ozarque
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "ozarque" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
08:34 am
[Link] |
Living underground...
This underground house of ours continues to amaze me. It was 18 degrees outside at six o'clock this morning when we got up. But inside our house -- despite the fact that we have no heat source in here at all at night -- it was 64 degrees. And when we turned on our electric space heater, it went up to 66 degrees in only twenty minutes.
All summer long, heat is stored in the earth and stone around our house and in its concrete walls; then when winter comes, that heat is released into our house. Because we had almost no real heat this past summer -- we had a plague of thunderstorms and gloom, day after day and night after night -- I wondered if it would be colder in here this winter than it usually is. But it hasn't turned out that way. The first day that we had to turn on the space heater didn't come along until October 23rd. And well into late November, I was able to open the house to the outdoors -- which means opening the front door and all the screened windows on the front porch -- for a few hours around noon almost every day.
I had always said that it would never get below 59 degrees in here, no matter how cold it got outside. Last year, in the January ice storm when we had a five-day power outage, I found out that that wasn't true. Ordinarily in the wintertime our lights are on all day long and late into the evening in all the rooms; ordinarily we use our oven -- which has electric ignition -- often for cooking. Ordinarily we have two tiny space heaters that we run in the bathroom and the room where our computers are when those rooms are in use. Ordinarily the thirty gallons of hot water in our water heater are giving off heat around the clock.
Our little generator -- the one we've now replaced with a much larger unit -- wasn't powerful enough to do all of that; it wasn't powerful enough to run the oven or the hot water heater at all. And it not only was 55 degrees in here every morning, it never got warmer than 56 degrees inside, even with the big space heater running. Still, there was nothing ordinary about that ice storm, with its three consecutive days and nights of nonstop sleet. It seems to me that for this house to have maintained 55/56 degrees through all that was pretty amazing.
And of course it works the other way round as well. The earth and stone and concrete walls store the winter's cold as well, and then release it into the house. We don't need our air conditioning until months after people living above ground have had to turn theirs on.
I can enthusiastically recommend living underground. Not that there aren't adjustments you have to make; there are. But an underground house is a marvelous device.
Tags: living underground
|
|
09:16 am
[Link] |
Eldering; winter holidays ahead...
One of the things that goes with eldering is that everything you do -- even things you've been doing for so many years that you could practically do them in your sleep -- starts taking much longer to do than it ever has before. It's frustrating, and infuriating, and you keep thinking that if you'd just put your mind to it you could do things faster .... but you learn that that's false.
The reason I'm bringing this up isn't because I think it will come as a revelation to any of you. I'm bringing it up because starting tomorrow I'm going to be up to my eyebrows in getting ready for Christmas. Putting up the Christmas tree. Trimming the Christmas tree. Writing and addressing the Christmas cards and Christmas checks. Making the fruitcake. Making the handcrafted presents. Wrapping the presents. Putting the local presents under the tree, and getting the nonlocal ones off in the mail in time. Cleaning the house. Doing the last-minute Christmas shopping. Making the grocery list for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Cooking the Christmas dinner. Fixing the Christmas Eve buffet. And the most important task of all: Writing the To Do lists, where all of these things get scheduled, and without which I would be helpless.
Usually we don't put up the Christmas tree until December 1st, but this year -- because George has discovered that everything he does takes him much longer now -- he has decided to get started early, and will be putting up the tree tomorrow instead. I won't be trimming it tomorrow, because tomorrow is my day off, but I will hit the ground running [slowly] on Monday.
Everything has side effects, and a side effect of all this is that I'm not going to have much time for posting here at Live Journal. I wanted to let you know. In preparation for that, here are URLs for some of my Christmas posts from years past:
Photo of our 2007 Christmas tree -- at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/476923.html .
Compiled list of Christmas links -- to holiday filksongs, holiday recipes [including that fruitcake], holiday poems, and posts about the handcrafted Christmas gifts I make -- at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/561560.html .
|
|
08:27 am
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages...
I'll be following your excellent suggestions and stashing the Swadesh [core vocabulary] lists for the four ET languages in my new novel on my SFWA website, so that those of you who are interested can see them and discuss them.
It will take me a while to get the material in order for posting; and then it will take a while for the SFWA webtech to post it. As soon as that's done, I'll post the URLs here.
