Solresol

Solresol is an invented language of the 19th century based on the seven notes of the C major scale, although in principle one could use any seven-note scale. This may seem an odd origin for an a priori system, unless one realizes that the inventor, one Francois Sudre, a French patriot, had developed it for military communications before the invention of the telegraph. This musical origin explains the use of relative length and stress in determining gender and plurality, and the profoundly non-anthropic use of a pause after every word. Sudre, a native French speaker, was still bound by the gender and number constraints of his mother tongue. Sudre's musical language was deemed brilliant, but unusable by the French military, which devastated the patriot. Since his system rested on the use of seven distinct units, there was no restriction in principle to the realm of music or speech. Sudre developed Solresol formats based on noise, touch, color and other media. All this creativity took place before Gallatin and the invention of Braille, so a communication system for the blind, the deaf, and the mute was a pressing concern for creators of invented languages or those who serves the disadvantaged communities. Whereas previous a priori languages had categorized concepts in a tree familiar to present-day biology students, Sudre used a series of notes or repetition of the same note to indicate the categories. Since Solresol had to be spoken as well as played and sung, the words were monophonic rather than polyphonic. Solresol suffered from this characteristic flaw of logical languages: the systematic categorization of concepts result in similar concepts sounding too similiar in phonology. This, in fact, may have been one of the reasons for the French military's rejection of Solresol. For some years, Sudre toured Europe promoting his language, but the audiences tended to view Solresol as an ingenious parlor trick rather than a valid method of communication.

Solresol enjoyed a brief popularity at the end of the 19th century, but then died out. Its infamy among those who are interested in logical and creative languages stems from its inherent bizarreness, while other, more conventional spoken systems have been forgotten. The Esperanto Wikipedia, naturally, has an extensive article on it. I suspect it was more tolerable to hear in the days when every cultured person was expected to play an instrument or sing. I suspect there were severe constraints on its flexibility and ability to create new vocabulary, but the current resources I can find on Solresol are so meager it is hard to be sure. There is a grammar (http://mozai.com/writing/not_mine/solresol/sorsoeng.htm), but the dictionary is missing, and somehow I doubt that the early 20th-century Paris address is still valid. I have watched an extraordinary video of the balcony scene in Solresol
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK9lspk0hAM )
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf83Z1rUMCo&feature=related )
and the band Melomane has a song called Solresol
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPISqn7VfNY )
, although the song is neither in Solresol nor, I suspect, translatable into it due to the presence of of flats and sharps in the song. The most famous, if unnoticed, use of Solresol in modern media is its use as the language of the aliens in Encounters of the Third Kind
( http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=encounters+of+the+third+kind ).
This seems to be an homage to the use of Esperanto as a non-descript human language in films set "abroad", and explains why the notes at the end have the feel of a language, despite their brevity.

The Tahoe Tongue: Clusivity vs. Number

One of the features of Washo unfamiliar to speakers of Indo-European languages is the concept of clusivity (whether the addressee is included in the pronoun). Clusivity in natural languages is restricted to the lst person plural, possibly because the plural of 'I' perforce includes another person. The two other grammatical persons available for this purpose are the 2nd ('thou') and 3rd ('he'). Some languages, such as Tok Pisin, do have combinatorial forms with both 2nd and 3rd, but this may be the result of the newness of the language and the ease with which the components of pronouns of Tok Pisin can be self-segregated. Washo has two suffixes, dual -ši and plural -hu, to distinguish the inclusive forms of the indicative from the exclusive (the jussive forms are -še and -hulew). The inclusive indicative suffixes may also be used on nouns. So far, this is not exotic from the linguistic point of view, but the treatment of independent pronouns in Washo shows an transformation of this system from clusivity-based to number-based.

Many Native American languages, among which Washo is included, treat grammatical number as optional; many plurals have a different shade from the corresponding singular. There are occasions, however, when it is necessary to be more specific about the person and number of the subject or object. In these cases, Washo does have a series of independent pronouns. I suspect that the prefixed pronouns of the Washo verb developed from a prior series of independent pronouns without number distinction, but I will save the detailed analysis of that phenomenon for another post. The independent pronouns of current Washo are based on the following stem: 1st person lé:, 2nd person mí:, 3rd person subject gí:, and 3rd person object gé:. The 1st and 2nd persons lack a subject/object distinction, depending on the subject-object prefix of the verb to disambiguate. The 1st person dual pronoun is léši. Note that it is not automatically parsed as inclusive. The suffix -ši has changed from a marker of inclusivity to one of duality. Even if the 2nd person dual pronoun míši acquired -ši as a sign of proxy clusivity, it has come to mean to indicate duality, since the 1st person dual has an extended form léšiši, in which the -ši suffix is attached to léši; this form means "we two (inclusive)".

