Phaedorás: Book of Kyobazu <<Discussion>>

[Raelifin]

Phaedorás: Book of Kyobazu, Discussion

Post all comments, questions or criticisms here. :yumm:

 - Raelifin

[Elven Doritos]

This last entry is VERY cool, very vivid and exciting description of the recent history and while flavoured with real world history has an exotic touch that makes me want to know more about what's going on. I like the mention of a recent hero and the development of weapons in the context of the campaign.

A question: if there are so many pirates are they at all becoming a society as opposed to mere rogues? (like say Okinawa or England)

[Raelifin]

Thanks!

To answer your question, pirates are not specifically a different society as much as they are a different political power. All ships need repair and supplies and so most pirates tend to dock at the same ports as Covenant ships, at different times or under disguise of course. And while pirates often form alliances, their typical defining characteristic is their backstabbing nature, especially where large amounts of wealth are involved.

Another important note is that while typical earth pirates are the scum of society, totwimi pirates often have family on their ship and are more akin to professional warriors.

Okay, I figured out how to describe this. Imagine that each and every ship is a nation-state. Pirates have the same culture, but prey on on the other wealthy nations. Some of the bigger nations have an alliance dedicated to stopping war by destroying all violent nations. All nations involved trade with the less-wealthy nations for food and other basic materials. Thus, they are already have any independence they might want.

[sparkletwist]

Having an interest in languages/linguistics/etc., I found the section where you outlined the details of the Morimikan language to be especially interesting.

An Object-Verb-Subject syntax is pretty unusual. Not that it's a bad thing!
But, I'm wondering, have you thought about maybe making the language ergative?
[spoiler=Brief summary of ergativity]
An ergative syntax centers on what we would consider to be the "object," where
an accusative syntax (which is what English and many, many other natural languages use) centers on what we would consider to be the "subject."
Essentially, in an ergative language, the subject of an intransitive verb (that is, a verb without a direct object) and the object of a transitive verb (a verb with an object) are considered to be in the same syntactic category. The subject of a transitive verb is a separate category-- the words "subject" and "object" cause a bit more confusion in this system, since English grammar words are generally more suited to talking about English grammar. As can be seen, this is in contrast to English, where the subject of an intransitive verb (lacking a direct object, the subject is the only noun that has anything to do with that verb) and the subject of a transitive verb are considered to be the same category.
[/spoiler]

I also liked the agglutinating structure-- I might even say it was more polysynthetic. I'm wondering if in their culture, there is really a concept of "words" as we think of them, or if it is much more based on a more nebulous system of "meaning units," where different sounds with different meanings are more or less freely appended to make arbitrary words as needed.

The system of connector words was interesting, too. It seems like in using this structure, a good deal of the meaning of the sentence would be encoded into the structure of the sentence itself. Does that mean that someone wishing to seem more educated may use different, more archaic connecting structures, just like people tend to use more archaic or Latinate constructions to create a "higher" speech in English? The structure itself reminded me a lot of Japanese, with its system of various particles. Most of these words were formerly nouns, and the entire sentence before the connector word was simply a relative clause modifying the noun. I'm not sure how Morimikan forms relative clauses (or if you even have thought about it, or even care), but perhaps that might be a useful base.

Anyway, good stuff. :)

[Raelifin]

Honestly, my expertise in conlangs is quite limited, so your comments are not only helpful, they broaden my horizons.

To answer the easy question first, the concept of a "word" is indeed foreign to Morimikan speakers, and instead the conceptual unit is the clause or sentence (the unit separated by a connector). Words, as I describe them, are natural breaks in speech, but the unit as a whole is composed, as you said, of idea-chunks, rather than individual words.

In Morimikan, the way a sentence is composed does, in fact, have a lot of meaning. Most of it is undertone, such as increased emphasis on the last words said. I'm sure that each ship, region, area, social structure or whatever has identifying speech patterns, but I'm not going to explicitly define any because of the size of the task and the amount of cultural diversity in totwimi life.

Thanks for brining up relative clauses. That's an area which  I wasn't conscious of, though I did build into the language In short, Morimikan doesn't handle relative clauses, adjectives are used instead. "Man with the tall hat." becomes "Tall-hat-holding Man."

