Kakallian: a Bird Conlang from the World of Shavor
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- oOOOOOooo so you guys think you can do better than me? I doubt it. I DOUBT IT! Actually just show up. You won't. Y'all need to start fearing me, otherwise bad things are gonna start happening.
In this episode, Zzineohp expands on his Phonology of birds, by engaging in the Morphology of birds, and the nitty-gritty of phonology as it applies to linguistics, rather than the raw analysis of sounds. but first, why are birds talking? Who else is talking? Are they talking to each other? All this and more in another episode of Top Gear.
0:00 Introduction
0:19 Lore
2:12 Consonants
2:34 Vowels
4:37 Allopneumics
5:16 Nominals
6:44 Verbs
7:47 Example Sentence
predatory animals mimicking human* speech is crazy
Bro just casually dropped alternative Splatoon lore to make a conlang
bro really said "Ok then, here’s the intro. I made 2 videos about animal phonologies, and I received at least one vaguely intrigued comment. So, bet. Here are some animal Conlangs. But first a word from our sponsor, AirUp!
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One of the things I’d like to do is set out some lore. The Wandering Island of Shavor is one of 7 factions in the world of Terra Mokra. The premise is, humans die out, probably the raptor or something, and sea level dropped-not just back to pre-industrial levels, but it dropped HARD. Which bring me to the sea squirt. So, as sea level drops, tunicates become a staple of the intertidal. Using the push and pull of waves rather than their own siphon action brings them closer to the surface, but also makes them reactive to the environment-it gives them a reason to stay, at least partially, motile in their adult stage. But like I said, they’d need a lot of pollen to fully emerge from the surf. Probably even a symbiotic relationship with plants. But I’ve got a remedy for that, too.
So, one of the rarely discussed features of global warming is the replacement of coastal salt marshes with mangrove swamps. Mangrove is a blanket term for any salt-adapted tree. Mangroves easily outcompete shrubs when they come into conflict-however, they can’t survive cold temperatures. Global warming eradicates those, and the mangroves spread. Without humans, global warming stops going up, but it doesn’t just disappear. The mangroves are here to stay, and tunicates gradually climb from the sea, to feed on pollen. But that’s not what I’m focusing on today. The point of turning Sea Squirts into Sky Squirts was so that they could use wind and their pharyngeal slits to make vibrations. They can use this to mimic bird calls. They lure in birds, and supplement their diet by FEEDING ON THEM.
Now. Is any of this likely? No, but the rapture exists in this universe, so cut me some slack. Birds learn to avoid this by creating more complex calls. The tunicates respond with more mimicry, and so on and so forth. It was under these circumstances that birds first evolved spoken language. Now, language emerged 8 separate times, today we’re only examining one that evolved in Ravens in Florida and the Coastal Plain. At the time we view Terra Mokra, these languages are still in their infancy-Shavorese is almost definitely a Proto-Language. Now, the language we observe today, Kakallian, is much less, infinite, than Shavorese-but, I still get to use 3D geometry to explain the phonology. So let’s go!
So if you watched the last video, birds are very limited in terms of consonants. They basically have 9 distinct consonants, Of which Kakallian uses these 3, represented using these symbols, and consonants can only appear in the onset, so they’re referred to as “hard attacks,” even thought that term means something different in English. But a majority of the vowels in Kakallian are just in hiatus, rubbing against each other. So let’s talk about those vowels?
Kakallian has 9 distinct vowel phonemes. This is fewer than most bird languages, but still confusing for humans, seeing as birds have no soft palate, no larynx, and have a giant hole in their hard palate. But as I’ve said, vowels is just frequencies. In humans we control these frequencies using various mouth shapes, but you can replicate it on different hardware. Blah blah blah, Comforting british man explains it better than grating American boy.
Birds, rather than a single human larynx, have a syrinx divided into 3 segments, each of which can operate separately, so they could extend the vowel quadrilateral into a 3! D! cube! Well, obviously, you can tell shapes, it’s a triangle, not a square. Why? Well, let’s look at a simplified version, using binary for “low” and “high.” In that case, the cardinal vowels are [u] at (0,0), [a] at (1,1), and [i] at (0, 1). Now, F1 is the lowest frequency, and F2 is the second lowest, you can’t really hear anything to the left of 1,1, you just know that F2 is “high.” Anything to the right of a is 1, 0, and if you think about it for a second, you’ll realize that the lowest frequency can’t be higher than the second lowest frequency. So, 3 cardinal vowels, and if you add a 3rd frequency, it has to be higher than both F1 AND F2. It has only 1 option where it can be less than 1. That creates 1 new cardinal vowel, what shall we call it? Well, [u˞], because it already exists. The 3rd axis is r-coloration. As promised, this…uh…pyramid, type thing is the 3d vowel space. Now, u˞ is uncomfortably “heavy” in the mouth, ɚ, which is not a cardinal, is about as deep as you wanna go, but birds have better hearing, so they might be fine with going deeper." 💀💀💀
That's crazyy
Brainrot
I think in world of birds "pretty" would be masculine and "handsome" would be feminine due how bird sexual dimorphism typically. Although that probably doesn't apply to Kakallian, as common ravens lack coloration sexual dimorphism. Also, have have the tunicates evolved to not lose their brains as adults or have they developed some different strategy to coordinate muscle movement to produce complex sounds?
Honestly, I don't think they would be in the practice of complimenting women on their looks, the word just wouldn't have parallel whatsoever. I'm assuming the tunicates would have some sort of decentralized nervous system, similar to a Starfish, and can only repeat hard-coded patterns.
I can’t believe you introduced us to a bird slur the same week the pope said a gay slur again
Though ravens are known to use their syrinx to mimic consonants that humans make, so there's that. I think their mouth would take a back seat.
well but it's their native language they're not mimicking anything
@@Vitor-oj8ow yes, but due to the versatility of their syrinx, they would likely not limit the syrinx to simple vowel sounds but also pseudo-consonants.
ok this is actually wild and I love it
God I love this
Most birds do not have better hearing; their hearing is sub-par compared to ours with them having a lower upper limit to frequency and the quietest they can hear is 20 dB.
4:37 burst out laughing.. great video!
I love that
Hello Mr zzineohp
hello sir phoenizz
A world with EIGHT separate origins of language? I'm curious how different they are. Anyway, nice worldbuilding! Using ingressive-egressive switching to distinguish too neighboring vowels is a spectacular way to use bird parts!
6:27 OK but what happens if you want to talk shit about a woman? Do you have to make all the prescriptivists cry?
Well ideally, but in practice you just have to use nouns and verbs, i.e. "she is an idiot"
Loved the occasional gsm interference in the background
i fforgot i had a magnet on my desk, and ya boi is BUZZING
Hello mr. Rizzler
Shouldn't there be tones? birds are pretty well known for singing.
And can reptiles also get speech too? i mean they're pretty related to birds.
lol Aurora reference
ABSOLUTELY MAKE MORE CONLAŊS LIKE ÐIS
/bΛt ækſUli ðıs ız ei rıli kul aidiΛ kip ıt Λp/
(btw strut is a stand in for schwa as i dont have a schwa on ðis keyboard)
Because of well... ravens don't have anything down there except an all-in-one chute and males and females look the same, the self-determination and self-identification would generally be only the only way to determine gender, unless they use stuff like X-rays to see if the birb has an ovary or a pair of testes (or intersex gonads).