Language of the Birds

~ yeah, I worked on a ConLang… ~

Normally, if some lonesome nerd tells you that they were “making a whole language for a story” you try to hide your boredom while they recite each new sound that they have stamped atop English grammar and lexicon. “See, ‘thurput’ means ‘river,’ and ‘zaz’ is the word ‘the,’ while ‘scup’ means ‘has’…” It’s a decoder-ring for the language they already know.

I’m a different kind of lonesome nerd. :p

The Language of the Birds is not ‘meant to sound cool’ or ‘fit with a certain image I want to convey about that culture, a certain vibe’. Nope. I’m a Mathematician, and I asked: “How could a language optimize functionality? And how much of a benefit would that have created, historically?” So, I have those constraints necessary for such a language, LotB from here-on… and I *still* haven’t picked a single sound=word association. I couldn’t speak or write any of it for you; I only know how to *find* it. Here:

We have a few thousand languages, branching along numerous routes, and along the way each of them would invent ‘slang’. Some of that slang became popular, persistent, standard. Map all of that slang! Look at the *sounds* used in that slang, to refer to a set of ideas. All of your onomatopoeia is in this bucket, too. Lots of slang-onomatopoeia are so old, succeeding for reasons we forgot, that they don’t seem like onomatopoeia to you!

“What animal is that?”

“The one that goes ‘woof’?”

“Yeah. That one.”

“It’s a wolf.”

“What about that one flying over us right now?”

“The one that screeches ‘cawk’?”

“Yup! That’s it.”

“It’s a hawk.”

“What about the BIG snarly one that goes ‘grrr’?”

“A bear.”

That is the selection-filter operating quietly in the background of every language, slowly *preferring* Slang A over Slang B *because* Slang A sounds-like-it-fits; it’s a closer match to our onomatopoeia-synesthesia!

That is the core concept of LotB: All single-syllable words are onomatopoeia-clusters. All compound words are compounds of those onomatopoeia-meanings. As a result, I would need an Ai to perform a comprehensive analysis of the slang of each language throughout history, to *find* those most-natural meanings of each sound. That’s why I can’t speak it, yet.

The Grammar is stupefyingly straight-forward: clauses let you insert or re-arrange information about their referents, with a general SOV word order. And, the compound-syllable words are always reverse-order constructions which are of the type matching their last syllable. That means: “snow shoe” is a kind of shoe for snow, NOT a kind of snow. “Space ship” is a kind of ship for space, NOT a kind of space.

Writing LotB is where things get a bit more nuanced.

There are only EIGHT normal strokes on a page: the four lines of horizontal, right-diagonal, vertical, then left-diagonal, followed by the ‘C’-half-circle, the ‘n’-half-circle, ‘D’-half-circle, ‘u’-half-circle. Those eight strokes each represent one of eight vowels, moving from the front to the back of the throat. They ALSO represent 16 consonants, which also move from front to back! How?! Here:

As a Vowel, that stroke is Largest. It is central in the letter-body. When you want to precede that Vowel with a Consonant, then that Consonant-stroke is written *smaller* and further up-and-or-to-the-left. The ‘soft’ Consonants are all written with the end of their stroke flowing into the beginning of the Vowel-stroke, while the paired ‘hard’ Consonant uses the same stroke, yet it *crosses* the beginning of the following Vowel-stroke. Same for Consonants at the end of the Vowel.

When a Consonant and its adjacent Vowel use the same stroke, connected, then you can replace that double-occurrence with a single occurrence, by adding a tiny full-circle at the side of the stroke which would have held the Consonant. So, if ‘b’ and ‘u’ used the same ‘C-stroke’ shape, then you would ONLY write the ‘C-stroke’ of the ‘u’ sound, while the start of that ‘C-stroke’ would have a tiny circle attached to it. Further, when a longer syllable has uncertain Vowel/Consonant distinction, you simply place a ‘.’ next to each Vowel.

Writing this way requires less than half as many strokes as in English, while needing less space for the same stroke-size, and it maintains readability and distinction at smaller print-sizes. And, because the full diversity of shapes are decomposable into these eight strokes, you have a panoply of calligraphic ‘styles’ for writing, while being able to make your writing look like almost any sort of image! A scribble on a page can be ‘pronounced’ as words. You can watch the flight of a bird, speaking the syllables its course wrote in the sky, and your friend can hear that word to re-create the flight-path!

Additionally, numbers are expressed as syllables, with the Vowel representing the ‘power’ of the number, similar to how English says ‘thousands’, ‘millions’, ‘billions’, ‘trillions.’ Meanwhile, the consonants of that number-syllable are Adding Binary Values. It isn’t that confusing:

If ‘thee’ is the value 1, and ‘vee’ is the value 2, then ‘veeth’ would be 2+1=3. If ‘j’ is the third consonant, then ‘jee’ equals the value 4. The fourth consonant, ‘sh’ has a value of 2 to the third power, 8. The fifth consonant, ‘s’ is equal to the fourth power of 2, 16.

By having each consecutive letter be TWICE the value of the previous letter, then Addition and Subtraction become PAIR-Matching. You have learned ALL of your Addition and Subtraction as a child, as soon as you can play Go Fish! “This number has a ‘sh’ in its syllables, and this other number ALSO has a ‘sh’ among its syllables, so adding two ‘sh’ together turns the pair of them into the NEXT letter in the list — ‘s’.” Similarly, the mathematical operations of Multiplication and Division are now ONLY Adding and Subtracting! “I need to multiply ‘v’ times ‘j’… and ‘v’ is ONE step away from the origin, ‘th’. So, I just move ONE step further than ‘j’ to multiply their values; ‘j’ becomes ‘sh’.” In essence, I turned the alphabet into a Slide-Rule.

There’s also a neat trick to use CVC syllable as triode logic: the pair of consonants each have four features, ‘hard/soft’ ‘beginning group/end-group’ etc., which each map to 1/0 output values. The Vowel between that pair of Consonants selects which of those eight features to look-at, and you read-off the 1/0 value associated with that feature. Write in ‘triode’ using a Quippu with various BEADS strung with multiple threads per bead, various knot-points along those threads, such that the bead can be a variable in State-Space. Now, you have a textile computer!