Kamakawi Word of the Day

i elea

• (expr.) hi, hello, welcome, greetings

I elea, he Lilana!
“Welcome, Leland!”

Notes: This post was preempted by my post about the 2010 Smiley Award, which itself preempted my post about Sylvia’s birthday, and then it was preempted again by Caturday (which, of course, preempts all), but now there’s nothing to preempt it!

Back on the first, Leland Paul Kusmer started a brand new project which sounds fascinating. It’s called the Monthly Conlang Project. He’s going to learn a new conlang every month with the intention of being able to translate a short piece (or two) into that conlang at the end of it. For the his first month, he’s chosen to learn Kamakawi.

In the meantime, I’m going to try my darnedest to expand what information is available for Kamakawi online (especially the vocabulary in the lexicon and corpus). And, what’s more, I’m going to actually really do it this time, as opposed to just saying that I’m going to actually really do it.

That’s the goal, anyway. I make no promises, in case I’m called upon to fight in some sort of gigantic space war. I’m led to believe that these things not only can happen, but have happened. Many times.

In the past few weeks.

Probably.

kavaka

• (v.) to write
• (n.) writing
• (n.) a piece of writing (of some kind)
• (adj.) writing

A kavaka ie hala’i o ei.
“Writing is my life.”

Notes: Yesterday’s post forced me to gloss over the fact that it was Sylvia Sotomayor’s birthday. Happy belated birthday, Sylvia!

Sylvia is the woman behind the Kēlen Word of the Day: The blog that started the whole conlang word of the day thing (though I take credit for suggesting the idea to Sylvia in the first place ). It’s been a lot of fun learning about Kēlen over the past…wow, almost a year! But there’s a special reason to tune into Sylvia’s blog now.

You see, yesterday Sylvia arrived in Australia to attend WorldCon: a large convention of science-fiction and other things I’ve recently been made aware of. On the Kēlen Word of the Day blog, Sylvia will be keeping track of her progress, posting a word a day, per usual, but also including a picture from Australia, and some details about her travels. As one who hates to travel, this is top notch for me: I get to see Australia, and I don’t have to leave the house!

So check it out! It should be a fun month to hear about how things are going down under.

Oh, duh, I almost forgot! The sample sentence was done in honor of Sylvia. See, it’s a sentence without verbs, in honor of Kēlen, the verbless language! There was a method to this madness, I swear!

As for this word, it certainly does look like it was derived from kava, the word for “fire”, but you want to know the real secret? The word for “write” comes from Franz Kafka: One of my favorite authors. If you were to render “Kafka” in Kamakawi, it would come out “Kavaka”.

Of course, Franz Kafka doesn’t exist in the world where Kamakawi is spoken, but that’s just fine by me. After all, it’s a legitimate word form. And the derivation (fake or otherwise) is one I love. In fact, I love everything about this word. I’m going to give it a smiley face of some kind. There we go.

imali

• (adj.) curious
• (v.) to be curious
• (n.) curiosity

He ma’a ti imali.
“Wisdom begins in wonder.”

Notes: The phrase is Socrates’, but it doubles as the first text on David Bell’s website. Since I was asked to post about it here, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve awarded the 2010 Smiley Award to David Bell’s ámman îar.

Sadly, David Bell is no longer with us. He died a few years ago, though we only learned about it within the last week. His language ámman îar is one of the best artlangs I’ve seen anywhere on the internet, and it saddened me greatly to see his site (graywizard.net) go offline a couple years back. To try to preserve his work, I’ve reconstructed his website and put it back up at graywizard.conlang.org. If you have a minute, I recommend you go check out his reference grammar for ámman îar. Though incomplete, it’s still one of the best conlang descriptions that exists on the web.

Though he can’t be here to read it, congratulations to David! His language was a true achievement, and I’m going to try my best to make sure it’s not forgotten.

ti’a

• (n.) time
• (v.) to take time, to last

Male ale ti’a li’ia ko!
“Your time will come!”

Notes: What a triumphant return this was! This is the refrain from a true classic:

Number 6
“The Wicker Man”

Brave New World (2000)

Wow. Now the release of this song was an event.

To give you some background, the first Iron Maiden album I bought was The X Factor, which came out in 1995. This was the first album with their third studio lead singer Blaze Bayley. Being a fan of metal, I had heard of Iron Maiden, and heard they were great, so I picked up this album and tried it out.

It was terrible.

