#maylalupa

Okay, I finally got the motivation to draw again, so here's an overdue request from @maylalupa to draw her girl Mayla in the Royal Guard of Corona uniform, since she joins in our collaborative works. Hope you like it!

The only modern Saporian verse I have is one where Cass and Andrew are each other’s beards.  They snark at the world together.  Baby bi Varian thinks they’re the coolest.

thanks!

what vulgar does is: 1) automate the most tedious and time consuming part of conlanging, namely the creation of words, and 2) give you tools create affixes (which modify the meaning of words they’re attached to) and other grammatical rules, which can then be used to automatically generate new words. 

i’m going to ramble under the cut quite a bit about what that means from an end user standpoint and in particular for using vulgarlang’s translator tool, which is what you’d want to do when using a finished language in a fictional story, and why understanding how grammar works is important in order to get the best use out of vulgar.

but three quick things before i do that. first, some resources: you can have a look at vulgar’s glossary for reference and consider brushing up on english grammar [and if you speak any other language(s), their grammar too]. there’s a lot of good online resources: this has a fairly thorough and clear overview of the basics (access to the interactive parts of the lessons is... pricey, but all the reading material is available for free), this has another, and you can find probably dozens more with a good google search.

second, read all of vulgar’s own documentation! it’s unfortunately sort of scattered around but it’s fairly thorough: custom vocab and affixes, grammar editor, phonological rule notation, regex and spelling, regex builder tool, IPA phonemes, basic phonology.

and third, while you will always get better, more fleshed out results by getting into the weeds with vulgar’s huge suite of customization tools, you can generate a decent conlang just by picking a set of phonemes and then clicking “generate new language.” for example, here i’ve done nothing but input saporian’s phonemes into a new file: 

then i clicked “generate new language” and got this result: 

which is serviceable; if i put the sentence dheì ˈæz̀e o chàˈlàza zi kìˈshotà kìˈkhuyoʊ (“i left my hat on the table”, which in this language is grammatically arranged as “i on the table my hat left” and which i input into the translator as “i on the table.NOUN.LOC my hat.NOUN.ACC leave.VERB.PAST”) in a story the worst that could be said of it is that the language looks pretty gnarly. and if we apply my saporian spelling rules, the same phrase starts to look a little better: dhay aźe o śālāza zi cīshotā cīhēgho.

if you want to play around with this almost-completely-randomly-generated language yourself, you can reproduce it by inputting these for the custom phonemes: 

m k s ð d n t χ ʑ ɕ θ ʝ l z p ʃ ʒ ɾ x

a ɔ ɪ ʏ ɑ i ɛ æ eɪ̯ oʊ̯

and then going to “save your language,” input 7282497035481961 for the seed, and click “generate this seed’s language.” 

you’ll notice, however, that even with this RNG language, when i used the translator i had to (1) input the words in the correct grammatical order [subject-oblique-object-verb], (2) assign grammatical cases to the nouns, and (3) tell the translator how to conjugate the verb. to figure out how to do this, i had to (A) refer to the randomly generated grammar for the language, and (B) understand how to apply that to the sentence i wanted to translate. so that’s the part where Understanding Grammar is important for getting the most out of vulgar.

further saporian-specific rambling under the cut! because Dhoʊkhàian has fairly simple grammar whereas saporian... doesn’t.

so the way the translator tool works is, you feed it english words that have Exact Translations into your conlang, adding any relevant affixes (using this syntax: word.AFFIX-AFFIX-AFFIX) and following the grammatical rules of the conlang (so if the conglang is VSO, you have to input words into the translator in that order.)

some quick, straightforward examples: 

in my saporian vulgarlang file i have an affix called “NEGATE” which, when attached to a noun, denotes the destruction or removal of that noun: so i can plug dog.NEGATE into vulgarlang’s translator and it will output lāsálan, which translates back to english as approximately as “the dog that was here (but left, died, or was taken away).”

and i can do the same to conjugate verbs, so with dánir (to rain, to water) i can plug in to_rain.VERB.FUT into the translator and vulgar will output daneídh (will rain, will water).

however, the translator has two big limitations: it doesn’t understand word order, and it can’t derive conjugated verbs on its own. meaning if i were to input the sentence she swore to plant it, vulgar would output this: za sworé to plant aen, which is (a) half-saporian and half mangled english to which saporian spelling and phonological rules have been haphazardly applied, and (b) very grammatically incorrect in saporian. 

so to get the correct translation for the english sentence “she swore to guard it,” i need to understand the grammar of both languages. in the sentence “she swore to plant it,” she is the subject, swore is the verb, and to plant it is something called a nominal infinitive phrase being used as the object.  

because saporian is VSO, that sentence should be arranged like this: swore (v) she (s) to guard it (o). but it doesn’t stop there, because saporian doesn’t have nominal infinitive phrases: instead, it takes the stem of the infinitive verb, attaches that as an affix to the stem of the main verb, and then conjugates the result: so in english with literal saporian grammar, this sentence would become [swore to plant] (v) she (s) it (o).

and finally, to plug this into the translator, i need to tell the translator how to derive the new verb “to swear to plant” from the extant verbs “to swear” and “to plant.” which... is not something it can do all in one step, so we start with this input: to_vow.VERB.TO.ACT.NOUN to_plant.VERB.TO.ACT.NOUN

which outputs the stems of both verbs: shoá lóhot

which i then compound together (which is simple, because they are both broad words) and input into the translator with the rest of the sentence like this: shoalóhot.NOUN.TO.VERB-VERB.PAST she it

which outputs the sentence: shoalhotamár za aen

and then i need to double check this result, to make sure that the translator correctly identified the pronoun “it” as the object of the sentence and gave it in the correct case (which it did) and, because my verb conjugation rules are somewhat complex from a programing standpoint, double check that the translator handled the verb correctly—which it didn’t, it randomly deleted the ó, which tells me there’s a bug in the NOUN.TO.VERB affix that i will need to fix later lol

with this knowledge, i can correct the outputted translation to this: 

shoalóhotamár za aen

This is for @maylalupa , based on our fic "Hellblock Tango". The outfits are ones she picked out, and I'm really happy with how it came out!