The Fan Language of Splatoon

[Inkling Ash]

Aahhhhh this thread is so confusing!!!

 

[PiyozR]

So um yeah unless anyone has any issues with the new version of the PDF, that will become the finalized edition (after I translate one more song)! I'm thinking of using a self-publisher to make myself a nice print copy for my bookshelves. Anyone who's interested can contact me.

While I wait for the final three lessons of Inkopolis University to be completed, I will also create some online Inkling lessons in the form of vocab drilling on an online language learning site. Right now I am using Memrise because it's great and free. I will make a note somewhere that you have to have one of the fonts installed on your computer to see the Inkling characters. After those three tasks, this project will come to a close and I'll probably send a tip to some gaming news sites to help give them some clicks.

 

[SyMag]

So um yeah unless anyone has any issues with the new version of the PDF, that will become the finalized edition (after I translate one more song)! I'm thinking of using a self-publisher to make myself a nice print copy for my bookshelves. Anyone who's interested can contact me.

While I wait for the final three lessons of Inkopolis University to be completed, I will also create some online Inkling lessons in the form of vocab drilling on an online language learning site. Right now I am using Memrise because it's great and free. I will make a note somewhere that you have to have one of the fonts installed on your computer to see the Inkling characters. After those three tasks, this project will come to a close and I'll probably send a tip to some gaming news sites to help give them some clicks.

The only suggestion I have is the section names. Instead of "S1, S2, S3," etc., maybe it should be named for the unit it's located in, such as "S1.1, S1.2, S2.1 etc." Other than that, I think it's pretty solid! You might want to spellcheck the whole thing though to be safe--for example my name in the intro

I'm very much interested in a physical copy of the guide! It would save me a lot of time since I wouldn't have to transcribe the entire thing into a notebook. And a Memrise course would be good for online learners, so I'm looking forward to that.

Great job again guys, glad I was able to help out!

 

[PiyozR]

Follow this link to the syllabary lesson on Memrise. This crap took hours to put together. I will add a link to it in the PDF.

 

[Vylion]

Well what a waste of time was last week for me. I'm now back on track, I uploaded the correct Arowana Sans Regular zip, and I'm currently working on 'XyX ligatures.

Also, now that you're shelving the project (wink wink), a broad question for all: where should the community have a constantly updated list of vocabulary in case people invent more words?

 

[SyMag]

Also, now that you're shelving the project (wink wink), a broad question for all: where should the community have a constantly updated list of vocabulary in case people invent more words?

Well the easy answer is a Google Doc, but I can easily see that becoming overwhelmingly large and cluttered very quickly. So I'm not sure

 

[Vylion]

Well the easy answer is a Google Doc, but I can easily see that becoming overwhelmingly large and cluttered very quickly. So I'm not sure

A Google Sheet would probably be slightly better, but just slightly.

There are also a few online conlanging Dictionary creation tools. It would require more commitment, but a good idea would be to conjunctionally maintain one. We could also keep a shared multi-admin tumblr blog to receive suggestions, and/or keep getting them only here.

Arowana Sans has the new ligatures now (added for all multisyllabic ligatures starting with a vowel, not just XyX ligatures). One of these days I'll implement the new ligatures into A. Bold too.

 

[SyMag]

There are also a few online conlanging Dictionary creation tools. It would require more commitment, but a good idea would be to conjunctionally maintain one. We could also keep a shared multi-admin tumblr blog to receive suggestions, and/or keep getting them only here.

Could you point us to an example of one of these online conlang tools? I'd be okay with it if it looks like it would be a good way of doing this

 

[PiyozR]

Also, now that you're shelving the project (wink wink), a broad question for all: where should the community have a constantly updated list of vocabulary in case people invent more words?

Nowhere. The project will be closed. As soon as I finish this one song translation, check for more errors and upload the last three lessons.

 

[PiyozR]

This is the cover page that I'm planning on adding to the PDF before I get it printed. I may try something bubblier to help with the Splatoon theme.

EDIT for a fun fact: If I edit the margins of the PDF to a size that's printable, the whole thing is 114 pages long!

 

[Jonathx]

@PiyozR @Ikaheishi I'd like to have the encoding finalized before the project is closed so we can have it available for anyone who wants to make a font for the Language (either in an appendix of the main guide or as a separate link on the Inkopolis U site), but the question of how to deal with the Calamari Dialect N character still hasn't been resolved. I gave some suggestions in my previous post for how to "unify" it with the schoolhouse version of the script (borrowing the term from how Unicode merged the Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions of Han characters into a single script), but received no comment as to preferences on the subject. Does anyone have an opinion on the subject, or should I just fit it in arbitrarily?

