I have put the Beanish corpus in GitHub, so you can all clone it and play with it: https://github.com/tresoldi/beanish/blob/master/corpus.txt
It is just a copy of the previous transliteration; if I don’t get more comments on the suggestions proposed by edo, I will change the glyphs soon. Each line is a single Beanish sentence (some repeated ones are missing, I will add them later: it will be up to each research to remove duplicates), followed by a # character and a description of the sentence (currently, the frame where it is found and the probable English translation). Everything in UTF-8.
So many people have been commenting on the ᘊ- prefix, suggesting it as a determinative, an augmentative, a superlative, a comparative of majority, etc. that I wasn’t able to discover who first suggested it on the OTT. User Newfur suggested in a comment to this blog that it could be an honorific, as the Japanese o-. While not strongly supporting it, I find the translation as “big/large” with an implied comparative (meaning “bigger/larger in regard to X than the standard”) the most probable: ᘊᒣᓭᐧᖊᔑ could mean “leopard”, literally “big cat/animal” (derived from an unseen *ᒣᓭᐧᖊᔑ, “cat, animal”), ᘊᒣᓭᐧᖊᔑ could be the modifier in the “cream for-healing” (probably related to “health”), ᘊᓭᘖᔭᓄ could indeed be “big water”, in the sense of either “flood” or “sea”, and ᘊᓭᘖᑦᓄ could be “leader” as “great person” or even, literally, “Big Hair” (and thus we would have a new word, *ᓭᘖᑦᓄ “hair(s)”).
Finally, as I posted in the OTT, I am thinking about a new thread in the XKCD fora, one mostly about Beanish. What do you think? (btw, I probably have missed some questions on the OTT, please send me a private message or post a comment here if you want to say/ask something).
Newfur said:
Sorry would just be “.u’u”. (oo-hoo)
greb said:
Thank you for the update. Just added a pull request to update the corpus.
tresoldi said:
Great! I still haven’t replied in a proper way to your comments because I am still finding my way in Lojban (and one can certainly get lost in there!), I’ll do it when ready.
Newfur said:
Also, it wasn’t quite accurate to say I suggested that 3- might be just an honorific. My thought had been that it might be a prefix implying largeness, importantness, or powerfulness, with the honorific prefix in Japanese being a good parallel. 😛
tresoldi said:
Oh, sorry, I hadn’t understood it this way! Looks that most people agree about that 3- being a prefix of “largeness, importantness, or powerfulness” (you narrowed it down in a good way), that’s good.
greb said:
I was just thinking about ᘊ- again. Maybe it’s more simpler then we think. It could be just a definite article, similar to the English “the”. The article seems to appear in front of most nouns exactly where you would expect them if you’re a speaker of a Western/Central European language.
tresoldi said:
That was my second thought (at first, I guesses it was a plural mark), I’ve discussed it here somewhere and in the XKCD forum (for example, I still translate ᘊᒣᑦᖽᖆᐨ as “the castle” and ᘊᓭᘖᔭᓄ as “waters” in the corpus, so you can see I am far from defending a position). I think both are plausible, there are some occurrences where I wouldn’t expect a “determinative”, such as in frame 2676 (while it is perfectly acceptable: “what is that? _the_ medicine”).
In fact, I was drawn to considering it a semantic prefix because of its common usage in conlangs, not necessarily Lojban. However, now that I have studied a bit of Lojban I am not that certain that the languages are related; in fact, I am going back to the idea that Beanish has an infix morphology.
waveney said:
There is beanish in 2933 to 2935…
greb said:
Regarding Lojban: I agree with you that Beanish is probably not related.
Do you really think it could be a determinative? According to wikipedia determinatives only appear in written language and aren’t used in spoken language. A definite article doesn’t share this characteristics. We might not know yet how the Beanies record their language exactly, but I just wanted to make this distinction.
tresoldi said:
Well, I was using “determinative” in a very loose sense, so that I could refer to something that distinguish a noun from a group without using standard class names as article, adjective, etc. I see that I had an Italian interference in English, I should have said “determiner”. But I wouldn’t exclude a determinative in its proper, scientific meaning: after all, Randall said that Beanish was designed to be as different from English as Linear A and I want to use this hint.
Regarding Lojban, I am almost sad, I really wanted Beanish to be related to it…