The Annals of Tepat

Texts and Translations

The Declaration of Independence (2, 3) - The Great Gatsby

Culture

All posts tagged “Culture”

Culture Topics: Kinship in Swira - New Year - Evil Santa - Differently-Flawed Prophecies - Volcano Cult - Concept of the Soul - Furries - Death the Winnower - Concept of Rights - The Thread of Sleep - Winterval - For the Arrow to Fly Forth - Souls of Objects - Human Sacrifice (NEW)  - Reactionary Geography - The Covenant of the People - Sorcery (NEW) -

Geography / Maps

Posts about geography / maps

Tiptum (general) (NEW) - Tepat (NEW) - The Inner Sea (NEW) - Northern Tiptum  (NEW) - The Straits and the Southwest Corner (NEW) - Qom Homeland (NEW) - The East - Notoq, Wasak - Muqali - The South - Climate - Vegetation - Population - Tiptum (language families) - The Dragon's Fang - Comments on mapmaking -

Surrounding nations

The East Coast (Amtom) (tagged) – collection of small states, frenemies with divergent socioeconomic views, who sometimes cooperate as guardians of cilivization

Swira (master post here) - one of the "northern barbarians," nomadic herders and master horsemen, inhabiting the plains north of Tepat, occasionally gathering into confederations that threaten Tepatic security. Tepat has been pushing its frontier northward and settling tribes within its borders in “independent barbarian homelands.” Also: May We See the Summer Again (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) - Kinship - Lunar New Year 1, 2 - Protolanguage - Horses/Thunder/Shrooms - For the Arrow to Fly Forth - Ear = Money -

Muqali (tagged) - that backward country up in the mountains that everyone makes jokes about.

Milim (tagged) - extinct kingdom Tepat overthrew, famed for massive human sacrifices - Pictographs - The Tsaltep and his demise -

Natural History

Vegetation regions - Pseudotaxites, the Confungus (2) - Bearded Tree + Assassin Tree - Nemul - Oregano - desert vegetation - the boss cat (NEW) -

Stories and Narratives

Yom and the Demon: A Supernatural Tale of Tepat

Vignettes: Facing the Tears  (NEW) - No Sheep in the Sky - New Year - Approaching Luqtal -

Folktales: The Legend of Dumbfuck (NEW) - Cougar woman - Ice Woman - The Lonely Tombstone -

Other texts

(NEW) Ancient Tepatic Recipe - https://www.tumblr.com/yuk-tepat/797446671526133761/ancient-tepatic-recipe?source=share

Other stuff

General worldbuilding, linguistics, and other stuff

Other conlangs

Çomyopregi - an Indo-European language

Languages from the Chained Adept books by Karen Myers: Kitali - Zannib

Meta

Making Logographic Writing Systems: 1, 2, 3 - How I organize it - Comments on mapmaking - Elephants and Zebras -

- O -

Marking the parts work together

So at the moment you will have writing which contains a mixture of signs, which are ambiguous. Before it was ambiguous what words were being written, if they sounded similar – e.g., ‘I’ or ‘eye.’ For that I suggested readding pictorial signs to distinguish meanings.

Incidentally, it’s curiously similar to what a lot of SNS and smartphone users have done, with abbreviated spelling, and the plethora of emojis: reduce words to just an indication of their standard spelling, but with ample emoticons, often at the end, to clarify what they’re talking about. If you think about it this way, it’s not too hard to understand.

However, there is another possible ambiguity here. You now have some symbols which are meant to be read straight; some which are read phonetically, but meant to be interpreted as different (though similar-sounding word); and some signs which are really not read but meant to clarify semantically otherwise ambiguous ways of writing. These correspond to the three aspects of a logographic system I mentioned earlier:

(1) Logograms (logographs) – signs that represent a word (or root) in the language

(2) Phonograms – signs that indicate sounds

(3) Semantograms / Determinatives – signs that mark a word as belonging to a semantic category

So here is the new question: which of these signs is which? How do I know, looking at a sign, if it’s supposed to be a logogram, phonogram, or semantogram? You will have to decide how to do that.

One way is to have different sets of signs for the different functions: any particular sign is either a phonetic sign, a logogram, or a logograph. They may be overlapping somewhat, but to some degree, you might know that one sign is meant to be read phonetically because it’s only ever a phonetic sign.

