Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 73
September 8, 2016
Five Star Reviews: Aphelion 0.1
Okay, I finally had time to read Aphelion 0.1 by Gloria Reynolds. And I did need that time.
First I saw each page as a sort of realistic abstract artwork—lots of pretty words and images. I got emotions: oh, they must be scared. That guy sure is pissed. Hey look, a birdy!
Then I got to the supplementary materials (study guide?) at the end, and a lot of what I thought had been beautiful nonsense started organizing itself into a story.
On the NEXT read-through I spotted the tiny, tiny little hints that connect one image to the next. This is the logo of the army that rescued the lost children, which the main character is remembering now, 20 years later. That dude with no face is his little brother, the one who was rescued. That huge wrinkly monster is the same guy. Ashers are bad.
There’s an image in the comic of a decontamination system built of miles of tubing packed like intestine into the wall of an airplane hangar. The tubing can unpack itself and then untwist from tube to sheet, exposing what must be something like the surface area of Jupiter to deal with some very nasty future weapons.
THAT is what Aphelion is like. A mind-bending amount of stuff that’s been twisted up, folded, and packed down into, what, like 10 pages? It is a bomb of meaning.
Go read it. (pdf)
A Piece of Cake
It should have been simple enough for the mining bots. But, you know the English expression about cake? Maybe it doesn’t apply to kozunak.
The Easter-bread ingredients weren’t easy to come by. Glucose syrup and yeast cultures came from the bio-labs and could be had for a few favors, but I nearly had to sell my soul for lemon and vanilla. The closest thing to eggs and flour were protein and fiber feed-stocks for the food printers. Getting my robots to hollow out a small asteroid to act as an oven was easy, just very illegal. So was pressurizing the metallic asteroid and aiming a mining laser at it.
But it worked! Warm in the asteroid’s shell, the yeast started turning carbohydrates and oxygen into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The dough began to rise. I set the laser to increase its intensity over a 24-hour period, so the hot metal of the asteroid would bake the dough inside. Heated air could escape through a valve I had the robots drill at an angle, so the oven would spin in place rather than zoom off into deep space. After a day, I could have the robots bring the (now cool) oven into the station and crack it like an egg to get at the finished Easter bread.
It was all going well. I had had the physics of Easter bread all figured out, but biology is more complicated, and psychology is even worst.
I didn’t plan on the yeast growing as fast as it did. I really didn’t plan on Mendez noticing the hot rock and going to investigate. Why would he try to crack the oven open? And how could I have predicted his reaction to the dough when it came rushing out at him?
Long story short: no, alien life has not been discovered on the Ryugu Mining Station. Also, I’m coming home early. Happy Easter!
September 6, 2016
Adamics 2: Vocabulary
Looking for meaning in the sounds around them, the first generation of Adamics will turn first to onomatopoeia words.
Here are some onomatopoetic words based on human noises
crying=wai-wai / feeling sudden pain=wai
food being eaten= ama-ama / biting=ama
heart beating=tuka-tuka
laughing=aha-aha / surprising someone=aha
swallowing=uku-uku
breathing=uhu-uhu / Doing nothing (pausing)=uhu
sneezing=aku
yawning=ua
Mechanical noises
dripping=kuwu-kuwu / losing something=kuwu
running=taka-taka / knocking=taka
walking=tupu-tupu / striking s.th. soft=tupu
motor running=humu-humu
rolling= poto-poto falling onto something=poto
striking something wet=pata
switch engaging=kiti
Other things will make no noise, but nonetheless will be assigned mimetic words, words that sound like the way an object or action would sound if it made a sound.
Sparkling=pina-pina / Lights coming on=pina
Sparking (electricity)=piti
Note that reduplicating words makes the actions they describe long or repeated.
Adamics 1.5: onomatopoeia and mimesis
In constructing the vocabulary for the first generation of the Adamic language, I realized I was missing two important sources of word-creation: onomatopoeia and mimesis.
