Vilani Word

[robject]

However, to answer the question, in the above it gives -S- as a sophont acting upon a superior sophont, but the lists it as being an inanimate acting upon a sophont. So which one is correct?

Good catch. I suspect you've found an error, and the copyist shall be punished. When in doubt, refer back to the Grammar file. And if that's in error, then I'll have to consult earlier grammars to see how far back the error goes.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

cool.

thanks it was mostly curiosity...

so when and where is the new study group?

 

[robject]

thanks it was mostly curiosity...

so when and where is the new study group?

Kugganzir, I think that's a neat idea. I know that Mister Anderson is always quick to turn the phrases; I'm usually the sluggish one. Since you're the newbie, where would you like to begin?

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

*shrugs*

I don't know, what do we normally learn first...

OK, that would be alphabet, but that's just learning to recognize the symbols...

Basic words and structure?

Am trying to wade my way through the Grammar Text and that's what led to the copy question. Still, see I don't yet know the basic words so I still have to work with cut and paste and learning the individual word's spellings.

Root words maybe?

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Professors Robject and GKA.

So, I was looking for info on Bilanidin cuisine and found the thread 'Talkin' Vilani', wow, nice pages full of Bilanidin correspondence. Now if I could only read it, some day though.

Anyway, I did have another question...

What would be the Proper Bilanidin for the following:

1. The Ancient and Illuminating Archives of the Venerable Line/House of Thornwood.

2. Novamani.

Thank you again, having a blast, wish I'd found CotI sooner....and where are the articles on Bilanidin cuisine?

I always figured it would be like a combo of Szechuan and Ethiopian (which is super awesome), how ever I don't really know. Though with the amount of weird ass things I do to my food, I might actually like Vilani cooking, but I don't know, no one seems to have done anything on it I can find so far.

Is there Canon/Non-canon books. articles, etc. covering the Vilani in depth and of course the cuisine...need to know.

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

So, I was looking for info on Bilanidin cuisine and found the thread 'Talkin' Vilani', wow, nice pages full of Bilanidin correspondence. Now if I could only read it, some day though.

Yeah, we had fun ... I still have some unfinished business on that thread that I should get back to sometime soon.

The Vilani verb-building script is a nice toy to play with, and very helpful in getting an early grasp of the language. Just find a subject and an intransitive verb, plug it in to the proper settings, and you're only seconds away from building your first simple Bilanidin sentence!

Anyway, I did have another question...

What would be the Proper Bilanidin for the following:

1. The Ancient and Illuminating Archives of the Venerable Line/House of Thornwood.

Kind of hurriedly, but here goes:

Adumlar Dinerka in Sharkuka Galibukaarukgi Daarnuludak

In Anglic: "The Great Family (Clan) Thornwood's Instructive and Ancient Library/Databank"

Daarnulud is the most likely Vilani approximation of the name "Thornwood," I'm guessing. I count at least three phonetic elements in your name that would cause a traditional Vilani speaker to break out into spitting fits.

2. Novamani.

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, and considering the traditional Vilani opinion on such subjects, I'd say the closest approximation of the term would be laguziin.:smirk:

Look it up.

Thank you again, having a blast, wish I'd found CotI sooner....and where are the articles on Bilanidin cuisine?

I always figured it would be like a combo of Szechuan and Ethiopian (which is super awesome), how ever I don't really know. Though with the amount of weird ass things I do to my food, I might actually like Vilani cooking, but I don't know, no one seems to have done anything on it I can find so far.

Really? Considering all the pickling and fermenting that goes on with it, I always thought of it as a sort of bastard child of Swedish and Korean cuisine. Most of the opinion you're going to find around here on Vilani cooking is that the less said about it, the better; and don't get them started on the subject of Vilani beer. But then again, most of the people on this kasha barduka wouldn't recognize a decent meal even if a shugilii walked up and dumped a potload right over their heads.

Is there Canon/Non-canon books. articles, etc. covering the Vilani in depth and of course the cuisine...need to know.

DGP's Vilani & Vargr has a lot of info -- although its an extremely rare book, very expensive to acquire, and is only regarded as pseudo-canonical due to festering Intellectual Property issues.

GURPS: Interstellar Wars has a lot to say about the Vilani of the late Ziru Sirka era. I generally agree with the content (except for the language references, which are mostly garbage); but many folks outside of the GURPS community regard GT material as pseudo-canonical.

Other than that, there's Robject's excellent language site (which you've already found), and the Traveller Wiki has a growing amount of information about the Vilani. I'm rather proud of the map I made of the later First Imperium for the Ziru Sirka page ... check it out!