This can be seen with the interaction between kanji and kana in Japanese. Japanese is a very complex system, having taken Chinese characters (kanji) and added two phonetic syllabaries (kana) on top of it. Chinese characters themselves of course were already a logographic system, containing its own semantic and phonetic components from Old Chinese, but for a moment let us ignore that internal complexity. Kanji are logographs. The two kana syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) are visually distinct from kanji (and each other too). The same sign is either a kana or a kanji, not both. The kana are always used for phonetic spelling, kanji are not.* The general pattern is for kanji to spell content words (nouns, adjectives, and the roots of inflected verbs), while hiragana are used to phonetically spell function words and the inflectional endings of verbs, and katakana phonetically spell foreign non-Chinese words and are used for emphasis, similar to italic type in Roman letters. So if I see a kana わ I know it is always representing the syllable wa and does not represent a word. Conversely, a kanji like say 自 represents a word/morpheme, meaning ‘self,’ which may be pronounced ji or mizukara depending on context, but is not representing just a sound. Furthermore, since Japanese doesn’t use spaces between words, the alternation between kanji and kana helps mark word boundaries.

(*I know that ateji exist, but that’s kind of a minor phenomenon and this is already complicated enough.)

However, from what I can tell, most systems do not separate each of those aspects completely, with totally unrelated sets of signs performing each function.

Another option: merging signs that function together into composite signs. In both Chinese and Maya, writing is organized into a series of square blocks. A single logograph can occupy a block by itself, or one or more basic signs can be combined inside it. When signs are combined, they are meant to be read together or associated in some way, by spelling out a new word which is different from the meanings of the basic signs, but somehow related to them.

So in Chinese, if a character has a radical, then it has been composed from at least two simpler signs. If it has been made of several signs, then you generally know that one sign in the block is suggesting the meaning of the overall character, and one sign is suggesting the sound. (Occasionally, the overall meaning may be a composite of the meanings of both components.)

In Chinese, being analytical, each block = one morpheme = one word in itself, generally. (This is true in Classical Chinese; in modern Mandarin most words are bimorphemic compounds and thus spelled with two characters, but ignore that for the moment.) Hence, the blocks themselves serve to distinguish word boundaries.

The organization of writing into blocks, and the structure of the blocks themselves, indicates the function of the signs, and their relationship to each other.

In Egyptian, hieroglyphic pictures can be used as phonetic signs, or semantic determinatives, but when they are used as logographs – when they actually stand for the word for the thing depicted – a small vertical stroke is written over the hieroglyph. (Two strokes mark the dual, and three make it plural.) Many people probably already know about cartouches in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are kind of rounded enclosures marking proper names.

A possibility which I haven’t really seen, is the use of some sort of diacritics to distinguish functions. These might function similar to the Egyptian ‘logogram’ stroke, but probably be a much more developed system. As a possible example, an old non-canon form of Yuk Tepat glyphs briefly made use of the ‘air’ sign. The representation of a puff of air, which stood for breath, which stood for speaking, was written over glyphs to indicate that they were simply meant ‘as spoken’ – i.e. for phonetic value alone.

Note, if you choose the Chinese / Maya route, your script will be massively more complex than say, classical Egyptian hieroglyphs with their relatively independent, unchanging forms, because you will need to have signs corresponding to combinations of signs. This is not so bad if you’re writing by hand but will become massively more difficult when you computerize. (My problem now.)

I’m sure you can think of other systems, and if you do, I’d like to see it.

Organizing: Basic signs

If you haven’t yet, make a complete list of all the basic signs you have created, which you will use. These are all the signs that cannot be broken down further into a simpler sign which means anything. As you develop each sign, write them down. This should be obvious, but keep track of them and write them in an ordered list.

So above is part of a 2-page list of basic signs in Yuk Tepat. I have not bothered to label most of them because after using them so much, I knew most of them already, at the point when I realized, “I really need a big at-a-glance list of these.” I would recommend that you organize your official list at the beginning, and also label the signs.

You will also need to decidehowto organize them. It’s best to have some system for ordering them. In Chinese, the system is obvious – ordering by stroke count. In Chinese, characters are composed of an easily identifiable number of discrete recognized strokes, which makes it easy to grade their complexity, and order them from simple to complex. (The same could be true of cuneiform, which has 5 distinct strokes that always occur in a definite number in a sign; however I do not know if cuneiform is in fact indexed this way.)

If you have ever used a Chinese character dictionary, you probably understand the principle. Looking up a character in a dictionary involves identifying the parts the character can be broken into, identifying which one is the radical (usually = the semantic determiner), then finding it in the list, then looking up that radical, which will give you all the characters derived from it, then finding it in that list. Taking again 泳, if you don’t know it, but recognize the three dots on the left side as ‘water,’ you can look up the ‘water’ radical. The water radical will be with all the other 3-stroke radicals. 泳 will be listed under that, with all other characters derived from the water radical. Chinese characters are ordered by the number of strokes. The total number of strokes in the character is 9, so you will find it after water-based characters with 8 strokes, and before water-based characters with 10 strokes.