 

[Ikaheishi]

@Jonathx I say go for it with your proposal. It makes sense to me and it works. And I like it. :)

Alas, I doubt you're going to get any input about it from someone else. :( (Sorry.)

Now…

I honestly feel that the care and attention towards this project, by what I guess might be called its leadership, is lacking. (But by no means am I saying that there is a lack of any effort.)

However, the reality is that this project has no real leadership. It started as a chain of haphazard contributions by various individuals in a forum thread, where one individual doing their own thing started becoming a de facto leader of sorts by way of meritocracy like many online projects. Eventually, efforts forked into separate things, one of which is the fan conlang discussed in this thread. All of that is not a bad thing itself. But there seems to be a bit of an attitude problem around here, and I've been becoming more and more appalled by it.

Over the past ten years or so, I've been involved with several projects that went south, so I get frustrated when I start seeing it happen to other projects. (Especially those I'm interested or involved in.) And my building frustration around this project culminated with this post:

Nowhere. The project will be closed. As soon as I finish this one song translation, check for more errors and upload the last three lessons.

PiyozR, you can not just up and decide that this project is over and it be so. None of us can. Projects like this one don't work that way. At its heart is an idea, and like the saying goes, you can't kill an idea. At most any one of us can only walk away and wash their hands of it, because anyone can, at any time, pick up where others have left off.

Now I could go off and rant here about all the different things that are wrong, but I'm not going to waste time with something unproductive like that. That fact is that we're all here because of a common interest we all share—a game and its fictional universe—and a common goal; the conlang. We each bring our own skills, talents, knowledge, and experience, and we all have our particular interests.

My interest lays in making the conlang just as usable as English, Japanese, or any other language we use with our computers today. And as part of that I want to make the very fanfiction I've been working on for what has now been a year available in not just my native English but also Inkling. And if I ever get to turn that fanfiction into its own playable game, I want to have it be playable in Inkling as well.

 

[SyMag]

@Jonathx I say go for it with your proposal. It makes sense to me and it works. And I like it. :)

Alas, I doubt you're going to get any input about it from someone else. :( (Sorry.)

Now…

I honestly feel that the care and attention towards this project, by what I guess might be called its leadership, is lacking. (But by no means am I saying that there is a lack of any effort.)

However, the reality is that this project has no real leadership. It started as a chain of haphazard contributions by various individuals in a forum thread, where one individual doing their own thing started becoming a de facto leader of sorts by way of meritocracy like many online projects. Eventually, efforts forked into separate things, one of which is the fan conlang discussed in this thread. All of that is not a bad thing itself. But there seems to be a bit of an attitude problem around here, and I've been becoming more and more appalled by it.

Over the past ten years or so, I've been involved with several projects that went south, so I get frustrated when I start seeing it happen to other projects. (Especially those I'm interested or involved in.) And my building frustration around this project culminated with this post:

PiyozR, you can not just up and decide that this project is over and it be so. None of us can. Projects like this one don't work that way. At its heart is an idea, and like the saying goes, you can't kill an idea. At most any one of us can only walk away and wash their hands of it, because anyone can, at any time, pick up where others have left off.

Now I could go off and rant here about all the different things that are wrong, but I'm not going to waste time with something unproductive like that. That fact is that we're all here because of a common interest we all share—a game and its fictional universe—and a common goal; the conlang. We each bring our own skills, talents, knowledge, and experience, and we all have our particular interests.

My interest lays in making the conlang just as usable as English, Japanese, or any other language we use with our computers today. And as part of that I want to make the very fanfiction I've been working on for what has now been a year available in not just my native English but also Inkling. And if I ever get to turn that fanfiction into its own playable game, I want to have it be playable in Inkling as well.

You know, I wanted to say something about that post, but I was afraid of stepping on anyone's toes by doing so. Maybe it's not my place to say this, but I agree with what Ika said in that we can't just close the curtains on this conlang and let it collect dust in the backs of our brains for eternity.

Do you think the people who originally created languages such as English, or anybody who speaks any language said, "well there's nothing else we can express in our language, we've perfected it, let's go grab a pint and never speak of this again?" Of course not. Languages are living things; they evolve constantly, adapting to the changing world around it. Now I'm not going to get into moribund or dead languages or anything complex like that, but studying languages in college, as well as the science of language, has given me an appreciation for it.

Personally I think the idea of simply closing the project altogether and leaving it unfinished is absolutely ridiculous. There's still so many things that can be said, literally; I could probably open a dictionary to the first page and find a word that hasn't been introduced into our conlang yet.