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Crazy mad fun for me!

Yeah, we had fun ... I still have some unfinished business on that thread that I should get back to sometime soon.

Once again the Dreaded Thread Necromancer Strikes again...
:devil:"Rise, Rise, Post Count Higher! Come Thread, Back from the Pyre!" *insert fave evil laugh here*

The Vilani verb-building script is a nice toy to play with, and very helpful in getting an early grasp of the language. Just find a subject and an intransitive verb, plug it in to the proper settings, and you're only seconds away from building your first simple Bilanidin sentence!

Sadly it pains me to say that while I can write and speak my native language....uh, I got forgot all the technical parts... sorry, so what is a intransitive verb anyway and honestly the Vilani Verb Builder could use some 'help' files for us gurukarpu (slowly learning to spell the couple of words I got so far.) For instance, do I use anglic or vilani words?

Kind of hurriedly, but here goes:

Adumlar Dinerka in Sharkuka Galibukaarukgi Daarnuludak

In Anglic: "The Great Family (Clan) Thornwood's Instructive and Ancient Library/Databank"

How would that parse out? (is that the right term, not being a linguist, I am not sure, but my reading on the Vilani Grammar Pages, suggests that I am using it correctly.)

Daarnulud is the most likely Vilani approximation of the name "Thornwood," I'm guessing. I count at least three phonetic elements in your name that would cause a traditional Vilani speaker to break out into spitting fits.

Why? (see sometimes they are 'simple' questions)

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, and considering the traditional Vilani opinion on such subjects, I'd say the closest approximation of the term would be laguziin.:smirk:

Look it up.

Tried the link but it kept timing out, grrr. However, it looks familar, is it one of those inedible terms? I am guessing that it ain't good. Though you'd think that the Vilani would be even better at such things than the Solomani, since just surviving on Vland would have required a better understanding of biology and it various disciplines.

Really? Considering all the pickling and fermenting that goes on with it, I always thought of it as a sort of bastard child of Swedish and Korean cuisine. Most of the opinion you're going to find around here on Vilani cooking is that the less said about it, the better; and don't get them started on the subject of Vilani beer. But then again, most of the people on this kasha barduka wouldn't recognize a decent meal even if a shugilii walked up and dumped a potload right over their heads.

Hmmm, well the Szechuan was actually I thought they would use a lot of spice to cover the odd flavors, and well Ethiopian because of how most of the dishes are prepared. And what's the deal with everyone and the chunky Vilani beer, like the Bilanidin didn't every discover sifting and sieving in their history?

DGP's Vilani & Vargr has a lot of info -- although its an extremely rare book, very expensive to acquire, and is only regarded as pseudo-canonical due to festering Intellectual Property issues.

That kinda scares me as I just found out on CotI that my beloved SOM is worth CrUS 75. What kinda IP issues, if it can be talked about even?

GURPS: Interstellar Wars has a lot to say about the Vilani of the late Ziru Sirka era. I generally agree with the content (except for the language references, which are mostly garbage); but many folks outside of the GURPS community regard GT material as pseudo-canonical.

Somewhere I should have a copy of this one, somewhere....

Other than that, there's Robject's excellent language site (which you've already found), and the Traveller Wiki has a growing amount of information about the Vilani. I'm rather proud of the map I made of the later First Imperium for the Ziru Sirka page ... check it out!

Yeah, pat yourself on the back for that one, been done looked at that, pu-leez! It is groovy though. Reminds one that 4000 worlds never made it out of the Long Night.

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

... so what is a intransitive verb anyway and honestly the Vilani Verb Builder could use some 'help' files for us gurukarpu (slowly learning to spell the couple of words I got so far.) For instance, do I use anglic or vilani words?

An intransitive verb is simply one that has no object, grammatically speaking. In other words, instead of the basic Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction of a typical Anglic sentence, there is only an SV usage. Anglic examples of such verbs are "to die," "to sleep," "to snore," et cetera. Vilani sentence structure is different from Anglic, but the basic idea is the same.

Anglic is much more fluid that Vilani in regard to its verbs, however, in that most Anglic verbs have both transitive and intransitive ("ambitransitive") properties. Vilani generally likes to keep these categories separate; although ambitransitive verbs are not unheard of.

Intransitive verbs are also important to Vilani in that they are the only verbs that can be used to build adjectives (and in Vilani, most adjectives are modified verbs).

