One of the hardest challenges in designing an alien language is coming up with grammatical features that are genuinely alien in nature. It's easy to say something like "hey look RPN; that's extremely alien to my feeble linguist mind" (unless you are Dutch, in which case this is no surprise) and resort to grammars that are, in fact, all too human—after all, humans wrote the Java VM.
With Lilitic, we're not exactly going full Monty—the story is that some humans were left to evolve as a space-faring race after they were abandoned by time-travelling researchers from the beginning of the universe, and have had a few billion years to... (drumroll) not change at all, because they were under no appreciable evolutionary pressures whatsoever, except maybe for spatial reasoning skills and radiation resistance.
That part of the backstory is a little lame around the edges, and I have no major desire to fill it in, but it makes it easy to travel to the far reaches of the greater unknown and, once in a while, find a pink fleshy biped there.
The Lilitai are... an offshoot. I've written this before, though, and I'd rather not write about it again, so I'm going to just link to the History of the Lilitai and be done with it, if it doesn't change in the process. Short story: a small group of Telaians (a tribe of space-faring humans) stumbles into a modest interstellar empire ruled by the Ksreskézai, exoskeleton-bearing quadrupeds with a penchant for mysticism and genetic engineering (it's Dune, with razor-covered talking reptiles and no sand!). They captured and reformatted the Telai, treating the little pink bipeds like pets and completely remaking their cultural identities and genomes over two generations.
The product of this was the first generation of the Lilitai: graceful, fully gynocogenic servants with lifespans measured in thousands of years. The idea was to enhance stability in the great noble families by providing a perspective that would exceed that of the already long-lived Ksreskézaian nobility, without dooming one of their own to the torment of near-immortality. In a way, they wielded considerable authority, as a central element of the noble family's estate, but never did that authority include any formally-defined privileges or powers.
The amount of human culture in the Lilitai is thus scant; most of their linguistic atmosphere by the time of Thet's colonization comes from pidgin dialects they acquired on worlds no longer under the rule of the Ksreskézaian empire once it collapsed. There are a few roots that I've traced to current languages, with the honest belief that they would survive untold spans of evolution in such a highly computer-literate culture, like "atsha" from "astra" for "star", and one Telaian goddess of bounty and protection who was transubstantiated into a Ksreskézaian-style emotion-spirit of the unbearable suffering of the powerless. It's assumed that they spoke Ksreskézaian as best they could whilst under that dominion for ten thousand years. But, beyond that, it's all fresh ground.
One thing that I've included (besides really bad and unpronounceable declensions for most word cases) is this particularly vile word modifier, applicable to any concrete or abstract noun or object, lú (The n is only used if the word modified starts with another vowel.) This prefix has given me untold amounts of grief since I first discovered it used in the construct lútheluvé, which does the rather cruel contortion of taking a word meaning "same" and changing it into one meaning "similar". Below that, in my paper copy of the Lilitic dictionary, is a very incomprehensible blurb that insists there is an appreciable difference between "greenish" and "green-like", which I am now convinced was a very bad example to pick.
So here I am to try and set the record straight about lú. (I will need to stop italicising it, though, because it will take all night if I keep going.)
Lú takes a word, which is an identifier for a concept, and then retrieves the attributes of that concept. The compound word that results then reflects any arbitrary element out of the set of possible concepts that have similar attributes. If we are to go with colours again, the word "lúklinu" means "green-ish"; if we define "green" to more precisely mean HSV(120, 100, 100), then the average Lilitic speaker would probably say that a colour would be lúklinu if it were HSV(120±20, 60±40, 60±40)—that is, mostly green, but cyan and yellow might be acceptable under stressed circumstances.
The important thing to understand about lú—and this part really made me hurt to figure out—is that it very specifically does not work from the concept itself; it examines the properties of the thing in question and considers them instead. As such, it doesn't reflect things associated directly with the concept, like connotations. In order to accurately translate the idea into English we would have to say something like "seemingly similar to", in order to put ourselves into objective and comparative thought, even though lú does not imply that the speaker's claim is based on limited information. That this concept is so difficult to translate (even though "similar", "~-like" or "~-ish" is usually sufficient) gives me great hope for its alien-ness. Conveniently, lú goes well with the "in" infix for classes of nouns: "lúklininu" means "the entire space of greenish colours." Importantly, it includes klinu itself: two concepts that are identical, or two references to the same concept, are considered similar.
It helps to see the flipside in order to understand lú. Dzú(n), which comes from the same origin as the determiner 'dzu' ("what"), permits only the same concept, identical copies of the original concept, or concepts that are related in function or the audience's mind. Lilitic is, by default, very tight and literal about its noun references: nouns are treated as names to specific objects unless the sentence is marked "hypothetical" (kai), in which case nouns function as if this sense of the dzú prefix were omnipresent. "Atshasa" no longer means "the stars", but simply "stars" in general, as does "dzúnatshasa" in any context.
One trick that comes with dzú (not covered by kai) is that it is not simply a subset of lú: it also includes things which are analogues of the affected concept: any machine may be lú with a computer, but not dzú with it. Yet, a government may be dzú with a computer operating system; as may physics or a large corporation. These bear commonalities with the notion of an operating system that are not descendent from its internal nature, but from a more abstract view of its function.
So what of constructs like dzúklininu, "the set of things which are analogous to green?" This is dependent on the audience's understanding of what it means to be the colour green—some might say that any other major colour of the seven-colour rainbow is an analogue, while others could present an attempt at defining the essence of what it means to be green, and others still would attempt to find some interpretive meaning; a present-day human might suggest involving the environment. Not everything has to make perfect sense to us—and it is probably not a construction that sees much use.
