plaindealingvillain

 So I am starting to have enough words to think about grammar (and some of the words I have been giving glyphs required me to think about it). And I have some weird ideas.

Basically, word order is going to be pretty free, where in simple sentences everything is implied from context. If you want to distinguish between Man Bites Dog and Dog Bites Man, you can't write it as a simple setence. "Steak bite hyena" and "Hyena bite steak" are both perfectly valid, though, as is "Bite hyena steak"; all mean that the hyena is biting the steak, because it doesn't make sense that a steak would bite a hyena or hyena a bite, or that the hyena would steak a bite, or that the bite would hyena a steak or steak a hyena.

Confused? As expected. Any word can in principle fill any role in the sentence, though most have a couple senses which are primary. But there is a set of marker words which can be used as simple particles to mark what thematic relation something has. Except it doesn't stop there; thematic relations are largely limited to nouns, and this isn't. There's a Shskle role for behavior verb, and for verb of becoming, and for any number of other things; it encompasses grammatical tense, aspect, mood, and voice, and may do some work for prepositions and maybe some other parts of speech; that I'll figure out later.

This also adds one of the first elements that will be genuinely hard for a non-native speaker to get; these markers can always be applied, and with the progressively-specifying nature of Shskle writing (going back over the written sentence to add more detail, like missing role-markers or clarifying subsentences, is normal and a polite way of indicating that you're growing ready to be interrupted) but are never actually mandatory, and understanding what role a word takes on in context when unmarked is going to be tricky unless you have a native's sense for it. (Though not as bad as the aliens in Kim Stanley Robinson's 'The Translator' - which I would definitely recommend.)

There is one related thing that is mandatory, though: Coindexing. In "I talked to Steve about Dave yesterday, and I'm going to meet him in the park tomorrow", how do you know who 'him' is? In English, you don't; this sentence has ambiguous coindexing. In contrast, "My family met Dave yesterday, and my brother John likes him" is unambiguous; 'him' refers to Dave. (There are rules about this, distinguishing pronouns, anaphors like 'himself', and certain other things.) In Shskle, this is done differently; there's a common set of basically-meaningless reference glyphs that can be used for indexing; putting one of these glyphs modifying two different words indicates that they refer to the same thing, action, idea, etc. The set of markers would probably acquire some meaning over time, but it's all basically connotational.

Another thing Shskle will have is some unusual ways of indicating simple conjuctions and emphasis. If you want to say 'very', you don't have a glyph for that. Instead, you double the glyph that's being emphasized, side by side like a hopscotch grid. "The dog is very tired"? Say "Dog tired/tired", with the two tireds placed like 2 and 3 in this image. Other things can also be done in this manner; there's no word for 'each', but there is a word for 'one thing' and a word for 'every thing', and if placed together side by side they convey 'each thing', i.e. every thing, but each considered individually. The same construction would probably also be used to indicate one object, considered as a group. Some ambiguity is going to happen.

Anyway, still working my way through the ULD (I'm still in chapter one, actually). Read a general guide to conlanging and it mentioned Ouwi', a language which fully explored some of the properties I'm thinking about for Shskle. It's cool, take a look.

Making words for a totally foreign language is *hard*. Especially when there isn't really any documentation of what very early protolanguages looked like to look at for reference. To get a sense of what words to make, I'm using a list of semantic primes here, and the universal language dictionary. I don't actually have a scanner near to hand, so I'll just ramble about what I have drawn and explain the hand signs and logic behind them.

Like most human sign languages, pronouns are pretty straightforward; they point to things. The sign for "I" is to direct your claws inward and move them in a short arc inward toward the chest; the sign for "You" is to direct the claws outward and move them in a short arc toward the second person. Him/Her/Them/It singular is done the same as you, only oriented in a different direction. All of these are written with a pair of curves; one represents the claw and the other the motion. In the singular, the two curves are parallel.
Plural has the same clawshape (in sign and writing) but a different motion; rather than sweep in the same direction, the motion is an arc to the sides, encompassing people nearby (whether or not those people are present). Reference to absent persons is done by pointing to empty space; the usual location is somewhere over the shoulder of the speaker, distinguished from referring to a person in the direction by not turning the head. This is written with a helical curve for the motion line. There is also a distinct dual case (for exactly two people); this is shown with a linear motion between the two people, and written with a straight line for the motion line.

All the signs for time (so far, at least) are based on the sign for day. Day is shown by a nearly-complete circle (open at the right edge) which is tangent to a broad inverted U, showing the arc of the sun in the sky. A long time is shown by changing the inverted U to a helix (looping three times), indicating several days. A short time is made by abbreviating the U to a small arc and drawing a horizontal line underneath it. In sign, a claw forms the almost-circle and the arc is the motion; for the short time, the other hand forms the line, moving in the opposite direction from the sun's arc.

