#kamakawi

[dedalvs]

what does Imeimei mean? are you somebody's meimei?

In 2001 I started work on a language called Kamakawi. In it, there is a word mei which means "to stay". Meimei means something like "to be left over", "to still be around". Imeimei means "leftovers", or "that which remains". At the time, this Tumblr was whatever I wasn't doing on other social media platforms. Now it is, rather prophetically, one of the only ones I have left, and I'd really rather not leave it.

Speaking of Tumblr and what's been going on very recently, I'd like to say that trans individuals have the right to exist, the trans community has the right to exist, and addressing someone how they wish to be addressed isn't as big an imposition as it's made out to be. After all, most of the time if you're addressing someone directly, you don't have to worry about pronouns, because we have the all-encompassing, all-gender, all-number pronoun YOU that rather neatly takes care of everything. The only time you really have to worry about pronouns is when you're talking about someone, at which point you can decide how much of an ass you want to be. It would be nice, though, if when we decide to insult someone, we insulted them based on what they do or say, rather than what they are, and it should be taken as the very bare minimum of decency to refer to someone how they want to be referred to. Much of the discussion we all have as humans about other humans occurs without the knowledge of those we're referring to, so frankly, misgendering someone in private conversation doesn't hurt them: it makes you look either ignorant or vile—or both. Mistakes happen, of course (in fact, I'd wager every single person on the planet has been misgendered at least once, cis or trans or nonbinary. I'm a cismale and always have been, but I've gotten my shares of accidental "ma'am"'s in a store), and mistakes are fine, but they should be genuine, honest mistakes, not "mistakes" ("Oh, my stars, did I use those pronouns? Oh, how clumsy of me!"), and certainly not intentional. I don't have any other way to say it: It really is the bare minimum of common decency, and being basically decent to one another should be a goal we all strive towards.

#conlang #kamakawi #language #trans rights

[atomicladyshark]

Somewhere over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World - Israel IZ Kamakawi...

#youtube

[tori60]

Somewhere over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World - Israel IZ Kamakawi...

#youtube

[tori51]

Somewhere over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World - Israel IZ Kamakawi...

#youtube

[whitefeathermfg]

early centruray Palaka from the Barbara Kamakawi Collection 

[occasionalconlanger-blog]

For anyone curious, the languages used are, in no particular order:

Malayalam, Amharic, Castithan, English, Shivaisith [ I can’t type the diacritics ], Irish Gaelic, Greek, Arabic, Finnish; Kamakawi and Japanese [ Hiragana ] can be partially be seen, and a bunch of others were cut off entirely.

Castithan, Shivaisith and Kamakawi are conlangs by David J. Peterson (@dedalvs).

[prismrain]

good p5 ships so far (I just got to the 6th palace so I can look back later if shit goes bad and regret these)

akira/ryuji/ann akira/ann ryuji/ann akira/ryuji akira/yusuke ann/makoto makoto/haru yusuke/futaba possibly… idk I just like their interactions a lot so far

akira/makoto and akira/haru are probably cute as well but I haven’t finished their confidants yet (and I’m not gonna romance them til next playthrough since i already romanced ann and I don’t need my ass kicked on valentines). I like the shogi girl so far (hifumi). fortune teller girl is ok so far. not a huge fan of kamakawi. takemi is great and is one of my favorites so far but I wish instead of romancing her she was like “call me in a few years”. same with ohya I wish she would just say “hey maybe we should grab a drink when you can finally buy me one”. I wish yusuke was a dating option…. him and mishima (at the very least) really should have been.

#i need a text tag or something .... #p5 /// #in case anyone is blocking anything about the game #p5 thoughts

[dedalvs]

what is your profile picture? i assume it's a character (maybe a logograph?) from a script of yours, but which one, and what does it mean?

It's a glyph from my old language Kamakawi. It stands for kala, which is a verb for "to speak". Kamakawi is the first language I did a logographic system for.

#conlang #language #kamakawi #dedalvs #orthography

[dedalvs]

do you have any tips for creating a font for a logographic conscript?

Yes: Create a classification/call up system. I created a logographic font for Kamakawi (in fact, my icon is one of the glyphs), and despite the fact that I feel like I could do a better job now, I think I did a pretty decent job with the design of the glyphs and the system. The one thing I absolutely did NOT do well is design a useable font. Since, at the time, you could only really access the characters you could type using lower case, upper case, alt, and alt + upper case (as well as the numbers), you only had access to ≈100 characters for a font. Furthermore, characters would be in random places. To expand the number of characters I could access, I made italic, bold, and bold+italic versions of the Kamakawi font that didn't actually italicize or bold the font at all: They brought up different character sets.

