How strange is it not to have non-English phonemes?

[Gareth3]

So I was thinking about simple naming languages, designed to be as easy as possible for readers or RPG players without any background in linguistics to understand and use. One restriction I thought of was to only use the phonemes of English. Not copying the English sound system but using a subset of it so every phoneme can be easily pronounced by native English speakers.
One obvious question is compared to natural languages, how contrived is this? How common is it for a natural language to have no phonemes that aren't also in the English phonemic inventory? It depends on how close the phonemes have to be. As I understand it many languages have a tap or trill r that most English dialects don't, so the answer is trivial if you're that strict. Let's say Maori counts as using only English phonemes, but Spanish doesn't.

[zompist]

A common expedient is what I call the Standard Fantasy Phonology, which is English plus [x] (kh).

Today's sf readers are far more sophisticated than a hundred years ago... I recently read one of Aliette de Bodard's books, which unapologetically uses Vietnamese names for every character, with all the correct diacritics. Let people wonder how it's pronounced, it won't hurt them.

If you're doing a tabletop RPG, it's probably best not to burden the players with things they can't pronounce. Though as Shamus Young pointed out, if you carefully name a character Abdul ibn Umar Hajji ar-Rahman or whatever... that is, non-English but quite readable... the players will refer to him as "the bearded guy in the palace" anyway.

(To answer your question more directly, yeah, it's pretty contrived. Almost every language has something that's not in English... even Hawaiian has [ʔ]. And Māori only counts if you ignore the length distinction and the allophone [ɸ] of wh...

[bradrn]

So I was thinking about simple naming languages, designed to be as easy as possible for readers or RPG players without any background in linguistics to understand and use. One restriction I thought of was to only use the phonemes of English. Not copying the English sound system but using a subset of it so every phoneme can be easily pronounced by native English speakers.
One obvious question is compared to natural languages, how contrived is this? How common is it for a natural language to have no phonemes that aren't also in the English phonemic inventory? It depends on how close the phonemes have to be. As I understand it many languages have a tap or trill r that most English dialects don't, so the answer is trivial if you're that strict. Let's say Maori counts as using only English phonemes, but Spanish doesn't.

I’d say it’s reasonably common for languages with smaller consonant inventories. (We can focus on consonants because most of the common vowel systems are subsets of English’s, more or less.) Referring to Nort’s old list, there’s plenty of languages there with no consonants which are not in English. For larger consonant inventories it gets progressively more unlikely, of course, but we can still find languages like Eipo (14 consonants) where all phonemes are shared with English. If we allow glottal stop there’s even more, e.g. Tetun (13 consonants) and Selaru (14 consonants).

(From a more general perspective, zompist’s points are excellent.)

[Gareth3]

(To answer your question more directly, yeah, it's pretty contrived. Almost every language has something that's not in English... even Hawaiian has [ʔ]. And Māori only counts if you ignore the length distinction and the allophone [ɸ] of wh...

Thanks for the feedback. I suppose the next step is having the language only have phonemes that are easily pronounceable by native English speakers, whether they're technically in the English language or not. I'm not sure how you'd decide whether say, /ɲ/ is easier than /q/.

[bradrn]

I'm not sure how you'd decide whether say, /ɲ/ is easier than /q/.

Neither am I, really. Use your own judgement.

[zompist]

I suppose the next step is having the language only have phonemes that are easily pronounceable by native English speakers, whether they're technically in the English language or not. I'm not sure how you'd decide whether say, /ɲ/ is easier than /q/.

Assuming this is a situation where non-linguists actually have to use the names, like an RPG-- people will come up with their own equivalents, or you can provide one. E.g. a name /ɲara/ can be turned into Nyara, and /aqir/ into Akir. Don't make it hard on the poor people.

E.g. Googling for difficult Japanese words... don't name your main NPCs something like Tsutaerarenakatta or Shutsuryoku.