In Tepat, which otherwise functions similarly to Chinese, characters are not composed of discrete strokes, but usually of one long connected stroke which bends, loops, doubles back, etc. While it’s still possible to grade complexity, and I’ve tried, it’s not as simple and obvious as Chinese, and not as useful.

Given that though, some other system, even an arbitrary one, is still better than none. Heck, you can just number them in the order you made them if desired.

What I did with Yuk Tepat was to sort the basic glyphs by dividing them into semantic categories, starting with humans and ending with ‘abstract’ glyphs, with things such as body parts, animals, plants, nature, tools in between. Interestingly, this turned out to be almost the exact same system Gardiner imposed on Egyptian, so I feel vindicated in it. Within each category, the glyphs have a standard order – essentially arbitrary, but often with some justification like top-to-bottom (e.g., “Body Parts” start with the head, “Nature” runs from the vault of the sky to water, which settles below ground level.)

This is not as simple a rule as stroke order, but it does serve the necessary task of sorting your glyphs, because you will probably have at least 200 signs, and you do not want to spend time searching a jumble of 200 signs for the one you need.

Alternatively, you can order all of the signs by the Roman-letter transliteration of that sign’s reading (more in a second about phonetic organization). You can change the order later, but please give them a standard order.

The Detailed List

I think it’s useful to have a single-page ordered view of the signs, but you should also created a longer, more detailed index of them all. Be prepare to leave space beside each one on your list, to create subentries.

Give each sign a heading. Then create subheadings: the subheadings, under each sign, are to keep track of the derivatives of each sign, and composite signs made up of it.

You can of course list derivative signs at the end, after basic ones, but for later ease I suggest grouping secondary signs with the primary signs they are derived from.

One more subheading: a list of variant signs / alternate forms of each sign. If like Chinese or Maya, where your signs will be crammed into one block, the shapes of the parts of that block will be squished and stretched to fit around each other, leading to distinct variants of each sign. They may also be abbreviated, or further simplified. Keep track of these. Generally these will tend to fall into certain patterns across signs, e.g., a form when the sign occurs on the left side of a composite character, or on the top. If you want to subclassify these variants by their kind of positional occurrence inside a compound, you can do this as well.

So start filling out your expanded sign list. Whenever you make a new sign, add it. Whenever you make a new sign by modifying a sign, or combining signs, add that one under the basic sign it’s composed of – its radical. You can follow the practice of using the semantic component as the radical – however, even if you privilege one component as the radical, if you are creating a sign composed of two basic signs, I would recommend listing it under both components, and cross-referencing them.

As an example, here is a page with the glyph yan ‘person’ and some associated signs. This is kind of a sloppy layout but shows the different kinds of information to keep linked to each of the glyphs you might make.

So going row by row what you see here is:

Evolution: the original pictograph, a kind of stick figure, and several successive stages. (Upper right corner: doodle of a completely different glyph, ignore it)

The free-standing logogram yan, followed by 4 positional variants. The dotted lines indicate where another basic glyph could be inserted to form a composite glyph.

Left side: some composite glyphs where yan is the radical. You can see the variant form of yan on top of these glyphs

Right side: some derived glyphs. These aren’t composites, they don’t contain other basic glyphs, but are formed by modifying yan in some way – for example, adding the little ‘hat’ on top of it.

5th row: some related glyphs. They aren’t considered derivatives; historically, they do evolve from different versions of a stick-figure human. You can see the ‘head’ (top loop) in most of them.

A composite glyph for ‘people/nation’ which is itself a semantic determiner in other glyphs.

So of these, I think the information in #2 and #3 is the most important and should be catalogued in whatever entry you make for your basic glyph: the glyph itself, variant/combining forms, modified/derived glyphs, any compound glyphs using it as a radical. The historical forms are probably of interest too, but not directly useful in organizing stuff.

Organizing sounds

It’s important to keep your signs phonetically organized somehow, to keep track of how each of the basic glyphs sound – and thus, how they can be used as phonetics to spell other words. So create some sort of index of phonetic elements in an orderly fashion – most likely you will get some sort of chart. Here is a section of a chart I used to organized Tepatic glyphs phonetically:

While this here is kind of old (I should redo it), you get an idea. Along the top, we have classes of initial consonants (e.g. P = labial stops). Along the side, we have a list of different kinds of ‘rhymes’ (vowel + final consonant). So the top second-left square shows a glyph (NOSE), and we can tell from this it starts with a labial consonant and ends in -im. This is pim and could also be used for phim, plim, pwim, etc. So if I invent phim (not yet), I already know that I can spell it by combining the phonetic pim ‘nose’ with whatever semantic radical is most appropriate to the meaning.

