The Dailies. May 1
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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6 thoughts on “The Dailies. May 1”
So I discovered the ABC file format, which is a plain-text way to represent musical scores, and which can be converted to MIDI relatively easily. I also created enough provisional vocabulary to finish the translation of The North Wind and the Sun.
So without further ado, here’s the ABC notation for it:
X: 1T:The North Wind and the Sun
M:none
L:1/4
Q:1/4=160
K:C
%%MIDI voice instrument=21
[DG] z/4 A z/4 c z/4 [GEc'] z/4 [CEA] z/4 [GAd] z/4 [Gc] z/4 [Gce] z/4 [deg][Cd] z/4 a2 z/4 e z/4 c z/4 [cg] z/4 [Eg]2 z/4 [Ed] z/4 a2 z/4 [deg][Cd] z/4 a2 | z2||
[DG] z/4 A z/4 [ca] z/4 [Cda] z/4 [Adg][Ae][Ac] z/4 c z/4 [DG] z/4 [Edg] z/4 [Adg][Ae][Ac] z/4 [Edg] z/4 [cga][DG] | z2||
[da] z/4 A z/4 [ca] z/4 [Ed] z/4 c z/4 [da] z/4 [Ac][Edg] z/4 [Adg][Ae][Ac] z/4 [cga][DG] z/4 [Ed] z/4 A z/4 [deg][Cd] z/4 [Dc] | z2||
[DG] z/4 A z/4 c z/4 [eac'] z/4 [CEA] z/4 [GAd] z/4 [DAc] z/4 e z/4 c z/4 [DG] z/4 E z/4 [DA]2 z/4 [eac'] z/4 [CEA] z/4 [GAd] z/4 [Dc] z/4 [DAc] z/4 [Ge] z/4
c'2 z/4 A z/4 c z/4 [ceg] z/4 [Adg][Ae][Ac] z/4 [cga][DG] z/4 [Dc] z/4 [Gcd] z/4 e z/4 [Ed] z/4 EC | z2||
[DG] z/4 A z/4 [dga][GA] z/4 [CEA] z/4 [GAd] z/4 [eac'] z/4 [Ae]2 | z2||
[DG] z/4 A z/4 [EGd] z/4 [Gce] z/4 [Edg] z/4 e | z2|| c'2 z/4 A z/4 [Ac][Edg] z/4 [Adg][Ae][Ac] z/4 [cga][DG] z/4 [EGa] z/4 [Ac'] | z2|| c'2 z/4 A z/4 [ca] z/4 [Acg] z/4 [CEA] z/4 [GAd] z/4 [deg][Cd] z/4 e z/4 c z/4 [da] z/4 [Gce] z/4 [deg][Cd] z/4 [Dc] | z2||
Edit: For some reason I can’t insert line breaks while editing a comment, so the last three lines got stuck together. It only affects formatting, so it’s not a huge deal, but it is annoying. You can just add line breaks after the double bars after copying it though.
This website https://abcjs.net/abcjs-editor.html can be used to play it, though it doesn’t seem to support the instrument directive and just plays it on a piano instead of an organ. It’s a bit late now though so I’ll have to figure out a better way to play it tomorrow.
The most annoying issue right now is one I created entirely by myself, and that’s that I used A B C D E F G H I J K for the eleven notes, while ABC uses C D E G A c d e g a c’ (which is what the pentatonic scale in C major is in traditional western notation) so I have to do somewhat confusing substitutions, but I can easily automate that process and I’ll do that tomorrow too. I might actually switch my notes to proper note names, though I don’t like the c’ notation much. Maybe the highest note can be something like h in my notes? It would get rid of the apostrophe, at least.
Oh, I did somewhat change the grammar, so I’ll post a new gloss for this.
This has got to be the strangest interlinear gloss I’ve ever done, but it does make the structure much easier to see.
You can see the ABC for this here. (I gave up on code blocks.)
I wouldn’t exactly call it “musical”, since it doesn’t have much melodic or harmonic structure, it just uses notes as phonemes. I think that’s fine though, it’s not actually meant to sound musical, it’s meant to sound very un-human, being as it is a language which came directly from an entirely different deity than the one which created fleshy beings.
If I ever compose poems or spells in it, I think I will try to make those at least sound a little musical, but conversational use can sound like whatever.
Also, I never mentioned this before, but all the Sůṙjafia have perfect pitch. It’s kind of necessary to having a language based on absolute pitches.
I still can’t figure out how to change the instrument to an organ, though. None of the programs I tried worked for me. I really didn’t expect that to be the sticking point.
This is fascinating and I love how you put it all together!
This is so creative and so thorough, I love it. A great approach at making an otherworldly un-human language.
Do they have anything like musical notation themselves? Do they have music in our sense, focusing on melodies and harmonies?
I haven’t yet worked out the orthography for Jafren, but I’m sure it will have some form of one. I might actually make a logography/syllabary-like instead of a phonetic writing system, though. Or some sort of compromise system, maybe like Japanese’s parallel orthographies? I’ll think about it some more. I feel like this language has the potential for a really interesting writing system and mimicking Western staff notation would just squander it.
As far as musical art forms, I imagine that theirs would be more similar to spoken poetry than to song. It would borrow its musicality from the careful use of the language itself, like metrical poetry, rather than altering the sounds of words to be more musical as singing does. It would mostly focus on melody and rhythm, and maybe rhyme, but not much on harmony. One thing to note about the major pentatonic scale is that there simply aren’t any very dissonant chords. I think that not having them would make some of the basic ideas of Western music harder to apply, such as functional harmony. I need to look more into non-Western cultures’ musical traditions though, because I don’t know much about them. I actually don’t even know all that much about Western music, I just watch a lot of 12tone videos.
I’m glad that this language is being so well-received.