FWIW, when I was a DM I insisted that people choose Verdurian names, but provided phrasebook-style pronunciations. ("Aďia is ah-THEE-ah.") I didn't make them learn any non-English sounds though Verdurian has a few.

[Ketsuban]

I suppose the next step is having the language only have phonemes that are easily pronounceable by native English speakers, whether they're technically in the English language or not. I'm not sure how you'd decide whether say, /ɲ/ is easier than /q/.

Professional conlangers seem to have made a point of trying to figure out what non-English sounds are accessible to monoglot English speakers. David Peterson seems to be okay with /q/ given it's in many of his languages and all of his most famous ones (Dothraki, High Valyrian and its descendants) although he may just be despairing at the lack of other good ways to use the letter Q for anything when authors insist on using it as a linguistic condiment. The creator of Na'vi evidently thinks English speakers can manage contrastive tone, vowel length or ejective consonants, and James Cameron liked the last one best.

[xxx]

unless you're making a language for yourself,
or for people in your immediate circle,
whatever you choose,
all your names will be adapted by their readers to their L1...
Either you choose this translation and make the words readable for them,
or you accept the wild and mismatched adaptations that will not be lacking...
as far as I'm concerned, unreadable words aren't memorized most of the time...

as for using the phonology of one language for another,
there would have to be only one phonology for one language...
most speakers have pronunciations that diverge
according to their personal history,
that of their parents,
and that of the territory in which they live, so...

[Gareth3]

FWIW, when I was a DM I insisted that people choose Verdurian names, but provided phrasebook-style pronunciations. ("Aďia is ah-THEE-ah.") I didn't make them learn any non-English sounds though Verdurian has a few.

That's interesting, thank you. So in effect they were using an American accent in Verdurian?

[sasasha]

It’s worth saying that you can make a Standard Fantasy naming language fairly distinctive by being judicious in what you leave out from English’s consonant set, and giving some thought to phonotactics. There’s also phoneme frequency.

Ursula Le Guin is a good example. I just finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness, which contains lots of names, words and phrases in two conlangs (Karhidish and Orgota), neither of which challenge the reader with any obvious non-English phonemes. But often it’s possible to guess which language a word is from.

Karhidish lacks <l>, and makes extremely high use of <r> ‒ it’s somewhere in most words ‒ and notably high use of <h> (whether or not in a digraph). Syllables are maximally CCCVCC (in the cases of <streth>, <eps>), but onset clusters are rare and invariably seem to involve <Cr> , <Cy> or <sC>. Some words have <x>. Geminate consonants are common.

The first dozen Karhidish words in the book:

Karhide, Odharhahad, Tuwa, Erhenrang, gossiwor, Argaven, Therem, Harth, rem, ir, Estraven, Pering

Orgota uses both /l/ and /r/ (and lots of the former, which immediately diagnoses an Orgota word). It also seems to use more of <ch> and <sh>, and <sl> is a notable onset cluster. I can’t find any Orgota words with <v>, which is common in Karhidish.

The first dozen Orgota words I can be nothered to find:

Orgoreyn, Orgota, Obsle, Kuseben, Pulefen, Meshe, Mishnory, Uth, Shusgis, Siuwensin, Slose, Kuwera

The languages have shared features (beyond neither using obviously non-English phonemes), which to some extent builds atmosphere given their contact history. In addition to its apparent value as /j/, there’s a vowel spelled <y> in both languages, and both use <th>. Neither contain many VV strings, other than with <y>. (These are all common Le Guin features, though.)

The point is, you don’t have to repeat English just because you’re not using non-English phonemes, and Standard Fantasy languages e.g. for a tabletop RPG can gain their own flavour through omission.

[bradrn]

Ursula Le Guin is a good example. I just finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness, which contains lots of names, words and phrases in two conlangs (Karhidish and Orgota), neither of which challenge the reader with any obvious non-English phonemes. But often it’s possible to guess which language a word is from.