This includes not just basic glyphs, but any glyphs derived from them, or compound glyphs. If they have a unique sound and can be used to represent the sound, they go in the chart.

In my chart, there are also some arrows. Since there are not glyphs that fill out absolutely every space, some syllables have to be “spelled” with other similar-ish syllables. For example, in the bottom right → HEW lets me know that there is no sign with a pronunciation that fits the chart syllable pattern no onset + /iw/, so if there’s a word like hiw, it should borrow the phonetic for hew, which is ‘close enough.’

Yuk Tepat is most similar to Chinese, in that it uses a fuzzy kind of ‘overall resemblance’ for the whole syllable to choose phonetic elements – instead of some strict rule like matching a particular part of the sound. Hence, the design of the phonetic organization system is similar to the Chinese Fanqie system, where each character’s pronunciation is divided into an onset and rhyme.

Your own system will depend on your language’s phonology and the kind of spelling system you want in your language – syllabic, alphabetic, etc. For Egyptian, Egyptian phonetic elements are first organized into uniliterals (signs representing a single consonant), biliterals (signs representing a sequence of two consonants), and triliterals (representing 3 consonants, disregarding any vowels that may come between them). As befits an Afroasiatic language, the uniliterals are usually presented in an alphabetic order parallel to the order of Hebrew and Arabic. You can always change your system. The important thing is, set up a system for organizing your signs phonologically now.

Whenever you create a new sign, and assign a reading to it, write it in the appropriate place in your chart right away. This serves two purposes: first, it helps you easily locate signs by their sound, so you can easily pick signs to write phonetically similar words / phrases. Second, it gives a direction to further work. You know where the gaps in your chart are and you know what kind of words you should make up to fill it out, until everything in your language can be spelled phonetically.

Organizing the dictionary

Finally, keep the meanings organized as well in your dictionary. I’m not going to ask you if you are making a dictionary of some sort for your conlang, because I’m going to assume you are, because you should. Some people just use an Excel spreadsheet, some people use dedicated dictionary software. My examples will mostly deal with Lexique Pro, which I primarily use.

While a dictionary is mainly for describing spoken language, and your dictionary is probably going to be in Romanization rather than your script, it’s important to integrate your logographs with your dictionary.

I insert logographic signs into the dictionary as picture. Having written all your basic signs, scan (if on paper) and create a separate small image file for each one. Name it and put them all in one folder. While making your dictionary, whenever you input the word / root corresponding to one of your basic signs, add the image to your dictionary entry.

You can add as many images to as many entries if you want, but at the very least I would recommend that your basic signs / radicals should be in your dictionary, which I have done.

If your writing system makes use of composite glyph blocks, like Chinese or Maya, but you do not want to write, scan, and import an image for every single one, an easy workaround is to make use of the \nt field (Note). This simply allows you to add a freeform text information in your entry. For entrywords that would be spelled with a composite glyph, I add a note near the top that just says something like “Semantic radical khlût MOUSE + phonetic pim NOSE.” (This is a completely made up example.) This tells me that it is made up of two basic glyphs, “mouse” and “nose.” So I know exactly how to spell it, even without an image of its glyph. If I have for some reason forgotten those two radicals, as basic glyphs I would have inserted at least their images into the dictionary. So I can say look up “mouse” and it shows me the entry with my image of that glyph.

Now crossreference everything every way you can.

Lexique Pro allows a variety of fields for indicating semantic relations among different entries, which I had not given much thought to before, and only came to think about these semantic connections a lot after starting Lexique Pro – really, I discovered it through Lexique Pro.

The most important are the ones tagged \lf (Lexical Function) and \sd (Semantic Domain). Lexical function creates a link to another entry with a specified relationship to the word, which you can label – for example, indicating synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and hypernyms. Semantic domain assigns your entry to one (or more!) categories / wordlists of entries with something in common – for example, all animal words, all plant words, color words, etc.

What’s great is they’re so flexible and I have tweaked them to help me organize so much more. For example, semantic domains can create custom domains. For Swira, who are nomadic herders, I created custom semantic domains for horse- and archery-related words. But you can use them to organize information that’s not even semantic. In the context of Yuk Tepat and its logographic script, what I did is to create a custom semantic domain for basic glyphs, then tag the names corresponding to every basic glyph in my logographic system. When I click on that semantic domain, it shows me an alphabetized list of every basic glyph.