With Lilitic, we're not exactly going full Monty—the story is that some humans were left to evolve as a space-faring race after they were abandoned by time-travelling researchers from the beginning of the universe, and have had a few billion years to... (drumroll) not change at all, because they were under no appreciable evolutionary pressures whatsoever, except maybe for spatial reasoning skills and radiation resistance.
That part of the backstory is a little lame around the edges, and I have no major desire to fill it in, but it makes it easy to travel to the far reaches of the greater unknown and, once in a while, find a pink fleshy biped there.
The Lilitai are... an offshoot. I've written this before, though, and I'd rather not write about it again, so I'm going to just link to the History of the Lilitai and be done with it, if it doesn't change in the process. Short story: a small group of Telaians (a tribe of space-faring humans) stumbles into a modest interstellar empire ruled by the Ksreskézai, exoskeleton-bearing quadrupeds with a penchant for mysticism and genetic engineering (it's Dune, with razor-covered talking reptiles and no sand!). They captured and reformatted the Telai, treating the little pink bipeds like pets and completely remaking their cultural identities and genomes over two generations.
The product of this was the first generation of the Lilitai: graceful, fully gynocogenic servants with lifespans measured in thousands of years. The idea was to enhance stability in the great noble families by providing a perspective that would exceed that of the already long-lived Ksreskézaian nobility, without dooming one of their own to the torment of near-immortality. In a way, they wielded considerable authority, as a central element of the noble family's estate, but never did that authority include any formally-defined privileges or powers.
The amount of human culture in the Lilitai is thus scant; most of their linguistic atmosphere by the time of Thet's colonization comes from pidgin dialects they acquired on worlds no longer under the rule of the Ksreskézaian empire once it collapsed. There are a few roots that I've traced to current languages, with the honest belief that they would survive untold spans of evolution in such a highly computer-literate culture, like "atsha" from "astra" for "star", and one Telaian goddess of bounty and protection who was transubstantiated into a Ksreskézaian-style emotion-spirit of the unbearable suffering of the powerless. It's assumed that they spoke Ksreskézaian as best they could whilst under that dominion for ten thousand years. But, beyond that, it's all fresh ground.
One thing that I've included (besides really bad and unpronounceable declensions for most word cases) is this particularly vile word modifier, applicable to any concrete or abstract noun or object, lú (The n is only used if the word modified starts with another vowel.) This prefix has given me untold amounts of grief since I first discovered it used in the construct lútheluvé, which does the rather cruel contortion of taking a word meaning "same" and changing it into one meaning "similar". Below that, in my paper copy of the Lilitic dictionary, is a very incomprehensible blurb that insists there is an appreciable difference between "greenish" and "green-like", which I am now convinced was a very bad example to pick.
So here I am to try and set the record straight about lú. (I will need to stop italicising it, though, because it will take all night if I keep going.)
Lú takes a word, which is an identifier for a concept, and then retrieves the attributes of that concept. The compound word that results then reflects any arbitrary element out of the set of possible concepts that have similar attributes. If we are to go with colours again, the word "lúklinu" means "green-ish"; if we define "green" to more precisely mean HSV(120, 100, 100), then the average Lilitic speaker would probably say that a colour would be lúklinu if it were HSV(120±20, 60±40, 60±40)—that is, mostly green, but cyan and yellow might be acceptable under stressed circumstances.
The important thing to understand about lú—and this part really made me hurt to figure out—is that it very specifically does not work from the concept itself; it examines the properties of the thing in question and considers them instead. As such, it doesn't reflect things associated directly with the concept, like connotations. In order to accurately translate the idea into English we would have to say something like "seemingly similar to", in order to put ourselves into objective and comparative thought, even though lú does not imply that the speaker's claim is based on limited information. That this concept is so difficult to translate (even though "similar", "~-like" or "~-ish" is usually sufficient) gives me great hope for its alien-ness. Conveniently, lú goes well with the "in" infix for classes of nouns: "lúklininu" means "the entire space of greenish colours." Importantly, it includes klinu itself: two concepts that are identical, or two references to the same concept, are considered similar.
It helps to see the flipside in order to understand lú. Dzú(n), which comes from the same origin as the determiner 'dzu' ("what"), permits only the same concept, identical copies of the original concept, or concepts that are related in function or the audience's mind. Lilitic is, by default, very tight and literal about its noun references: nouns are treated as names to specific objects unless the sentence is marked "hypothetical" (kai), in which case nouns function as if this sense of the dzú prefix were omnipresent. "Atshasa" no longer means "the stars", but simply "stars" in general, as does "dzúnatshasa" in any context.
One trick that comes with dzú (not covered by kai) is that it is not simply a subset of lú: it also includes things which are analogues of the affected concept: any machine may be lú with a computer, but not dzú with it. Yet, a government may be dzú with a computer operating system; as may physics or a large corporation. These bear commonalities with the notion of an operating system that are not descendent from its internal nature, but from a more abstract view of its function.
So what of constructs like dzúklininu, "the set of things which are analogous to green?" This is dependent on the audience's understanding of what it means to be the colour green—some might say that any other major colour of the seven-colour rainbow is an analogue, while others could present an attempt at defining the essence of what it means to be green, and others still would attempt to find some interpretive meaning; a present-day human might suggest involving the environment. Not everything has to make perfect sense to us—and it is probably not a construction that sees much use.
