's how I almost always see it being used, and makes sense in this case), but my dictionary says that it literally means "angered" or "anxious to find out something". I guess the second one could mean curious, but why not just say that? Tertangkapnya is also an interesting word being a nominalization. I have an article about -nya nominalizations somewhere, I should probably read it again sometime.
• "Einstein dengan teori relativitas khusus dan umumnya."
• This, as far as I can tell, is a fragment in English and Indonesian. It's easy to translate (you probably don't need to know indonesian to translate it), but it NEEDS MORE CONTEXT
• "Begitu mereka terjerumus, adalah masalah besar di kemudian hari."
• Terjerumus appears to be a new word for me. I think in this case it is definitely being used like "to fall into sin". Also, this appears to be a case where "adalah" means"ada-lah" not "is".
• "Saya membeli kertas, pena, dan tinta."
• This is the one where I realized I was translating most things into the past tense. Probably accurate, but context is really important for translations and even more so for Indonesian, where tense is so context based.
• "Bonus dihitung dan diberikan secara harian."
•  I realized I've been doing a similar sort of thing with things that could be singular or plural. I think in this case it is plural. Honestly, I've gotten pretty bad at marking plurals in english sometimes, it just doesn't seem important anymore.
• "Saya raba seluruh bagian tubuh yang sensitif"
• This is the second translation that I think it pulled from a porn site. I'm translating these as unerotically as possible. "I groped all the sensitive body parts".
• "Apa sih penyebab tubuh kita bisa merasakan gatal?"
• I don't get many translations that use particles like "sih". Kind of hard to translate, but not too bad overall, though I did a pretty liberal translation on this one.
• "Cara menghilangkan jerawat yang aman adalah secara tradisional."
• I'm looking at this one and seeing reasonable translations. First I thought it would be "a safe and traditional way to remove acne", but then I noticed the adalah. The best translation would probably be "A safe way to remove acne is traditionally" and play on the fact that English does allow (I think) adverbs in the predicate like that.
• "Tak pernah secuilpun kudengar kabar tentang dirinya."
• Who even uses language like this? I guess I should try to preserve the formality of it. Trying to decide if I change the word order or preserve it for poetic sake.
• "Kamu wonderwoman, yang membuatku ngerasa jadi superman"
• I don't want the context on this one. Hopefully it's a song or a poem.

Other random translation note. -nya and dia are really difficult because I never know if to translate them to he or she, or if a straight singular they is best. I NEED CONTEXT TO TRANSLATE. Google's advice? "If you feel you need more context (like gender or formality), go ahead and translate as best you can". This is why Google Translate (and all machine translations) suck. Machines can't understand the context and pragmatics of a statement.

Well that's enough for tonight. Translation is a really fun exercise.

Symmetrical Voice in Toúījāb Kīkxot

So I read an article about the Totoli language of Sulawesi today (For reference it is "Symmetrical Voice and Applicative Alternations: Evidence from Totoli" by Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Sonja Riesberg). Interesting stuff, mostly focusing on how Totoli has significant features of both symmetrical voice languages (its own typology) and Philippine-type languages (a relative of the symmetrical voice languages of course). Some things I liked included the authors getting slightly annoyed with Philippinists (for assuming everything is like Philippine languages, I guess) and the general overall topic. I'm always looking for info about obscure languages of Indonesia. My general feeling is that it is really hard to find such info, especially online. A lot of the examples used seemed pretty natural to me as an Indonesian speaker, so I guess I do understand this applicative suffixes after all :p. I was interested that the benefactive/instrumental suffix (-kan in indonesian, -an in Totoli, for the actor voice) can have a iterative function...which is a function of the locative suffix (-i in both languages) in Indonesian. Or maybe I don't, as I didn't quite get what exactly their conclusion that there was a locative voice in opposition to an undergoer voice with a goal applicative suffix meant, though the proposal seemed reasonable enough.

Anyway, this reminded me a lot of Toúījāb Kīkxot and how it came to have the typology it has. When I was learning Indonesian I thought the voicing system of Indonesian (which I later learned is called symmetrical voice) was cool and a feature I didn't see often, if ever in conglangs (sure, austronesian alignment appears lots, but Indonesian is pretty much ignored by everyone so yeah). I also decided I wanted to do something with triconsonantal roots (but had no knowledge of Arabic at the time and no access into any materials, so we get what wonderful mess we have), but that's not super relevant right now.

Now, with my Indonesian grammar book (The Sneddon one, I highly recommend it), I saw that suffixes like -i and -kan could do cool things with objects and marking arguments. I didn't quite get it at the time (let alone know that these are called applicatives) but I decided that Toúījāb Kīkxot should have them too. Originally there were 2-3 (locative, "benefactive" and an optional patient), later I added a third instrumental/causative. They were pretty much as classic applicative suffixes, as far as I can tell, marking the role of the direct object (often raising the transitivity of the verb, requiring a change of verb form) or the subject in the undergoer voice. I'll cover what they actually do in another post, since the benefactive form is especially confusing, but that's how they came about. It's one part of the language I am really proud of, as it gives a very different flavor than English and can do some pretty cool things. Plus it really helps with focus and showing what is most important in a sentence.

