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babylon5_loveWhile I have a fully fledged preliminary linguistic grammar set out, it's long and academic sounding, and I wasn't sure if it'd be appropriate for a b5 love month day.
But today I wanna talk a little about CONLANGS. Because I love them and I really think there's room for work to be done on the constructed languages we hear in Babylon 5: namely, the Minbari languages, and of those, the Warrior Caste language.
FYI: for the purposes of the following, when Delenn mentions Adronato (also sometimes spelled Adronado), Fik (Feek), Lenn'a (Lenn'ah) in S02E15 'And Now For A Word', she clarifies that Adronato is the language of the Religious Caste, but it's not clear which of the other two is the Worker and Warrior language. I take Fik=Warrior, Lenn'a=Worker languages, but in some cases I've heard it used that Fik=Worker Caste language, Lenn'a=Warrior Caste language.
In 'To Dream In The City Of Sorrows', we also get some more information about the languages: the Worker Caste language is "simple and unadorned"; the Religious Caste language is highly complex and takes many more words to say an equivalent English sentence. Sinclair learnt the Warrior Caste language after the war, and doesn't start learning Adronato until he arrives on Minbar, and in his narration: "The religious-caste dialect was far more difficult, with a demanding and intricate set of grammatical rules that changed from situation to situation, depending on who you were speaking to and about what. It was far too easy to say the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong grammatical way in the religious-caste dialect, and thereby commit a faux pas or an interstellar incident. He much preferred the straightforward, more vigorous approach of the military-caste dialect, or even the simple, unadorned style of the worker caste."
Moreover, the book mentions a Worker Caste language taboo: "All Minbari could understand the dialects of all three castes, at least in their pure, official form untainted by regional differences. In spite of all the differences in syntax and word use, they were essentially the same language. Indeed, members of the worker caste had to be absolutely fluent in both religious and warrior-caste dialects, since the members of those castes would never speak worker dialect, even to a worker."
Sinclair's not a linguist, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt on this, but if there are such notable differences in syntax and word use, those are more likely different languages, not dialects of the same language. Maybe what he meant is they have the same root - that's more plausible. Maybe 'essentially' is intended to be his room for error. In any case: these could well be three different languages, and there's little reason to suggest that they should be intelligible. The degree of intelligibility will probably depend on how closely you headcanon the castes to work together. Myself, I headcanon them to be very separate and distinct: the majority of Workers don't talk often to the majority of Warriors who don't talk often to the majority of Religious, with each caste taking on the most elementary roles of the other two castes within their own caste. In such a situation, I wouldn't expect the languages to be intelligible. After all, English, Croatian, and German have the same root (by which I mean they have a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European) but they're not intelligible.
(On the other hand, the more the castes work together, the more you'd expect overlapping areal features to jump from one language to the other, the more you'd expect the language divide to be blurred and degree of intelligibility should increase. So you can of course headcanon this the other way if you prefer. Maybe you'd wind up with a kind of Adronato/Fik/Lenn'a creole. Equally cool!)
Thus my personal take on it: I don't think they're mutually intelligible. a) because that's more interesting linguistically :D more linguistic diversity is absolutely my bias, I won't lie, and b) the different political and social conventions between the castes is a factor that pushes the languages apart (even though if everybody speaks all three languages, that's a factor that would drive them together). Basically, if you want the castes to be culturally very different from each other (and this is suggested in canon at least between Religious and Warrior), it makes sense for the languages to also be very different from each other. And if they're unintelligible, it makes sense that Sinclair spends so much time in the book learning the Religious Caste language when he already knows the Warrior Caste language.
Lastly, I understand the former jumpnow site had a Minbari dictionary (without specifying which Minbari language). So focusing on Fik and suggesting it’s a wholly separate language is my attempt to include rather than override the jumpnow stuff: maybe jumpnow is Adronato work, where I'm going to focus on Fik, and now we can both exist!
A Very Small Corpus
Of the set of all of the things that are said in B5 in "Minbari" (it's never specified which Minbari language, but you might infer it due to who is speaking and what caste they are), there are relatively few Fik attestations. No Warrior Caste Minbari ever speaks in a Minbari language onscreen - when Delenn and Neroon have a conversation, that takes place for the viewer in English, and whether it's meant to be Adronato (Religious Caste) or Fik (Warrior Caste), or some kind of Adronato/Fik pidgin, we don't know.
I therefore posit that the only actual Fik attestations on the show are Marcus': "Nuzin falani en alis mi dron"(1), followed by "Nusental", and at some points he also commands the other Minbari on the White Stars, which don't lead to any interesting clues about grammar so I omit them here. There's also a few words here and there which are suspected to have been Warrior Caste for obvious semantic reasons: denn'shah, for example, is likely a native Warrior Caste word, as is mora'dum.