I similarly created a “semantic” domain to list all of the signs and composite signs in the phonetic chart listed previously.

“Lexical function” can also be flexibly used for non-semantic crossreferencing. For example, I can insert a lexical function, label it “Used as a radical,” and write in it all the other composite glyphs formed using it as a radical. Similarly, I can create another lexical function field and put in all the modified glyphs derived from it. (This is unique to Tepatic glyphs, but there are a small number of marks which can be added to basic glyphs to create new glyphs – e.g., forming a glyph for ‘finger’ from the glyph ‘hand.’ These are not properly composite glyphs, because they are not made of multiple base glyphs. Anyway, you get the idea.)

Lexique Pro unfortunately does not automatically create backlinks, or update links, so you should visit the entry pages for each of the derived glyphs and create backlinks to their radical. Time-consuming, but I think in the long run better for keeping your dictionary organized.

If you think that this could replace the paper charts I showed in the first part of this post, yeah I guess it could, but I’m too analog to not keep a handy paper chart lying around. I am not perpetually online. If you’re even more analog than me though, you could use index cards for everything. Either way, take care organizing all your glyphs! You will have an unwieldy number of them very soon.

Conclusion

Although there are many customs associated with rite-of-passage, which may or may not be done, or may be handled differently in different places, one of the most widespread and consistent is a ritual where the boy gets his first orgasm and ejaculation from the community.

Teenage boys are initiated into manhood by being brought to oragasm and ejaculation by an elder – typically by an older woman or older women of the community, one not related to the boy(s).

The woman who did this was often called a tyum (< *ti- hand + -um feminine suffix - see the glyphs at the top of the post (2 variations)). The tyum could be no woman in particular, or a group of the elders of the community, or a particular woman might be given the role customarily; in the latter case it was common for this woman to also be the midwife, matchmaker, or shamaness.

(In case you’re wondering, passage-rites for young women are less common and well-developed, but one of the more common ones is for families to announce menarche by flying a red flag outside the house.)

When the boy came, the old woman/women would shout hurrah and the semen would be saved as a talisman for the boy when he grew older.

There was a lot of variation, and how it went on was often particular to the ways of the particular village. In old villages, this was often a big event – all the boys of a certain age might go through it together. For several days each teenage boy would go through it one by one – or possibly, all of them would be done together at the same time. Rarely, they were all done outside in public, with the teenage girls watching and cheering for them. However, it could also be done to each boy alone in private when he showed signs of puberty. This could make it difficult to perform, although the women who gave it were often skilled with their hands.

It’s worth noting that masturbation has long been considered taboo in Tepat. People are not supposed to do sexual stuff alone. The handjob ritual must be done before a kid learns this. It must be the first ejaculation they have. In fact, part of the reason for this is to socialize and communalize sexuality and prevent people from having their first experience alone and making it a habit. Boys are told if they masturbate, it will raise their blood pressure and heart rate dangerously and cause a heart attack (no mention is made of whether plain old sex will kill you). Additionally, it was believed that when the old woman touches him, she can ‘sense’ if a boy has done it before, and would report his misdeed to the village.

Obviously, there’s a lot of embarrassment potential. Nobody wants to be humiliated – and really, most people don’t want to humiliate their friends and neighbors either, so it can be supposed deception was actually quite common. Silhen i-Tsyam was supposed to have failed to ejaculate, despite which his old woman lied and claimed he had, which he remembered as an early, formative experiences of human deceptiveness.

For the feudal elite, the old village woman could also be called in to the estate to do the lord’s sons, or the household might hire a nanny and expect her to do it, although the nanny might also be an older serf. In towns, elites might also do the communal thing at an exclusive party for only their sons.

Still widespread in the Shattered Land, the custom has declined since then. Selkwit in her monograph (Y+247) elucidated several causes for the custom’s decline. Urbanization speeded decline of the practice. Increasing numbers of people moving to the cities (speeded by dislocation) severed communal ties and group cohesion – although there were still institutions emerging for those who still wanted to keep the ancient ways. So while there was some decline, urbanization also led to the emergence of semi-professional specialist women. These were NOT prostitutes – the type was an older, married woman with children, a ‘fertile’ one, definitely not a virgin – and one who had knowledge of sexual and womanly thing, who was wise and could teach. Her fertility would also, er, rub off on him. So they were often not exclusively handjobbers.