Sealed on their generation ship with no language in-put, the babies of the first Adamic generation will invent some words randomly by simply assigning meaning to babbled syllables. Other things in the ship will make noise, however, and those will be more likely to be imitated to arrive at onomatopoetic words.
crying=uwa-uwa
food being eaten= ama-ama
heart beating=tuka-tuka
laughing=aha-aha
screaming=wai-wai
swallowing=uku-uku
breathing=uhu=uhu
dripping=kuwu-kuwu
running=taka-taka
walking=tupu-tupu
sneezing=aku
yawning=ua
motor running=huwa-huwa
crashing= kana
striking s.th. soft=punu
Other things will make no noise, but nonetheless will be assigned mimetic words, words that sound like the way an object or action would sound if it made a sound.
Doing nothing (pausing)=uhu
Lights coming on=pina
Putting it all together, here is the vocab list for First Gen. Adamic so far. Go here to see how it can be put together.
nouns
papa=a person
papapa=a parent
payu=a robot
panu=a control
papapanu=a ruler
papayu=a child
payuyi=an animal
mama=liquid food
mamama=milk
mapi=solid food
mapiyi=meat
mamapi=porridge
mamapiyi=meat stew
mamayi=blood
kaka=an object
kakaka=a turd
kawa=a substance
kawama=an inedible liquid
kakapi=a chunk
kakakawama=urine
adjectives
wa=big
pi=small
nu=tall
yi=not tall
ha=long
mu=not long
wu=thick
pu=thin
ya=wide
mi=narrow
na=not
verbs
grasping ma=to eat
grasping pa=to interact
grasping ka=to give
grasping mapa=to bite
pointing ma=to dwell
pointing pa=to be functional
pointing ka=to have
waving ma=to be born
waving pa=to turn on
waving ka=to die
September 5, 2016
Adamics 0: a bibliography
Thanks to everyone who’s been helping me figure out the Adamic language, especially those who’ve cited sources. My list of reading has now gotten so large, I need a bibliography to manage it all. Here it is!
Resources
Language Universals Archive and here
Infant speech development
The Role of Audition in Infant Babbling
THE DEVELOPMENT OF VOCALIZATIONS OF DEAF AND NORMALLY HEARING INFANTS
Crosslinguistic similarities and differences in babbling: Phylogenetic implications
Sentence Structure
A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation
Sign Language
What sign language creation teaches us about language
Psychology
Reactive Attachment Disorder: A Disorder of Attachment or of Temperament?
Search for more about:
Deep structure
Nicaraguan Sign Language
The history of American Sign Language
Home sign and ad hoc sign systems
Tone of voice and sentence structure
Cants and cryptolects
Onomatopoea
September 1, 2016
Comet Forest
The gas giant loomed over the comet’s tiny horizon like the ground under a sky-diver’s head.
It was easy to see that death now, that splat. The planet wasn’t a pretty blue-and-green ball in the sky any more. It wasn’t even the sky, itself. The planet was down. It was the surface toward which this comet plummeted, taking the universe’s most unique ecosystem with it.
Even now, the vertical silver-black sheets of the flag-trees whipped in the outer edges of the gas giant’s atmosphere. Threads of superconductive hyphae lit the ground with specral radiance, desperately trying to flush heat out of the comet’s leading edge. It wasn’t working. Already the surface of the comet was mushy under its organic crust, carbon monoxide and methane venting in miniature geysers. Soon the oxygen and water would sublimate, too. There might even be brief period where a human could turn off their space suit and breathe the air of this space-faring forest as it died.
Joon wouldn’t be here by that point. There wouldn’t be anything for him to stand on; that last gasp of breathable air would be part of the tail the comet’s tail, already too deep inside the planet’s gravity well for him to escape.
Joon would have to leave soon, but not before he spent one last minute looking up (that is, down, far down) into the sky that was the ground of the gas giant.