So, take, for example, the keystroke <l> (that's an ell). By typing it in various combinations, you could get all the following:

Regular (lower case): syllabic glyph for [la]

Regular (upper case): syllabic glyph for [lo]

Regular (alt): the agentive infix [-li-]

Regular (alt + upper case): the causative suffix [-le]

Italic (lower case): glyph for [eli] "to love"

Italic (upper case): glyph for [peka] "land"

Italic (alt): glyph for [poi] "scarcity"

Italic (alt + upper case): glyph for [elu] "long"

Bold (lower case): glyph for [kilika] "lobster"

Bold (upper case): glyph for [kala] "to speak"

Bold (alt): glyph for [tiki] "lava"

Bold (alt + upper case): glyph for [noe] "leaf"

Bold Italic (lower case): glyph for [maʔa] "to learn"

Bold Italic (upper case): glyph for [tama] "leg"

Bold Italic (alt): glyph for [halaʔi] "life"

Bold Italic (alt + upper case): glyph for [ite] "shortness of breath"

And it took me, like, 15 minutes to find all these, because that's how hard it is to manage this "system" which isn't a system at all.

For High Valyrian, I created a much simpler system. It goes like this:

Type #

Type a word in English

Type another #

Then the font automatically returns the glyph you need.

Now, I have to program every word in there as a contextual ligature, but my GOD is it worth it. Plus I have a full list detailing each glyph, what words it's used for, what words can be used to call it up in the font, etc. This is the organization system that Kamakawi desperately needed, but I had no idea how to do it.

So, that's my advice for creating a font that features logographs. If you don't have a way to organize all the glyphs, I promise you, you'll lose some of them. I need to catalog Kamakawi's glyphs at some point (maybe do a new font...). Eh. Someday.

#conlang #language #kamakawi #high valyrian #valyrian #orthography #font making

[dedalvs]

Hey David! I've always been curious about what you do for a living betwen conlangs. do you have a main job? do you have many? of course you don't have to answer if you don't wanna :P Also this may be old but I really love your page on Kamakawi baby names!

Thank you! I like them, too! I've been waiting to hear someone named their baby something in Kamakawi. I think some of them are very nice. :) (For those curious, the page is here.)

And the answer to your other question is no, I don't have another job. This is all I do. In fact, my daughter has a rather unique long form birth certificate, I think, since under the profession of the father I got to write "language creator". Had nothing else to write! lol

#conlang #kamakawi

[dedalvs]

Well now I HAVE to ask how to say/write "chicken" in your various languages!

Oh here we go...

🐔🐥🐤🐣🐓

Azrán: upózh

Bodzvokhan: dǝq

Castithan: chikano (< English)

Dothraki: jiz

Hen Linge: mak

High Valyrian: ñoves (rooster), qulbes (hen)

Irathient: tisese

Kamakawi: iki (animal), i'iki (food)

Méníshè: t'òdír

Noalath: vokach

Övüsi: kuge

Ravkan: shuk (rooster), shuka (hen)

Trigedasleng: omi (generic), egleya (hen)

Yulish: bökki

Zemeni: wela

Zhyler: levžel

That's not all of them, but that's a lot of them!

(Btw, I was sitting here coming up with this list, and @quothalinguist glances at it and is instantly like, "You're coming up with words for 'chicken'? Méníshè's got one!' And, of course, she was right!)

#veenilla #conlang #azrán #bodzvokhan #castithan #dothraki #hen linge #high valyrian #valyrian #menishe #méníshè #noalath #ovusi #öv��si #trigedasleng #trig #the100 #got #game of thrones #house of the dragon #hotd #into the badlands #switches #motherland #motherland fort salem #fort salem #bright #clexa #defiance #irathient

[dedalvs]

your Kitty looks like my Mr Fuzz Ball, just a bit less fuzzy. he is a Large Boy doing his best ‘i’m so cute, tiny and light, please pick me up and hold me and carry me around for an hour without break, or i will walk in your way and squawk at you so loudly people down the road might hear it’ look right here. he is my darling boy.

