I’m speculating under Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics influence, but the more I look at the Beanish script, the more it looks like a consonantal abugida to me.
An abugida?
03 Saturday Aug 2013
Posted in Senza categoria
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wprkr said:
I’m very doubtful here. If you take word length, implied vowels would essentially double word length. Then there is no indication of terminating consonant-only letters, which in CAS should be small versions of “ordinary” glyphs, but could be done by accentuation in other writing systems.
On another issue, the positioning of punctuation at the “end” might be suggestive of a RTL system, but Beanish might prefix sentences like Spanish; read LTR the common prefix ᗱ- might actually be a suffix. Speculation: French -e?
tresoldi said:
Hi wpkr! It’s great to have you discussing here, please continue if you can. 🙂
Now, regarding the abugida. At first I was under the same impression that an abugida wouldn’t be probable due mostly to word lengths, but this is the only feature that weakens the hypothesys. When I look at the distribution and context of the diacritics, they seem to confirm the abugida theory (I had already hinted at that some posts ago) stronger than the mean word length disproves it. The word length could be an intentional feature by Randall (even though the deciphered words, like “water” and “sea”, suggest that you are right), and the phonology is still to much obscure to prove or disprove the theory (but I agree that there are no indications of terminating consonant-only letter).
To further discuss Beanish with a scientific mindset we must finish the review of the transliterations and the compilation of the glyph-to-glyph transitions. I will try to do it tomorrow, and I also want to group the glyphs into classes with some maximum-likelihood-criterion as soon as possible (I know the population is very small, but it is worth a try — if we get nothing, we at least confirm that the entropy is “too” high).
Regarding the RTL/LTR, I am not sure that the positioning of the punctuation suggests an RTL system, could you elaborate on that? You take them as prosody marks? Not that I am denying that the script could be RTL: it was, in fact, one of the first things I checked and things like 3- being suffixes would indeed make Beanish closer to a Romance/Germanic basis. Regarding this specific prefix 3-, at first I thought it was a plural mark, then an incorporated determinative, but I am just guessing; it could be a coincidence, but it only seems to occur in common nouns.
nex said:
RTL/LFR:
I don’t think we could ever figure this one out: if we find a pattern like complement-verb-subject we could rule that the language is RTL, or that the sentence arrangement has changed in the future.
As for the double question mark: while Spanish enforces the starting one in schools, it really is a feature of the language that is clearly fading away (it didn’t evolve naturally to begin with). I don’t think Beanish could inherit that trait.
tresoldi said:
An object-verb-subject order, when read LTR, wouldn’t rule out that the script is LTR: not only, as you said, the language could have changed (once more, we are assuming a Romance/Germanic proto-language — if, cross your fingers, Randall evolved Beanish form Klingon the expected order would be OVS), but also, while rare, OVS is found in natural languages. An OVS would suggest a tendency for Beanish to place modifiers before nouns and verbs, but this would only be meaningful if we established that Beanish is indeed derived from an existing natural language.
As for the inverted question mark, the fact that it is fading away in Spanish doesn’t necessarily mean that something alike would not be found in Beanish (I’ve already seen language reformers suggesting its adoption in various languages, from Portuguese to English, and Rosetta could have decreed its usage in Beanish script). However, I think that the punctuation identified so far is not placed at beginning of sentences, mostly because I think the script is LTR. I know my reasoning is in part circular (the main feature to support my LTR theory is… the position of the punctuation), but just as the inverted marks show a tendency of fading away in actual usage, I find it improbable to have punctuation only at the beginning and not at the end.
wprkr said:
Well, Randall has shown some preoccupation with the RTL code in Unicode before. In the xkcd index, all entries following “RTL” are still mirrored. Now, my idea was that he may have used RTL words, but to give us a red herring , prepended the punctuation.
Wait … I looked it up in the corpus, and the multi-line question from frame 2728 totally nils my argument (except we wanted to assume that they wrote not only left-to-right, but also bottom-to-top).
My speculation that ᘊ- could be a suffix is void also. From the context it could be some universal prefix with the meaning “good, large, real” and whatever.
It’s not so bad if we keep eliminating possibilities.
tresoldi said:
Unfortunately we don’t have much to safely rule out, not even a bottom-to-top script. If we want to play the game of speculation, it could even be a boustrophedon with glyphs and dialogs very carefully selected to make it look, to the uninitiated, like an unidirectional script (which would mean Randall is a very mean guy 😉 ).
I can see ᘊ- as a semantic affix — you can see what I did here 😀 — meaning “good, large, real” (perhaps Beanish works more like Ancient Greek than English?), but it is a bit too common for that in my opinion. My guess is that it is a syntactic or morphological affix (I wanted it to be a case mark for nouns, but the examples we have suggest otherwise).
André Rhine-Davis said:
When speaking her garbled English though, Rosetta put the Beanish punctuation marks at the *end* of sentences. I think that pretty much confirms that it’s LTR