The Language Diaries, Part 6 ~ The Nameless Idioglossia

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Birthday - Cole Porter (composer)
Birthday - Donald Duck
Take a Kid Fishing Weekend (Minn)
World Cup (Germany)

 

Normally I don’t pay much attention to them savvy modern whodunnits on TV, except CSI, but tonight there was an interesting Law & Order: SVU rerun about twins that was actually fascinating, if not completely accurate,* and Ally should have stayed and watched it but she didn’t because she is silly and does things like homework instead of watching TV with her friends.

 

And now I want to revisit my idioglossia conlang.

 

It’s an old one, made specifically for two of my characters (twins), and it has very little to do with actual idioglossia—which is what they call it when young twins develop what people used to believe was a private twin language but what is now believed to be a sign of delayed speech development in one or both of them. (If only one is delayed, the other will mimic their speech patterns and make it sound like a language.) The understanding they share comes mostly from the way twins can be very in tune to each other—much like long-married people may need only a few words to understand each other.

 

I didn’t know any of this when I decided to try out a twin idioglossia. My idea actually came from David and Leigh Eddings’ book Polgara the Sorceress, in which the protagonist and her twin sister have their own private language. While all dialogue in this language is rendered into English, Polgara sometimes describes untranslatable aspects of it. The Eddings have a very loose and somewhat farfetched sense of linguistics, but the idea caught my attention as an interesting exercise. I started thinking about how a language spoken by two very close individuals would be different from one spoken among a whole society. There’s the question of pronominal deixis—that is, the values of pronouns would be very different. After all, in a language spoken by two people, would there really be any need for ‘I’ and ‘you’ pronouns? I figured that they could have pronouns meaning ‘brother,’ ‘sister,’ ‘both of us,’ and ‘some/everybody else,’ and they wouldn’t even need to use them very often because it would be evident from the context anyway. (There is also a special one for their caretaker, with whom they are very close.) And in a language wherein the people have such a close history, context would be everything.** It was fun to work out how much could be conveyed with a single well-placed word.

 

Another feature of this language is that it relies on both signs and voice, as the twins were learning ASL as well as English at an early age. The idea was that signs were the grammatical elements, while the voice contained the lexical elements (although this was intentionally leaky). I still want to revisit this idea, although I’m moving on to fully signed conlangs now.

 

I haven’t worked on this language in a long time, and while it has a rather extensive vocabulary (partly because its minimalist aspect means that one word can take on many different meanings, so one word in their language could generate quite a few English equivalents) it isn’t one of my more thought-out languages. But now I want to take a look at it again and see if I can’t do more with it.

 

  

**Hell, my mom often complains that my own siblings and I talk in code, because so much of what we say is a contextual reference to a past shared experience—we quote media we’ve all experienced or make oblique allusions to either events we’ve been privy to, family folklore, or, most infuriating of all, the private universe we used to play pretend with and now make up stories for. She finds it fascinating and maddening.

*Between us Liz and I solved it two minutes into the introduction of the twin characters. Dumb detectives.

Comments

[tiryn.livejournal.com]

Seriously, the stuff you do amazes me. I'm not sure I quite have this kind of...creativity and dedication to anything. Well, nothing that anyone else would fine interesting. So yeah, awesomeness with the conlanging...is that a verb? O_o And now you'll have the long summer days to do all this crazy-cool stuff. :D

Oh yeah, if you're still coming just let me know. Don't feel obliged or anything. I invite people to these little get-togethers and they never show up (*coughAmyandHeathercough*) so if you're like, "Meh" that's okay. But who can resist the siren call of free food, and Daron's famous peanut chicken at that? XD If you can't find the house here's my number:541-206-2577. Since apparently people have difficulty seeing the house number. Though I can tell you it's the two story white house with the lawn that looks like crap. =P Anyway...yeah.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

:) Yeah, conlang can be a verb. You'd be surprised what I find interesting, so maybe you can show me some o' yours.

Liz probably won't be showin', but Emily would like to come along. Should be fun! And really, peanut chicken ... I'm so there. (If I can find it, spatial dumbass that I am.)

[tiryn.livejournal.com]

Heh, well if you get lost just wander around shouting things like "Syntax!" and "Morphophonemics!" seeing as Sheldon and I will be the only people in the area who will know what you're saying. =P

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I like that idea of splitting lexical and grammtical elements between modes. Nifty!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

long-married people may need only a few words to understand each other.

Or a lot of words not to. XD

Two of my close LJ friends who are sisters both told me they used to have a language they'd both made up which they only spoke to each other when they were children. People found it odd. I thought it was rather impressive and pretty darn cool, at that.