Ákat - as constructed by logoscript
I thought I'd start an new thread for this discussion - which Sano requested in the other Ákat thread. To give this thread a purpose, I'll try to show how - and why - the Ákat sentence ...
àkifdavihxà!bat àfittinoicux
(the horse carries a heavy load)
... ends up looking like this in the logoscript:
Firstly, some practical details about the logoscript
- the script is a recent development in the history of the language, which is itself is a 'reconstructed' language: the Nakap philosophers believed that the original language had been corrupted by time and wickedness, and sought to rediscover the original as part of their philosophical discourse (leading to a sort of 'warped' linguistics).
- because of the artificial nature of the language, in particular the 'recovery' of core concepts and the uncovering of regularised grammatical and derivational rules, the development of the logoscript was made a lot easier. It is important to remember that the logoscript is tied more closely to the philosophical underpinnings of the language than it is to phonology, syntax or grammar.
- the language is normally written in the commonscript (see example above). The logoscript is used for more artistic purposes. Books printed in the logoscript tend to be philosophical in nature. Among the wider public, the logoscript has found a home in signwriting, letterheads, posh invitations and announcements, etc.
- the script is generally painted with a reasonably fine, flattish brush, or written on paper using a broad-nibbed pen (reflected in the glyphology of the example above). Children tend to learn the script alongside the teaching of the commonscript, though emphasis is given to the commonscript with logoscript activities being the more 'fun' part of the curriculum.
- the script has been used for other Telik languages, particularly those used in the cities of southwestern Ewlah. These languages were the base material for the Nakap philosophers' development of Ákat, making the transfer of the logographs a little easier.
- the man who came up with the first set of glyphs claimed he found them written on a cave wall high in the Arakush mountains, thus making them a good candidate for developing the script. While even his close associates considered the man to be a bit unhinged, and his story doubtful (he was not an avid mountaineer), people liked the proposal of developing a logoscript to help them investigate and explain the language. This happened around 350-400 orbits ago.
Where is the script used?
Here's a map. Note that the features and names have been rendered in the Gevey language, though the names of the key cities we are interested in are a reasonable approximation (to the Gevey speaker's ear/eye) of how the locals would pronounce the names:
Questions are very welcome. For my next post, I'll talk about core concepts and their relationship to simple nouns and verbs.
I thought I'd start an new thread for this discussion - which Sano requested in the other Ákat thread. To give this thread a purpose, I'll try to show how - and why - the Ákat sentence ...
àkifdavihxà!bat àfittinoicux
(the horse carries a heavy load)
... ends up looking like this in the logoscript:
Firstly, some practical details about the logoscript
- the script is a recent development in the history of the language, which is itself is a 'reconstructed' language: the Nakap philosophers believed that the original language had been corrupted by time and wickedness, and sought to rediscover the original as part of their philosophical discourse (leading to a sort of 'warped' linguistics).
- because of the artificial nature of the language, in particular the 'recovery' of core concepts and the uncovering of regularised grammatical and derivational rules, the development of the logoscript was made a lot easier. It is important to remember that the logoscript is tied more closely to the philosophical underpinnings of the language than it is to phonology, syntax or grammar.
- the language is normally written in the commonscript (see example above). The logoscript is used for more artistic purposes. Books printed in the logoscript tend to be philosophical in nature. Among the wider public, the logoscript has found a home in signwriting, letterheads, posh invitations and announcements, etc.
- the script is generally painted with a reasonably fine, flattish brush, or written on paper using a broad-nibbed pen (reflected in the glyphology of the example above). Children tend to learn the script alongside the teaching of the commonscript, though emphasis is given to the commonscript with logoscript activities being the more 'fun' part of the curriculum.
- the script has been used for other Telik languages, particularly those used in the cities of southwestern Ewlah. These languages were the base material for the Nakap philosophers' development of Ákat, making the transfer of the logographs a little easier.
- the man who came up with the first set of glyphs claimed he found them written on a cave wall high in the Arakush mountains, thus making them a good candidate for developing the script. While even his close associates considered the man to be a bit unhinged, and his story doubtful (he was not an avid mountaineer), people liked the proposal of developing a logoscript to help them investigate and explain the language. This happened around 350-400 orbits ago.
Where is the script used?
Here's a map. Note that the features and names have been rendered in the Gevey language, though the names of the key cities we are interested in are a reasonable approximation (to the Gevey speaker's ear/eye) of how the locals would pronounce the names:
Questions are very welcome. For my next post, I'll talk about core concepts and their relationship to simple nouns and verbs.
- speed - dealing with all aspects of velocity and speed, including fast, quick, slow; also horses
- hand - all things to do with hands; also deals with giving and taking, presenting and receiving
- surfeit - The concepts of overloading, taking more than required, filling things with other things
- weight - all things to do with weight and gravity
Note how general these core concepts seem. While some can be fairly specific, others are very wide-ranging. They can also seem to cover unrelated concepts: the 'weight' glyph looks like a camel not because camels are considered to be especially heavy animals, but rather because in several of the Telik languages (from which Ákat was developed) the words for 'camel' and 'heavy' were near-homonyms to each other.
