Current location:	Secret Underground Lair
Current mood:	nerdy
Current music:	Dance-o-Girl - Morning Strikes Now
Entry tags:	abbreviations, acronyms, artificial languages, conlangs, constructed languages, linguistics

Is this really as foreign as it looks?
I figured, instead of returning gloriously with the requisite series of Emo-Potteresque tirades about how much I miss college and how passionately ambivalent I am about my job...  Well, to make a long story short (Too late!), that is the way things is around here.

Oh yeah, but instead of all that, I figured I would share some of my random text-friendly handiworks.  So, I will start us off with a neat way to come up with words for an artificial language, using only a few simple, somewhat bendable rules, and any available dictionary.  Here's the idea.

So, a few years ago in college, Andrew shared with me a technique he knew about that could make any acronym into a pronounceable word, simply by inserting the vowels "a," "e," "i," "o," and "u," in that order, between unpronounceable groups of consonants.  My memory might be a little fuzzy on that, but I guess the idea is that if you had something like "TTS" (Text-to-Speech), you could pronounce it /tates/ ("tah-tess").

Taking that into consideration, and also being reminded so constantly of cute, easily pronounceable Japanese abbreviations like リモコン (rimokon, for "remote control"), or ラブホ (rabuho, for "love hotel"), I decided to try something kind of in between the two.

Take any acronym.  The rules are as follows:

1.  If the acronym can be pronounced as it stands, then you are finished.  For instance, "USA" can be pronounced, say, as oo-sah.
2.  If you come across a group of vowels or consonants that you deem awkward, you must break them up.
3.  To break up a cluster of consonants, place a vowel strategically inside the cluster.  The vowel must be the next available vowel from the word to which the preceding consonant belongs.  For instance, if you had "TTS," for "Text-to-speech" you must obviously break up the double "T" at the beginning of the word.  You are now creating a word of the form "t-?-ts".  Since the preceding T belongs to the word "text," the vowel to be inserted is an E.  You now have the word "tets".  Of course, nothing is stopping you from inserting even more vowels, up to the point where you could have "tetos," "tetse," or even "tetose".  You can see that when drawing our "E" from the word "speech," we have totally ignored the interceding "P."

That was a very long, illustrative list item, and I hope you got a lot out of it.

4.  To break up an unwieldy block of vowels, using the same concept, find a spot to strategically place a consonant; this consonant must be the next available consonant coming from the word to which the preceding vowel belongs.  This time, let's use "AAA," which, of course, refers to the American Accordionists' Association, based out of Fairfield, Connecticut.  Sure, you could just pronounce this as did old Joseph of Aramathea with his dying breath.  Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.  However, if you, like all the people I imagine I might ask if I knew them, but I don't know them, but they probably don't take to triple vowels, then we could turn this "aaa" into "aaca," "amaa," or, of course, "amaca".

So far, you might have noticed, I've been using really short, "real" acronyms.  Nothing, though, is stopping us from using any kind of crazy string of letters.  One of the first things I tried, for practice, was to pick a short passage of song lyrics and convert them to acronyms.  Let's say, for kitsch's sake, that we wanted to make a word out of the line:

"Every morning there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four-post bed."

This may be an extreme example, but it can be done.  First, pull each first letter out and make a long string of letters:  "Emtahhftcomgfpb".  Then break up any bunches of letters that you don't think sound good together.  Personally, I'm going to jump to the following result:  "Emtahahaftecomgifpob".  Clearly this was a bad example, and I don't know what possessed me to do it.  But the point is that anyone with enough patience will be able to pronounce that word ten times fast.  That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

So where's the part where this becomes a practical way to make up words for an artificial language?  That's where the dictionary comes in.  I'll provide a few examples here to illustrate the merits of this approach.

old - raia: "relatively advanced in age"
new - sif: "still fresh"
red - hacretob: "having a color resembling that of blood"
strange - nopek: "not previously known"
cat - coram: "catcher of rats and mice"
English - Wegloe: "West Germanic language of England"
Earth - Tipfots: "third planet from the sun"
soon - itnef: "in the near future"

You'll begin to notice from these examples that standard dictionary definitions aren't always the right way to go, and it can pay to get a little creative.  You can see, also, from the following examples, that shades of meaning for a single word in English can be made into completely separate words:

love - exoona: "an expression of one's affection"
love - eosar: "(the) emotion of sex and romance" (i.e. eros)
love - sopoe: "(a) strong predilection or enthusiasm"
love - lode: "(to) like or desire enthusiastically" (Verb!  I love playing the sacbut!)

The list could go on and on.  But maybe later.  Whew.