Murder: The semantics of killing people

Last night I got in a debate about ethics. But one interesting thing that our debate briefly looked at the word murder (context: At one point, I was arguing that when you use the word murder in debate of course murder is evil, because our language encodes said value judgement in the word itself, he was saying that murder is evil, but because killing is evil).  I don't quite remember how to do these semantic things but the word murder in english looks something like this:

Murder

=death

[+caused]

[+intentional]
[+bad]

Or in other words, murder is a form of death which was caused by another person, intentionally, and is bad. If we negate the intentional, it becomes a different word in english, manslaughter. Remove the bad and it becomes something like justified killing or self-defense or just plain killing. If it isn't caused by another person/thing, it isn't a cut into the field of killing itself, just part of the larger space of dying. In english, we represent a lot of these different semantic divisions lexically, but after the debate I started thinking, how do I do this in my own languages. Which ones make semantic divisions we don't? Are said division more morphological/derivational in nature or lexical? So let's take a look at what I have so far and what visions I have for said languages, and go from there!

Ǩüttǩarrą Roś:

So there's actually two drafts of this language and in the first draft (must be from like 6 or 8 years ago, wow), I actually have a discussion of this issue. I haven't reapplied it to the second draft yet (though I probably will), but clearly how I wanted to divided the roots was animate vs inanimate, with english translations sort of like this:

category	human	non human
end a life	kill	kill
kill for the sake of resource harvesting	manhunt	hunt
no reason	murder	slaughter
self-defense or honor	avenge	slay

That was more difficult than it should be and now the html is even more or a mess. Anyway, my point is that the primary division here between "humans" and "non-humans". Volition isn't really considered, though intent is. It reflects a cultural idea that using something is better than not using something and that the ends justify the means.

In the current draft, I have one root so far related to this: pëntov "to die". Presumably this lines up with with the human form of death. Pënsočov is "to kill" lit "to cause to die". I'm guessing this is the neutral "kill". As for the others, there currently is no way to express intent, but conidering this is meant to be a constructed language, it falls within reason that the constructor would create roots for each row. By analogy the base root would mean "to die", and then a causative lets it fill space on this table. This leaves me with up to seven more roots to create, as I want to maintain the human/non-human split.

Osogkum:

This language does not have any roots at all yet relating to death or killing. So I'll look at the more theoretical approach of how I'd derive words from a hypothetical root. Osogkum has two grammatical functions that are relevant to this discussion, I feel: a volitive mood and a causative voice. The volative mood in this case marks a verb as explicitly intentional, or it could mean that the subject wants to do the verb (yay ambiguity, though I think that a desire is more likely in certain aspects/voices and volition in others, like the perfective. But ambiguity sill remains). The causative voice raises the valency of the verb marking the new subject as causing the old subject (now marked as the indirect object) to do the verb to the object. But I think that this is almost entirely for constructions like "He made her read the book" in Osogkum. So I feel that the split between death and killing would be separate roots (and using the causative would mark the separation between the subject and the cause of the object's death, as opposed to the use "to kill"). Then volition (either desire or intentionality) can be expressed, so the difference between murder and manslaughter would be morphological in nature. I think that's how this will work in this language.

The Tundra Afrit language:

Barely has a phonology and smatterings of morphology. I don't even have a name for it yet.  So we'll skip it for now

Toúījāb Kīkxot:

So so far I have one root relating to death PJP. As often works, the change in transitivity makes this a causative so āpjāp "to die" becomes pījūp "to kill". Judging from their culture and the general feel of the language, I think that most differentiation in volition and value judgements will come from modifiers, compounds and reduplication (I think I already have the intensitive translated as "murder" and pījūp-pujip should translate to "manslaughter") or even syntax. That being said, I do feel a specific root meaning "to die a martyr/to martyr someone" is probably in order, as that seems like the sort of thing this language would have. And it probably would fall in class 1 (human) instead of class 3 (inanimate).

Nounwise, it is very easy to express the difference between dying and killing, and compounding should work to cut up the semantic space.

The sea people's language:

I really need to derive a name for this. Anyway, I have a root, gepom, which means things relating to dying. Because of the way this language works gepok would have some meaning like "dead", gepor would mean "to die", and the conjugated for would mean "to kill". As far as volition and the like goes, I feel like would have a lot to do with the choice of verb form, noun case and syntax. I think that manslaughter would probably be represented in a sort of sentence like "Dies X[absolutive], Kills Y[nominative] X[absolutive]", while murder would be simple "Kills Y[nominative] X[absolutive]" Active-stative languages are weird. An intentional death would most likely have X in the nominative, after all. I really don't know man. That's part of why I started other projects and keep hopping between languages while skipping this. I'll get back to it one day. The nouns, staying a very seperate class from verbs would probably cover the concepts separately and use loans as needed to further differentiate them. I can totally see the Sea People's borrowing the Kikxot word pajpo (lit. killing) to mean "murder" in our sense.

The mountain people's language.

Also needs a name. It has separate words for "to die" mẽwĩẽ and "to kill" ẽmẽtõ. There is a grammatical causative, but I doubt it applies in this case. I think it has more to do with adjectives or other things. I dunno. At the very least the ideas are lexically different here. The differences in volition are really easily expressed in this languages using verbal particles, but for the nouns (I just now realized that I've been ignoring nouns, which is a big part in the semantic differences of english death verbs. Oh well, I'll try to add a bit) it is probably a bit trickier. Verbs and nouns convert a lot, then a construction using pũ (I swear the language isn't entirely nasal!) could make such distinctions. So for example ẽmẽtõ would mean "killing" but ẽmẽtõ pũ "desire" (lit. killing's desire) would mean "murder" and ẽmẽtõ pũ "accident" (lit. killing's accident) would mean "manslaughter". Of course, in actual spoken language, people might just try to make the verb the core of the sentence instead of a noun.

And that's my first actual language post.  What a big step! Most probably won't be this involved, but hey, semantics is fun.