Yingzi Babel Speech

[Remousamavi]

Several years ago, I happened on Rosenfelder's Yingzi article; since then, I've read and re-read it so many times I now have every sentence committed to memory.

After reading it the first few times, I began to wonder what Yingzi would look like if it were a fully fledged, fully functional writing system. Thus, while riding the obsession at the height of its reign, I experimented with full sentences by adding my own new characters, based on a lot of back-and-fourth with the article.

After a few false starts and failed attempts, I eventually came up with this:

---

If English Were Written Like Chinese.jpg (118.5 KiB) Viewed 7575 times

---

The above is a transcription of the Babel Speech (New King James Version). Here is the non-Yingzi version, with brackets to emphasize inflections that have their own character or words that could be thought of as monosyllabic:

Now the whole Earth had one language and one speech.
And it came to pass as they journey[ed] from the East that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there.
Then they sai[d] to one another, "Come, let us make brick[s] and bake them thoroughly." They had brick[s] for stone and they had asphalt for mortar.
And they sai[d], "Come, let us build ourselv[es] a city and a [tower] who[se] top is in the heaven[s]. Let us make a name for ourselv[es] lest we be scatter[ed] abroad over the face of the whole Earth.
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
And the lord sai[d], "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them."
"Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another'[s] speech."
So the Lord scatter[ed] them abroad from there over the face of all the Earth, and they ceas[ed] building the city.
Therefore it[s] name is call[ed] Babel, because there the Lord confus[ed] the language of all the Earth and from there the Lord scatter[ed] them abroad over the face of all the Earth.



Notes:

• The Yingzi characters from the article are used where referenced (such as Language (gang / bridge)), and are the basis for some new combinations (guilt > built). This whole venture was basically an ambitious attempt at guesswork.
• Some words in the verse may or may not be two-syllable words. They're the sort of words that English scholars quarrel over, such as hour, girl, shire, oil. In this instance, these kinds of words get a single character - they conveniently fall into rhyming categories on their own anyway (wire, dire, liar, Meyer...)
• The characters in this version of Yingzi are simplified because they're easier to read and write that way, especially when you're working with a letter-sized piece of paper, a pencil, and the lighting of wherever I happen to be at the time.
• This rendition of Yingzi follows the rules on the original article as faithfully as I can, including separating voiced / unvoiced phonetic sets and making a token effort at guessing if "borrowed" words should get their own Yingzi or not.

So, with all that, any questions or constructive criticism is welcome. I might also put up a chart with the full list of phonetics used in this particular verse.

(PS: Apologies if I put this in the wrong section. I mostly put it here because GreenBowtie's Yingzi Modern thread was also here, and because it is based on one of Rosenfelder's works).

[zompist]

Looks pretty neat. But it'd be great to get a closer look, with glosses.

(You could leave the character composition as a puzzle for now...)

[Remousamavi]

Something like this?

Yingzigloss.jpg (18.6 KiB) Viewed 7527 times

[zompist]

Yes, that helps a lot!

[kodé]

Just want to say that this is super cool! I’m slowly decoding it and having a blast.

[Moose-tache]

This is so fun. Every time I try to interpret a section, I have to remind myself that the syntax will perfectly match English, and not subconsciously put head nouns at the end, etc. I think I've identified the word "Babel," and it looks a little different than other glyphs. Is there a Yingzi version of Bopomofo for phonetic transcriptions?

[Remousamavi]

No, mostly because that idea's not mentioned in Mark's original Yingzi article, which I've been using as the basis for this venture.
Plus there's the question of "why build a new phonetic script if we already had the Roman alphabet?" If we did build up a new system maybe we could clean up some old inconsistencies (P in pot vs spot, then vs plinth, dud vs middle, etc) by having each possible sound, whether some share the same Roman letter today, get its own glyph. Same with two-letter vowels (Spook, book).

For this particular venture, though, I've been going on the approximation principle, finding the nearest existing syllable and figuring out if it would have its own derived character (Babel, for instance, is formed with "Bay - bell")

[Moose-tache]

there's the question of "why build a new phonetic script if we already had the Roman alphabet?"

Forgive me a moment of devil's advocacy, but couldn't one possibly, were one so inclined, ask just such a question about building a gigantic logographic writing system for English?

[Remousamavi]

To answer that:
Certainly, if some extremist linguist group or whatever somehow actually managed to talk a community of English speakers into Yingzi, but they found need to use a supplementary alphabet - they'd quickly just switch to that alphabet and Yingzi would eventually fall out of fashion and be forgotten.

Now suppose that first Yingzi was adapted - for whatever reason - and we used Yingzi and only Yingzi for the next few hundred years. Dialects emerge, existing dialect-speakers bicker over "correct" pronunciations, and Yingzi falls out of sync. A teacher teaches his/her student how to pronounce the "horse" Yingzi by saying it aloud, but different parts of the world pronounce it differently. If "ain't" doesn't have it's own Yingzi, it'd just be another way of pronouncing "aren't" or "isn't", yet there'd likely be people arguing about why "ain't" doesn't "rhyme" with "quaint".
By then, nobody is taught ABC's anymore, so we invent a phonetic script similar to Bopomofo as a supplementary to teach the diverging readings of Yingzi and help the scribes adapt Yingzi by creating new characters or rearranging the sets, or by just sticking with standard English and everyone just learns that Yingzi only rhymes in the "official" version of English.

Or, we could trend to a slightly more Japanese style where this new script is used alongside Yingzi keywords like Hiragana/Katakana are used alongside Kanji.

[Ketsuban]

For this particular venture, though, I've been going on the approximation principle, finding the nearest existing syllable and figuring out if it would have its own derived character (Babel, for instance, is formed with "Bay - bell")

I'd be inclined to write it the same as "babble" for the sake of pretending there's a philological tradition of maintaining the pun across language barriers. (The pronunciation doesn't work in my native English, but that's never stopped Chinese before.)