So regarding the Verb Builder -- here's how to use it in order to build a basic intransitive sentence:

1. Think up an intransitive verb and a subject (example: "to cry," "girl" -- i.e. "the girl is crying").
2. Find their Vilani equivalents (makena="to cry," guga="girl").
3. Plug the verb (makena) into the "Root:" slot of the Verb Builder.
4. Click on the little down arrow symbol on the "Subject/Object:" slot and choose the marker you think best reflects the relationship of the subject (guga) to the speaker. In this case it is almost certainly either "proximate human" (if the girl is in some way "close" to the speaker) or "distal human" (if, for some reason, she is not). For simplicity's sake, let's say that the girl is close ("proximate") to the speaker in some way.
5. Press "Build the Verb," and note the results. The answer you should have gotten was amakena ... a- being the verbal prefix marker for a proximate human in an intransitive sentence.

Now all you have to do is build the sentence. It's important to note that a typical Vilani sentence starts with the verb; but other than that, our task here is quite easy. Lay the "built" verb (amakena) out, and follow it with the subject (guga). And thus, you have:

Amakena guga.
"The girl cries" ... or, in a more typical Anglic construction: "The girl is crying."

There you have it! Now you can play around with a different collection of nouns, verbs, and relationship markers; and see what you get.

Tried the link but it kept timing out, grrr. However, it looks familar, is it one of those inedible terms? I am guessing that it ain't good. Though you'd think that the Vilani would be even better at such things than the Solomani, since just surviving on Vland would have required a better understanding of biology and it various disciplines.

It's Vilani for "monster;" and no, their understanding of biology has always been quite stunted in comparison to the Solomani. This is because other than the food-digestibility issue (and the GIANT RAMPAGING KILLBOTS), life on Vland was fairly untaxing towards its transplanted humans.

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

How would that parse out? (is that the right term, not being a linguist, I am not sure, but my reading on the Vilani Grammar Pages, suggests that I am using it correctly.)

Let's see if this makes sense:

[FONT=arial,helvetica][(A--dumlar) (Diner--ka) in (Sharku--ka)] + [(Gali--bukaaruk--gi) (Daarnulud--ak)][/FONT]

1. a- (possessive marker, "attaching" it to Daarnulud) + dumlar "library, databank"
2. diner "to learn, grasp; understand" + -ka (adjectival marker)
3. in "and"
4. sharku "old, ancient; longstanding" + -ka (adjectival marker)
5. gali- "great, renowned; mighty" (intransitive verbal adjective "attached" to the noun, indicating a permanent or inherent state in regards to that noun) + bukaaruk "extended family, clan" + -gi (partitive marker, a form of the possessive case that indicates the noun following it is a "part" of it).
6. Daarnulud "Thornwood" + ak (possessive suffix, marking the noun as "owner" of dumlar, above)

Why? (see sometimes they are 'simple' questions)

Simplest answer: "th," "o," and "w" represent sounds that do not exist in the modern Vilani language. And generally, people don't do well trying to grasp phonetic constructs that don't exist in their own language. Often, they aren't even capable of hearing it (the much-mocked ancient Japanese confusion over Old Terran English's "r's" and "l's" being a good example of that).

Anglic-speakers have these blind spots, as well. I remember spending a sizable chunk of my Old Terran Russian classes in my University days staring blankly at my professor while she valiantly tried to get me to hear the difference between two Slavic phonemes that for all the world to me just sounded like "eihw" repeated over and over.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Thanks again and again.

I would normally try something slick here but I am slowly learning not to.

So, I will merely point out that I now have a notebook, (back to school time) and reading the Vilani Grammar Pages for now....

Up to Pivot Constraints, but feel the need to go back and study more. Trying to learn alphabet as well.....:toast:

Working hard. So thanks for all the help, but why can't the girl be laughing, is so much better than her crying...

 

[robject]

I would normally try something slick here but I am slowly learning not to.

So, I will merely point out that I now have a notebook, (back to school time) and reading the Vilani Grammar Pages for now....

Up to Pivot Constraints, but feel the need to go back and study more. Trying to learn alphabet as well.....:toast:

Working hard. So thanks for all the help, but why can't the girl be laughing, is so much better than her crying...

Pivot constraints is damalaaru hard. I'd put that topic off as long as possible.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

starting over...

Thanks for the warning, but actually I am going back and starting at the beginning of the Work, and using the old study technique of writing it all down as I study so as to imprint the knowledge deeper, having manipulated it.....i hope.

 

[aramis]

Anglic-speakers have these blind spots, as well. I remember spending a sizable chunk of my Old Terran Russian classes in my University days staring blankly at my professor while she valiantly tried to get me to hear the difference between two Slavic phonemes that for all the world to me just sounded like "eihw" repeated over and over.

English has some 43 sounds of the 49 typical in the human repertoire. Russian has only 38 to 40, but includes three not in English....