==================
Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm ; "Why Are Old Women Older Than Old Men And How Can We Fix That?" at http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesElginOld.html ; Religious Language Newsletter archive at http://www.forlovingkindness.org ; Fiction online: "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Story-Panglish.html ; "What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/epa.htm ; "Weather Bulletin" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Weather.html ; "A Quorum Of Grandmothers" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/QuorumOfGrandmothers.html ; The Communipaths at http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html . More stuff at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SiteMap.html ; LiveJournal blog index at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque ; Art Gallery at
http://www.bysuzettehadenelgin.com .
Tags: writing science fiction
|
|
08:45 am
[Link] |
Writing science fiction; the new novel...
You may or may not remember the novel I'm working on now, which has a U.S. Corps of Linguist candidate -- who has failed three of her final exams -- ordered to do a penalty monograph on the grammars of four previously unstudied ET languages. [First page, draft 17, is at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/621925.html .]
Which means that I've had to spend this past week doing the following:
1. Thumbnail sketches of each of the four languages.
2. Phoneme lists for each of the four languages. [That is, the list of meaningful sounds].
3. Swadesh lists for each of the four languages. [That is, the core vocabulary list of roughly 100 words that the linguist would use to start her fieldwork.]
These three things have to be done before I can do the plotting, and they take a lot of time. And of course, for a linguist they're mind-candy. I'll be sorry when I've finished doing them.
No title yet. Not even a glimmer of an idea for a title.
Tags: writing science fiction
|
|
07:57 am
[Link] |
Personal note; thank you...
Many thanks for all the birthday wishes! I appreciate them very much.
|
|
08:46 am
[Link] |
Poem; "Foundling"...
Foundling
It was a surprise:
finding a tiny cherub,
sucking its small thumb,
out on our doorstep
in a white wicker basket.
It was a puzzle.
How do you do it?
How do you raise a cherub?
Do you tie it down?
What do you feed it?
Can it fly now, right away,
or does it first crawl
and then walk, then fly?
Is it a boy, or a girl,
or something other?
Can it learn English?
Is it hard-wired for language?
How do we begin?
Do we report it?
And if so, who do we call --
a social worker,
or perhaps a priest?
Can humans keep a cherub
left on their doorstep?
We don't even know
if it would ever grow up
into an angel.
Tags: poem
|
|
09:13 am
[Link] |
Personal note; a very strange day...
This past Thursday was as strange a day as I've ever spent in my life...
After last January's humungous ice storm [see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/573430.html and http://ozarque.livejournal.com/573613.html ], we immediately bought a much bigger and more powerful generator than the little one we'd had before. George put in a lot of advance time doing sub-assemblies so that he could hook it up more quickly, and that was wise of him. But getting it done meant that he had to turn off all the electric power to our house, which in turn meant that Sheba and I would have been without lights, water, heat, and bathroom facilities while he worked.
In a city, we'd just have rented a motel room for the day, but where we live there are only two motels and both of them are permanently rented by local workers. So that was not a possibility. He could have taken us to my daughter's place in Fayetteville, but that would have added four hours of driving to an already-long task. That made no sense. The obvious thing to do was for Sheba and I to spend the day at Michael's mobile home, right there on our property, with all the necessary mod cons. Bathrooms. Furnace. Refrigerator. Running water. And that is what we did.
George started the job at about nine a.m., and finished at two p.m. And Sheba and I were very comfortable. We had our lunch in the refrigerator, I had plenty of stuff to read, plus my PDA with all its games. We took one of Sheba's little beds, and some of her blankets and toys, and bowls of dry dog food and water. All was well.
But it was so very strange. To be in Michael's house, surrounded by a lot of his things, made it so very hard to believe that he is gone forever. So many places where I'd seen him, so many times; I knew it was irrational, but I kept feeling as though I'd look up and he'd be there.
I had worried that Sheba might spend the day hunting for Michael, because his scent was everywhere; that would have been hard for me to watch. It didn't happen. I lay on the couch and read, and she lay curled up beside me the whole time, tucked in under one of her blankets. She wasn't any more interested in exploring and searching than I was, and I was grateful for that.
It was the adult thing to do, and it's wonderful that we now have a generator that will let us run all the electric stuff at our place if we get power outages again this year. It's wonderful that George, who wired our place himself when it was built, knows all about working with electricity and could do the job on his own.
But I am so glad that day is over.
Tags: memoir
|
|
10:29 am
[Link] |
Recommended link; whistle language...
Recommended: "Shepherds Whistle While They Work And Brains Process Sounds As Language," at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050106112603.htm .
|
|
07:27 am
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (4)...
