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Eaglestone T5 sites no longer seem to be working

Yeah. The domain lapsed and the site went away. I backed up most of my web pages.

I haven't decided where to migrate my stuff.
 
It might be in the internet archive. Go back to 2011 if you can't find it in the recent backups.
 
Bad news and good news.

Bad news is that archive didn't go deep enough and didn't save the Vilani dictionary, although it did get some other pages.

Good news is that I had copied some of it on my older computer.

I know that some people don't like Vilani being Sumerian, but to me its "why not?" How many people in even a gaming group are going to know Sumerian when they hear it? Especially GM accented, ultra basic Sumerian. Or Akkadian or Old Babylonian or whatever it is this Vilani is based on?

To further derail this thread; anyone know how much, if any, Sumerian was used in the GURPS:Traveller Interstellar Wars? There is an extensive section on the Vilani, some really useful stuff in any campaign, with lots of Vilani words and titles and such. I wonder how much was cribbed from a cylinder seal dedicated to Inanna.
 
Ancients were 300,000 YA. Sumerian was spoken 5000YA. If there were any relationship, Sumerian would be 120x closer to English than Vilani.

(300kY of descent of Terran language from a common ancestor, plus 300kY of independent evolution on Vland)
 
I know that some people don't like Vilani being Sumerian, but to me its "why not?" How many people in even a gaming group are going to know Sumerian when they hear it? Especially GM accented, ultra basic Sumerian. Or Akkadian or Old Babylonian or whatever it is this Vilani is based on?
It's phonetically similar to Sumerian, but that's really it. If there are any Sumerian words buried in the dictionary list, they are vastly overwhelmed by the ones that are simply made up, enough so that the 'Sumerian' ones can be easily dismissed as false cognates. If you look hard enough, you can also find Vilani false friends and cognates floating around in modern Japanese, Hindi or even Nigerian.

For the record, though, there are plenty of Solomani words in the Vilani language. That's to be expected, of course, for any language that has been rendered subordinate to another over the course of a couple of thousand years. And the vast majority are English/Anglic borrowings, and not pre-contact at all.

To further derail this thread; anyone know how much, if any, Sumerian was used in the GURPS:Traveller Interstellar Wars? There is an extensive section on the Vilani, some really useful stuff in any campaign, with lots of Vilani words and titles and such. I wonder how much was cribbed from a cylinder seal dedicated to Inanna.
GURPS:IW appears to have leached a few words from Sumerian: Saarpuhii and Apkallu are both very close to Sumerian words of similar meaning to their Vilani counterparts (although the Sumerian word is 'sar puhi'). But these are words wholly invented by GURPS:IW -- and Saarpuhii, for the record, shouldn't be a Vilani word at all: there's no 'h' sound in the language, nor has any version of Vilani featured gliding vowels.

I like GURPS:IW a lot -- the only glaring exception being the absolute bomb they dropped on the Vilani language. That part seems to have been written by people who either didn't know or care very much about the previous work done on it, and as a result it pretty much butchers everything related to Bilanidin that it touches. The words they invented for Vilani military organizations are pure rot, by the standards of the language as set up during the CT Era, with many of the words not even sounding like something a cultural Vilani could pronounce easily. And the stuff written up as language fluff for the Legion of the Frontier (pg. 94) is like nails on a chalkboard to anyone who's invested anything in the history of this language -- "Diduma inshaiirshurla aipgia ginagkhuuirkake kakiiinkhish khiikishela ad?" Not only is that gibberish, it's terrible, unpronounceable, un-Vilani gibberish.
 
I like GURPS:IW a lot -- the only glaring exception being the absolute bomb they dropped on the Vilani language.
I think this is by design -- and illustrates just how corrupt the rimward provinces of the Ziru Sirka had become near the end. They weren't even speaking proper Vilani! Over milenia Vilani grammarians had rigorously and systematically established the standard rules of syntax and curated an offical lexicon. And in the end, those rimward provinces were speaking some weird mix of Vegan and Geonee and who knows what else. No wonder the barbarian Terrans rolled them over!
 
If there are any Sumerian words buried in the dictionary list, they are vastly overwhelmed by the ones that are simply made up, enough so that the 'Sumerian' ones can be easily dismissed as false cognates.

Dingir being an obvious and old one. Isn't Shurruppak there too?

GURPS:IW appears to have leached a few words from Sumerian: Saarpuhii and Apkallu are both very close to Sumerian words of similar meaning to their Vilani counterparts (although the Sumerian word is 'sar puhi').
I think Saarpuhii predates GURPS? Not sure. Anyway, it's Old High Vilani, which had slightly different rules (for example, "Bilani" in OHV is spelt "Vilani". And they've got the letter 'o').

The words they invented for Vilani military organizations are pure rot, by the standards of the language as set up during the CT Era, with many of the words not even sounding like something a cultural Vilani could pronounce easily.
Ah, a shame.

"Diduma inshaiirshurla aipgia ginagkhuuirkake kakiiinkhish khiikishela ad?"
"aipgia" and "ad" make me suspect that this phrase is colloquial, originating in Core sector, since those look like Sylean words.
 
I agree that is a shame about the Bilanidin being discarded. I really enjoyed that conlang newsgroup (or whatever that list was called), but haven't seen it in years. The closest I've found was Eaglestone's site dictionary... and I'm not sure if those words came from there or not.

Is that information on Bilanidin available anywhere on the intertubes?

