The Fan Language of Splatoon

[theFIZZYnator]

Excerpt from private conversation with PiyozR

Other Random Things I Just Noticed:

• Inkling should have a word for "ten"; now it is just "one-zero". At least in the history of our world here, the concept of "ten" came a long time before numbers existed, and the concept of "zero" was invented a certain time after the other digits.
• There should be a word for "to snipe", ideally related to { Ŧuroži }, for "charger".
• To say "the Cat in the Hat", is the word order { Eyuredu ri Pata }, or is it {Pata ri Eyuredu }? The PDF, I think, never specifies.
• Do the glyphs change pronunciation depending on the following syllable? E.g. { piesuzoi } "Octarian" and { Piesenaipie } "Octo Valley" start with the same two letters, but in the former, the second letter is read { su } and in the latter, { se }. Is this an error? I feel like I could see this quite often while reading the PDF.
• Does { saioyu } mean just a bowl, or all utensils, encompassing plates and platters? If not, what are the words that mean the other utensils? Forks? Knives? Spoons? Chopsticks? Cups?
• Since they utilize highly symmetrical writing systems, their version of the palindrome could be physically flipping the text upside down to yield another text. It's a cool idea, but impractical, since none of us are yet proficient enough at Inkling.

Fonts
I've messed around with the letters, and have developed a character encoding, though it requires a character palette supporting Unicode.
I found that I needed 130 letters, which won't fit in ASCII range, so I extended into Latin Extended A, the next block.
It looks a little something like this:

 

[VeryButter]

(Posting in thread so I can follow it.)

I love this so much <3. Although, every update is just tedious for me, due to the fact that I'm printing this all out. I swear I'm gonna run out of paper by the time this is done XD I've already got about 15 pages of scrap already. Oh well! I love this language too much to let my book fall outdated, even if it means re-printing most of the pages every few days (unless I run out of ink, then I'll buy some more and continue printing.)

Also dangit, I just finished printing and now an update's probably going to come out with Fizzy's points. Which means more printing. Which means more scrap. D: (at least I got a lot of drawing paper!)

EDIT: I also have two a questions. Where, exactly, is the word for "Will"? And Do you put the "To" in the verbs when speaking them?

EDIT 2: Just realised what the word for will was. Ignore the first question :p

 

[Coelpts]

some ideas for a few words from a new squid that is completely enraptured in this. hope you don't mind! (by the by, keep up the good work!)

/ikore/ Wild or Untamed, can be used as slang for winging something. /Zoi ati papa ikore ɹutu!/ He was shooting ink wildly!
/ikore oei/ A Fad, literally "wild fresh"
/beota oei/ Fashion, literally "good fresh"
/tasi/ Calm, composed, or tamed. /Zoi tasi ejuɹedu ziujo./ This cat is tame.
/diho/ Music or a song.
/diho d͡ʒepai ijozoi/ DJ, literally "Music Expert" /Pa si henu ɹiuno diho d͡ʒepai ijozoi!/ You are a very bad DJ!
/did͡ʒe zoi/ A shortened form of the previous.
/t͡suɹo eja/ To snipe, as suggested by FIZZYnator. sorry mate, gonna keep using the fake IPA until the pdf is updated so i can copy-paste from there.

some feelings and emotions:
/biwai/ Happy
/tsunu/ Sad
/gafabu/ Angry
/ibai/ Afraid
/wafi/ Surprise
/buei/ Disgust
/d͡ʒoki buwai/ Apathy, literally "without happiness"
/d͡ʒo zaɹi/ Doubt, literally "to not believe"

thank you!

 

[EclipseMT]

There should be a word for "ten;" even Japanese has it with the other numbers (transliterated) being ten-one, ten-two, ten-three...two-ten, two-ten-one, etc....

Why not allocate another particle?

 

[PiyozR]

There should be a word for "ten;" even Japanese has it with the other numbers (transliterated) being ten-one, ten-two, ten-three...two-ten, two-ten-one, etc....

Why not allocate another particle?

Discussing this with Fizzynator. I'm going to add one tonight.

@Coelpts I'm going to add your words, too. It's just that, well...

@theFIZZYnator and I have been talking in a PM about revamping some of our language. Here's my idea right now.

The Syllabary

Right now, there's nothing wrong with our syllabary. It's not entirely straightforward. For example, take /so/, /sai/, /ʃo/ and /ʃu/. All four letters are some variation of the same characters, just flipped around. Then take /pa/, /pi/, /pai/ and /pie/. All those letters are the same character just flipped around. Sure, it might be realistic of a language to not be 100% consistent with its phones and writing system. But that makes it so much more difficult for people like us to learn and remember. Fizzy and I want to makes some changes in this department. To streamline Inkling.

My current suggestion is that we keep the phonetics of our syllabary untouched. We simply swap some letters around, remove some duplicates, and add a couple more. This way, all the vocabulary and grammar that we created will be exactly the same. It's just that some words will look different. Our pronunciation of Inkling will be unchanged.