There is no such reanalysis of the verbal suffix. The verbal form "you two are singing" is the same as "thou art singing" or "you-all are singing". All of these forms would be míšmi. Even though the clusivity suffixes do not have an absolute slot in the series of verbal suffixes, they always appear relatively close to the verbal root, and therefore do not have the flexibility of the independent pronouns.

Korean Number Woes

Current varieties of English find one set of numbers sufficient. I exclude binary on the pirnciple that it is not used for counting except as a geeky in-joke. I must specify current English because there were rural systems of counting, in formerly Welsh areas such as Cumbria; the non-English system was restricted to counting herd animals, a limited but very important semantic domain for the local culture. In Korean, and I believe Japanese also, there are two counting systems: one native, and one adopted and adapted from the Chinese spoken at the time of contact. A comparison that might make more sense to those who only know Indo-European languages: this situation is as if Slavic-speakers counted numbers using Slavic numerals, but counted things using Greek.

I can more readily recognize the Sino-Korean numbers, thanks to the small amount of Chinese I learned (sadly, the lack of oral practice has made the tones nigh-impossible). Most of the numbers are easily recognizable, although I did briefly find the Sino-Korean vs. native Korean distracting. The use of Sino-Korean numerals as count nouns accords with the isolating, SVO, head-final nature of Chinese, while the agglutinative, SOV, head-final structure of Korean precludes count nouns except as a borrowing from culture languages of the area (i.e., Chinese). The head-final feature of Korean, however, does provide a convenient location for the count noun. The optionality of the plural suffix - a not uncommon feature of non-Indo-European languages - in Korean also makes the count nouns welcome.

More Hebrew

I have mastered the chapter on the I-Yod, I-Waw, I-Waw/III-Guttural verbs and the one on III-He' verbs. The next challenge is the Doubly-Weak verbs. The exercises are moving more towards actual Biblical content! That is a good thing, not just because it is my goal to read the Tanakh in the original Hebrew, but also because it provides a check on my many errors without a teachers' guide. I managed, however, to get through the exercises with only one point of confusion. The last translation exercise in the III-He' chapter was composed of four verses from Jeremiah (4:23-26) - I've never been more excited reading about desolation and depopulation! I have also noticed increasing signs of etymological two-letter roots among the roots with "weaker" consonants, and more words of high frequency. This is not surprising, since the most common verbs of a language are often irregular - or if regular, use an uncommon pattern. The number of synonyms for generic Biblical actions and feelings is also increasing, while leads me to believe that the recitation of the Tanakh in Hebrew is less snooze-inducing (at least in terms of the variety of roots) than the standard English translation.

Birthday Trip

It's been five days and I have the pictures, so I suppose I should write about my birthday trip.

This year the whole family, minus the younger brother, headed down the hill into the desert towards Pyramid Lake. There was some trouble along Mount Rose, so we went down via Truckee instead, past the old power plant. Once we headed north from Reno, we began to enter the real Nevada and it was easy to see why the region had been settled by family bands rather than larger units. The destruction of the pinyon trees and the consequent desertification of the landscape did no good, either.

We reached Pyramid Lake and I was astonished at the shade of blue. I was assured that it was a frequent color for desert lakes. The eponymous Pyramid, an island-rock, lay next to Anaho Island on which the pelicans (I was initially surprised that Washo had a word for them) lived with many other breeding colonies. I had to indulge my inner anthropologist and take notes on the information sign. The simplistic and inaccurate orthography of the sign, pandering the linguistically illiterate, somewhat annoyed me, but the sign did provide substantial detail for the size of its font. Each Paiute band (since Pyramid Lake was Paiute rather than Washo territory) was centered around a water source and named after a characteristic food. In the case of Pyramid Lake, that food was the cui-ui, an archaic-looking indigenous fish, which was stranded there as the enormous glacial lake evaporated. Puff, who had been somewhat listless from the heat, found the environment of Pyramid Lake congenial, and wanted to explore the doubtless rattlesnake-infested bushes. There were groups of people day-tripping by the lake (which requires a permit from Nixon) and the the road north abruptly degenrated into bone-jarring rocks. I do mean rocks, not gravel. So we turned around.