In a comment, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) maeveenroute asked two questions. First, this one:
"What feature would (or did, in your story) make rests qualitatively different?"
Here's an edited excerpt from "Honor Is Golden" [Analog, May 2004] where Oka -- one of the two USCOL linguists sent to analyze the Goldens' language -- is explaining things to the U.S. Senate, in a hearing:
=====
The Senator closest to her frowned, and rubbed at his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t get it, Professor,” he said, sounding cross. “All those sounds you’re talking about -- dishes breaking, cats meowing, and so on -- we have those sounds on Earth, right? But we know they’re just noises. How come it doesn’t work that way in -- what did you call it? Oh, yeah -- in Moth. How come it doesn’t work that way in Moth? How could it not work that way? I can’t imagine such a thing!”
“That’s exactly the point,” Oka said. “Human beings are hard-wired for human languages. We’re designed neurologically to recognize only certain things and combinations of things as languages, and we’re not able to imagine anything else qualifying. We have a whole universe of sounds around us, just as you say. The first thing we do, faced with all that data, is divide sounds into language and non-language. The next thing we do is divide the sounds that are language into vowels and consonants, and we can’t imagine there being something else that would be part of language. For the Goldens there is something else... that’s part of language in the same way that vowels and consonants are. There may be only one of those alien language-parts or there may be more than one; we have no way of knowing. ... Whatever they are, our brains are able to make the right division between language and nonlanguage -- presumably the reason we can do that much is because Moth is humanoid -- but that’s as far as we can go. Faced with all the sounds that are language on Golden, we can identify the vowels and the consonants, but we’re hopelessly lost with the others. Our brains keep trying, but they can’t do it, they just flounder around. Fortunately, I finally realized that that didn’t matter.”
A Senator leaned forward and opened his mouth to speak, but Oka raised her hand to stop him.
“Hang on just one minute, please, Senator,” she said. “I’m almost finished. ... You know how in music, when part of the melody is a silence of a certain size and shape, you use a symbol called a ‘rest’ to write that down? I was looking at a piece of music all full of rests, and I suddenly realized that we could handle the sequences of Moth that way. The other parts of the words are unquestionably stable, it’s only those non-vowel/non-consonant segments that human beings perceive as sometimes one thing, sometimes another. So I had the computer replace every last damned one of the mystery sounds with a pound sign -- there wasn’t a rest symbol on my keyboard -- and transcribe all the rest. ...”
“But if you do it that way,” asked the Senator she had put on hold before, “then how can you pronounce the words?”
“We can’t,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ll never be able to speak Moth -- it has sounds in it that aren’t possible as part of language for human beings, and we’ll never be able to learn them. But we can use the language to communicate, all the same. You wear your computer, you see, in the usual way, and the computer transcribes Moth as it’s spoken and prints it out for you. ... The same way native speakers of English can easily read written English that has misspellings in it or has coffee spilled on it, native speakers of Moth can read their own language even when it’s full of rests -- full of pound signs. It’s not elegant, and it’s not perfect, but it works.”
=====
The second question from maeveenroute was:
"What was the reviewer's problem with your rest phoneme? I mean, I just raised a point of clarification, but I can't think of anything serious enough to merit mention in a review, much less any kind of slamming."
I don't know the answer to that question because what the reviewer said was just "And Elgin's solution is rests! Well..... duh!" I'm an old lady, but I do know what that means. I'm sorry I can't give you a link to the review; it didn't strike me as something I needed to keep track of.
|
|
08:59 am
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (3)...
I am guilty of having done a post here that could only have been understood by cybertelepaths. I had all the backstory for my new novel in my head, I had all my linguistics-stuff in my head, so I just went blithely along with that post as if you [youall] were similarly encumbered. I am greatly blessed that houseboatonstyx came to my rescue with a comment, and -- with that resource in hand -- I am going to do my best to straighten up the mess I made. Here's the first paragraph of the comment:
"If we're looking for sounds that would be PERCEIVED as something other than vowels or consonsonants or something along that continuum -- that's an issue about the perceivers, isn't it? If they've been trained that to be meaningful, a sound must be classified as v, c, or in between -- then won't anything that might be meaningful be stuck into one of those categories, whether it physiologically fits the physiological definition or not?"
Yes. Terran linguists listening to the speech of native speakers of an ET language are going to expect to hear vowels and consonants because that's what they've been trained to hear, and are going to sort the sounds they hear into those two categories for that reason. Only after the U.S. Corps of Linguists (USCOL) had accumulated a large database of ET sound-based languages that included vowels, consonants, and "something else" would it be possible to train them to identify and analyze that "something else." And my conviction is that that would take a very long time to happen.
