Sunday, March 4, 2012

Another Language Sample

Still working on the Elefdar language, and still having fun. I've written a script that generates all possible phonemes, based on the list of available letters and a set of restrictions about certain letter combinations that are not allowed.

Now, I'm working on a script that reads from a text file of 2,000 common English words, and generates Elefdar words based on one or two (combined) phonemes. This script is not fully functional yet, as I need to add in the rules to prevent restricted phoneme combinations. For the moment, it is still only generating words based on a single phoneme - effectively, it randomly chooses a phoneme from the Elefdar list, and that is the word.

And so, we have a list that looks something like the below. Each time I run the script I get a different list of course, and at this point I am basically just playing with it to ensure that I can get words that are aesthetically pleasing to me. If I don't like them, I throw them out - which is one of the advantages of creating a constructed language, of course. Once I'm happy with 80% of the words being generated, I will call it "gold" and start building the official lexicon.

So without further ado, here's a simple sample of single-syllable (heh... alliteration) Elefdar words as randomly chosen for the list of English words.

"find","if"
"back","smaig"
"most","len"
"right","glais"
"man","maut"
"small","gam"
"life, live","plud"
"much","grin"
"down","pat"
"day","claig"
"between","com"
"many","dhaub"
"before","flac"
"need","eid"
"because","plaun"
"want","neid"
"mean","meim"
"even","peib"
"through","clap"
"yeah","thruc"
"big","blaim"
"three","crog"
"thing","flas"
"tell","snic"
"such","oth"
"feel","smauc"
"under, below","stam"
"leave","gril"
"must","frain"

Pronunciation notes:
  • DH is a voiced sound like "th" in "that".
  • TH is always aspirated and unvoiced, like "th" in "bath".
  • C is always a hard "k" sound.
  • A is always a long vowel like the "a" in "father".
  • E is short as in "bet".
  • I sounds about half-way between the "i" in "fit" and the "ee" in "feet".
  • O sounds about half-way between the pronunciation of "dote" and "dot".
  • U is always long, like the pronunciation of "boot".
  • AI is a diphthong that sounds like the English word "eye".
  • EI is a diphthong that sounds like "ei" in "weigh".
  • AU is a diphthong that sounds like "ou" in "out".

2 comments:

  1. Sweet. Maybe someday Google will be able to translate pages into Elefdar.

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  2. Now THAT would be cool. :-) I suppose I could open-source the language once it's reached some sort of version 1.0...

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