Currently, 'high' and 'good' (which share a glyph) are formed by placing one hand flat above and the other in a point and driving it up to the flat. 'Low' and 'bad' are similar, but with the flat below the point and the moving claw driving down. I'm not enormously happy with these, though I'm pretty happy with the good/high, bad/low homonym pairs. (It's good to have unusual homonymies; that way you know you aren't just making your own language again.)

I stuck the glyph for 'person' through several iterations of simplification. The original sign was probably just pointing to other Shskle lazily and indicating 'nonspecific' by a shake of the head or equivalent (what is their body language like? I have no idea.), but the written form is a sketch of a Shskle, which as I drew it looks like this, only with slightly more legs. This becomes a part of more complex glyphs and gets smoothed down, though, so eventually it stops being drawn with distinct legs, more as an S-curve with a curved crossbar which represents the claws on one side and and the tail on the other. In short, rather like a stick figure of one of these. "People" as a general concept is written by two of these with a continuous crossbar, or signed by using the 'arbitrary person' pronoun reference with the plural handmotion, usually gesturing broadly at the sky.

So that's things I have done. What I'm currently trying to figure out is prepositions. The ULD starts with from,to,at,inside,outside, and I don't know how to derive these from more tangible signs or glyphs. Inside/outside could maybe use a cave? Do I even want to have prepositions? I'm going to be doing a lot of other things by essentially requiring a mini-sentence to sprout off from the main body when you would otherwise add a modifying expression, so maybe prepositions should be left out entirely and their role taken by comparative adjectives. That seems ugly, though.

While I'm thinking about it, here's the basic grammar outline. It's an extreme generalization of the topic-comment syntax; whatever is meant to be the focus of the sentence comes first (generally a noun or verb, but not necessarily), and the bare bones of the sentence follows it. Example: The main line of the sentence might be
>cat I chase
But this can be expanded. Maybe the cat was bright red

red
cat	I	chase

Or the cat yowls frequently

I
annoy
cat	I	chase

Or maybe the cat killed your hamster

hamster	I	possessive
past
cat	I	chase
		past

With the latter two, there are other ways of writing it. Is the most important thing that your hamster was killed? Then write it this way:

possessive	chase
I	I
hamster	cat	kill
		past

As I envision it, these sentences can be stacked and weaved outward to arbitrary complexity. Shskle poetry is traditionally structured as one large sentence, with the artful arrangement of the branches just as important as the words chosen. When debating topics, the sentences are generally written starting from the most critical portion of the argument and spiraling outward, moving from branch to branch to add detail in order of importance.


Thus ends my braindump for the day. Hopefully soon I'll get a scanner working (or get to the local library) and show off some of the glyphs (and my terribly handwriting).

Shskle is a conlang. My first, and so far only.

I first had the idea for this language about five years ago: a conlang where subordinate clauses and complex modifiers didn't interrupt the flow of the sentence, but went off at right angles to the main thread of the sentence.

The problem was that human languages don't work that way. Spoken words are linear, one at a time and ordered, and writing that down naturally follows the same logic. So clearly, this can't be a spoken language. For a while, I considered that it should naturally be written-first, spoken-second, an inversion of the human standard. (This was partly heavily inspired by a minor plot thread in the Phule's Company series, which I read a decade ago. This also inspired the aliens I invented to explain Shskle's peculiarities. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Later I realized that primitive writing isn't that useful and doesn't make sense evolutionarily. Recognizing a scratched cave-drawing of something in time for it to serve as a useful message, not so likely. But I still wanted this to be the main form of the language, so I decided that simple thoughts can be expressed in a organic sign language, but that complex communication requires writing; embedding doesn't naturally fit into the language, and has to be written.

At this point, I realized I needed an alien race, and they would have to have very good eyesight, some natural means of scratching glyphs into slate, wood, or dirt, and circumstances where cries of communication would be harmful. OK, they have to be a predator species, with claws. Since I was once an eight-year-old boy, they became velociraptors until further notice. (Also, Phule's Company.)

Because I know neither sign nor Chinese, making a lexicon to start constructing sentences with has been slow going. I started working on this properly about a year, year and a half ago, and have worked on it intermittently since, but don't have much to show for it.

However, I mentioned my conlang to some nice people on the Internet, and they said that it sounded cool (which it does, let's be real here.) So I'm going to try harder this time. With that in mind, I'm going to document things I come up with about the aliens and their language, which are both called "Shskle", on this blog.