My argument that Marcus speaks Fik is for the following reasons:
All the other attestations in the show are presumably Adronato, because either Lennier or Delenn are speaking/being spoken to. I don't think there are any actual attestations of Lenn'a - while it's possible that Lennier speaks to a Worker Caste member (the episode where they're fitting Zack Allen for a new uniform and she sticks him with the needle - that could be the Worker Caste he's speaking to), he would probably do so in Adronato, not Lenn'a, again because Strange Worker Taboo, and the Worker Caste Minbari in question (if they are in fact Worker) does not reply.
We might also consider Susan's attempt at learning a Minbari language is more Fik: if, like Sinclair (and imo Marcus) she's picked up Fik out of not-having-a-taboo and being-easier-than-Adronato reasons, then her words are also Fik.
Last but not least, I could literally write a separate essay on picking apart English influences in the Minbari words we hear on the show and how much we can ignore for the purposes of fieldwork, but that's a topic for another time!
1. These are approximate transliterations! I took them from here but that's not an official source. I don't have a source for the screenplays so I don't even know how/whether it's written in the screenplays like this. The IPA is in the glosses in the next section.
2. I don't know how else you could learn, because no where in B5 canon to my knowledge does it explain how people can learn languages to near-native fluency in so little a time. Translator devices exist but are external (e.g., Gaim, pak'ma'ra) unlike internal devices/microbes/babelfish used in e.g. Farscape, Hitchhiker's Guide, or AIs used in e.g. Mass Effect. There's a few great ideas I have seen floating around fandom about how to implement near-instant linguistic ability using telepaths, but I don't know whether these are canon/taken from a possibly-canon text, or if they're the invention of the fic author.
3. At some point the Religious must have been permitted to join, but it's not clear to me when. In the book, it's said Valen created the Anla'shok out of the Warrior clans. But Turval who becomes Anla'shok Na following Lennon's death was Religious Caste, and being Anla'shok Na is usually a 'most senior Ranger' position, so he's clearly been Anla'shok for some time.
Glosses
'you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met'
'you're welcome'
I'm postulating that 'nu' is our second person singular pronoun (jumpnow also put this together, I think) and 'zin/sen' (I’m identifying these as the same word, sen is just misspelled/misspoken) is a copula conjugated for that person. This makes the latter phrase easy: 'nusen/nu zin' is 'you are', then 'tal' could mean 'welcome'. And this looks pretty straightforward and rigorous!
'Fa' is present in jumpnow in that, if Fara is a name meaning Shining Dawn with -ra = Dawn (as suggested by other -ra names), then fa- could mean some manner of 'shining'. Not canon but that makes for nice continuity with the jumpnow work. Thus, 'falani' = beautiful/shining + some superlative form + maybe a feminiser. In fact maybe all adjective modifiers come after the root like this. So: fa-la-ni = shiny/beautiful/radiant+most+female = 'most beautiful female'.
There's a few ways to pattern out the last bit: you could do it literally, or you could do it with an expression. For example, maybe what Marcus literally says in Fik is '(you are the most beautiful woman) who I ever beheld' - maybe what he says is '(you are the most beautiful woman) to visit my eyes'. It could be anything, because there's no clues elsewhere in the other Minbari/Adronato phrases or jumpnow, and because it could be anything I've left a deeper analysis for the moment. If we do it literally:
en alis mi dron = who ever I met
and that works pretty well.
My preferred take (because it avoided having a verb to conjugate and at the time I started doing this, I wanted to leave off verb conjugations to a later date):
en alis mi dron = in all of my meeting. Sounds a bit strange in English, but this uses a nominalised version of the verb (avoiding conjugations) and also gives us a 1sg poss in 'mi'.
I've got a few more bits glossed out that I've used for this language when it appears in my fic (so, it's not at all canon, but the grammar gets fancier). If anybody's interested I'm (very very happy, probably too happy) to chat! But this has gotten long enough and I haven't even started really talking about the actual grammar work so I'm gonna stop it here. I guess I just really miss linguistics classes so uh please come talk to me about conlangs! Even if it’s just to correct me on my Leipzig glossing. Did you ever write a conlang? Would you? What kinds of things would you put in a conlang?
for 'judge' from the b5drabbleproject @ tumblr:
Susan Ivanova isn't all that great. Control has no idea why the Host should be so fixated. Her hair is too long, too wild; she's too thin, she exercises daily, and there's a weird hum around her mind like Ivanova is onto her. Like Ivanova knows what Control is up to. Control must keep their distance.