The first song, “The Sign of the Cross”, had promise, but thereafter, the off-key caterwauling of Bayley and the uninspired song writing left me cold. I immediately wrote Iron Maiden off as a band that had aged and was no longer any good (and, perhaps, was never any good). It wasn’t until, by chance, I heard “Run to the Hills” on a metal show on a local radio station that I decided to give them another chance. I proceeded to get their earlier albums, and the rest was history.

The discovery that Iron Maiden was one of the best metal bands in history, however, made me sad, more than anything else, because I thought, “Wow. This band was so good, and I missed them!” Bruce Dickinson was gone, and the band was…well, writing songs like “Fortunes of War” (or “Como Estais Amigos”, for that matter).

Then came the year 2000. On the radio, I heard an advertisement for Iron Maiden playing a concert, which struck me as odd (why would a non-metal radio station be advertising a concert of a band that had lost its way so irrevocably?), until they played a brief snippet of the chorus of “The Wicker Man”: “Your time will come!”

That was Bruce Dickinson; it was unmistakable. But is this some song I hadn’t heard before—some B-side? I thought. Unlikely. But does that mean that—! And, sure enough, it was true: Bruce Dickinson was back. And…wow.

It wasn’t like a return to form. It was much more than that. “The Wicker Man” opens with a single guitar playing some riffs that sound faded, distant; a little unimpressive. And then at the end of the measure a second guitar comes in loud and forceful, and there’s no looking back from there. This song grabs you by the throat and reminds you why you listen to metal, and why it’s good to be alive. And the best thing is that the rest of the album is fantastic. Iron Maiden didn’t reunite to get more money, or to produce some songs that sounded like the old ones, but to take the band to new heights undreamt of prior. This wasn’t a new Iron Maiden album, but a new classic. After a terrible hiatus, they came back and produced some of the best songs they’ve ever recorded, and this is the best of the bunch.

And, just to further illustrate how everything’s coming on back, I got the chance to see Iron Maiden (with Bruce Dickinson) a few years back in San Diego. Now I just need to see David Bowie and I’ll be set!

The iku for ti’a is very close to the original iku for ha; there’s just an added line. You can kind of see the ti in there, but its presence is barely noticeable. The result, though, is pretty cool, I think.

I’ve always been uncomfortable coining words for “time” in conlangs. They demand a lot of attention; a lot of thought. I think that’s why this word’s definition hasn’t been elaborated very much. The word should bespeak a system, or at least bring a long with it a host of other words. These words will help to shape the culture in important ways. Words for time, and related concepts, can’t be coined lightly. I think it’s for that reason that I always leave them until last, and spend so much time avoiding them. (For example, I haven’t even touched time in Dothraki.) Some day I’ll work it all out.

eine

• (n.) woman
• (n.) wife
• (adj.) female

-ne

• (suf.) feminine suffix

A male li Eine Lila i ia!
“Iron Maiden’s gonna get you!”

Notes: Hey, it’s August 16th! Know what that means? Legendary heavy metal band Iron Maiden’s new album The Final Frontier is out! In honor of this, their fifteenth studio album, I’m going to count down my personal top ten Iron Maiden songs on the Kamakawi Word of the Day blog.

I understand that most, if not all, of those of you who read this blog don’t listen to metal at all, and may have never heard a single Iron Maiden song. I also know, though, that many (again, if not most) of you are fans of fantasy and science-fiction. What I shall try to argue over the coming days is that heavy metal is intended to be listened to in a way that’s fundamentally different from other forms of music, and, furthermore, that the following analogy holds:

other music : heavy metal :: other literature : science-fiction/fantasy

The countdown will start tomorrow (I need to get the new album and see if I need to readjust my top ten). In the meantime, you can check out this Wikipedia article on their recent documentary. It’s pretty cool. They filmed this particular tour because they were doing shows in a bunch of places they’d never been before for logistics reasons. What made it work this time is that their lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, chartered his own plane and flew the band around from place to place.

I’ve called this iku an ikunoala, even though you can’t quite see the ne in it. I really like the way this one turned out, but I think I got confused when designing it. At the time, I think I saw the lower stick going the opposite direction… That would’ve made the ne more recognizable.

This iku doubles as the feminine suffix. The feminine suffix has a very limited distribution. It enjoys some use here and there with family terms, and I think with chickens… I must be tired. To sleep! Big day of translating and Iron Maiden-listening tomorrow.

feyo

• (v.) to play (a game or something similar)

U nai ie iveyo u male feyo…
“We know the game and we’re gonna play it…”

Notes: I was convinced that this line wasn’t going to work out well, but it did! Basically I ditched the “it”, figuring it was implied, and what this translates as is “We know the game and we’re going to play”. Not bad!