And here's the next paragraph of the comment:
"Are we looking for sounds from the vocal tract that would be so different physiologically/phonetically that they COULD NOT be fitted into those v-c categories, even by a sort of legal fiction? But would somehow be clearly meaningful so that they COULD NOT simply be disregarded or somehow marginalized?"
Yes again. My Brethandi ETs -- because their anatomy is very different from the anatomy of the Terran cattle they so closely resemble to the casual eye -- are able to speak in a fashion comparable to Terran speech, although they of course have distinctive accents. [I knew that. So I did a cognitive SHAZAM-leap and took it for granted that you would know it too. Sheesh.] And my question was serious. Supposing one or more of the Brethandi languages was composed of three meaningful classes of sounds -- vowels, consonants, and something else -- then what, I wanted to know, could that something else possibly be?
One possibility turned up in a comment from kelsied:
"Consonants, vowels, and rests. As in music. The rhythmic and intentional interruption of consonants and vowels to modify their meaning."
That option -- musical rests -- is the one I used in my USCOL story "Honor Is Golden," published in Analog. [Not online anywhere, so far as I know.] It worked, to my satisfaction and my editor's, although I got slammed for it in a review. My linguists weren't able to isolate the rest-phonemes or work with them, but they were able to establish communication. Which was their primary goal.
I hope this clarifies things just a tad. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll try again.
|
|
12:42 pm
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages; your comments (2)...
The second batch of your comments I want to tackle -- about a possible "third class of meaningful sounds" in an ET language -- is those that propose various kinds of noises. The noises described in your comments included percussives [sounds that could be made with drums, rattles, and the like]; crackling; clicks; whistles; burps and belches; teeth-clicks; farts; squeaks; squeals; and more.
Those of you who've complained that I didn't define my terms -- neither "vowel" nor "consonant" -- are absolutely right, and I apologize. For me, vowels are speech sounds that are produced without any obstruction of the flow of air through the vocal tract; consonants are speech sounds for which that flow of air is obstructed in some fashion. That of course means that the vowel/consonant distinction has to be a continuum, not an either/or binary split. As pgdudda has pointed out, the English liquids [L and R] and the English glides [Y and W and H] are neither strictly vowels nor strictly consonants; they fall in between the two, somewhere on the continuum.
My opinion -- and it's only that, an opinion, since I've never encountered an ET language -- is that all of the varieties of noises proposed in your comments would be perceived by Terrans, and by Terran linguists, as falling somewhere on the vowel/consonant continuum; that is, as either vowel-like or consonant-like. I don't believe they would perceive the noises as a separate, third class of meaningful speech sounds.
I could be wrong about this. For sure.
|
08:44 am
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages; your comments...
The first batch of your comments on my ET phonology question that I want to tackle is the batch that doesn't try to answer my question. I don't know whether it's because I didn't make myself clear, or because the question was perhaps read too quickly, or because the commenters just preferred not to color inside the lines. In any case...
My question was narrow and specific:
Suppose the ET language we're dealing with has three classes of meaningful sounds: vowels; consonants; and something else. What could the something else be?
Comments proposing that the something else could be colors, or smells, or the position of the speaker's face/ears/tail/fur -- something other than a class of meaningful sounds -- are answering a different question. It's an interesting question, and I thank you for the comments, but it's not the question that I asked.
|
|
08:04 am
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages, continued...
In a recent post, I said:
"Suppose you encounter a language that has three basic classes of meaningful sounds: vowels, consonants -- and something else. The question then is: What could that 'something else' be?" Now I'm not quite sure what to do with the blogmonster I managed to create with that question.
One possibility is to take up each of your comments, one at a time, and respond in detail. That means finding a way to explain a great deal of basic information about phonetics and phonology, without resorting to LinguistSpeak, and without creating additional confusions that would tie us up in knots for weeks, maybe months, while I tried to straighten them out. This would take a very long time.
Another possibility is for me to sort the comments into classes of some kind and deal with them in batches, with all the same caveats attached.
Another possibility is to notice that you seem to have had a good time proposing answers to my question, to thank you for all your excellent comments, and then to just butt out and mind my own business.
Do you [youall] have a preference?
|
|
02:04 pm
[Link] |
Writing science fiction; new novel, page 1...
[Note: This will go through another fifty drafts, but I can live with this one. Here's page 1 of Draft 17, as promised.]