Control will admit that it's a brilliant idea to get close to the second-in-command. (How close is too close? Control lets the Host field that one.)
If only Control could take the credit. Control would've chosen the lead command. But the Host chose Ivanova.
But today I wanna talk a little about CONLANGS. Because I love them and I really think there's room for work to be done on the constructed languages we hear in Babylon 5: namely, the Minbari languages, and of those, the Warrior Caste language.
FYI: for the purposes of the following, when Delenn mentions Adronato (also sometimes spelled Adronado), Fik (Feek), Lenn'a (Lenn'ah) in S02E15 'And Now For A Word', she clarifies that Adronato is the language of the Religious Caste, but it's not clear which of the other two is the Worker and Warrior language. I take Fik=Warrior, Lenn'a=Worker languages, but in some cases I've heard it used that Fik=Worker Caste language, Lenn'a=Warrior Caste language.
In 'To Dream In The City Of Sorrows', we also get some more information about the languages: the Worker Caste language is "simple and unadorned"; the Religious Caste language is highly complex and takes many more words to say an equivalent English sentence. Sinclair learnt the Warrior Caste language after the war, and doesn't start learning Adronato until he arrives on Minbar, and in his narration: "The religious-caste dialect was far more difficult, with a demanding and intricate set of grammatical rules that changed from situation to situation, depending on who you were speaking to and about what. It was far too easy to say the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong grammatical way in the religious-caste dialect, and thereby commit a faux pas or an interstellar incident. He much preferred the straightforward, more vigorous approach of the military-caste dialect, or even the simple, unadorned style of the worker caste."
Moreover, the book mentions a Worker Caste language taboo: "All Minbari could understand the dialects of all three castes, at least in their pure, official form untainted by regional differences. In spite of all the differences in syntax and word use, they were essentially the same language. Indeed, members of the worker caste had to be absolutely fluent in both religious and warrior-caste dialects, since the members of those castes would never speak worker dialect, even to a worker."
Sinclair's not a linguist, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt on this, but if there are such notable differences in syntax and word use, those are more likely different languages, not dialects of the same language. Maybe what he meant is they have the same root - that's more plausible. Maybe 'essentially' is intended to be his room for error. In any case: these could well be three different languages, and there's little reason to suggest that they should be intelligible. The degree of intelligibility will probably depend on how closely you headcanon the castes to work together. Myself, I headcanon them to be very separate and distinct: the majority of Workers don't talk often to the majority of Warriors who don't talk often to the majority of Religious, with each caste taking on the most elementary roles of the other two castes within their own caste. In such a situation, I wouldn't expect the languages to be intelligible. After all, English, Croatian, and German have the same root (by which I mean they have a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European) but they're not intelligible.
(On the other hand, the more the castes work together, the more you'd expect overlapping areal features to jump from one language to the other, the more you'd expect the language divide to be blurred and degree of intelligibility should increase. So you can of course headcanon this the other way if you prefer. Maybe you'd wind up with a kind of Adronato/Fik/Lenn'a creole. Equally cool!)
Thus my personal take on it: I don't think they're mutually intelligible. a) because that's more interesting linguistically :D more linguistic diversity is absolutely my bias, I won't lie, and b) the different political and social conventions between the castes is a factor that pushes the languages apart (even though if everybody speaks all three languages, that's a factor that would drive them together). Basically, if you want the castes to be culturally very different from each other (and this is suggested in canon at least between Religious and Warrior), it makes sense for the languages to also be very different from each other. And if they're unintelligible, it makes sense that Sinclair spends so much time in the book learning the Religious Caste language when he already knows the Warrior Caste language.
Lastly, I understand the former jumpnow site had a Minbari dictionary (without specifying which Minbari language). So focusing on Fik and suggesting it’s a wholly separate language is my attempt to include rather than override the jumpnow stuff: maybe jumpnow is Adronato work, where I'm going to focus on Fik, and now we can both exist!
A Very Small Corpus
Of the set of all of the things that are said in B5 in "Minbari" (it's never specified which Minbari language, but you might infer it due to who is speaking and what caste they are), there are relatively few Fik attestations. No Warrior Caste Minbari ever speaks in a Minbari language onscreen - when Delenn and Neroon have a conversation, that takes place for the viewer in English, and whether it's meant to be Adronato (Religious Caste) or Fik (Warrior Caste), or some kind of Adronato/Fik pidgin, we don't know.