Funny you should mention it… Le Guin is one of my favourite authors, and The Left Hand of Darkness one of my favourite books, but the names in it have always bothered me. I can never work out how to pronounce them: like, is Estraven meant to be /estˈɹɑːvən/ or /ˈestraven/ or something else entirely? Gossiwor could be /ˈɡɒsɪwoː/ or /ˈgosiwor/ or /goˈsːiwor/ or any number of alternatives. And who knows what Karhide is meant to represent — /ˈkɑːha͡id/? /karˈhide/? //kaˈr̥idə/? /kaʐiˈde/?…

This is of course the inevitable result of taking a linguistic viewpoint to an English-like orthography, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get annoyed at it!

The languages have shared features (beyond neither using obviously non-English phonemes), which to some extent builds atmosphere given their contact history. In addition to its apparent value as /j/, there’s a vowel spelled <y> in both languages, and both use <th>. Neither contain many VV strings, other than with <y>. (These are all common Le Guin features, though.)

Yes, I’ve noticed that all Le Guin’s languages share more or less the same aesthetic — which annoys me equally much each time. The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, the Earthsea books… I know I’m reading Le Guin as soon as I see the first ⟨th⟩.

(The funny thing is that Le Guin knows perfectly well what she’s doing when it comes to languages. Her short story Dancing to Ganam contains a full-on elicitation session, for instance, in which there’s enough evidence for the reader to work out that — IIRC — the language in question is SOV with a prefix for the accusative case. I hear that Always Coming Home has a full-on conlang, but it’s a multimedia work and I have no idea how I could access a copy. In any case, what she’s doing is a deliberate sop to the Anglophones. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than doing it out of sheer ignorance like most other writers.)

[Raphael]

Oh, when I'm in doubt about how to pronounce a name, I tend to default to "English pronunciations for consonants and German or Italian pronunciations for vowels".

[alice]

Oh, when I'm in doubt about how to pronounce a name, I tend to default to "English pronunciations for consonants and German or Italian pronunciations for vowels".

This is, oddly, the rationale behind my suggestions for transcribing a conlang, which some of you may remember from a previous era.

[Glenn]

(The funny thing is that Le Guin knows perfectly well what she’s doing when it comes to languages. Her short story Dancing to Ganam contains a full-on elicitation session, for instance, in which there’s enough evidence for the reader to work out that — IIRC — the language in question is SOV with a prefix for the accusative case. I hear that Always Coming Home has a full-on conlang, but it’s a multimedia work and I have no idea how I could access a copy. In any case, what she’s doing is a deliberate sop to the Anglophones. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than doing it out of sheer ignorance like most other writers.)

The book Always Coming Home, which is freely available, includes some names and words (and a couple of phrases and/or sentences) in the conlang Kesh, as well as a pronunciation guide and a short glossary of vocabulary. The recent Library of America edition, which I have read, includes some previously unpublished material, including a section with some brief bits of further information about Kesh grammar, although not a full grammatical sketch. (One of these seems to contradict the material found in the book: the default word order is described as OVS, but the only examples of Kesh sentences in the book appear to be SV; I don't think that there are any examples of transitive sentences.)

The original 1985 edition of the book included an audiocassette, "The Music and Poetry of the Kesh", which is absent from later editions (my own copy, a mass market paperback from 1986, does not have it). However, CD versions and an LP version of the cassette were later made, and I somehow managed to get my hands on a couple of the CDs. I don't remember how I got them, but the CD is apparently for sale here. (I hope that the link works; it did before I pasted it in, but I am having trouble getting the page to reload on my computer, although it loads just fine on my phone. Note that this is for the CD alone, not the CD and the book; you would have to get the latter separately, but again, the book is much easier to find.) According to the Wikipedia article, it is (or was) available as an MP3 file as well.

The album itself is an interesting thing; here is an article about the making of it on the website Bandcamp, including excerpts from two of the tracks. (Bandcamp was selling the LP version, but they appear to be out of stock.) According to an account which I have seen in a couple of places, it was the making of the album that inspired Le Guin to flesh out the conlang, when Todd Barton, the composer, pointed out that they would need lyrics in the people's own language. The album includes instrumental pieces, songs, and poems in Kesh, some of which appear in English in the book, as well as a couple in Kesh; I think one short piece (the Quail Song) appears in both. Some of the tracks lean into the "anthropology of the future" element of Always Coming Home, with "background" noises (voices, nature sounds, etc.) that create the effect that these fictional, post-apocalyptic, far-future people were just going about their normal lives when an anthropologist showed up and turned on a tape recorder. (Unfortunately, while one of my two CD copies came with liner notes describing the context of the tracks - descriptions of the pieces and fictional notes about where and how they were "recorded" - none include either transcriptions or translations of the Kesh words, so I was often reduced to listening to the tracks, comparing them to the material in the book, and guessing at what the words might be.)

In addition, I also read the Library of America version of The Complete Orsinia, containing Le Guin's anthology Orsinian Tales and the novel Malafrena, set in our own world in the fictional Central/Eastern European country of Orsinia, which is perhaps Le Guin's earliest actual conworld, first created when she was a university student in the 1940s, although the books were only published many years later. The books contain some Orsinian names of people and places, and the Library of America edition, like that of Always Coming Home, contains some previously unpublished material, including excerpts in Orsinian of a pair of poems that appear in English in Malafrena (once again, alas, without glosses or the like). I do not know how much Le Guin fleshed out Orsinian (not much, I think), but judging from the few samples available, it appears to be a Romance language with some Slavic borrowings, perhaps a little like Romanian. (The external explanation for this appears to be that while Le Guin set Orsinia in Eastern Europe, her own familiarity was with the Romance languages - she knew French, Spanish, and Italian, and she received a Fulbright scholarship in 1953 to go to France and study Renaissance-era French poetry. She was certainly exposed to other languages, including non-IE languages, but those were the ones that she knew well.)

Apologies for the long off-topic post; apparently I had a lot to say on the subject...

[bradrn]

Interesting post, thanks!

(One of these seems to contradict the material found in the book: the default word order is described as OVS, but the only examples of Kesh sentences in the book appear to be SV; I don't think that there are any examples of transitive sentences.)

This isn’t necessarily a contradiction — Päri and Kuikuro (and probably some other natlangs too) show OVS for transitive sentences and SV for intransitive ones (with some flexibility). Basically this is ergativity in word order, with intransitive S being grouped with transitive O.

(That being said, I think it’s more likely that this is an accidental contradiction, yes.)

[Glenn]

This isn’t necessarily a contradiction — Päri and Kuikuro (and probably some other natlangs too) show OVS for transitive sentences and SV for intransitive ones (with some flexibility). Basically this is ergativity in word order, with intransitive S being grouped with transitive O.

(That being said, I think it’s more likely that this is an accidental contradiction, yes.)

Thanks; I was pretty sure that there were natlang precedents for that kind of thing. (At the same time, I agree with you that this is probably an accidental contradiction, especially since Kesh is otherwise described as nominative-accusative.)

I do agree that Le Guin's other works are less developed in terms of language creation, and that her created names and terms tend to have some typical patterns. At the same time, she was still ahead of her time in her focus on the culture and anthropology of her settings.

I also have to admit that when I read The Left Hand of Darkness, I pronounced most of the Karhidish and Orgata names as if they were American English (e.g., [ˈkɑɹ.ha͡id] for "Karhide", and so on), although I was admittedly not looking at them through a linguistics lens at the time.

[sasasha]

For anyone who hasn’t realised, “Music and Poetry of the Kesh” is available to listen to for free on Youtube.

It’s a wonderful piece of work!

I’ve been lucky enough to have found a copy of Always Coming Home in a second-hand bookshop, but hadn’t realised it was freely available online. Thanks for the tip; hopefully there’s a pdf reader that can render it searchable. It’s also a wonderful work.

Re pronunciations in The Left Hand of Darkness (and apologies that I soon begin to riff on Earthsea as well)...

It seems to me that Le Guin (a) understood that most people would pronounce Karhide with /a͜ɪ/, and (b) didn’t do anything about it; thus Karhide has /a͜ɪ/ in it for me. The same goes for Roke, and many other spellings with ⟨(VC)e⟩ in her works: in the absence of anything to prevent the reader reading these as ‘long vowels’, I presume they are intended to represent ‘long vowels’. I note that this approach was commonplace in early- and mid-century SF: E. R. Eddison’s 1922 “The Worm Ouroborus” contains a short pronunciation guide which specifies, for instance, that Gorice rhymes with rice; and Tolkien felt he had to employ diaerises to stop the reader reading ⟨(VC)e⟩ strings this way.

However, for some reason I read Tibe as /'ti:.bə/. She didn’t do anything about that either...

In all of her works that I know, Le Guin peppered English calques of names in with transcribed ‘conlang’ names. This brings an ambiguity into play in certain cases: is Roke really the island’s Hardic name, or could it be a calque of an Old Hardic / Old Speech name which suggests fog/vapour (P.Germ. raukiz- "smoke", O.N. roka "whirlwind, fine spray", Mid.Eng. roke "fog, vapour, cloud"), and thus be read as an English speaker would read it? Roke is a seat of weatherworking in Earthsea and is protectable from incursion by magical storms and fogs, so it’s likely the latter...

Le Guin may never have decided herself. There’s an Old Speech quotation senvanissai'n ar Roke! glossed as "take/carry us to Roke!". I find it hard to believe that Roke is really the island’s name in the Old Speech, as the name is in such general use, and Old Speech names supposedly hold such profound magical power over their referents, that any magician speaking about it would seem to be in danger of inadvertently casting spells. I also find it hard to believe that the Old Speech went through the Great Vowel Shift.

Ultimately, Le Guin leaves it to individual readers to find their own phonetic and semantic relationship with her written words, and this is probably one of the reasons they’ve enjoyed wide and enduring popularity. It might puzzle and annoy us, but we’re probably a minority in her fan base...

[bradrn]

Re pronunciations in The Left Hand of Darkness (and apologies that I soon begin to riff on Earthsea as well)...

I think all this is still on-topic, given that Gareth3 originally wanted to know about making con-names accessible to English-speakers.

E. R. Eddison’s 1922 “The Worm Ouroborus” contains a short pronunciation guide which specifies, for instance, that Gorice rhymes with rice

Gosh. I would have expected that name to rhyme with Horace.

In all of her works that I know, Le Guin peppered English calques of names in with transcribed ‘conlang’ names. This brings an ambiguity into play in certain cases: is Roke really the island’s Hardic name, or could it be a calque of an Old Hardic / Old Speech name which suggests fog/vapour (P.Germ. raukiz- "smoke", O.N. roka "whirlwind, fine spray", Mid.Eng. roke "fog, vapour, cloud"), and thus be read as an English speaker would read it? Roke is a seat of weatherworking in Earthsea and is protectable from incursion by magical storms and fogs, so it’s likely the latter...

It’s worth remembering that there is a translation convention in place — Hardic is invariably reflected as English. ‘Roke’ may be a particularly obvious English calque, but from the forms of the other island names, I’m inclined to believe that they’re nearly all intended to be calques. Names like ‘Way’, ‘Havnor’, ‘Éa’ and ‘Paln’ all recall the forms of English words. Meanwhile, names like ‘Iffish’, ‘Sattins’, ‘Soders’, ‘Korp’ recall English names adapted from Celtic languages (cf. ‘Callanish’, ‘Sollas’, ‘Dunnet’, ‘Tongue’ and many more examples from the UK). Only the Kargad islands have distinctively non-English names, and they explicitly speak a different language.