Forgive me if I'm a bit confused. I speak a very small bit of æ—¥æ¬èªž (Japanese) and I'm not sure how their particle structure translates to phrase/clause linking. Are you saying that particles like は originally were nouns and the word or words before them were simply descriptors of the nouns? If so, that's wicked awesome and I'll have to work it in to one of my languages (I think Phaedoras has 18, but I'm not sure). I still don't see how that has anything to do with my connector words, except that clauses in general are similar. :)

Ergative vs. Accusative!
Just to be clear, I had to look this up and I still don't fully understand it. Accusative is easy to get, but I'm a little fuzzy on ergativity, so I'll explain Morimikan phrase/clause structure a little more right now and possibly post again after I've looked at the topic more.

Morimikan speech is structured in a way that the most important material comes last, like a wave building up to a crest. Intransitive verbs are rare and as I have it layed out, there is no phonetic/written nomination of subject or object.

Thanks for the input. :D

[Tybalt]

Actually Raelfin the idea is quite good and solid. A fair number of cultures have practiced raiding, piracy and so on outside of their own tribe or people and considered this quite reasonable, even honorable as far as their regard for themselves went. However people who don't subscribe to the same views would call them pirates.

[Raelifin]

After thinking about it more, I'm pretty sure I don't want to make Morimikan ergative. Thanks for the brain spike though.

@ Tybalt: Thank you. I use the word pirate because it gives a specific flavor and does a good job at depicting the style of combat, but in reality it's more like tribal raiding/war.

[Poseptune]

A discussion for Phaedoras? Next thing you know there will be a game with a character named Moruk.... :innocentlook: What?

Well now that there is a discussion for this ancient setting that is getting a tummy tuck and face lift, I suppose I will have to comment on it. But later, now I have to look like I'm working... :lookslikehe'sworking:

[sparkletwist]

There is a somewhat famous (and highly controversial) hypothesis in linguistics, called Sapir-Whorf, that says that one's language determines one's way of thinking. It would be interesting to think about how a language in which there is no broad category of "word" would affect the thought processes of the culture involved. For example, in many cultures, two objects that are differentiated only by adjective, with the same root noun, are seen as more similar than two objects that are named by a different root noun-- a "white dog" and a "black dog" are both "dog," different from "cat." I wonder how it would affect the culture, and the thought process, if instead, the meaning units were more arbitrary, and one could think of a "whitedog" and a "blackdog" as their own little categories... this is obviously a trivial example, but I think you see where I'm going with it.

The relative clause structure can be stronger or weaker in different languages, that is to say, they allow for a varying degree of length or complexity in what can be relativized. English is quite permissive-- Romance languages are not so much, and some people have tried to adapt some of these restrictions to English, leading to silliness like the belief prepositions are not something you want to end a sentence with. ;)

For example, as one idea, instead of relativization the preferred structure could be a connector word for "further description"-- the sentence "I see the man who is holding a hat" could become "I see the man <descriptor> holding a hat."

As for Japanese, I don't know about wa, but many of the other particles were originally nouns. I'm fairly sure no comes from mono (thing), and others are used as both particles and nouns-- for example, hodo, used in "... as ... as ..." (like as tall as, as big as, etc.) constructions, is also a noun meaning "extent," and so on.

How it connects is that perhaps the connector words were originally nouns (or verbs!) and come from relative-clause-like formations. For example, the word for "because" could've originally come from "reason," the structure "I did this for the reason that..." eventually simplifying down to "I did this because..."

I'm sort of curious what you mean by "intransitive verbs are rare."  How are fairly standard intransitive verbs like "sleep" etc. handled?

Anyway, don't mind my ramblings. Just more random food for thought. :D

[Raelifin]

Man, I'm going to have to rewrite the language entry at this rate...

What I meant was that intransitive verbs are not always used in situations where we might think they're the clear-cut choice. The most common intransitive verb is titwan, which means "to be." I'll outline a few instances of ways to use intransitive verbs (or what would be) in Morimikan.

"Tomoe shok titwan littoe." (I will soon be a sleeper)
In some cases, intransitive verbs are actually nouns which one can "be" at a specific time.

"Mihu mihok littoe." (I speak words.)
Redundant phrases do exist, as is the case here. Often, the redundant word (mihu) is omitted, see below.