Maybe some of you don't want to partake in this project any longer, and that's perfectly fine. It's not my place to judge you for that. But I seriously believe that we need to continue updating this conlang we've created, and let it mature just like any other language throughout mankind's history. Even if that means I have to do it alone. I won't let such an amazing project simply fade into oblivion. What we're doing here is really awesome, and I just hope there are people besides Ika and myself who recognize that.

 

[Jonathx]

Yeah, I felt the same way about that remark, but being so new to the board, I didn't want to push the issue. If you're done with your contribution to the project, that's fine, I'm sure there's a point where I'll want to get on with my life and be done with the fan language as well. But it is a community project, so as long as the community is willing to put the work into expanding it, why prevent them from doing so?

The guide is looking great, and will probably remain the cornerstone grammar and introductory guide to Inkling, but even the best textbooks on a language don't contain every word for every possible situation--that's not its job. A wiki-based "Unabridged Inkling Dictionary" being updated by whoever wants to put in the effort would allow the community to continue to grow and expand in a coordinated way, without relying on any individual to stay on any longer than their interest and/or life schedule allows.

 

[PiyozR]

Woah woah woah woah woah everyone! Hold up a sec. I think you've all completely misunderstood me! Or perhaps I never explained myself.

When I said that this whole business what being wrapped up, I was talking about the PDF guide and the YouTube videos! I wasn't saying everything related to this conlang needed to come to an end! Everyone in the universe is free to do whatever their minds can create. That's the reason I created this whole thing in the first place. So that anyone with even a slight grasp of linguistics and a love of Splatoon could pick up this conlang and use it. That's what conlangs are for. You think Tolkien created the tongues of Middle Earth and called it a day? No, he went and built a lore and a world using those languages as a springboard. And that's what Inkling is. A jump pad into fan-made, unofficial Splatoon fan creations. A painting hangs in a museum to be looked at. A song plays to be listened to. A conlang is learned to be used and developed. A conlang is an active, living creation. It's a form of art unlike any other.

When I say I am wrapping up this project, I'm just talking about my portion of it: the Language Guide and the Inkopolis University channel. The main reason is that I'm going to be leaving the country in a few weeks to work full time (away from my Wii U, sadly). I won't have the time to dedicate to continue this conlang anymore. After that, you all are welcome to continue utilizing this conlang in any way that you like. Share with your families. Share it with your friends. Share it with your enemies. Share it with strangers on the street. From that point on, it's the community's job.

I apologize if anyone felt they were being slighted or ignored at any stage during this project. There are just so many people coming in with different thoughts on Inkling that it all can become confusing at times. I try to keep everything focused to my original concept and unfortunately that involves denying certain ideas. I've always listened to suggestions/concerns whether or not they can be employed. This conlang is the super-awesome Nintendo fan language that it is today because of the hard work of everyone who's helped me here and irl. You are all awesome. I wish I could pay you but the US government is breathing down my neck about some hefty college loans.

Now onto specific points:

I'd like to have the encoding finalized before the project is closed so we can have it available for anyone who wants to make a font for the Language (either in an appendix of the main guide or as a separate link on the Inkopolis U site), but the question of how to deal with the Calamari Dialect N character still hasn't been resolved. I gave some suggestions in my previous post for how to "unify" it with the schoolhouse version of the script (borrowing the term from how Unicode merged the Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions of Han characters into a single script), but received no comment as to preferences on the subject. Does anyone have an opinion on the subject, or should I just fit it in arbitrarily?

I'm sorry. I must have missed your post about that before (or forgotten or not understood). The {n} character is not an official symbol in the schoolhouse Inkling established in the guide. For what I can gather from EclipseMT's notes on the character, country Inklings tend to employ {n} at the end of syllables only. That means they probably wouldn't think of {n} as a variation of {ne}, {na}, {no}. {nai}, etc, which all begin with that consonant sound. I don't know anything about encoding or such things so I'm not sure what help I can be.

@Jonathx
However, the reality is that this project has no real leadership. It started as a chain of haphazard contributions by various individuals in a forum thread, where one individual doing their own thing started becoming a de facto leader of sorts by way of meritocracy like many online projects. Eventually, efforts forked into separate things, one of which is the fan conlang discussed in this thread. All of that is not a bad thing itself. But there seems to be a bit of an attitude problem around here, and I've been becoming more and more appalled by it.

Lack of leaderships is a brilliant way to describe all of this. I am not and never have been a leader. I'm a worker bee. Just place a task, no matter how tedious and arbitrary, in front of me and I will whittle away at it until my head crashes on the keyboard. Coordinating a forum of users to contribute to one community-wide project like this? You'd need someone better than me. We'd need a manager. Some kind of boss to crack the whip at us. A drill sergeant for squid language.