It spun.
Joon looked down, controlled his nausea, and looked back up again. Yes, the blue gas giant was spinning above him. Or, he shifted his perspective, he was spinning above the giant. The whole comet was spinning. The gas venting from the geysers had taken on a distinct curve. So had the flag-trees. Could they be catching the atmosphere?
The spin was so intense now that Joon could feel it in his inner ears. It was easily strong enough to overcome the comet’s minuscule gravity and fling him into space, but Joon was stuck to the ground. The reddish slime that covered the ground frothed, sealing over geysers, climbing over his boots. The superconductor hyphae glowed.
“Uh,” said Joon, and a tremendous force shoved him backward.
Boots still stuck to the ground, found himself leaning back at an angle, his suit groaning as it tried to support his body. Above him, enormous purple geysers belched gasses into the sky above the gas giant. Gasses that acted as rocket engines, smashing the comet forward as it spun. Gasses laced with purple organics that polymerized as Joon watched, forming nets. Scoops.
The spin increased. They were drilling through the giant’s upper atmosphere now, flag-trees spinning like the blades of a windmill. Or a propeller? Flag trees were good conductors. It was how they caught solar wind. Now, though, might they be doing something else? Not sailing, but flying?
Soon, the curve of the gas giant’s horizon appeared. Above the forest-ship, stars appeared.
This story started with artapir’s speculation about giant tide pools in space, and got some more flesh from Exxos von Steamboldt. Go ahead and read about the places they took the ideas.
August 30, 2016
Health Update
Here’s a health update:I went in for blood tests and a CAT scan last week and everything looks good! Very low tumor markers in the blood and nothing showed up in the CAT scan except for a pair of very slightly enlarged lymph nodes. Very good news.
We talked to an oncologist, who said that she wouldn’t prescribe chemotherapy at all for me if I was 70, but since I’m 32 and there’s still a lot of time for things to go wrong with me (…yay?) she wants me to do a course of mild chemotherapy.
BUT she doesn’t want me to start chemo until after I get my colonostomy removed. I need to get my guts put back together. We were planning to do that in December, but now it looks like we might have that surgery in October. That’s good because I’ll be able to go back to a more normal diet, but it won’t be easy to psych myself up for another surgery so soon.We’re going to talk to surgeons this week and next week to get their opinion.
In short: everything is looking good. I may get back to normal even sooner than I had hoped. I’m feeling way better than I did this time last year, when I was starting to get sick. Now I just need to deal with this writer’s block 
August 29, 2016
Adamics 2: Pidgin Sentences
Last time we looked at how the orphaned space-babies (i.e. the Adamics) generated vocabulary in the first generation. Now let’s look at how they put that vocabulary together.
Sentence Structure
Sentences have no set structure, but are built from basic concepts to more explicit
=I want something
=I want food!
=I want a lot of food!
=I want (someone) to give me a lot of food!
papapa=I want mother(or father) to give me a lot of food.
Other possible sentence structures change the emphasis of the sentence (with help from textmechanic):
papapa wa mapi=give me something, mother. A lot of food
papapa wa mapi =Mother, a lot of food. Give it!
mapi papapa=Give me something a lot. food, mother.
There is a lot of potential for ambiguity.
papapa papayu=The mother bites the child or The child bites the mother.
Ambiguity might be avoided by including the object in the verb-gesture
papapa papayu>=The mother bites the child.
<grasping papapa mapa> papayu=The child bites the mother.
Since importance to the speaker determines word order, the first word is also usually the subject of the sentence.
papapa =The mother bites the child.
Putting the child first but keeping it within the verb-gesture allows the child to be the head of the sentence without losing its status as the object of the verb.
papapa=The child is bitten by the mother.
There are no embedded clauses, but sentences follow each other with logical connections left up to the listener.
papapa = That child doesn’t have food (so) mother, give (that) child food. Please, food give to that child.