Heh, heh… Here’s another win for the internet. Check out www.yougotrickrolled.com. For those of us who watched the World Cup earlier this summer, it’ll bring back some…“fond” memories.

ima

• (part.) used for emphasis
• (v.) used as a way for repeating previously given commands
• (expr.) a kind of exhortative used to incite others to action

A toko eli ti’i ima…
“Gotta make you understand…”

Notes: And the total teardown is complete!

This sentence actually means “My love is very strong”. Combined with the last phrase, I translated “I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling / Gotta make you understand” as “I’m going to convince you / That my love is very strong”. That’s basically the same thing (one has to admit that the original is pretty content-less).

The exciting chorus is coming up next!

This iku enjoys a lot of use, but I’m not quite sure how it works. It kind of looks like ma when you add the vertical line, but not enough to call this an ikunoala. Thus I stuck it in the “other” category.

Here’s an amusing pie chart I found over at Richie’s Randoms. I think the best part about this graphic is it makes absolutely no sense as a pie chart at all.

favatu

• (n.) rule(s), ruleset, instruction(s), guideline(s)

Fe’a'u favatu ti ia oi’i…
“You know the rules and so do I…”

Notes: Continuing with my translation of Rick Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, we have a word derived from another word I just recently posted (fancy that! It usually works the other way around…). In case you’re curious about how a partial reduplication of “number” can get us to “rules”, it comes from the sense of fatu that means “orderly” and “obedient”. The favatu are what you’re supposed to do or follow. If you do, you’re fatu.

One thing that a number of conlangers (myself included) are having trouble with when it comes to translating this song is keeping with the meter. The problem has nothing to do with the conlangers, but could have something to do with our native language(s). English (and German as well) have a lot of content words that are monosyllabic. One thing I’ve noticed is that many of us conlangers who have a Germanic language as our first language tend to create languages that are just the opposite. Take Latin, for example. You can count the number of monosyllabic content words on two hands and a foot—and even those aren’t always monosyllabic (rex, “king”, is monosyllabic, but put that word anywhere in a sentence other than subject position, and there it goes!). It’s this type of language, it seems to me, that Germanic-speaking conlangers go for; there aren’t many like English or Chinese.

So think about the first part of the line above: “You know the rules.” Without even knowing the exact words, I can look at that clause and tell you that it will be six syllables at the minimum in Kamakawi. Why? Because there are three content words: “you”, “know” and “rules”. There are fewer than 40 content words that are monosyllabic in Kamakawi, and I pretty much have them memorized, which means that each of these words will be at least two syllables long, giving us at least six syllables—and probably more. That’s two more syllables than the English line already, and we haven’t even gotten to the “and so do I” part.

Rather than try to translate it piece by piece, then, I changed the line to get as close to the meter as possible. I changed it, essentially, to “The rules are known by you and me.” Passivizing eats up a syllable, true, and “rules” turns out to be three syllables. But getting rid of a verb in the second half of the clause really frees things up. For an eight syllable line, then, I cut it down to twelve in Kamakawi, which itself can be cut down to ten in singing by cramming a couple things together (ti ia can become tia), and those extra two syllables can be throw in during a second or two when there’s no singing.

While I’m translating the song, I’m going to link to some of my favorite Rick Roll stuff online. Today, I’ll link to my favorite Rick Roll video: The Muppets’ Rick Roll Video. Enjoy!

eli

• (v.) to love, to be in love with
• (n.) love
• (adj.) loving

Oku keili eya ie eli…
“We’re no strangers to love…”

Notes: Oh snap! You all have just been Rick Rolled!

This isn’t coming out of nowhere, though. A few days ago, on the Rejistanian Word of the Day Blog, friend of the KWOTD Rejistania posted an entire translation of the (in)famous Rick Astley song. She then challenged me to translate it into Kamakawi, and I’ve picked up the gauntlet!

The problem with this translation (i.e. if one were to use the translation and sing the song live) is meter. It’s not difficult to rhyme in Kamakawi (only five vowels, eight consonants), but words can accrue a number of syllable that can’t be easily jettisoned. Take this first line. “We’re no strangers to love” is six syllables. The Kamakawi translation above is eleven syllables. Yikes! One can get away with running ie eli together in song, but that’s still ten. Removing the pronoun eya would render eight, but then there’s no clear way to get the “we” in there… Plus, with no previous referent, the sentence would sound really, really odd.

One might imagine that oku could get shortened to o, but that only buys us one syllable (nine).