"Titwan littiyamanoe." (I am sad)
Titwan (to be) is the most common intransitive verb, and in this instance because of the form of suffix-adjectives, it takes intransitive form.

"Lakmas littoe." (I swim)
The true intransitive verb does still exist, but isn't all that common.

After looking at my post again, I realized that I forgot to add the section on omitted words other than particles (temporal and plural). Like Japanese, Morimikan can leave out certain words based on context, especially redundant words, the pronoun "I" and titwan. I guess I'll just add that to the list and add it when I have some time.

Thanks again for the ramblings. :)

[sparkletwist]

In some cases, intransitive verbs are actually nouns which one can "be" at a specific time.

"Lakmas littoe." (I swim)
The true intransitive verb does still exist, but isn't all that common.[/quote]
Hmm, why not "I am a swimmer"?

[Endless_Helix]

Raelfin,

Just wanted to say that this setting is seven kinds of awesome, and I can't wait for the next update.

Just a couple of questions:

How does the religion work? I know you haven't really delved into this yet, but I'm really curious...

The pirate families, are kind of like an organized crime family? For example, The Bur'leh family are pirates, do they have an armada of raiders, or do they have their one ship with which they raid?

How do the genetics work? One trait from each parent? Random?

[Raelifin]

"Lakmas littoe." (I swim)
The true intransitive verb does still exist, but isn't all that common.

No, you're not pedantic at all. This is the wonderful world of constructive criticism and you've been really helpful. :D

And I am not a swimmer because language, especially Morimikan, is irregular and varied. While one ship invents a way to describe being a ____, another decides to extend verb form. "Tomu" is a standard noun used to describe sloth or rest, thus "Tomoe" is the masculine version of it, translated roughly as "restful man." Lakmas on the other hand is a pretty common verb, and to get a noun-form you'd need to extend it to mean something like fish, though that would sound strange. As a general rule, I also try to keep newer, more specific, actions as is-nouns (example: "Archery" becomes "archer-(wo)man," becomes "I will be an archer," or "I will shoot.")

Your idea regarding an additional connector word for descriptions is solid, and I'll probably add it.

Just a couple of questions:

How does the religion work? I know you haven't really delved into this yet, but I'm really curious...

The pirate families, are kind of like an organized crime family? For example, The Bur'leh family are pirates, do they have an armada of raiders, or do they have their one ship with which they raid?[/quote]How do the genetics work? One trait from each parent? Random?[/quote] How do genetics work with humans? Omaku are prone to rapid mutation, especially regarding aesthetic physical characteristics (eye color, hair color, facial structure), but otherwise behave as humans with regard to genes. Genetic code is derived from combining the genes of both parents and mutating bits. Tall omaku generally have tall children. And yes, omaku can cross-breed with other bloodlines, though it is usually taboo.

Great comments all. I'll try to update soon.
 - Rael

[sparkletwist]

Morimikan, is irregular and varied. While one ship invents a way to describe being a ____, another decides to extend verb form.

Interesting, would it be fair to say that the language is actually more of a community of related dialects, then? What I wonder is how mutually intelligible some of them would be-- if radically different speech patterns have developed in some places, they might have branched off into the realm where they are only partially understandable to some of the people. This would probably, then, result in the development of either a "standard language," or some sort of trade pidgin. That leads me to wonder... is there a standard literary language? How important is literacy to them, in general?

[Raelifin]

[ic Main Thread]Like most languages in Phaedorás, Morimikan lacked a written form until very recently when the invention of pictographic language was introduced...[/ic]Literacy is a very new concept and one that isn't highly valued. For the totwimi, more emphasis is put on cartography and map-reading. The pictographic form of Morimikan is structured as [large pictograph]-word-[large pictograph] and so on. Each large pictograph is composed of subsections and together it forms a phrase. The word in between is a connector or a mark indicating a new block of text.

While Morimikan is diverse and the totwimi people are generally scattered, remember that communication with other ships/ports is common, this prevents too much fragmentation. A good number of totwimi are also able to speak many different tongues and most merchants use Imperial Ubin when bartering, as it has a detailed and static vocabulary for discussing quantity and measurement.

Morimikan is too well-knit to be considered a family of related dialects, to answer your question.