As I recall "Dingir" is not even actually pronounced in Sumerian. It literally means "star" but is used as a signifier for a deity's name, like a punctuation mark. Then again its been decades since I picked up that little factoid so I'm likely misremembering.

So to swing this back to the topic - I used Eaglestone's site for Vilani language reference. I would love to see a site with all that language information in one place.
 
Dingir being an obvious and old one. Isn't Shurruppak there too?
Spelt with one 'r' -- but, yes, it was a Sumerian city.

I think Saarpuhii predates GURPS? Not sure. Anyway, it's Old High Vilani, which had slightly different rules...
Yeah, I included rules for dealing with what happened to the 'h' between OHV and SV in those Sound Change files I made up years ago. But didn't you and I come up with that explanation in the first place? I know I've ranted about interloping 'h's and gliding vowels polluting our Surasishiishe Lamaska here before, and in the end I had decided that the 'h' was a fossilized remainder of some some earlier sound (an aspirated 't', maybe?) from Archaic Vilani, or maybe a holdover from ceremonial Dirmani terminology. Or at least that's the explanation for what's going on inside the Sound Change files, as I recall.

(for example, "Bilani" in OHV is spelt "Vilani". And they've got the letter 'o')
I don't recall that 'v'=>'b' is specifically a transformation between OHV to SV, although I suppose I could go and dig up the old Sound Change files to discover that I'm contradicting myself right now (all this stuff is now several years back, after all). I know that my interpretation of the 'v/b' issue has traditionally been a more a matter of outsider cultural (mis)interpretation, based on the fact -- well, an arbitrary fact that I made up years ago -- that the Vilani phoneme in question was classically pronounced as a voiced bilabial affricate, with a tendency in the lower ranks (and foreigners) to be pronounced as the much easier voiced bilabial fricative. A really kludgy speaker of Vilani -- like a simpleton, or your basic Solomani mook -- would usually resort to a bilabial stop. At any rate, this allows for a range of interpretation when transliterating from Ruuraak to Latin script, and that range just happens to be from 'v' to 'b'.

As a side note -- you may remember I once pointed out somewhere that Standard Vilani/Bilanidin contains no labiodental phonemes (Anglic 'f' and 'v'), which likely means that Vilani traditionalists regard that pronunciation scheme as extremely rude. In fact, I believe a native speaker of Vilani could go his entire life without ever having to show anyone his teeth. I even invented a word once, which I can't find now (but was based on 'teeth-language' as a compound word), that was derogatory Vilani slang for Anglic. But here's another one: Kishasishiishe ('bite-language') which is arguably even more derogatory, and thus better.

Seems like a mouthful for a basic slang term, but I bet we could plug that into the compound word OHV=>SV Sound Changer and it would produce something more realistic.

"aipgia" and "ad" make me suspect that this phrase is colloquial, originating in Core sector, since those look like Sylean words.
Well, my main problem with that phrase is that it doesn't look like it has any linguistic structure at all, agglutinative or otherwise -- it just looks like 'blahblahblahzork ALIENESE!' to me. But that may just be my Indo-European bias doing the thinking for me; maybe a Turk would see it differently.
 
The Vilani Noble titles (including Saarpuhii) first appeared in T4: Milieu 0.
Well, that explains me not knowing about that. My knowledge of T4 stuff is somewhere just north of nil.

Is that information on Bilanidin available anywhere on the intertubes?
I have the grammar PDF that Rob made up and sent to me about 6-7 years ago. It's not as convenient for lookup as the old HTML page was, but at least it still exists. I also have the word list, as well as a very incomplete attempt on my part to expand it, format it better, and provide it as dual English-Vilani and Vilani-English versions.

So to swing this back to the topic - I used Eaglestone's site for Vilani language reference. I would love to see a site with all that language information in one place.
Could the Traveller Wiki host it? I know there's already some language information on the site as it is.
 
If the dictionary gets posted to COTI, I'll [o]move[/o] copy the dictionary to the Reference section...

Or Rob could post it there directly himself... ≤Hint, hint, nudge, wink≥ ≤Points to red starburst on his post headers≥:ssb:
 
Good. I have been able to gather the stuff I would use, but it would be great to see it all in one place available again. Or to get a conversation started on it, based on the previous work.
 
I don't recall that 'v'=>'b' is specifically a transformation between OHV to SV, although I suppose I could go and dig up the old Sound Change files to discover that I'm contradicting myself right now (all this stuff is now several years back, after all). I know that my interpretation of the 'v/b' issue has traditionally been a more a matter of outsider cultural (mis)interpretation, based on the fact -- well, an arbitrary fact that I made up years ago -- that the Vilani phoneme in question was classically pronounced as a voiced bilabial affricate, with a tendency in the lower ranks (and foreigners) to be pronounced as the much easier voiced bilabial fricative. A really kludgy speaker of Vilani -- like a simpleton, or your basic Solomani mook -- would usually resort to a bilabial stop. At any rate, this allows for a range of interpretation when transliterating from Ruuraak to Latin script, and that range just happens to be from 'v' to 'b'.

Hmm... maybe the letter concerned is actually pronounced as a voiced bilabial fricative? That sound lies between a b (voiced bilabial stop) and a v (voiced labiodental fricative), so I can imagine Anglic-speakers being unsure about whether to transcribe it as a b or a v. This could lead to a shift in spelling at some point or between multiple groups, similar to the difference between Wade–Giles and pinyin transcription for Mandarin.
 
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