Awwwww! I love Mr. Fuzz Ball! And yes, the key difference is in the tail. Kelli’s tail is long and thin and wonderful (hence her name, Keli, the Kamakawi word for “tail”). Here’s a great shot that shows off her tail:

One more:

I LOVE Mr. Fuzz Ball’s tail! Soft like a feather boa! Thanks for sharing him!

#cat #cats #black cat #black cats #there are two of them

[dedalvs]

This might be because I'm tempted to introduce you and your work to my followers but am personally aware of how even very impressive work (like your GoT langs) can still be a complication for the artist in the present, by virtue of being Past work., but I wanted to ask what your thoughts on that are? like where do you see conlanging in 15 years, as a thing ppl are interested in

These seem to be two different questions, and I wish you would've elaborated a bit more on the first, as it could mean a number of different things. I'm always delighted to talk about old work (although since House of the Dragon is currently airing, Valyrian is kind of current work, isn't it?), because I can remember what it was like to create it. I may not think some language I created a long while back is the best language, but I can remember why I was doing it, what the goals were, and how I executed them, and I can always talk about that. I don't see that as a bad thing. I guess someone might be worried about people only being interested in their old work and not their new, but that's not a big deal. Time usually evens things out, as long as you're still at it. And if you go somewhere new, there will be a new audience to await you and be excited about what you're doing.

Think about something like Twin Peaks, for example. Richard Beymer plays a character named Ben Horne. Twin Peaks was, like, the IT show for a while, and everyone who had a major (or even minor) role in it became famous—like, next level famous (talking about the 90s). For a lot of people, that is how they know who Richard Beymer is—an older guy who played Ben Horne on Twin Peaks. But he also played a character named Tony (i.e. the male lead) in the movie West Side Story—and, in fact, was nominated for the Golden Globe for best actor. If it's the year 1962 and you're talking about Richard Beymer, you're talking about the West Side Story guy. That was his thing! That was the ONLY thing he was known for! And it was a big thing, and he did a great job. And he did other work in the intervening thirty years between West Side Story and Twin Peaks, but for a while, he was only the West Side Story guy. Then Twin Peaks happens, and younger fans are like, "What's West Side Story…?"

I suppose as an artist there's a concern that if you do it once, you may not be able to do it again. And then let's say you do it twice. Could you do it a third time? And maybe you do it three times, but it was five years, and you were hot then. What about ten years later? Will that be it?

All this stuff is just thinking. It's intangible. If it does nothing to help you, then banish the thinking: Let it in, hear what it has to say, then send it on its way and allow your brain to move on to other things. If your brain gets caught up with thinking like this it won't move on to other things, and those "other things" are what you could be doing now.

The nice thing about creating a language is a language is never done. All the languages I've created for shows are still current, for me. I'm still working on them. None of them have errors or quirks so bad that I don't want to work on them anymore, and I think that's a real sign of success as a conlanger. The languages I created before that, only one would I still work with (Kamakawi); the rest need a total overhaul. (In fact, that was part of the inspiration for LangTime Studio: I wanted to give some of my old languages that I still liked an overhaul. Instead, Jessie and I created brand new ones, and they're even better.)

I don't really know where conlanging will be in 15 years, because right now, it's kind of a mess. There's too much going on and no way to focus in on any one thing—and no way to figure out who's doing what. That means it's harder to find and recognize good stuff. That situation is unsustainable. Conlangers will either give up (imagine a huge crowd gathered to shout for the attention of the queen who's on tour, only the queen never shows up, because there is no queen), or something will happen that allows the community to focus its attention and say, "This is good! Let's look at this for a little bit." Like, music is coming out every day, but we have award shows, we have radio stations, we have movies and shows and commercials that feature music, we have artists curating lists, in addition to self-promotion, of course. Right now we have movies and shows that feature conlangs, but while every show and film has music, not every show and film has a conlang. Then outside of that there's self-promotion. It's not working. Good work isn't being ignored: It's not being found. There's an important difference there. It's not like we all know what the best conlangs are right now and we're choosing not to say anything about them: We literally don't know what or where they are. That's what isn't sustainable.

So yeah, I don't know what's going to happen in the next 15 years. Someone needs to find a solution to this. And it's hard, because there's no one place on the internet where everyone goes. There's no guarantee that anyone's going to see anything. It's not like the old days, where everyone watched what was on TV, and everyone read the newspaper.

