Arrghhhh!!!! and a Summary of What has Gone Before Rob Zook Wed, 26 Nov 1997 18:57:18 -0600 Now that the mindless emotive noise is out of the way..,I wonder if I'm the only one impatient at the pace of things around here. Anyway, also I wonder now what we should do next. We need to flesh out the vocabulary and the grammar. Naturally fleshing out the vocabular seems a necessary first step before we can flesh out the grammar. We can create words by random manual construction, by random automated construction, or by a statistical automated construction (based on the words we have). I assume since I've mentioned the automated construction several times that no one has any objection to doing that? I'll assume that's what we want to do from now on unless someone voices some objections. I'd really like to hear Marketa's opinion on this idea though (hint hint). Anyway as a prelude to expanding the vocabulary we needed to analyze the bits we do have, which Marketa and her father have constructed and culled from various sources (canon and not). Saul has firstly come up with an alternative transcription system for writing Vulcan with English letters: Vowels: Zvelebil Epstein Notation Notation i i u u e e o o ^ ^ a a i: ii u: uu e: ee o: oo ^: ^^ a~ a~ e~ e~ o~ o~ Consonants: Zvelebil Epstein Zvelebil Epstein Zvelebil Epstein Notation Notation Notation Notation Notation Notation p p d d ch tch b b th th dzh dj f f dh dh k k v v n n g g w w s s x x w~ wh z z h h w~l whl c ts ng ng m m sh c ks ks t t zh j q q Zvelebil Epstein Notation Notation j y r r l l rh rr n~ n~ ' ' I only have one afterthought to Saul's system. I would rather see as , which makes it consistent with and gets rid of another instance of that silly little ~ thingie. Also, Saul has indirectly proposed the adoption of general linguistic terminology as much as possible. Which among other things means letters surrounded by <> refer to spelling conventions, letters surrounded by [] refer to phonetic spelling, and letters surrounded by // refer to phonemic spellings. Next we discussed what all the letters sounded like and Saul has come up with a pretty good set of English words to describe the sounds of each letters, and I have created a chart on my home page to show the phonological attributes for all the phonemes. http://home,unicom,net/~lalaith/startrek/vulc_lang/vulc_letters,html This page shows the Epstein transliteration notation, the IPA equivalents to each letters (at least as far as we've been able to determine), an English word which demonstrates the sounds (sort of, not taking dialectical considerations into account), and the equivalent letter in the Modern Vulcan Writing I've been working on. We still have some confusion regarding the sounds which a, aa, and w represent, but hopefully Prof. Zvelebil will clear that up for us while he's visiting Marketa. Next Saul made some rather clarifying remarks about the morphological structure of phrases in the Vulcan Lexicon, and incidentally cleared up a couple of things about the grammar I found confusing. Next we extracted what we think are at least *some* of the allowed word initial, and word ending consonant clusters: Word Initial Consonant Clusters: [stop]+[fricative of the opposite voicing] pf ps pc px ph bv bz bj tf (ts) (tc) tx th dv dz (dj) kf (ks) kc kx kh gv gz gj qf qs qc qx qh [stop]+[approximate] py by ty dy ky gy qy pl bl tl dl kl gl ql [stop]+[tap] pr br tr dr kr gr qr prr brr trr drr krr grr qrr (not sure about these) [fricative]+[nasal] vm zm jm xm fm sm cm hm vn zn jn xn fn sn cn hn [nasal]+[nasal] mn mny mng nm nym ngm [fricative]+[tap] vr zr jr xr fr sr cr hr (nobody commented on these so I'm going to throw them in here too) [fricative]+[approximate]: vl zl jl xl fl sl cl hl [nasal]+[tap]: mr nr nyr ngr [approximate]+[tap]: lr yr wr Word Ending Consonant Clusters: [tap]+[stop]: rp rb rt rd rk rg rq [tap]+[fricative]: rf rv rs rz rc rj rx rh [stop]+[fricative] pf ps pc px ph bv bz bj tf (ts) (tc) tx th dv dz (dj) kf (ks) kc kx kh gv gz gj qf qs qc qx qh [fricative]+[stop] fp sp cp xp hp vb zb jb ft st ct xt ht vd zd jd fk sk ck xk hk vg zg jg fq sq cq xq hq [approximate]+[lateral] yl wl ywhl wwhl [fricative]+[lateral] fl vl sl zl cl jl xl hl fwhl vwhl swhl zwhl cwhl jwhl xwhl hwhl [aspirated stop]+[stop] khp khb kht khd khk khg khq th thb tht thd thk thg thq dh dhb dht dhd dhk dhg dhq Now far as I can tell, we only need to do two things before we can start creating words the easy way. We need to know how to form syllables, and we need to finalize a frequency distribution for each of the following: 1. phonemes 2. consonant clusters 3. syllable forms I'm going to suggest that we leave the frequencies for the phonemes pretty much as they are (except for increasing the values on the ones which do not appear in the dictionary to say 10%). Then letting items two and three have unary frequency distributions now, and then doing some trial runs to see what kind of goofy words appear and then adjust the frequencies for them as we try and eliminate goofy looking words. Goofy of course meaning something highly unpleasant looking as defined subjectively by anyone who complains about any particular word ;-) We can keep the words which crop up in these preliminary runs which we like and assign them some meaning either manually or at random. Now, that I've burst out with all I needed to say, for Vulcan's sake SOMEBODY ELSE SAY SOMETHING DAMMIT! Rob Z. -------------------------------------------------------- Not reaching a goal on a given day does not preclude reaching it tomorrow, or next year. One failure does not mean all is lost. Let it be motivation to improve, to deliver optimum performance in the next undertaking, whatever it may be - not to give up and quit trying. -- Capt. Spock