#firish

Ìf báì!

Jessie Sams (@quothalinguist) and I created a language for Pixar's latest film Elemental. We created both a spoken language and writing system that are used in spots throughout the film. It's out today, so if you watch it, see if you can spot any of it! We had a lot of fun creating a language the requested "sound like fire". A tough thing to do with a human mouth, but we had some fun with it! Some language highlights:

Ejective consonants

No nasals

Fricative nuclei

Fluid (ha, ha) case system

Glyphs that resemble braziers

Assuming the English we hear and read is just the Water-language translated for our convenience, I imagine the actual language to have a phonetic inventory that invokes splashing noises, the crashing of waves, and the rushing of rivers; with a healthy dose of slurps and gulps thrown in.

The Earth-language sounds like rattling and cracking stones, groaning earth, and the snapping of twigs. Vowels are held in such a way as to make speech a slow and patient process and consonants are often rolled. Clicks are a prominent feature.

Getting into Firish, better late than never. The wiki is a godsend!

I notice the conjunctions/prepositions (?) sh, r and ss a lot. What do they mean and what are their etymologies?

Thanks!

Sorry about that. I've been adding Ts'íts'àsh stuff to the wiki slowly and in spurts. All the postpositions are in there now, with etymologies. You can find them here:

I've actually gotten this question a couple times, which is great! But this type of thing just isn't possible with a conlang. It has nothing to do with the quality of the conlang or the level of completion (i.e. the amount of vocabulary, how much of the grammar has been recorded, etc.), and I'll tell you specifically why.

First, you may have seen "translators" for various languages online like LingoJam. LingoJam not only has translators for a bunch of different languages, but allows you to make your own translators. The way these work, though, is you write down a word in one language and write its translation into another—something like:

English > Spanish

I > yo

am > soy

to > a

the > el

store > tienda

going > yendo

That is, you put in one to one correspondences, and that's what it has to work with. Once you're done, if you ask for a translation, it looks up the words and sees what's available and it spits back what it has, in order. If we had this very minimal English to Spanish dictionary (which is 100% accurate, by the way! That is, all of these English words can be translated as all of these Spanish words), you could ask LingoJam to translate the following into Spanish...

I am going to the store.

...and you would get...

Yo soy yendo a el tienda.

Now, if you speak Spanish, you'll see all the places this went wrong. (Short version: You don't always need subjects pronouns in Spanish; you use a different helping verb for "to be x'ing" in Spanish; you rarely actually use this "to be x'ing" construction in Spanish; the present tense is sufficient; though el means "the", it's the wrong gender for tienda—analogous to saying "an store" as opposed to "a store" in English.) And you can actually avoid this in LingoJam by adding phrases on top of single words:

English > Spanish

the store > la tienda

I am going > voy

But you can imagine how much work that would be...

The reason why things like LingoJam are so popular, though, is because imagine if you knew nothing about Spanish. Typing in "I am going to the store" and having it instantly spit out "Yo soy yendo a el tienda" is pretty darn satisfying! If you don't know it's wrong but you're happy with it, what's the problem?

Now, a language like Spanish is huge, so it's easier to get accurate Spanish translations online than it is to get accurate Korean translations online—and it's easier to get accurate Korean translations online than accurate Tigrinya translations online, etc. The reason for that takes us to Google Translate.

I think most people know that with LingoJam, you get what you pay for. Google Translate, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated, and much more accurate. It's not 100%, but it's pretty darn good—for widely spoken languages. This is why.

Way back when, Syfy facilitated a chat between me and the folks at Google Translate because they wanted to see if Google and I could work together to create a translator for a couple of my Defiance languages at TED in 2013. After all, we had a full two weeks. We could bang something like that out in two weeks, right? (lol no)

I learned then how Google Translate works. Google Translate doesn't actually know anything about the specific grammar of a language—maybe a couple language specific tweaks, but it's not as if you can go under the hood and find a full grammar of Spanish that tells you when to use the subjunctive, what all the conjugations are, etc. Instead, what Google Translate has is a database (i.e. Google, along with Google Books, Google Scholar, etc.) with tons of, presumably, fluent documents written in the various target languages offered on Google Translate. They also have faithful translations of those documents—not all, but a percentage. Google Translate uses that information to predict what a given sentence in one language will turn into in another.

In order to do this successfully, Google Translate needs BILLIONS of documents to troll. And it has that. It has BILLIONS of articles written in Spanish and translated to English. That's why the English to Spanish translation is as good as it is.

Now, having said that, anyone who's bilingual in English and Spanish knows that Google Translate isn't perfect. Sometimes it's pretty good, but sometimes it produces a lot of clunky, unnatural, or even incorrect translations. This is because there isn't a human back there calling the shots.