We went through the surprisingly charming town of Nixon (headquarters of the Pyramid Lake Reservation) and headed east towards Fallon. The towns were conspicuously greener than the surrounding desert, but the area near the road showed evidence of water. It was not deep desert. Before we reached Fallon, we headed back towards the Lahontan Reservoir. It was larger than I had realized, but the outskirts of the adjacent town had a shabbiness typical of Nevada towns. On the way to Carson City - which is the capital of Nevada, not Reno or Las Vegas- we passed the Kit Kat Ranch and the Bunny Ranch, since Nevada is a land where many bad habits can be indulged without fear of prosecution. Dad expressed an urge to take the now-completed railroad line from Carson City to Virginia City. That would be fun, but it will have to wait until next year. Carson City itself is quite charming, and illustrated the virtue of having separate commercial and capital metropoleis. It would be worth a day visit. We returned to the mountains, and celebrated at home in the evening.

The shade of blue in this photo is slightly darker than

in real life.

You can see the Pyramid to the left of Anaho Island

Not a desert dog, but happy nonetheless

(Ex)clusive Amator

Often the minor details of languages and the quirks of their dialects fascinate me - and I mean that in its root sense of bewitching so that the bewitched must think about his love, be it a grammatical feature or nubile young maiden. In this case, what has bewitched me is not some Thessalian hussy, but a regional clusivity distinction in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese (which, incidentally, is not quite the same as Standard Mandarin Chinese). Clusivity, as I have written elsewhere, is the distinction between the inclusion of the addressee or his exclusion from the first person pronoun. It is an open question whether one would prefer the blunt clarity of the exclusive pronoun ("zan2men" vs. "wo3men"), or the awkward correction of the meaning of the first person plural in languages which lack a clusivity distinction. In the languages of East Asia, all of which appear to have or have had forms specific to status as well as person, some of the distinctions may have arisen as a separation of plural forms into distinct semantic spheres, although I suppose phonological change could have disguised related roots. Certainly, it took me a moment to connect Sino-Korean 'ku' and Mandarin Chinese 'jiu3' as the number '9'. The clusive forms of Tok Pisin (yumi vs. mipela) are, unsurprisingly, morphologically transparent, but sufficient time could disguise its origins. It is noticeable that the Mandarin exclusive form (the one which is clearly and analogically related to the first person singular "wo3") is the one favored by speakers who do not make the distinction. This is a case of analogical levelling, encouraged by the transparent system of plural formation. It makes me wonder whether the "men" of the Chinese plural is not generic plural marker that somehow became restricted to pronouns.

A Persistent Gadfly, or a Linguistic Socrates

I do not know why this bothers me so, but ever since I read about this linguistic feature, the mystery of its origin has haunted me. I understand the rest of the sandhi rules for the Bahasa Melayu verbal prefix meng-, but the rule regarding the voiceless plosives (p, t, c, k) baffles me. I could be content with knowing the rule by which it functions in contemporary language, but anyone familiar with ceaseless linguistic curiosity would find that unlikely. I am probably the only person to regard a German grammar review as appropriate airplane and airport reading when I am not going to Germany nor am I preparing for a graduate oral exam. So I still want to know the origin.

When the verbal prefix meng- is placed before the initial consonant of a BM root, certain changes take place. If the initial consonant is nasal (m, n, ng), the velar nasal of the verbal prefix disappears in favor the nasal initial consonant. This does not surprise me, since assimilation of the -ng- is the path of least resistance, and the marked preference in BM for CV syllables would encourage degemination of the sequence of two nasals. If the initial consonant is a voiced plosive (b, d, g), the velar nasal of the verbal prefix first assimilates to the place of articulation, then bonds with the plosive to form a prenasalized voiced plosive. This process also does not surprise me. If the initial consonant is a voiceless plosive (p, t, k), however, the plosive disappears after the expected assimilation to the place of articulation; this is a behavior I would have thought more apt to the voiced plosives. Since prenasalized voiceless plosives (the expected intermediate step) are permissible within roots such as nampak, perhaps the difference has something to with the morpheme boundary of meng- and the relevant root; but so far I cannot construct the sequence of phonological adjustments.