Clearly, there’s a lot missing. Where are pronouns? Indirect objects? Tenses and moods? And what do Adamics do for gestures when they can’t see each other and gestures are useless?
Remember that this earliest form of Adamic is only a sort of pigeon. It won’t become a creole until the Next Generation. I hope you’ll tune in.
In the mean time, here is the complete vocab list for First Gen. Adamic.
nouns
papa=a person
papapa=a parent
payu=a robot
panu=a control
papapanu=a ruler
papayu=a child
payuyi=an animal
mama=liquid food
mamama=milk
mapi=solid food
mapiyi=meat
mamapi=porridge
mamapiyi=meat stew
mamayi=blood
kaka=an object
kakaka=a turd
kawa=a substance
kawama=an inedible liquid
kakapi=a chunk
kakakawama=urine
adjectives
wa=big
pi=small
nu=tall
yi=not tall
ha=long
mu=not long
wu=thick
pu=thin
ya=wide
mi=narrow
na=not
verbs
grasping ma=to eat
grasping pa=to interact
grasping ka=to give
grasping mapa=to bite
pointing ma=to dwell
pointing pa=to be functional
pointing ka=to have
waving ma=to be born
waving pa=to turn on
waving ka=to die
August 24, 2016
The Adamic Language 1: Baby Talk
Imagine if a bunch of babies were raised by robots that don’t talk to them. Children raised without language input generally fail to learn to speak (and develop crippling psychological problems, if they survive at all), but if many babies are raised around each other, might their babbling be enough to create a language? Creoles and Nicaraguan Sign Language suggest the answer is “yes.”
Let’s call this language “Adamic.”
Phonemes:
Infant babbling gives us a clue as to what sounds these Adamics would have to work with:
p/b, t/d, k/g, m, n, s, h, w, y(as in Yellow), a, u (I added the vowels based on crying and cooing)
That matches up pretty well with the 10 most common phonemes across languages:
p/b, k/g, m, N(as in siNG), h, w, j, a, u, i
So conservatively, the Adamics start out with a sound repertoire of
p, k, m, n, h, w, y, a, u, i
That’s a very small number of phonemes, but remember that’s just what the Adamics are starting with. They’ll generate more soon. Now on to…
Semantics
Again mimicking infants, these phonemes are uttered in a strict Consonant-Vowel pattern, often reduplicated.
ex. mamama, papa, kiki
Noun-like words refer to classes of objects (or “essence”) that can then be reduplicated to create a type (“ideal”) or narrowed down to create a more traditional noun. (with some help from awkwords)
pa=interactive things
papa=a person, papapa=a parent
payu=a robot, panu=a control, papapanu=a ruler, papayu=a child, payuyi=an animal
ma=edible things
mama=a liquid food, mamama=baby formula
mapi=a solid food, mapiyi=meat, mamapi=porridge, mamapiyi=meat stew, mamayi=blood
ka=other things
kaka=an object, kakaka=a turd
kawa=a substance, kawama=an inedible liquid, kakapi=a chunk, kakakawama=urine
Words can also be strung together in adjunct noun series as in English, with the first word in the series being the “most important”
payu mapiyi =a slave (literally meat robot)
Adjective-like words refer to dimensions and negation
wa=big/many, pi=small/few
nu=tall, yi=not tall
ha=long, mu=not long
wu=thick, pu=thin
ya=wide, mi=narrow
na=not
Adjectives can be reduplicated: wawa=very big or bigger than, wawawa=extremely big or the most. They can follow, precede, or bracket nouns: wa papa wa=a very big person, nana papa na=not a person at all.