But that's its best translator. Now imagine translating between English and Samoan (one of the other languages it offers). There are EXPONENTIALLY more online articles in Spanish than Samoan. Consequently, the translations you get between English and Samoan on Google Translate are absolutely no guarantee.

And bear in mind, there's a kind of minimum threshold they work with before adding a language to Google Translate. If Samoan is on there and not Fijian, it's because there's that much more Samoan online than Fijian.

Now let's go back to conlangs. What Google Translate wants is BILLIONS of articles written online in the target language. Forget how complete the grammar of a conlang is, whether you can find that description online, or how many thousands of words the conlang has. How many fluent articles are there written in that conlang that are online? How many can one person to? How about a team of people? And how many conlangs have that?

This is why Google Translate has Esperanto and nothing else. Esperanto has been around for 136 years, and in that time there have been a good number of people who have learned to speak it fluently, and have written things (poems, articles, books) that are now online. It is as much as Spanish? Certainly not, but it is enough to hit Google Translate's minimum threshold, and so it's available.

Assuming you have a conlang with a full grammar and a good amount of vocab, if it were popular, it might have enough available material for Google Translate to work with 125 years from now. But at the moment, it's not possible. That says nothing about the language: It's about how Google Translate works.

And bear in mind, Google Translate is, at the moment, our best non-human translator.

If predictive-AI gets good enough that it can learn the grammar of a language, then it may be possible to produce a translator for a new conlang. That, though, is not the goal of Google Translate. Maybe ChatGPT and things like it will get there one day, but even that isn't a dedicated language learning AI. We need an AI that doesn't work with billions of fluent articles, but works with two books: a complete grammar and a dictionary. If an AI can one day work with those two tiny (by comparison) resources and actually produce translations that are as good as or better than Google Translate, then we'll be at a "translation-on-demand" place that will be good enough to feed a new conlang to. At that point, it will simply be a matter of producing a grammar and lexicon of sufficient size for the AI to do its thing.

If you mean did the glyphs we created ever appear, yes, they did; we saw them all over the place. Now, were they ever used to write anything specific, as opposed to just being used for decoration in random ways? That I don't know. We did send them a list of some things spelled out correctly, but I don't know if they used them. It would've been nice to do some of the things that were in focus (like an open and closed sign), but we never had any communication with the art department.

You have to understand: It's a rare thing to get to even do a writing system. On many shows/films (Game of Thrones, Thor: The Dark World, Emerald City, Paper Girls) production finds the very notion of a language having a unique writing system somewhat comical. Others (The Shannara Chronicles, Raya and the Last Dragon, Halo) find the notion that the language creator(s) would create the writing system used in the show amusing. We weren't hired to create a writing system for Elemental. We told them we could do it and they said no. We did it anyway. And after they saw it, they decided they liked it and would use it. That doesn't happen often!

So yeah, the fact that they didn't use the writing system to spell things out accurately? Not a big deal. You think everything in the background of Defiance was spelled correctly? There were dozens of pill bottles in Doc Yewll's office with over 200 words of text on them each. That was just gibberish done in the Indogene font, because, frankly, no matter how much you zoom in on those Doc Yewll scenes, you will never be able to read that writing (nor will you be able to see that what filled the pill bottles were things like oyster crackers).

I think I might be able to help with some terminology and to clear up some assumptions.

First, there are two levels of representation for the language. One is the orthography. The orthography are the unique characters that are used to spell the language that look like this:

For the actors, we have a romanization system. This system uses the Roman alphabet (the one we use for English) so actors know how to pronounce the language without having to learn anything extra (like how to read all that above).

The writing system for Ts'íts'àsh is complex and it doesn't line up neatly with its pronunciation. You can learn how to use it (check out the full system here), but it's probably best to just figure out how to spell each word you want, and then learn the spellings for the various grammar bits. The writing system was created for the language. Just like there's no equivalent of "q" in Japanese, there's absolutely no relationship between the Ts'íts'àsh writng system and the Roman alphabet. There is no "version" of "q" or "x" or "j" in the Ts'íts'àsh writing system.

The romanization is fairly manageable. There's just the consonants needed for the language (p, b, t, d, t', k, k', f, s, sh, kh, r), the vowels (a, e, i, o, u), and the acute, grave, and circumflex accents for tone (á, à, â). There's no need for any other letters to spell everything you need to in Ts'íts'àsh.

So really all you should bother with is learning the sound system and how each thing is spelled. It's not difficult, as almost every symbol is identical to its IPA equivalent, and the digraphs are fairly explicable.