bloodyrosemccoy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2010-02-22 12:56 am
bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2010-02-22 12:56 am
Silent Phonemes
Have started trying to work on the language for my orlys again.
For those of you who don’t live inside my head with me, the orlys are one of my alien species. They’re a sort of two-legged elephantosaurus, with one huge eye that perceives things like color, contours, and gestalts, and three smaller eyes spaced around their heads that give them a 360˚ range of black and white contour and motion perception and a rather awkward depth perception. They have a trunklike proboscis under the big eye, and two long tentacles on either side of it. And yes, they are so-named because the first one I drew looked like it was making the O RLY owl face.
Orlys are naturally deaf,* so they communicate with sign language—which is why it’s been difficult to make a conlang, because I am a slow artist, and despite my longstanding interest in ASL it’s harder for me to process than spoken language.
I think I’ve worked out a sort of writing system, though, with each morpheme (or possibly equivalent of a syllable; I haven’t decided) containing three radicals—one for each manipulator, with different glyphs for tentacle/trunk shape and diacritical marks to indicate various other aspects. It’s starting to look like a cross between SignWriting and Rikchik.** I’m thinking it’ll wind up resembling ASL and other human sign languages more in terms of structure, but I still need to work it out.
The important thing is, I can finally start working it out now that I have a way to notate it. It’s one of the first times I’ve started a conlang with the writing system. Let’s hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass later. It's possible I'll evolve it for them so that it becomes a logographic language, like Chinese, which used to be pictographic. I'll just have to see.
And yes, there will be images once I get my dumb scanner going. *grumble* Then you can see pictures of the orlys, too!
*Mostly. They do perceive vibrations in the ground through special sensors in their feet, which counts as sound, but it’s a kind of narrow range.
**I put the Omniglot page in there because it gives a nice overview; here’s the official website. I’d recommend checking it out; Rikchik is a pretty goddamn awesome conlang.
For those of you who don’t live inside my head with me, the orlys are one of my alien species. They’re a sort of two-legged elephantosaurus, with one huge eye that perceives things like color, contours, and gestalts, and three smaller eyes spaced around their heads that give them a 360˚ range of black and white contour and motion perception and a rather awkward depth perception. They have a trunklike proboscis under the big eye, and two long tentacles on either side of it. And yes, they are so-named because the first one I drew looked like it was making the O RLY owl face.
Orlys are naturally deaf,* so they communicate with sign language—which is why it’s been difficult to make a conlang, because I am a slow artist, and despite my longstanding interest in ASL it’s harder for me to process than spoken language.
I think I’ve worked out a sort of writing system, though, with each morpheme (or possibly equivalent of a syllable; I haven’t decided) containing three radicals—one for each manipulator, with different glyphs for tentacle/trunk shape and diacritical marks to indicate various other aspects. It’s starting to look like a cross between SignWriting and Rikchik.** I’m thinking it’ll wind up resembling ASL and other human sign languages more in terms of structure, but I still need to work it out.
The important thing is, I can finally start working it out now that I have a way to notate it. It’s one of the first times I’ve started a conlang with the writing system. Let’s hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass later. It's possible I'll evolve it for them so that it becomes a logographic language, like Chinese, which used to be pictographic. I'll just have to see.
And yes, there will be images once I get my dumb scanner going. *grumble* Then you can see pictures of the orlys, too!
*Mostly. They do perceive vibrations in the ground through special sensors in their feet, which counts as sound, but it’s a kind of narrow range.
**I put the Omniglot page in there because it gives a nice overview; here’s the official website. I’d recommend checking it out; Rikchik is a pretty goddamn awesome conlang.
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* Well, except for one dialect, the one spoken by both the in-system colonists and the ones who live orbiting a planet that looks habitable, but is hope to nanomachines (or bacteria -- haven't decided) that kill anything more complicated than the fish dead. Apparently extinct terrestrials can't clean up their messes. Harder to speak with your body in close quarters or in a space suit.
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I'll see if I can keep this up--my sign language creation is woefully spotty so far. I'll let you know!