Verb-like words refer to actions, they are gestural, but can be made more specific with simultaneous speech
grasping=to do
grasping ma=to eat/drink, grasping pa=to interact, grasping ka=to give
pointing=to be
pointing ma=to dwell, pointing pa=to be functional, pointing ka=to have
waving=to occur
waving ma=to be born, waving pa=to turn on, waving ka=to die
Other gestures alter the emotion of a statement
begging=submission
begging grasping ka=please, begging pointing pa=yes, sir!
clapping=authority
clapping grasping pa=do it!
patting=friendship
patting waving ma=we are brothers
Click here for sentence structure and more vocabulary
The Adamic Language 1
Imagine if a bunch of babies were raised by robots that don’t talk to them. Children raised without language input generally fail to learn to speak (and develop crippling psychological problems, if they survive at all), but if many babies are raised around each other, might their babbling be enough to create a language? Creoles and Nicaraguan Sign Language suggest the answer is “yes.”
Let’s call this language “Adamic.”
Phonemes:
Infant babbling gives us a clue as to what sounds these Adamics would have to work with:
p/b, t/d, k/g, m, n, s, h, w, y(as in Yellow), a, u (I added the vowels based on crying and cooing)
That matches up pretty well with the 10 most common phonemes across languages:
p/b, k/g, m, N(as in siNG), h, w, j, a, u, i
So conservatively, the Adamics start out with a sound repertoire of
p, k, m, n, h, w, y, a, u, i
That’s a very small number of phonemes, but remember that’s just what the Adamics are starting with. They’ll generate more soon. Now on to…
Semantics
Again mimicking infants, these phonemes are uttered in a strict Consonant-Vowel pattern, often reduplicated.
ex. mamama, baba, kiki
Noun-like words refer to classes of objects (or “essence”) that can then be reduplicated to create a type (“ideal”) or narrowed down to create a more traditional noun. (with some help from awkwords)
ma=edible things
mama=a liquid food, mamama=baby formula
mapi=a solid food, mapiyi=meat, mamapi=porraige, mamapiyi=meat stew, mamayi=blood
pa=interactive things
papa=a person, papapa=a parent
payu=a robot, panu=a control, papapanu=a ruler, papayu=a child, payuyi=an animal
ka=other things
kaka=an object, kakaka=a turd
kawa=a substance, kawama=an inedible liquid, kakapi=a chunk, kakakawama=urine
Words can also be strung together in adjunct noun series as in English
Mapiyi payu=a slave (literally meat robot)
Adjective-like words refer to dimensions
wu=big/many, pi=small/few
nu=tall, yi=not tall
ha=long, mu=not long
wa=thick, pu=thin
ya=wide, mi=narrow
Adjectives can be redublicated: wawa=very big or bigger than, wawawa=extremely big or the most
Verb-like words refer to actions, they are gestural, but can be made more specific with simultaneous speech
grasping=to do
grasping ma=to eat/drink, grasping pa=to interact, grasping ka=to give
pointing=to be
pointing ma=to dwell, pointing pa=to be functional, pointing ka=to have
waving=to occur
waving ma=to be born, waving pa=to turn on, waving ka=to die
Other gestures alter the emotion of a statement
begging=submission
begging grasping ka=please, begging pointing pa=yes, sir!
clapping=authority
clapping grasping pa=do it!
patting=friendship
patting waving ma=we are brothers
Sentence Structure
Sentences are SOV with analytic morphology. They build from basic concepts to more explicit
/grasping ka/=give! (/ and / denote where the motion begins and ends)
/grasping mapi ka/=give (me) food!
/grasping wa mapi ka/= give (me) a lot of food!
papapa /grasping wa mapi ka/=mother (or father), give (me) a lot of food!
papapa papayu /pointing mapi ka/ /grasping wa mapi ka/=mother (or father), (so that) (that) child (can) have food, give (them) a lot of food!
Clearly, there’s a lot missing. Where are pronouns? Indirect objects? Tenses and moods? Not to mention all that missing vocabulary. And what do Adamics do for gestures when they can’t see each other and gestures are useless?
Remember that this earliest form of Adamic is only a sort of pigeon. It won’t become a creole until the Next Generation. I hope you’ll tune in.