(Of course, this is precisely what Tolkien did with Westron, though unlike Le Guin he actually worked out the details. ‘Rivendell’ was really Karningul, ‘The Shire’ was really Sûza, Frodo Baggins was actually named Maura Labingi.)

I also find it hard to believe that the Old Speech went through the Great Vowel Shift.

Cheeky suggestion: the Old Speech name is /rokə/, and the modern name is /ɹə͡ʊk/.

Ultimately, Le Guin leaves it to individual readers to find their own phonetic and semantic relationship with her written words, and this is probably one of the reasons they’ve enjoyed wide and enduring popularity.

I find it interesting to compare this situation with Tolkien. He, of course, was the opposite, having had very determined views about phonaesthetics, down to the aforementioned diaereses on final ⟨-e⟩ to ensure their correct pronunciation. And Tolkien is even more popular than Le Guin. So if it is a factor, it’s hardly a major one.

When in doubt, do proper conlanging!

[sasasha]

I find it interesting to compare this situation with Tolkien. He, of course, was the opposite, having had very determined views about phonaesthetics, down to the aforementioned diaereses on final ⟨-e⟩ to ensure their correct pronunciation. And Tolkien is even more popular than Le Guin. So if it is a factor, it’s hardly a major one.

When in doubt, do proper conlanging!

I understand all your points, but I don’t agree with the implication (which I may have misread) that Le Guin should have done anything differently, or is a model that should be avoided in preference of yours, “do proper conlanging!”. Her works are her works; they are popular, award-winning and enduring and one of them is among your favourite novels. Do you think she should have spent less time worldbuilding, or written fewer novels, or rested less or spent less time with her family and friends, in favour of improving her conlangs?

I don’t think she needed to improve her conlanging to be a better novelist ‒ though, of course, it might have made her a better conlanger. The proportion of readers who would rather have seen fleshed out conlangs than what she did produce is, I suspect, about the same as the proportion who would rather The Shire have been printed as Sûza... Not many.

Incidentally, I’m not sure I buy that Hardic is a ‘translation’ of English like Westron. I think Le Guin’s idea of Hardic may well have been a language that looks and sounds a lot like an archaic Celtic-influenced English. The evidence from the Roke sentence possibly corroborates that. I agree that there a lot of calques ‒ but it’s possible that they’re mixed in with Hardic, rather than that they are translations of Hardic.

[bradrn]

I find it interesting to compare this situation with Tolkien. He, of course, was the opposite, having had very determined views about phonaesthetics, down to the aforementioned diaereses on final ⟨-e⟩ to ensure their correct pronunciation. And Tolkien is even more popular than Le Guin. So if it is a factor, it’s hardly a major one.

When in doubt, do proper conlanging!

I understand all your points, but I don’t agree with the implication (which I may have misread) that Le Guin should have done anything differently, or is a model that should be avoided in preference of yours, “do proper conlanging!”. Her works are her works; they are popular, award-winning and enduring and one of them is among your favourite novels. Do you think she should have spent less time worldbuilding, or written fewer novels, or rested less or spent less time with her family and friends, in favour of improving her conlangs?

It’s not really a criticism of Le Guin; I meant it more as a statement of what I’d like to see from future writers.

(That being said, a naming language doesn’t take much work, and is all that’s required for a series like Earthsea. Who knows, maybe Le Guin did indeed work out the Old Speech coherently, and we just have too little information to tell.)

Incidentally, I’m not sure I buy that Hardic is a ‘translation’ of English like Westron. I think Le Guin’s idea of Hardic may well have been a language that looks and sounds a lot like an archaic Celtic-influenced English. The evidence from the Roke sentence possibly corroborates that.

Perhaps… though personally I never got any Celtic vibes from the Old Speech.