I therefore posit that the only actual Fik attestations on the show are Marcus': "Nuzin falani en alis mi dron"(1), followed by "Nusental", and at some points he also commands the other Minbari on the White Stars, which don't lead to any interesting clues about grammar so I omit them here. There's also a few words here and there which are suspected to have been Warrior Caste for obvious semantic reasons: denn'shah, for example, is likely a native Warrior Caste word, as is mora'dum.
My argument that Marcus speaks Fik is for the following reasons:
- in To Dream in the City of Sorrows, Sinclair mentions that he learned the Warrior Caste's language (Fik), not the Religious Caste language (Adronato);
- Adronato is supposedly more complex than Fik (which is in turn more complex than Lenn'a) but there is a taboo on non-Workers speaking the Worker Caste language where there isn't one on non-Warriors speaking the Warrior Caste language, so Fik would be more easily and likely learned in three months of Ranger training than Adronato if one is learning 'conventionally'(2); and
- I mean think about it - imagine how annoyed the Warrior Caste would be if, after finally relenting to allow humans to join the Anla'shok, one of the concessions the Religious Caste promises them is that they will continue to teach them in Fik (as would have been the case before, the Anla'shok until this time having been comprised solely(3) of individuals from the Warrior Caste). That probably sounds to them like a grand idea and also a cultural/caste victory. In Principle. But now humans are going around Minbar butchering their tongue. Just - just think about how mad the Warriors would be, and let that amuse you for a moment, because it amuses me very greatly.
All the other attestations in the show are presumably Adronato, because either Lennier or Delenn are speaking/being spoken to. I don't think there are any actual attestations of Lenn'a - while it's possible that Lennier speaks to a Worker Caste member (the episode where they're fitting Zack Allen for a new uniform and she sticks him with the needle - that could be the Worker Caste he's speaking to), he would probably do so in Adronato, not Lenn'a, again because Strange Worker Taboo, and the Worker Caste Minbari in question (if they are in fact Worker) does not reply.
We might also consider Susan's attempt at learning a Minbari language is more Fik: if, like Sinclair (and imo Marcus) she's picked up Fik out of not-having-a-taboo and being-easier-than-Adronato reasons, then her words are also Fik.
Last but not least, I could literally write a separate essay on picking apart English influences in the Minbari words we hear on the show and how much we can ignore for the purposes of fieldwork, but that's a topic for another time!
1. These are approximate transliterations! I took them from here but that's not an official source. I don't have a source for the screenplays so I don't even know how/whether it's written in the screenplays like this. The IPA is in the glosses in the next section.
2. I don't know how else you could learn, because no where in B5 canon to my knowledge does it explain how people can learn languages to near-native fluency in so little a time. Translator devices exist but are external (e.g., Gaim, pak'ma'ra) unlike internal devices/microbes/babelfish used in e.g. Farscape, Hitchhiker's Guide, or AIs used in e.g. Mass Effect. There's a few great ideas I have seen floating around fandom about how to implement near-instant linguistic ability using telepaths, but I don't know whether these are canon/taken from a possibly-canon text, or if they're the invention of the fic author.
3. At some point the Religious must have been permitted to join, but it's not clear to me when. In the book, it's said Valen created the Anla'shok out of the Warrior clans. But Turval who becomes Anla'shok Na following Lennon's death was Religious Caste, and being Anla'shok Na is usually a 'most senior Ranger' position, so he's clearly been Anla'shok for some time.
Glosses
| Nu | zin | falani | en | alis | mi | dron |
| /nu | zɪn | fə-lɑ-ni | ɛn | al-ɪs | mi | dron/ |
| 2sɢ | be-2sɢ | radiant (one)-sᴜᴘ-ꜰ | in | all-ᴘʟ | 1sɢ-ᴘᴏss-ɢᴇɴ | meet-ɴᴢʀ[-ᴘʟ][-ɢᴇɴ] |
| Nu | sen | tal |
| /nu | zɪn | tɑl/ |
| 2sɢ | be-2sɢ | welcome |
I'm postulating that 'nu' is our second person singular pronoun (jumpnow also put this together, I think) and 'zin/sen' (I’m identifying these as the same word, sen is just misspelled/misspoken) is a copula conjugated for that person. This makes the latter phrase easy: 'nusen/nu zin' is 'you are', then 'tal' could mean 'welcome'. And this looks pretty straightforward and rigorous!
'Fa' is present in jumpnow in that, if Fara is a name meaning Shining Dawn with -ra = Dawn (as suggested by other -ra names), then fa- could mean some manner of 'shining'. Not canon but that makes for nice continuity with the jumpnow work. Thus, 'falani' = beautiful/shining + some superlative form + maybe a feminiser. In fact maybe all adjective modifiers come after the root like this. So: fa-la-ni = shiny/beautiful/radiant+most+female = 'most beautiful female'.
There's a few ways to pattern out the last bit: you could do it literally, or you could do it with an expression. For example, maybe what Marcus literally says in Fik is '(you are the most beautiful woman) who I ever beheld' - maybe what he says is '(you are the most beautiful woman) to visit my eyes'. It could be anything, because there's no clues elsewhere in the other Minbari/Adronato phrases or jumpnow, and because it could be anything I've left a deeper analysis for the moment. If we do it literally:
en alis mi dron = who ever I met
and that works pretty well.
My preferred take (because it avoided having a verb to conjugate and at the time I started doing this, I wanted to leave off verb conjugations to a later date):
en alis mi dron = in all of my meeting. Sounds a bit strange in English, but this uses a nominalised version of the verb (avoiding conjugations) and also gives us a 1sg poss in 'mi'.
I've got a few more bits glossed out that I've used for this language when it appears in my fic (so, it's not at all canon, but the grammar gets fancier). If anybody's interested I'm (very very happy, probably too happy) to chat! But this has gotten long enough and I haven't even started really talking about the actual grammar work so I'm gonna stop it here. I guess I just really miss linguistics classes so uh please come talk to me about conlangs! Even if it’s just to correct me on my Leipzig glossing. Did you ever write a conlang? Would you? What kinds of things would you put in a conlang?
for 'judge' from the b5drabbleproject @ tumblr:
Susan Ivanova isn't all that great. Control has no idea why the Host should be so fixated. Her hair is too long, too wild; she's too thin, she exercises daily, and there's a weird hum around her mind like Ivanova is onto her. Like Ivanova knows what Control is up to. Control must keep their distance.
Control will admit that it's a brilliant idea to get close to the second-in-command. (How close is too close? Control lets the Host field that one.)
If only Control could take the credit. Control would've chosen the lead command. But the Host chose Ivanova.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 02:04 am (UTC)Ur translation work is also wonderful. Sorry if I missed anything indicating this, but do u think Fik (or any Minbari language) uses declensions to replace prepositions? I love ur final idea for "en alis mi dron" but it just raised the question because of the possibilities. Like "alis" could mean "all of" altogether vs. "mi" being genitive - unless that's what you were referring to with the possessive note, but I interpreted that as being about an unmodified "my." Idk if I explained that well at all jkfhkdkjl but it's just where the question came from. Tl;dr do any of the languages use declensions in the place of/paired with prepositions and which would be most likely if that's something you'd want to think about?
(Again sorry if I misunderstood anything! I'm def gonna have to reread this when I'm not sick.)
Also!! That drabble!! Thank u for healing the wounds of Control saying she influenced Talia. I also rly adore the voice you've given them. It's very matter-of-fact and strategic.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 12:25 pm (UTC)walksstruts onto Babylon 5 like 'this a Star Rider event, my clan Important, make way peons' and his confidence literally cannot be contained so he's comfy speaking in his most basic way even if it might sound kinda cheeky and rural (especially if it sounds kinda cheeky, because Delenn is there and he needs to put on airs to convey as best he can that he's running this op). And then something knocks him off his game and he readopts the more formal standardised Fik forms as a 'okay no games now take me seriously or I will straight up blast this place'.and to answer your question it's yes and no - while I don't headcanon Fik as using declensions to fully replace prepositions the way say the Finno-Ugric languages do, I did give it a prepositional case (to be used for all prepositions). So the preposition has to stick around as an actual word and can't be inferred from the case marking, but the case definitely has to be marked and not to do so would be ungrammatical. Some exceptions are made for items that have a genitive construction - then the prepositional 'of' bit is elided exactly as you've got it with 'alis'.
And kjsdhf you didn't misunderstand anything at all! Actually I'm really glad to bring up that last bit because I also admit I don't know quite what to do with it. My thinking with it was having genitive case-marking on top of a possessive one which like. drastically alters the pronoun but doesn't wind up affecting the marking on the noun too much. And this would only be the case in 1sg and 2pl-Formal persons. (One fun thing about working with Fik is anything that doesn't make too much sense/has an unnecessary amount of exceptions is totally cool because dem warriors love their tradition and might resist linguistic changes.) I also thought 'alis' meant 'all (of)' and that the 'of' relation was implied in that the argument of that construction would require the genitive.
but I'm def open to suggestions! Even if what we conclude doesn't fit what I have so far, it could always be explained as something like 'that is how it works in Literary Fik but in Spoken Fik it sounds stilted; that said Marcus didn't learn Fik from a Warrior because no Warrior wanted to teach a human, he learned it from a textbook'.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 01:55 pm (UTC)The declension thing makes so much sense, ty for explaining it! Having a single case for all prepositions sounds rly rly solid. Overall, I don't think I have any suggestions but if anything comes to mind I'll let you know! I def need to start thinking abt B5's languages more.
Btw, is there a reasoning behind what u mentioned only applying to 1sg and 2pl formal? Or is it just the warrior caste being Like That?
Alsooo I was able to get the actual spelling of the thing Marcus says if you'd like it? It's pretty similar to what you have, just a couple small differences. Plus if there are any other spellings you ever need just lmk the episode and I can most likely find them.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 02:03 pm (UTC)I wish we had more B5 languages! We have some neat Narn and Centauri words here and there but we never get any full phrases. to say nothing of the Vorlons. (btw your Vorlon text = wingdings from the feb 14 day, pretty sure that's canon now! it just Is)
and yeah there is some reasoning behind it: in the case of the 1sg it's because of how this particular gloss turned out (mi was something that didn't fit my current 1sg pronouns for different cases patterns so I made it a possibly historical Exception). In the case of the 2pl-formal it's because a lot of the formalities stick around. I feel like the Warrior Caste would be a stickler for social niceties and deixis given the chain of command type thing and those parts would actually stay in the language much longer. Actually related to that it's my headcanon that the Worker Caste's language doesn't have any social deixis use - if they want to show respect to someone like they're talking to the Grey Council or something, they just use Fik or Adronato, whose scheme of honorifics and stuff is way more complex - but among workers, all are equal, as reflected in Lenn'a.
skjdh I'D LOVE THAT SPELLING if you don't mind!!
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 02:34 pm (UTC)Disclaimer that I couldn't find it in the script when Marcus initially says it (I think it may have been added in later on) so this is when Susan quotes him: "Nusen fallani, en alles me dron."
Also kjlhkjah to get the Vorlon Text TM I may have just... opened a picture of Pat Tallman in notepad and took the messiest section. That's 100% how Vorlons process their thoughts into... whatever it is they process their thoughts into.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 03:01 pm (UTC)also honestly that's genius and it kind of makes sense too, like Vorlons are just On Another Level of thinking so why not begin with a representation of something that isn't actually words.
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Date: 2019-02-26 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 04:33 am (UTC)your analysis was really interesting, & I like the way you've split the languages as not mutually intelligible. (Scifi tropes that bother me include "THE [alien species] language" rather than "AN [alien species] language")
I'm not sure if I imagined this, but I thought there might have been a suggestion in canon that there was some sort of subconscious learning? I forget the proper name, but it's the kind where you put it on when you sleep for a period of time and then you get the knowledge. I could very well be mistaken though.
For the glosses -- I'm wondering about how to place emphasis. It's been a while since I looked at the episode where Ivanova mangles directions ('brickbat lingerie' &c.), but given the 'most beautiful' in that gloss, it kind of fucked over my ideas about either reduplication or an infix, to represent superlatives. Do you have ideas about that?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-26 12:46 pm (UTC)And good point, it's possible that Ivanova's learning Fik instead of (the more complex) Adronato, and that's another item for the corpus! I gotta look at that again. Is that where they were talking about the subliminal language learning? I missed that suggestion completely :'D I gotta pay more attention when I watch things...
Thanks for the note on 'falani' - actually after some thought that gloss is subject to change. Marcus might not even be saying 'the most beautiful (woman)' it could be more adjectival than nominalised and agreement is made for gender (as in French "tu es la plus belle que jamais j'ai rencontré" vs "tu es la plus belle femme que jamais j'ai rencontré" - maybe something is gapped there in the first). I didn't see the -la- as an infix so much as I saw it as an affix -la, like -(e)st for English superlatives. But I guess it becomes an infix when you tack on another ending after that either to nominalise or to make gender agreement.
As for emphasis/focus, I haven't given that much thought for Fik just yet - actually y'know I haven't even really been concentrating on adjectives at all, I've mostly been looking at verb forms. So there's still loads of room for options and ideas. What kind of cool ideas did you have for reduplication and infixes?
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Date: 2019-02-26 07:18 pm (UTC)I just think infixes are cool. My conception of the grammar was that an adjective agrees in gender and/or number (or possibly caste instead of gender?) via prefixes, and the emphatic infix would go between the agreement prefix and the base adjective. But for reduplication I like the way Chamorro does it -- partial reduplication via the penultimate or ultimate syllable to mean 'very'.
I think I'd probably have to go back over canon to get more of an idea for specifics, since my current conlang project is a rework of my very first shot at it and that's the only thing filling my head, lol.
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Date: 2019-02-26 07:52 pm (UTC)Well according to Delenn there are three languages (2.15). And according to Lennier there are 97 dialects (1.21). So I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Sinclair is mistaken when he refers to the languages as dialects. :D - What I think might have happened (just guess work) is that Minbari ensure that they learn each of the “basic languages” (that’s what Delenn calls them, don’t ask me) because they want to know what other people are talking about in a society so based in secrets. And Sinclair observed that they could understand what other people are saying and mistakenly believed that they can understand each other because the languages are similar enough, when actually they might understand each other because they have a vested interest in understanding what the other people are saying. (This is basically the only reason I can think of why the Warrior Caste and the Religious Caste would bother with learning the Worker Caste language if speaking it is taboo to them.)
We’ve seen how an attempt at having a confidential conversation works against Delenn and Lennan when they switch to Adronato (I suppose?) and the Nightwatch guy interrupts them to say that he’s learned their language from his prisoners. (3.11) And we’ve seen Lennier successfully use it when he switches in Atonement to talk to the Seamstress.
But I expect I’m preaching to the choir on how important it can be to know other people’s languages, both to communicate and to understand what is being communicated. --- And basically I just really do agree that it’s a lot more likely that those three languages are NOT particularly similar. Why would they be when most Caste members aren’t particularly keen on interacting with one another? Of course it’s possible that Minbari kids are taught all three in case they want to switch castes or marry someone from another caste. But I guess that might be too charitable a take. :D
That probably sounds to them like a grand idea and also a cultural/caste victory. In Principle. But now humans are going around Minbar butchering their tongue. Just - just think about how mad the Warriors would be, and let that amuse you for a moment, because it amuses me very greatly.
Headcanon accepted and appreciated!!! :D <3 :D
At some point the Religious must have been permitted to join, but it's not clear to me when. In the book, it's said Valen created the Anla'shok out of the Warrior clans. But Turval who becomes Anla'shok Na following Lennon's death was Religious Caste, and being Anla'shok Na is usually a 'most senior Ranger' position, so he's clearly been Anla'shok for some time.
Well Lennon informs us that “there are only a few of us, and most of us are old and tired from years of watching, weary of being mocked by certain members of this Council and by the Warrior Caste who think of us as an embarrassment...” (In the Beginning) --- So I’d say that at least by that point the Warrior Caste wouldn’t have been particularly eager to have their own people join the Rangers (if you consider someone an embarrassment, would you encourage your kids to join?), which might explain how a member of the Religious Caste ended up as Anla’Shok’Na?
Sorry... you know I hail from Lit rather than Ling... so my interactions with your work are a little more “oh look, canon” rather than “hey I can totally add to your work”. But I do appreciate it and I’d love to see more - as I think I mentioned before. (If I haven’t I failed when we talked about this.)
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Date: 2019-02-27 02:10 pm (UTC)Yes, and this is why I have it suggested that Sinclair (who also isn't a native speaker of these languages) was oversimplifying. (In reality it's also possibly the case that the author of that book just misspoke.) Interesting theory about the secrets!! I really like it. My headcanon is that what weapons and training is to the Warriors, secrets and information is to the Religious Caste, and since the Religious Caste has arguable cultural hegemony over Minbar as a whole, to trade in secrets and information can make you a very well-positioned and powerful person. So yeah headcanon accepted!
We've seen how an attempt at having a confidential conversation works against Delenn and Lennan when they switch to Adronato (I suppose?) and the Nightwatch guy interrupts them to say that he's learned their language from his prisoners. (3.11) And we've seen Lennier successfully use it when he switches in Atonement to talk to the Seamstress.
I'm not convinced that's Lennier switching, I think that's Lennier speaking more Adronato and the worker in question understands him because she understands Adronato as well as her native Worker language, or one of the Worker dialects. (I'm assuming that over the 3 'basic languages' as Delenn calls them - maybe they're a standardised version of the three linguistic sub-groups/subfamilies - the 97 dialects are more or less evenly distributed, but it's quite possibly the case that there's actually only a handful of Warrior dialects and there's a TON of Worker ones. It could depend what split people headcanon the Caste population distribution!)
And basically I just really do agree that it's a lot more likely that those three languages are NOT particularly similar. Why would they be when most Caste members aren't particularly keen on interacting with one another?
Yes, this is an incredibly salient point!! I feel like it can't be stated enough - the Castes don't seem like they interact heavily with each other, so there's a cultural trifurcation. And language and culture have a complex feedback system with each other, but I think it'd also affect the language. I like your theory about raising kids with 3 languages just in case they follow the calling of their hearts.
So I'd say that at least by that point the Warrior Caste wouldn't have been particularly eager to have their own people join the Rangers (if you consider someone an embarrassment, would you encourage your kids to join?), which might explain how a member of the Religious Caste ended up as Anla'Shok'Na?
That's still not a clue as to how or when the Religious were granted inclusion into the Anla'shok in the first place. It's definitely canon that the Warrior Caste thinks they're kind of a joke and probably wouldn't encourage their own kids towards it. But it doesn't say when Religious Caste started picking up the slack - it doesn't say when the Religious Caste would have been permitted to join, or if it were ever even in question that they could formally join. Who knows, maybe they were always permitted as some kind of "I want to follow the path of Valen" religious rite. Or maybe Turval followed the calling of his heart as a younger man to the Warrior Caste, and then immediately thereafter joined the Anla'shok. All I intended was that it's canon that the first Anla'shok were 100% Warrior, but a thousand years later there is at least one Religious in the Anla'shok. And when Sinclair says "ok I will take command of the Rangers but the Workers gotta come too" it's a Big Problem for some people - like Neroon :'D and why should he care, being a Warrior, about what he thinks is an embarrassment, but Neroon likes to get super mad about the Principle Of Things especially when Humans are involved. Did he get this mad about the Religious Caste, or is it only the Worker Caste who he thinks he as a Warrior has cultural hegemony over? (I'll admit I headcanon some strange things about Neroon and Workers relationship wise, but I think at the end of the day he's just as superior to them as much of the rest of the Warrior Caste.)
good thoughts!!!
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Date: 2020-11-29 01:10 am (UTC)I know I'm desperately late to this party, but I landed here because I'm writing a Lennier-centered ficlet-rapidly-becoming-full-fanfic and it's relevant that he switches to Adronato at a certain moment and...yeah, I'm falling in deep with this fandom. I'm still in my first watch through, just about to finish season 3. I have so many feelings! Plus I was, once upon a time, a linguist by training/trade, so this conlang endeavor speaks to my heart.
For now all I have handy to contribute is:
I wonder if "dron" might be pleasantly interpreted as a noun translating to "knowledge", or, in better English for Marcus's specific context, "acquaintance". So he's saying "...in all my acquaintance." Then we can have fun with the same root existing in the name of the language Adronato. Since we know "na" is "one/first", perhaps the Religious Caste named their own language something like "toward knowledge of oneness/unity". Given that the Minbari cosmology posits that all life as the universe made manifest, attempting to understand itself, I like this interpretation!
That would make "-to" a suffix similar to English "-ness" or "-dom", which transforms words of other types into nouns (taking "na" from "one" to "oneness/unity"). It would also require the language's syllabification and/or spelling rules to require the reduction from "Adronnato" to "Adronato", since I'm using the n in both parts, but since we have plenty of play based on the original material, why not? However if the initial "a" of "Adronato" is the "toward", that really only covers one of the two prepositions I've used in my English translation of Adronato. So...this line of thinking is not perfect. I just love the headcanon aspect. I'll keep thinking. :)
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Date: 2020-12-04 05:18 pm (UTC)yeah, I'm falling in deep with this fandom.
yesssssss!! One of us, one of us! I'm very intrigued about this Lennier-centred ficlet you make mention of :D
I really love the idea of putting 'na' into Adronnato and (over time, possibly geminate consonants fell out of the language? We see a lot of them in names but I have a whole other essay about why the names are spelled the way they are and the writing system(s) available to Minbar, hahah) getting rid of the underlying meaning. To me (I might just be narrow-minding this tho) the only way to eke out meaning from the words we see is by assuming these languages are fusional or that the translation is very much not one-to-one and any translation given on-screen was misleading, so that whole construct reads really well to me.
I wonder if "dron" might be pleasantly interpreted as a noun translating to "knowledge", or, in better English for Marcus's specific context, "acquaintance". So he's saying "...in all my acquaintance."
I LOVE this, and also kind of headcanon it too, I think the first ideas I had for this bit were related around acquaintance/knowledge/connecting in a meeting sense. I don't know why I gave up on those early thoughts. Anyway, I very much like this!!
I also really dig your argument about 'adronato' as a whole working off of 'dron', though ultimately I think Marcus is speaking a different language to Adronato but those are mostly based on my own cultural/worldbuilding logic reasons. But working in 'na' with Adronato on a cultural basis like that? *chef's kiss* it's kind of perfect!! I have a similar argument for verb tenses and a subjunctive-like tense.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts :D If you ever have any more (or that Lennier ficlet 👀), I'd love to hear!!