You see, I never expected to create anything more than an alphabet. I've made tons of languages over the years that never evolve past a written alphabet. But this time my little Splatoon alphabet gained followers and attention from multi-lingual Splatoon fans and I saw no reason to stop. Users would just pop in with an idea and I'm be all like "Yeah, sure! Why not?" From there, the conlang grew and grew and became so much more than I ever imagined a year ago. A comprehensive guide? Educational videos? Fan art and comics? This is all new territory for me! I'm just barely able to juggle all of this stuff with my daily life (housework, work work, friends, applications, visa papers, death in the family, brother's wedding, pitiful self-esteem, weekly mass shootings, etc).

Again, I apologize if anyone feels disrespected from how I manage this project. I'm a poor leader and I'll be the first to admit that. Most of this is outside of my comfort zone.

Do you think the people who originally created languages such as English, or anybody who speaks any language said, "well there's nothing else we can express in our language, we've perfected it, let's go grab a pint and never speak of this again?" Of course not. Languages are living things; they evolve constantly, adapting to the changing world around it. Now I'm not going to get into moribund or dead languages or anything complex like that, but studying languages in college, as well as the science of language, has given me an appreciation for it.

This guy gets it.

The guide is looking great, and will probably remain the cornerstone grammar and introductory guide to Inkling, but even the best textbooks on a language don't contain every word for every possible situation--that's not its job. A wiki-based "Unabridged Inkling Dictionary" being updated by whoever wants to put in the effort would allow the community to continue to grow and expand in a coordinated way, without relying on any individual to stay on any longer than their interest and/or life schedule allows.

I never thought of the PDF as a dictionary per se. Just everything that I created. The rest up up to you. Or whoever wants to.

If you want to start an open dictionary (or something like that) with a few users then you have my complete blessing. However, that is something that I absolutely will not have the time to contribute to. Take this language and run with it. Paint the Sistine Chapel in Inkling. Translate War and Peace. Perform Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Octoling". If anyone starts any offshoot projects with our conlang, please just list me as the initial creator. That's all I ask.

Are we all square? Any other questions or concerns? I am all ears for the next seven weeks or so.

In other news, I have to spend some time reformatting the PDF. This time, it's the margins. Right now, they're at .12 inches at the side, which is unprintable. I am going to adjust them to .5 inches so that I can make myself a print copy. Plus anyone who wants a print copy can take this to a local Fedex or Office Depot and whip up a fresh copy, too! More details soon.[/user]

 

[SyMag]

Well of course anything we do from here forward will have you listed for getting this entire conlang off the ground. It'd be disrespectful not to. And like I said, it's completely fine if you will no longer have the time to contribute to the project in the next few weeks, though if you ever have spare time you're more than welcome to come back!

As for the leadership issue, I don't think there should be just one person at the helm. If anything, because this is a community project, there should be a group of people who all work together in the interests of the community and who all can contribute to the project. That's just my opinion, hopefully I worded that well.

Speaking of special projects, maybe I'll translate my favorite book into Inkling, because why not.

 

[Ikaheishi]

@PiyozR I'm glad that this was all just a crazy misunderstanding. Admittedly, I did see what is the reality as a possibility, but instead I interpreted things the way that I did. I guess my life has made me more cynical than I realized. Sorry about that.

At least there's some good coming out of my bit of grandstanding there… We all should be on the same page now. :)

I'm just barely able to juggle all of this stuff with my daily life (housework, work work, friends, applications, visa papers, death in the family, brother's wedding, pitiful self-esteem, weekly mass shootings, etc).

I totally understand… I'm in a similar boat. My life has been a absolute mess for the past year… College is not going well, my current inability to work if need be, a possible 500 mile move, medical issues, a whole slew of legal matters to navigate, and on top of that with how crazy the world is getting stepping outside of home is becoming impossible without incurring severe anxiety. The juggle between projects/hobbies and life is difficult; in my case it's been tipping to one side and I haven't gotten much done with anything as a result. :(

But, good luck with your stuff, okay? ;)

 

[PiyozR]

Lesson Number Seven of Inkopolis University is here! Sorry it took so long. Loads and loads of irl stuff.

Attached are some of the covers that I created for the PDF's physical printing. Right now, I'm going with the darker blue one. Which do you guys like the best?

 

[SyMag]

The dark blue for sure

 

[theFIZZYnator]

I'm back after all this time because I watched one video about conlangs and it reminded me of this. What did I miss?