CHAPTER ONE
It's not fair.
That was the thought that consumed her, never mind how aware she was that it was childish and whiny. And unjustified. What had happened to her was what would have happened to any USCOL candidate who had failed her final exams. Still, it had all her attention. And there were other, even less seemly, thoughts tangled in with it...
"But I worked so hard."
"But I never missed even one class."
"But it was easier for the rest of my class because they came out of better linguistics programs than I did. [And whose fault was that?]."
Briar knew what drivel all of those thought-tangles were. She had failed three of her finals, that was the simple truth, and the penalty she'd been assigned for that -- a monograph describing and discussing the Brethandi languages -- was horrendously difficult, that was the simple truth as well. But she wasn't stupid; she was prepared to admit that it was in fact entirely fair and that she was a lucky woman. They could have just kicked her out of the program -- that was in fact what she had taken it for granted that they would do, when they told her about the failed exams -- instead of offering her the chance to redeem herself by writing the penalty monograph.
They were going to send her to Gaudalle, the Brethandi planet -- in spite of the fact that she hadn't yet qualified for USCOL -- to do the necessary fieldwork with the four languages: Thandi; Aubre; Lenadess; Nangdi. And it wasn't going to be easy. The Brethandi weren't humanoid; except that their legs ended in feet, not hooves, they looked exactly like Terran cattle. Briar hadn't yet taken any courses in nonhumanoid languages. The Brethandi did speak and write Panglish, saints be praised, because they understood that there was no way to function in this galaxy without being literate in Panglish, but they bitterly resented that necessity, as they bitterly resented the fact that although Earth had no empire it remained the dominant planet. No Brethandi willingly used Panglish. Briar's Brethandi consultants were going to be unanimously sullen, they were going to work with her only grudgingly.
Briar understood very well the politics behind what was happening. The point was not only that she should fail -- and fail spectacularly -- but that she should be an example to the worlds. The message to other potential U.S. Corps of Linguists candidates would be loud and clear: "This is what can happen to you if you're not the ideal candidate. If you, like Briar, don't come from a 'heritage' family, where your parents were part of USCOL, and their parents were linguists, so that from birth you ate and breathed linguistics. If you, like Briar, didn't get your prerequisite Ph.D. in linguistics at one of the top half dozen universities USCOL favors. Be warned. You could end up like Briar Jamison -- an interplanetary laughingstock."
Tags: writing science fiction
|
09:39 am
[Link] |
Linguistics; ET languages...
SF writers trying to describe an ET language in their fiction tend to lean toward languages made up of colors or smells or textures or musical notes or some such thing. But a Terran language could easily work that way.
What you need to identify a language as extraterrestrial is some feature never before observed in any Terran language. For example, suppose you encounter a language that has three basic classes of meaningful sounds: vowels, consonants -- and something else. The question then is: What could that "something else" be?
It couldn't be tone, by the way, or aspiration. Tone is just a way to modify vowels; aspiration is just a way to modify consonants. You'd still have only two classes of meaningful sounds.
|
|
09:07 am
[Link] |
Writing science fiction; getting it all in there...
This new novel is huge. Scary huge. I have to fit into it, somehow, all of the following:
1. Enough of the backstory about USCOL [U.S. Corps of Linguists] -- historical, descriptive, and more -- to make it real and vivid for the reader. [This is not made easier by the fact that the backstory is actually going on in the Real World right now; Googling for "National Language Service Corps" will fill you in on that, at least if the name holds still for a while. It started as "Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps," briefly became just "The Language Corps," then moved on to the current "National Language Service Corps."]
2. Enough of the backstory about the Brethandi ETs on Planet Gaudalle -- historical, descriptive, and more -- to make that story arc real and vivid for the reader, and to make readers care about them. And to make readers interested in Thandi, Aubre, Lenadess -- the three major languages spoken on Gaudalle -- and Nangdi, a fourth language still spoken but endangered.
3. The story arc of the USCOL candidate -- Briar Jamison -- who has failed three of her horrendously difficult final exams, and as a penalty has been ordered to write a monograph on the grammars of those four Brethandi languages.
I do realize that George R.R. Martin would find fitting all of this into one book laughably easy. But me -- I'm struggling with it.
Come the day I have an opening page that I can live with, I'll post it here.
Tags: writing science fiction
|
|
09:10 am
[Link] |
Personal note; contradicting myself...