Hmmm… But on testing, one can add ie eli (elided) as an afterthought after eya. It would occur after the word “love” in the English and before the start of the next line. I think one would have to do that (and will have to do that for the rest of the song) to make this work (either that or translate stanzas as a whole and cut them up in a different manner from the way the song does, contentwise). We’ll see how I manage!

Oddly enough, the most interesting word in this line is keili, but since I haven’t done “love” yet, I felt I should (it’s a good word to know). I’ll get to keili later.

The iku for eli is a straight-up ikunoala with a little V for e placed on top of the glyph for li. I think it’s a fortuitous combination, as the resultant glyph looks nice. I also like how it incorporates the “giving” hand. Well, actually, it’s kind of a “giving” and a “taking” hand, but that’s what love is, after all.

noala

• (v.) to sing (archaic meaning to make a noise)
• (n.) song
• (n.) singing
• (adj.) singing
• (n.) sound (technical)

Noala ei tie kepo iviki.
“I sing the body electric.”

Notes: This is the first line of one of the sections of Walt Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass. The syntax in English is a bit odd, and doesn’t make immediate sense unless you recognize its ancestry in Latin verse (cf. the first line of Virgil‘s The Aeneid Arma virumque cano, “Arms and the man I sing”, where both “arms” and “man” are in the accusative). In Latin, certainly, this meant something (where the subject of one’s song could serve as the direct object); in English, that’s not as certain. Perhaps if it were translated for sense, it would come out to something like “I sing about the body electric”, but that doesn’t really have the same ring…

Anyway, in Kamakawi, I figured since it’s a matter of an extra letter (not even an extra syllable), ti would make more sense here than the direct object marker i. It’s an instrumental, true, but it also marks sources frequently, and that’s what I think of when I read this: The cause of the poem is the body—the source of its inspiration. Ti, then would seem most appropriate.

But back to the point of this entry, a commenter asked yesterday what the overall letter frequency of Kamakawi was. I didn’t have this information immediately available, as Jim Henry, who did the initial analysis, focused on syllables rather than letters. This makes sense for Kamakawi, whose base unit is really the syllable (there aren’t even any codas), but it made me work a bit to get the letter frequency of Kamakawi. Nevertheless, I have done so, and I’ve presented the results below (which, I have to admit, took me quite by surprise!):

Okay, before I comment, a couple of explanations first. In order for the count to work, Jim redid the intervocalic sound changes (so all instances of V became F and all instances of ‘ became H). He kept, however, both Y and W as phonemes. I think this is probably something one ought to do, since there are minimal pairs, but even those minimal pairs aren’t straightforward (the ones that don’t have the glide are often morphologically complex). In the overall syllable count statistics he came up with, then, I counted all occurrences of Y and W as I and U respectively. That, I think, gives a more accurate count.

Also, when I was doing the stats yesterday, the numbers didn’t add up to 100%. I had to do a little tweaking to get it to work, so I though to avoid that today, I’d take the numbers out to two decimal places. And wouldn’t you know it! The count added up to 100.58%! How does that happen?! So what I did was I subtracted six hundredths from the top six, and then subtracted four hundredths from each row. That probably won’t affect the percentages too much; it’s still fairly accurate…

Okay, now for the results! First, no one should be surprised that the first five spots are taken by the five vowels. Kamakawi is a language that allows one onset consonant maximum, and no codas. This means that every syllable in Kamakawi will have at least one vowel but at most one consonant. Since there are tons of syllables that have no consonants at all, it’s no shock that the vowels dominate the count. I’m also not surprised to see A on top of the list. Even with the prevalence of words beginning with the i- prefix, if one looks at all environments, I think there’s no question that A would win out.

I have to tell you, though, what absolutely shocked me was that L beat out K as the top phoneme. If you asked me yesterday what the most common consonant was in Kamakawi, I would’ve responded K, and would have done so immediately. I can’t believe L won out! It must be all the causative suffixes…

What I found next most surprising is how little there is of T and N those are two of the most common consonants in English—and with good reason (the alveolar ridge is the richest place of articulation in the human mouth, and its consonants are favored the world over—especially in inflectional morphology). Oh well. Perhaps it’s the Hawaiian influence creeping in (for T, of course, not for N).

I’m not surprised to see F/V at the bottom. It’s certainly the least common sound in Kamakawi. But I am surprised that H/’ wasn’t higher, and that P is so low. If I were to put it ahead of anything, I would’ve put it ahead of M, but take a look at M, up there as the third most common consonant! That I never would have guessed.

So, there you have it! The phoneme frequencies of Kamakawi. Again, this is based on an older form of the lexicon, so it’s not 100% up-to-date, but I expect that, for the most part, this pattern will hold.