I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and the topic of Conlangs came up—as it often does around me. Turns out, this friend, an aspiring author, is writing a series of novels in which the protagonist falls in love with a mermaid. A rather hackneyed premise, they concede to me, but it conceals a trap. Readers are lured in by the promise of soft-core mermaid erotica, and stay for the madly complicated, richly elaborated aquatic societies, complete their own histories and languages.
It was here that my ears perked up and I produced my notepad and pen.
(Intense interest builds)
Jonathan: You said you wanted mermaid languages?
Author: yes
J: Tell me first about their physiology. How do they breathe? How do they produce sounds? Or maybe they don’t make sounds at all Maybe they have a signed language?
A: Ohh, I hadn’t considered the idea of a signed language. I like it, but wait...that wouldn’t be practical underwater. Visibility is not always great at long distances.
J: You’re not wrong there, being underwater definitely adds a complicating factor to communication, and there’s also light-distortion to take into account, which might alter the shape of a sign, affecting meaning.
A: Well, maybe they only speak a signed language with their closest friends and children, People who they’re likely to be physically close enough to speak it with.
J: I’ll make a note of it.
A: But back to anatomy....they have lungs. They’re modeled off of whales and dolphins.
J: Ahh, so they don’t have fish parts, and exhale-inhale and phonate similar to the cetaceans?
A: Yes
J: good good, this information is useful. It gives me at least one good starting point for designing the sounds of their language. I would imagine, in the first place, that their language would be highly tonal. If we are modeling the sound of Merish after whalesong, then we would want a language that can capture a wide range of vocalic distinctions. It would make sense for their vowels to be manipulable harmonically. Merish is thus a tonal Language, like Masaai and Chinese. Since we’re dealing with an alien culture and the point of the novel is estrangement and bewilderment, we should make the language somewhat difficult. Different from English at least. Let’s stipulate a reasonably complex tone distinction for Merish.
1). High 2) Low 3) Rising 4) Falling 5) Rising-falling 6) Falling-rising. 7) middle
At this point, it became necessary for me to became a human gramophone faithfully reproducing vowels to give a notion of the proper musicality of the language.
A: Oh, that’s not too bad, it would certainly fit in with the idea that I had that their language would be very difficult for humans to acquire.
J: well, difficult if you didn’t speak a tonal language to begin with
A: Right, and my protagonist speaks English, and encounters the mermaids out near the Great Lakes.
J: The Great Lakes is a mysteriously pleasing geographic region, to be sure. If I remember correctly, it was home to a variety of different cultures and languages, and saw English and French exploration as well. (see Lakota America by Pekka Hamalainen)
A: Ohhhh, that actually works really well for my world, you see, because the mermaids had decided to stop abducting humans some time ago...
J: Because....?
A: Because It had gotten too dangerous. If too many humans went missing they would take notice and abduct the mermaids.
J: That little facet could be represented in the conlang as well. So, depending on when the mermaids had stopped abducting humans, they could have included Ojibwe or French or English loan words into their vocabulary. Since there was a large population of Ojibwe speakers around that area. Chippewa was also important, if I recall correctly. The protagonist might could even recognize a stray lone-word.
A: I like that a lot. It makes the mermaids seem a bit more grounded in the real world. Sure, they have their own fantasy language, but they can also imitate and borrow from humans. It might be in a similar way to how humans make onomatopoeic words, based off of a dog’s bark or a rooster’s cry? Maybe the mermaids make “humanomatopoeia”
J: That’s an amazing portmanteau word. Humanomatopoeia? It raises some interesting world-building questions. How would mermaids represent human speech? Are they similar enough to humans that they would interpret the noises we make with our mouths as speaking? This might be a point of cultural difference, right? A mermaid conlang in the Great lakes is necessarily going to develop differently than a mermaid language in the Pacific off the coast of Japan. Levels of detail like that are immediately captured and conveyed in a conlang. We don’t need answers right now. These are just things to keep in mind.
A: Exactly so, because, my mermaids will have different anatomies, physiologies, languages and cultures, depending on where they're located, as well as what level of the sea they’re native to. So mermaids dwelling at the Sunlight zone, would have cetacean characteristics; mermaids at, and a little beyond, the twilight zone would be more ichthian; and mermaids at the abyssal zone would have Kraken tentacles and angler-fish lights.