I know that I have said in this journal, many times, that there was no point in my writing another novel because no publisher would consider a novel with my name on it. [For details, see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/2005/04/09/ .] And now here I am, writing another novel nonetheless. Contradicting myself.
I can explain this only by reminding you of my misery when I had no book-in-progress to anchor my days, after a lifetime spent anchored always by my books. Whether it's ever published or not, writing this novel is restoring balance to my daily life.
The writing has been going well so far. I'm up to my eyebrows printing out all the backstory files I've been accumulating for the past few years and putting them into a three-ring binder for easy access. And I'm well into a first draft of Chapter One.
Thank you for all the encouraging comments you've been sending me about this project; I'm very grateful.
Tags: writing science fiction
|
|
09:04 am
[Link] |
Writing science fiction; the new novel...
I'm struggling with the problem of the form for the new novel -- the one about grammars of nonhumanoid ET languages. And I think I know how to begin, which is a Good Thing. It's going to be a USCOL novel [a U.S. Corps of Linguists novel], and it's going to include the Brethandi [my ETs that look like Terran cattle] and their languages. The context: A USCOL candidate has failed her horrendously difficult final exams, and as a penalty she is ordered to write a monograph on the grammars of those Brethandi languages.
[This has a real-life correlate by the way. It happened to me. I failed my exam on Historical Linguistics -- a course I'd never taken, but for our competency exams at UCSD we were obligated to pass exams over courses we'd never taken. We were responsible for every course offered, whether we'd taken it or not. As a penalty, I was required to write a monograph reconstructing the pronominal system of Proto-Athabaskan. It was awful ... but at least it was for a Terran language.]
The crucial thing that would make a language truly Alien is the presence of some feature that has never been observed in any Terran language. And of course that's easy: That is, there are an infinite number of ways to cheat. You just do something like saying the ET language has a rule requiring its native speakers to end every sentence by saying that sentence in reverse. Like: "The elephant charged across the clearing clearing the across charged elephant the." Or a rule that every word in a sentence has to be said or written three times. Or every word has to be pronounced first in its basic form and then in reverse. Or you say the ET language has 389 case categories. Stuff like that. No question; a language with rules like those, or a language with 389 case categories, couldn't be a Terran language. But that's cheating. It doesn't tell you anything about the grammar of the ET language; it's just tricks. Tricks that any Terran equipped with a computer could perform.
I have huge quantities of backstory and supporting material already written on the USCOL universe. [For a sample, see "Linguistics: Why a U.S. Corps of Linguists Would Be a Threat," at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/36719.html .] I know all about USCOL. And I have a lot of background material already written on the Brethandi world and culture. [There's a sample at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/600691.html .]
Now I just have to solve the problem of coming up with a valid non-cheating feature of a Brethandi language that truly has never been observed in a Terran language. But I don't have to do that before I start writing the novel; I can let that problem perk in the background and go ahead and write.
I'll keep you posted.
Tags: writing science fiction
|
|
10:34 am
[Link] |
Links that might interest you...
There are two earlier posts on nonhumanoid languages in this journal that might interest you -- at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/620418.html?replyto=13559170 and at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/33721.html .
Tags: writing science fiction
|
08:36 am
[Link] |
New anchor, new book...
Back on October 17th I did a post here complaining that -- after a lifetime of always having my days arranged around whatever book [or books] I was writing at the time -- I was feeling totally adrift because I was bookless. No book in progress, no deadline; and it had me just wandering around aimlessly, fretting.
And zoethe commented:
"I have a very strong sense that somewhere in your subconscious an entirely different kind of book is brewing, and your feeling of being lost is based on your superego's worry that you haven't done such a thing before. I think that what's in front of you is going to require you to be brave, and is going to be challenging. And I think you have to go through this frustration in order to give yourself permission to write it."
I think zoethe was right, especially about the challenge, and I am much intimidated by what's emerging. I think I am With Book, finally, and this time it's scary beyond description.
I'm an Orthodox Chomskyan Linguist, convinced that what a human being can recognize as a language is hardwired in the human brain as a set of characteristics and parameters with off/on switches. I've always claimed that someone who could envisage a truly Alien language -- a nonhumanoid language -- would have to be a someone equipped with an Alien brain.
But this book that's taking shape in my brain right now would have to be called something like The Joy Of Nonhumanoid Grammars. Grammars, plural. By definition, that's not a book I could write. But it's taking shape in my brain all the same, and pretty soon it's going to be taking shape on my computer screen.
Eep.
Tags: writing science fiction
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |