More speaking in tongues
Jul. 10th, 2007 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThe second day of the Language Creation Conference was just as interesting as the first, but I will skip over the specifics of the papers and presentations and straight to the workshops. Sunday continued the brainstorming workshops with the same teams/working groups. Saturday's brainstorming exercises started out with a selection of Duplo blocks (sort of oversized Lego blocks) in various sizes and colors. In the first exercise, we were given the sentence "I should've read it the first time" and told to render it with our blocks. My team wasn't quite sure what the point of this was yet, so we more or less transcribed the English sentence, using color-themes for parts of speech and block size for lexical weight (e.g., smaller for function words, larger for more concrete concepts).
After that, the exercises got a bit more inspiring and we got more into the swing of things. The second exercise was to come up with some cultural parameters for the speakers of our language -- we were given a list of parameters and had to come up with something in a couple of minutes. (A key part of the exercises ended up being the frenetic pace -- it helped get the creative juices flowing.) So we went for a science-fictional setting:
Species: aquatic
Historic era: (left blank)
Planet: other (non-Earth)
Geographic region: body of fresh water
Tech level: high tech (the details were left un-worked-out)
Next we were given a set of six words/concepts to "translate" using our Duplo blocks: "bright", "shining", "intelligent", "round", "angular", and "stupid". One of the things we hit on was organizing the blocks and concepts according to "warm" and "cool" colors, but we also came up with what would turn out to be a continuing theme -- deciding that this culture obligatorily encoded concepts as either "bounded" or "unbounded", with warm colors representing unbounded concepts and cool colors bounded ones. Hence the abstract notions of "bright" and "shining" were represented by red and yellow 2x2 blocks, while "intelligent" was also felt to be an "unbounded" concept, using an orange 2x4 block. Defined shapes were "bounded" and representational (blue 2x2 block for "round" and I think a blue stack of blue 2x2 on a 2x4 for "angular", but this isn't clear in the notes). "Stupid" was also felt to be a bounded (or binding) concept and was a green 2x2.
From that point on, we built on each exercise to do the next, extending and transferring representations as much as possible (even when somewhat far-fetched). The next assignment was to borrow a vocabulary item from a neighboring culture (i.e., the next team over) and do something with it. We decided that, being an aquatic culture, we would at some point have borrowed some other culture's word for "fire". (This would, of course, have been long in the past, since we were now a high-tech culture.) The next culture over lent us a stack of red blocks (I think it was a 2x4 with a 2x2 centered on it, but the notes aren't clear). This, we elaborated into compounds for "controlled (camp) fire" (capped with a bounding light blue block), and "uncontrolled fire" (capped with an unbounding yellow block). For our example sentence using this, we compounded "shine+intelligence" and declared it to mean "teach/ing/er" and then connected the two (with some block I can't make out) for "teach safe-fires", which we glossed more fully as "Only you can prevent forest fires."
For the last Saturday exercise we were given a list of language-related words and once again instructed to represent all of them using our colored blocks. We quickly simplified the problem by deciding that our culture did not lexically distinguish semantically-related verbs and abstract nouns, and that we considered some of the distinctions being made not to be expressed in our language. At the same time, we came up with something of a semantic map of meaning-relationships, resulting in the following outline:
"tongue"
|
"talk", "say", "speech" --> "voice"
|
"narrate", "dictate", "story" --> "narrator"
|
"microphone"
From this, we started by identifying the tongue as as a bounded round thing (roughly) and named it with the 2x2 blue block. Speech was an unbinding of the tongue by means of intelligence (with the 2x4 orange block from above), stuck together in a compound. The relationship between the "talk" group and the "narrate" group we determined to be one of verb valence (although I don't think we used that particular term at the time) -- i.e., that the latter sense incorporated an obligatory "listener" concept. This was represented in our block-words with a long green block (2x8) with the "speech" compound set on one end and the other end open for a representation of the listener. The cool color (in addition to being the only long block we had) represented the narrowing (binding) of the sense of the verb. The default was another intelligent being (represented by a 2x2 white block -- I'm not remembering the complete reasoning there except that other beings were counted as unbounded, hence the warm color). To create an agent ("narrator"), the "speech" element was further compounded by the 2x2 yellow block we had originally picked to represent the 1st person singular in the first exercise -- this block had eye decals on the sides, which had inspired us to use it for "I". The "narrate/dictate" symbol could instead by transformed into "microphone" by adding an instrument block (2x4 blue) on the open end of the long green block.
The next set of exercises added actual words to the mix, but now it's time for bed, so I'll continue that later.
After that, the exercises got a bit more inspiring and we got more into the swing of things. The second exercise was to come up with some cultural parameters for the speakers of our language -- we were given a list of parameters and had to come up with something in a couple of minutes. (A key part of the exercises ended up being the frenetic pace -- it helped get the creative juices flowing.) So we went for a science-fictional setting:
Species: aquatic
Historic era: (left blank)
Planet: other (non-Earth)
Geographic region: body of fresh water
Tech level: high tech (the details were left un-worked-out)
Next we were given a set of six words/concepts to "translate" using our Duplo blocks: "bright", "shining", "intelligent", "round", "angular", and "stupid". One of the things we hit on was organizing the blocks and concepts according to "warm" and "cool" colors, but we also came up with what would turn out to be a continuing theme -- deciding that this culture obligatorily encoded concepts as either "bounded" or "unbounded", with warm colors representing unbounded concepts and cool colors bounded ones. Hence the abstract notions of "bright" and "shining" were represented by red and yellow 2x2 blocks, while "intelligent" was also felt to be an "unbounded" concept, using an orange 2x4 block. Defined shapes were "bounded" and representational (blue 2x2 block for "round" and I think a blue stack of blue 2x2 on a 2x4 for "angular", but this isn't clear in the notes). "Stupid" was also felt to be a bounded (or binding) concept and was a green 2x2.
From that point on, we built on each exercise to do the next, extending and transferring representations as much as possible (even when somewhat far-fetched). The next assignment was to borrow a vocabulary item from a neighboring culture (i.e., the next team over) and do something with it. We decided that, being an aquatic culture, we would at some point have borrowed some other culture's word for "fire". (This would, of course, have been long in the past, since we were now a high-tech culture.) The next culture over lent us a stack of red blocks (I think it was a 2x4 with a 2x2 centered on it, but the notes aren't clear). This, we elaborated into compounds for "controlled (camp) fire" (capped with a bounding light blue block), and "uncontrolled fire" (capped with an unbounding yellow block). For our example sentence using this, we compounded "shine+intelligence" and declared it to mean "teach/ing/er" and then connected the two (with some block I can't make out) for "teach safe-fires", which we glossed more fully as "Only you can prevent forest fires."
For the last Saturday exercise we were given a list of language-related words and once again instructed to represent all of them using our colored blocks. We quickly simplified the problem by deciding that our culture did not lexically distinguish semantically-related verbs and abstract nouns, and that we considered some of the distinctions being made not to be expressed in our language. At the same time, we came up with something of a semantic map of meaning-relationships, resulting in the following outline:
"tongue"
|
"talk", "say", "speech" --> "voice"
|
"narrate", "dictate", "story" --> "narrator"
|
"microphone"
From this, we started by identifying the tongue as as a bounded round thing (roughly) and named it with the 2x2 blue block. Speech was an unbinding of the tongue by means of intelligence (with the 2x4 orange block from above), stuck together in a compound. The relationship between the "talk" group and the "narrate" group we determined to be one of verb valence (although I don't think we used that particular term at the time) -- i.e., that the latter sense incorporated an obligatory "listener" concept. This was represented in our block-words with a long green block (2x8) with the "speech" compound set on one end and the other end open for a representation of the listener. The cool color (in addition to being the only long block we had) represented the narrowing (binding) of the sense of the verb. The default was another intelligent being (represented by a 2x2 white block -- I'm not remembering the complete reasoning there except that other beings were counted as unbounded, hence the warm color). To create an agent ("narrator"), the "speech" element was further compounded by the 2x2 yellow block we had originally picked to represent the 1st person singular in the first exercise -- this block had eye decals on the sides, which had inspired us to use it for "I". The "narrate/dictate" symbol could instead by transformed into "microphone" by adding an instrument block (2x4 blue) on the open end of the long green block.
The next set of exercises added actual words to the mix, but now it's time for bed, so I'll continue that later.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-11 01:49 pm (UTC)(And NOT just because I like to play with blocks.)
=^)
no subject
Date: 2007-07-11 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-12 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-12 05:26 am (UTC)