The letters for which GKA mentions are И, У & Ы. (ee, oo as in boo, and a sound halfway between them)

The other confusions are for Ш & Щ. (sh, but not plosively, transliterated š; and a harder sh sound stransliterated as shch or šč.)

Х isn't in english, either. (The "German ch" sound.)

So when translatng to Bilandin, we can imply the B isn't quite our B, either... cause it was transliterated as a V by the ROM....

It happens a lot.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Glad I have a Mac....

Thanks to my having a Mac, I can actually see the Cyrillic letters!

So, with all the other fonts on the board, and this being a Traveller site...

Why don't we have any Vilani Fonts, I know I have four in my Font Book right now, including Bilanidin, Vilani Serif, Vilani Standard and Vilani Headline (which seems to be a variant or the same font as Bilanidin)?

Surely I am not the only one, right? *looks around hopefully*

 

[aramis]

Partly because it would require getting unicode fonts done. And then getting them assigned to a unicode range.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Ummmmm.....

Partly because it would require getting unicode fonts done. And then getting them assigned to a unicode range.

*pretends that he understood that last*

Anything I can do, hell I only work Fifthday to Sevenday so, if it's some goofy transcription work, I could do that.

OTOH, I have only limited, ok, very limited coding experience.

Besides, I suppose it's only a cute flavor issue only...speaking of when can I get my site subscription, dangit?

 

[aramis]

Unicode, encoded in UTF-8, is how (most of) the net does multiple languages. It uses a 4byte character set (16^4) or larger, encoded in 7bit text (0 to 127=128 characters, essentially just the standard keyboard with shift key and the control characters).

It includes all the standard 7bit latin, plus assigns ranges for accented latin (128 to 256), and each major character set. The range for cyrillic, for example, is abut 128 characters... Cyril's own system had only 45, which double to 90 for upper and lower case... and includes a few odd characters no longer used, a few used in one or two cyrllic languages, and some accented characters.

It's not hard to make a unicode font.

But, in order to keep things sane, there is a central registry for custom unicode systems, and I've not looked into HOW the registry works.

Now, if someone emails me (1) a graphic of the Bilandin font labeled in latin for sound, and (2) a good TTF or PS Bilandin font, and (3) the needed permission from the font's originator, I can probably pull together both a font and keyboard for MacOS, as I do have the needed tools. I'm not up for redrawing characters, tho'.... As to getting it registered, that's another matter.

Further, if unregistered or improperly labelled, persons looking at fonts in the custom ranges may see whatever is encoded in that range on their system, if anything, for example, linear-A pictograms or Ancient Hebrew....

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

The letters for which GKA mentions are И, У & Ы. (ee, oo as in boo, and a sound halfway between them)

Yep. Those are exactly the problem sounds to which I was referring.

The other confusions are for Ш & Щ. (sh, but not plosively, transliterated š; and a harder sh sound stransliterated as shch or šč.)

Kugganzir! I had forgotten all about those two. Yeah, I chewed up a lot of class time trying to get my ears and tongue to cooperate on those sounds, as well.

So when translatng to Bilandin, we can imply the B isn't quite our B, either... cause it was transliterated as a V by the ROM....

It's a less "complete" 'B' than the Anglic in my book, which can sound somewhat like a 'V', depending on one's own personal phonetic background. I liken it to the kind of 'B' that usually comes out when the weather's too cold for your mouth to work properly (about 20 below or so).

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

Thanks to my having a Mac, I can actually see the Cyrillic letters!

Come down off that horse, boy. I can see those Russkie letters just fine on my plain Jane Windoze box, thank you very much.

Why don't we have any Vilani Fonts, I know I have four in my Font Book right now, including Bilanidin, Vilani Serif, Vilani Standard and Vilani Headline (which seems to be a variant or the same font as Bilanidin)?

Surely I am not the only one, right? *looks around hopefully*

My opinion on the Bilanidin/Vilani collection of fonts has always been a great big "meh." I regard it as a kluge, since it's basically just an alien-looking transliteration of the same-old, same-old Anglic/Roman alphabet.

True Vilani is written in ruuraak -- which is an abugida, not an alphabet. At least I'm pretty sure it is (it might be a more standard-issue syllabary); unfortunately, the only information I can find about it is a brief sample buried in a corner over on Robject's language site. It might be possible to reconstruct a complete symbol collection based just on the sample provided; but it would be much easier if I could just find someplace where all the symbols and diacritics are assembled in one collection.

 

[aramis]

And it is fairly simple (albeit time consuming) to make that work easily on mac, and to set it up with kerning pairs to ligatures.