The Notation

Up until now, we've used IPA to communicate what phones our language has. Nothing wrong with that, really. It's been a great way to avoid confusion. It's just that it ignores the possibility of allophones. As we discussed in this thread, some Inkling phones can be spoken differently and have the same meaning. For example, [w] and [v] are the same thing in Inkling. As are [ɹ] and [ɽ] (the English "R" and the Japanese flap). IPA doesn't allow us to show that Inkling isn't spoken so uniformly (as languages don't really do that anywhere ever). This is where Fizzynator's idea of a new notation system comes in. Using different symbols to represent Inkling phonemes, we can add some notes in our PDF and videos to tell our students that "this is the Inkling character" and "this is the notation of its pronunciation" and "these are the different noises that can produce this letter". Include it all in one package and we should be set.

What I'm Going To Do

For the next couple of days, I am going to a) add these new words sans characters to our vocab list and b) write up by hand every phoneme that we have so far (like 127 iirc) and assign characters again. Most will be the same. Many will changed. I may subtract some and add some new guys. @Joseph Staleknight I may need you to cook up some new vector art for some brand new Inkling characters that I spotted in Camp Triggerfish. Gonna post all this stuff here when I finish.

Like this post if you're on board. Any one who has feedback on our mild revamp of Inkling is welcome to share.

 

[EclipseMT]

I may need you to cook up some new vector art for some brand new Inkling characters that I spotted in Camp Triggerfish. Gonna post all this stuff here when I finish.

What are you thinking about these characters in terms of what they would be? |n| as an individual character can be one of them.

 

[Joseph Staleknight]

Got it.

As soon as you post the new characters/assignments I'll get to work on making the new ones and rearranging everything else as needed.

 

[theFIZZYnator]

I've attached an updated and streamlined version of the PDF describing the alphabet. And for the ones who can't copy-paste or don't want to, there are alternate ways to write them! e.g. { Ŧuroži } = { Tsurozhi }

 

[EclipseMT]

So essentially a modified Hebon-shiki romanization?

 

[Grimlai]

Here are some of my ideas.
/gobi/: Strike
/gobi mu ujo/: Ink Strike
/badaido/: Way (of the)
/eja ͡tsu/: Fist
/wutai/: Grab, Grapple, or Hold.
/zou/: Staff
/tai si/: Peace
/tai siwa/: Peaceful
/ɹiepo/: Mind
/zoito/: Punch
/kid͡ʒi/: Energy
/kie/: Chi, Ki (changed from /ki/, which means with.)
/mame gaize/: Alcohol, Alcoholic drinks
/mame gaizewa/: Alcoholic
/mainu/: Love
/Ninutenu/: God (Cause Nintendo created them? Oh never mind.)
/ijewo/: Fear
/bohomi/: Squad

Most of it I created for this thread, but there are some others thrown in there.

 

[PiyozR]

Attached are my recommendations for a partially-revised Inkling syllabary. I added five new letters to replace duplicates, and I re-arranged most of the "e" and "Q" characters, some of which received new phones within them for more fluid pronunciation. A note on /rai/. It's the black sheep of the bunch. It's one that I've seen across Splatoon maps and Sunken Scrolls pages. I also added a /Šai/ letter.

If everyone is in agreement on these, we can move on to modify our word base accordingly and build upon it. Anyone with ideas for this suggested new syllabary please come forward.

NOTE: the final "Q" character (circle with the line sticking out the right) is pronounced /iyu/.

 

[NasiDe]

I don't exactly have much of anything to add here (although I'm really looking forward to the results and what you all are doing!), but I find it amusing that one of the new band's names in the upcoming update is ABXY and their album cover shows exactly four symbols for their band name.

 

[calthax]

On the first picture, I noticed there were some cut off text on the top right, on top of the four letters that start with b.

 

[Joseph Staleknight]

Very nice, though there are two letters with the pronunciation oyu. Going by the pattern you had in the last few glyphs I guess you meant iyu on the second.

Anyway, I'll get to work on the new glyphs as soon as I can!

 

[theFIZZYnator]

So essentially a modified Hebon-shiki romanization?

No, it's not... I was trying to go more like Esperanto did with their alphabet.

 

[Joseph Staleknight]

Okay, finished vectorizing the new syllabary. The glyphs that got deprecated from having their own sounds I decided to keep as alts of other glyphs, and new glyphs were made based on @PiyozR's sketches. As for rai, I also made a simplified glyph based on the left half of the original as I felt that the Inklings would want something simpler to write outside of formal branding, schoolwork, etc.

Oh, and now I'm using @theFIZZYnator's orthography here for consistency's sake.

 

[EclipseMT]

So the language has no glyph to represent |n| as a standalone sound?

 

[Joseph Staleknight]

Not that I know of. Apparently they didn't consider it that much.

 

[InklingPurple (Akiko)]

Attached are my recommendations for a partially-revised Inkling syllabary. I added five new letters to replace duplicates, and I re-arranged most of the "e" and "Q" characters, some of which received new phones within them for more fluid pronunciation. A note on /rai/. It's the black sheep of the bunch. It's one that I've seen across Splatoon maps and Sunken Scrolls pages. I also added a /Šai/ letter.

If everyone is in agreement on these, we can move on to modify our word base accordingly and build upon it. Anyone with ideas for this suggested new syllabary please come forward.

"Thanks a ton for this, after I found this whole thing out, I decided to learn how to write it out and maybe attempt to speak it. I could probably decipher what the music artists in Inkopolis might be singing, and possibly give a proper, accurate English translation. But probably not."

 

[MissingNumbers]

"I could probably decipher what the music artists in Inkopolis might be singing, and possibly give a proper, accurate English translation. But probably not."

It's actually not physically possible. That's just sort of how it goes.