To make core concepts useful, they need to be turned into nouns - which I'll cover in the next posting.
- The object surglyph is placed above the head noun's core concept glyph, and is used in both the agentive and patientive noun cases (the oblique case has a set of different surglyphs)
- the first noun class is the people class, also known as the WA class as the class prefix in the singular is á. This class is used mainly for those objects most directly related to people.
- the next class is the nature class (or JA class, à). As expected, most animals and some plants can be found in this class.
- the made things class (TA class) is used for many things that are built or constructed, where some form of human intervention has taken place.
- the fourth class is the thought things class (or NA class). Here we find objects associated mainly with the mind and imagination.
- finally we have the dangerous things class (SA class). This is a rag-bag collection of things which in some way or another are considered to be potentially dangerous to the individual or the wider society.
The key thing to remember about Ákat noun classes is that they are not an empirical (or for that matter a logical) division of the world, but rather a mix of philosophical and historical groupings. This is often most clearly shown in the JA class words, where the links between a JA noun and its sibling WA, TA, NA and SA nouns simply makes no sense until you realise that the association is based on cultural associations - particularly myths and stories which employ different animals as anthropormorphic metaphors for particular human (and even non-human) traits.
Let's have a look at an example. The third core concept in our sentence is fit, which I previously translated as surfeit. In fact, the noun used in the sentence is àfit, a JA class noun which can be translated as hoard, load or pack. Here are the other simple nouns which are derived from this core concept:
- ýfit obesity, fatness
- àfit hoard, load, pack
- tyhnfit stuffing material
- nafit rich person
- syhnfit bursting, explosion.
You will have probably spotted that three of the above five examples are using noun class subglyphs which are slightly different from the surglyphs I listed near the top of this post. There's a good reason for this: the subglyphs also show a noun's number as well as its case. The number 'accents' are entirely regular; you can always tell a noun's class by looking at the left hand end of the subglyph.
If people have understood the above, then this little exercise should be simple: have a look at the example sentence and try to work out the class of the other three 'words' (one of them is a verb, not a noun, but it is derived from a noun and carries that noun's class in its subglyph) ...
- paucal (é or we) - for count nouns this (usually) indicates between two and five objects; for mass nouns, a (relatively) large amount of the object
- plural (ó or wo) - for count nouns this (usually) indicates more than five objects; for mass nouns, a very large measure of the object
- nullar (ú or wu) - for count nouns this means no (zero) objects; for mass nouns, it can mean a lack of that particular object, or a minimum amount of it (depending on the noun)
- undetermined (ý or wy) - used by both count and mass nouns for describing the objects in general or abstract terms when they count or measure of them is irrelevant.
Let's have a look at what this means for the nouns in our example sentence:
àkif (trans: horse) - this is a count noun in the JA class, in this instance used as a singular noun. The paucal form is èikif (some horses, a team of horses); the plural is òikif (many horses, a herd of horses); the nullar is ùkif (no horses); and the undetermined form is ỳkif (horse
- hnis - 0 .......... 
- hnip - 1 .......... 
- hnit - 2
- hnif - 3 .......... 
- hnix - 4 .......... 
- hnik - 5
- hnil - 6 .......... 
- hnim - 7
There's also a set of numerical core concept glyphs based on the above glyphs which are used in complex nouns and the like. We'll look at how the logoscript (and the language) deal with numbers in a later post.
napix - art, an artistic endeavour
napixkíf - a sketch, a drawing
tyhnfos - beer
tyhnfosêkìf - the Telik equivalent of aqua vitae
The core concept kif (speed, and horses) has two derivational models associated with it.
>>> The first of these follows the first derivational model (known as 'front marking') and is used in the sense of speedy or fast. Combined with the word napix - art - it results in the word napixkíf - a sketch or a drawing.
>>> The second follows a different derivational model (model 7, also known as 'back marking with vowel insertion'). It is used in the sense of deliberate slowness. Combined with the word tyhnfos - beer - it results in the nasty looking word tyhnfosêkìf - which can be translated as 'alcohol', most usually a fairly tasteless spirit distilled from rice or barley.
For us, the key point to note here is the subglyphs under the horsey's head - these are derevation markers. Each model has its own subglyph (currently I've devised 12 glyphs):
- model 1 - front marking
- model 2 - back marking
- model 3 - open marking
- model 4 - host reduplication
- model 5 - vowel insertion
- model 6 - front marking with vowel insertion
- model 7 - back marking with vowel insertion
- model 8 - nasal insertion
- model 9 - non-sillibant replacement
- model 10 - sillibant replacement
- model 11 - general irregular
- model 12 - numerical irregular
The other key point is that the object surglyph (the hat) now extends over two core concepts, not one. This will hold true for any surglyph placed over a derived word.
On a general point, this is one of those cases where the logoscript has little to do with the phonology or even the morphology of the language. Rather, it tracks the philosophical roots of words and the language - an important consideration for philosophers, but not that interesting to the wider society who make use of the script.