etaoin arieuāt
Most of the time I use vulgarlang to generate languages, since I can stay phonologically consistent across a culture while being ratshit at making up words. Staring at its blessedly low-effort output, I got curious about Mandoāa, one of Star Warsā most famous conlangs. The easiest thing to do seemed to be to grab the list of words from mandoa.org, so I did. After scrubbing it a bit for punctuation marks - not the comma - I ran it through a couple of analysis tools to see how itās different from English, and what other characteristics it might have. If anyoneās got any longer Mandoāa texts, please flick me a link even if it contains user invented words. Iād be interested to see how different they are.
The first thing was a frequency analysis. For instance, in a plain English text, 12.7% of all letters will be an E, while very few will be an X. In Mandoāa, 17.14% of all letters will be an A, and very few will be a W.
The twelve most frequent letters in English, in order, are: ETAOIN SHRDLU. In Mandoāa, theyāre ARIEUāT ONSLY. Until now, I hadnāt noticed that Travissās Mandoāa doesnāt actually contain an F, and I think but canāt find a reference for, that she said Fett is derived from vhett, meaning farmer. Mandoāa has no Z either, which could be a nice bit of world-building regarding Satine Kryze perhaps coming from another population altogether (like the Norman French after 1066) but almost certainly isnāt. There are also no letters for X or Q.
After that, I did a sliding bigram analysis. This scans through the text looking for which two letters are most likely to appear next to each other. In English, the six most common are TH, HE, IN, ER, AN and RE. Interestingly, for a language created by someone called Karen, Mandoāa has AR, IR, AA, RA, KA, and AN.
K itself is nearly seven times more likely to appear in Mandoāa than it is in English. People do tend to prefer the letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet, so this isnāt quite as egotistical as you might assume. Itās the thirteenth most common letter in Mandoāa, half way down the frequency list.
Even though the letters donāt appear in written Mandoāa, the sounds for F, Q, X, and Z might be present in spoken Mandoāa. However, I tend to headcanon them as too pragmatic to put up with an orthography as horrifying as Englishās, so for me this now means that someone with a heavy Mando accent would curse vhiervhek about the vhekking banta vhodder.Ā Thatās not a typo in bantha; Mandoāa is missing TH as a bigram and presumably as a phoneme as well.
I have no idea why she chose these letters to leave out while leaving the rhotics in. F itself occurs about 2.2% of the time in English, the 15th most common letter, but the bigram VH that she implies replaced it is only the 171st most frequent one in Mandoāa, showing up 0.16% of the time. Odd, since itās in the name belonging to the most famous Mandos of them all.
Although this analysis is based on Mandoāa orthography, it suggests a restricted number of phonemes. The pronunciation guide limits that even more. I couldnāt find any Mando written in IPA, although some poor sod has probably tried it. At some point in the future I might try and figure out how many phonemes it has, compared to real-world languages and other conlangs, like Klingon and Dothraki.
Thereās no real conclusion here, except that it hasnāt escaped my notice that the seven most common letters in Mandoāa, ARIEUāT, are similar to the word forĀ traitor, foreigner, outsider:Ā aruetii, which could be a bemusing in-universe cultural artifact, and that double letters donāt seem to mean anything, pronunciation-wise, so why is the third most common bigram AA when it doesnāt denote a long vowel or anything useful?
(and if Etainās name came from ETAOIN?)
