I wasn't thinking of anything so exotic! Really I always tried to keep Vilani a very naturalistic human (solomani, if you like) language. I had the impression that many of the readers back then felt that anything not familiar to them from Spanish, German, or (for the
really exotic) Japanese or Chinese was simply too silly and implausible to belong in Vilani
o:
Mac, you're talking to a guy who's exposed to written
Hmong on a near-daily basis. A completely real language, of course ... and at least a thousand years old; but in print it
looks crazier and science fictiony-er than anything anyone's ever inflicted on the Traveller universe. Here's a link to a
Hmong-language news article, in case you've never seen it in print before ...
And of course it's extremely tonal ... far more than anything anyone's ever conceived (nor should!) for Vilani. I'm also hearing a lot of Amharic and Somali on the streets these days, too; so I doubt this iteration of Vilani discussions is going to be as Indo-European-centric as what you had to put up with in those days of yore.
I'd figured that tone in Vilani was simply lexical; maybe used in a very limited way to express 'inflectional' or 'conjugational' categories.
Well, now that Robject showed me those parts on tone patterns that I had missed, I see that's basically where he went with it.
The historical depth you've been building -- including the automated sound change files -- is really cool -- love to see more of it!
Well, Rob had built some SC files before I got around to them. The main reason I developed them further was because there were already an armload of "handmade" OHV etymologies plugged into the lexicon, and I wanted to make sure that any sound change files reflected those realities.
And the historian in me says that the changes in a language must be important markers in their own right -- that it's useful (or in the case of the Traveller universe, 'colorful') to know what the social circumstances were that helped cause those shifts. It's sort of like discussing the Great Vowel Shift without knowing anything about the social turmoils of Late Medieval/Early Modern England, or writing an article about the vast simplifications that Old English grammar went through while pretending the Norman Conquest was just a fad.
Oh...? Tell all!
Well, my goal for 'Gashikani' is to create a language that is just about a step past that of a dialectic variance with Standard Vilani ... basically like how I've heard Germans describe what it's like for them to communicate with native Dutch speakers (and vice-versa, I suppose). There's also an element of isolated colonialism about them, so I figure that means a more conservative language (both in grammar and morphology) from the basepoint of their settlement era. This would mean (to me, at least) "walking back" a Standard Vilani word to its OHV equivalent, adding a few extra AV "holdovers," and then putting in an additional layer representing the local Yileans (the local minor human race of the region) attempting to get their alien mouths around the Vilani pronunciation system.
And then of course it gets walked back, with some subtle but far-ranging variances from the Standard Vilani. An example would be the Vilani 'b.' I see that as having been a voiced bilabial (af)fricative in the past (hence the Anglic 'v'/'b' confusion). In Vilani it evolved into a true plosive; but I could see Gashikani, for instance, going down the road of perhaps gently "sliding" the consonant into a voiced approximate of some sort (vaguely similar to an Anglic 'w'). The same relationship could be made between the OHV's intervocalic 'h' (which has effectively disappeared in SV), and a Gashikani 'y.'
I suppose there would be a simpler and more direct way to go about this; but at least this way I can mimic some historical process, as I see it.
o:
As for the Chekaal and Old Dirmani SC files -- they'd mostly be for color, and to create cool-looking etymologies in the Vilani dictionaries. Although like I said, a working Old Dirmani walkback might also be a good way to create a nice pile of Ten Dollar personal names for high-ranking Vilani NPC's.