J: That’s utterly beautiful. And the presence of different mermaids living at different levels of depth suggests corresponding differences in the Merish dialects to characterize concepts such as light, darkness, closeness, heat, coldness. I mean, folk living in near absolute zero waters, sure as heck ain’t gonna have a word for warmth, at least not warmth as an external quality of the environment. Furthermore, I wanted to ask, How did the mermaids get into the Great Lakes? Because, they’re the group that you’re writing about?
A: That’s correct, and it’s a good question. I don’t remember exactly how they were formed....
J: It’s not important...
A: right, but I do know that at some point in the prehistoric past, a tectonic plate moved, or a glacier slid, or a volcano erupted...
J: something geological happened
A; right, and the result was the Great Lakes, and the mermaids in my story are the descendants of the mermaids who were trapped in the lakes at the time of the cataclysm
J: (Cries out with delight) Oh, ho! Now here’s what’s an excellent world-building premise
A; Really?
J: yes indeed. And I’ll tell you why. So there’s this Linguist, Peter Trudgill, I think he’s called, and he’s compiled various datas that seem to indicate interesting correlation between speaker-group size and retention of idiosyncratic or inconsistent grammatical cases. His tentative observation seems to be that in smaller languages with more tight-knit communities, whose speech is characterized by close open contact, there tends to be a more robust retention of idiosyncratic forms. So what that means practically, is that not only is the Merish language generally hard and foreign, but the Salt Lake Merish language is particularly difficult and complicated, because it wouldn’t have changed as much.
Now, obviously, in a conlang, we want to avoid horrible monster-grammars
A: (laughs) Oh yes
J: But we can still have Salt Lake Merish retain some distinctions and categories that make it different not only from human languages but from other merish languages
A: Ohhhh, That’s an intriguing idea, though I would want to get to the other mermaid species in another book. I can’t get ahead of myself too quickly. I can feel my world getting larger underneath me.
J: That’s the danger of a good conlang. It grows like a coral reef.
A: There was something else though, that’s important for the world building
J: (Curious) Oh? What is it?
A: So, my mermaids live within a non-binary polyamorous society. I want the protagonist--a woman--to fall in love with a male-bodied mermaid, and make a number of (mistaken) assumptions about how love and romance work within their culture.
J: (excitedly) Say no more. I have immediately several excellent ideas.
A: (pleased) Lovely.
J: So the first thing to realize is that you can encode social categories grammatically. It’s not always just a question of using some version of sir or ma’am--a separate title--to convey politeness. You can be polite or rude in some languages--Japanese and Q’anjob’al come to mind (See Lingthusiasm Podcast ep 83)-- depending on what affix you place on a verb! So social values of collectivity and anti-individualism should be reflected/encoded in the grammar. The most immediate way to do this for Merish is by introducing some extra distinctions to the pronoun system. Specifically, by introducing extra ways of counting—what are called number distinctions.
Here I have introduced to Salt Lake Merish, two characteristics particularly salient for the world-building:
1) Grammatical Tone and
2) a Dual and Plural-exclusive-inclusive distinction.
(The diacritical marks on the words refer to vowel tone. A grave accent refers to falling tone. An acute accent to rising tone. A line is high tone, and the little bowl-shaped diacritic refers to falling-rising tone)
Grammatical tone refers to the fact that the number of the pronouns changes depending on the quality of the tone, instead of by affixation (another syllable is added to the word to change its meaning) , zero-derivation (the meaning changes but the surface form does not) , or ablaut (the vowel inside the word changes, i.e. a-->e. The presence of Grammatical tone requires speakers to have very sharp acoustic distinctions, to have a sharp ear. Which makes sense for singing mermaids
The Dual and plural-exclusive-inclusive distinction are separate ways of counting nouns, different from the English singular and plural. The dual number is used to refer to two things. That’s it. Just two. It can also be used to refer to pairs. Like lips, hands, eyes, ears would all get the dual number in Merish. The plural inclusive is used to refer to a group of things in which the speaker includes themselves or an interlocutor. The plural exclusive is used to refer to a plurality of things from which the speaker excludes themselves.
So for instance, if you’re a mermaid, and you’re talking to three of your friends and they say
We(inclusive) are going fishing
you would know that you yourself were included in the invitation. However if they were to say
We (exclusive) are going fishing
you would know that your three friends were going off on their own, and you were free to do what you wanted.
A: Gracious, that’s really useful actually
J: I’m glad you think so. I think that these grammatical distinctions are important for Merish culture because they allow speakers to specify who belongs or doesn’t belong to a group and who is or isn’t in a singular partnership. I included grammatical Tone because I thought it was a very un-english way of marking words grammatically, as well as an intuitively available method for a singing people.
(Second Part Coming Soon)