Not sure if these were the answers you were looking for, but I hope they serve you well. <3

#conlang #dick-nymph #valyrian #high valyrian #got #game of thrones #hotd #house of the dragon

[dedalvs]

welcome back! i’ve really been enjoying langtime studio. it’s been really inspirational for my own conlanging, both regarding the linguistics stuff you guys use as well as your general workflow

Thank you! That was the hope.

For those unfamiliar, LangTime Studio is a joint project by me and Jessie Sams (@quothalinguist). Jessie and I created the Méníshè language for Motherland: Fort Salem, and we loved working together so much that we wanted something else to do in the downtime between that first season and a potential season 2 (which was no guarantee, at the time). I couldn't wait for some other job to come along, so I decided to do something with a project I'd been neglecting.

For a long time, I've wanted to do something that was essentially a board game version of the Sega Genesis game Shining Force (for newer gamers, it's like proto-Fire Emblem, but better). I wanted to set it in a post-human Earth featuring anthropomorphic animals (mutated somewhat like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and I wanted them all to speak their own languages. They'd have absolutely no connection to previous human languages, just as they'd have no connection to previous human culture. In order to have any characters in this game, I'd have to create actual languages to draw names from, and I kept stalling.

Originally my plan was to "upgrade" my old languages. I was goingj to have five different anthropomorphic species, and I was going to take the following languages and redo them, bringing them up to my current standard:

Cats: Zhyler

Rabbits: Kamakawi

Opossums: Sidaan

Dogs: Gweydr

Mice: Njaama

I even started with Zhyler (I have a tiny little document called New Zhüler on my computer), but there was just too much to change... It ripped the heart and soul out of the original projects, and the new versions simply weren't as good as I wanted them to be.

Then I hit an idea that combined this idea with one I'd had earlier (to wit: Some famous author could set up a subscription service where essentially they write their new novel on, like, Google Docs, and they let people watch literally while they write). What if Jessie and I created these languages together, and did it on YouTube, and then started a Patreon to justify the work hours we were putting into it?

And this is where LangTime Studio was born. Jessie and I worked together to come up with the details, and ultimately we decided we'd stream every Thursday at 2 p.m. Pacific. We've been doing it now since February of 2020, and we've worked our way through the languages for the rabbits, opossums, and mice, and we're nearing completion on our cat language. Only the dog language remains!

I'd always hoped that anyone could pop in at any time and not have to be there from the beginning of the season. I mean, if you're watching Bob Ross, it's fascinating to see him start from a totally blank canvas, but if he's already got a sky, ground, and a mountain on there, it's not like you turn it off. It's still fun to see a happy little tree come into being!

Most of the time it looks like this:

That is, Jessie and I spend a lot of time to thinking and trying to figure out what to do next, and people watch and chat and give us ideas, answer questions, etc.

It's been a fun Thursday tradition for us for what's coming on three years now, and we're looking to keep going!

So that's partly what we've been up to. We didn't know how well we'd be able to keep it up with my travel schedule, but you'll notice this started in February of 2020. February 27th, in fact. I actually did have a talk in between then and the total lockdown which put our second episode on a Wednesday. The next talk I had was canceled. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one...

Of course, catching a live stream isn't something everyone can do or wants to do, but hey, if you want to know what it's like for a conlanger to work on a language from absolute zero to fairly functional, this is it. I'd always hoped especially that beginning conlangers would find it inspiring and encouraging to see how utterly and completely lost we get—and how often it happens. Like anything else, you just gotta keep plugging away. :)

#conlang #language #archipithecus #lts #langtime #langtime studio #quothalinguist #engála #wokuthízhű #tpaalha #sarkezhe #méníshè #motherland #motherland fort salem #fort salem #switches

[dedalvs]

Did you name Kelli after the Kamakawi word, or create the word after Kelli? She's adorable!

Keli with one "l", and in this case, I named her after the the Kamakawi word. She came from the shelter with the name Cleo, but I wanted to give her a new name, and her tail at that age was sooooooo much longer than she was! And she absolutely loved to thwap against hollow things to hear the sound of it (the wall, empty cardboard boxes). She reveled in the percussive joy of it, and so it made sense that Keli should be her name. :) I love her so much.

[dedalvs]

What do Imeimei numerals look like?

Nothing special, to be honest. (Assuming you’re talking about Kamakawi’s script.) A summary can be found here, and I’ll go ahead and upload a screenshot of the graphic I have there. Voilà!

Thanks for the ask!

#conlang #language #Kamakawi #conscript #orthography #Anonymous