Play language/history

Giri tile and toy block scripts

14:52, 4 April 2022 (PDT)

The canonical consonant inventory of Gĭri, the Middlesex and early Moonshine children's speech register, was:

Bilabials:                   m   b
Coronals:                t   n   l
Palatals:                        y
Velars:                  kʷ  ŋ  (Ø)

And the vowels were /a i u/. Thus there were 27 syllables, representable in various means based on the number three. Giri had no writing systems of its own because the speakers never lived independently; if they wrote at all, they used their parents' alphabets. Nonetheless, when the proto-Moonshine people met the Play people, they were amazed at how young Play children adeptly wrote their language with only two letters, stacked in two or even three dimensions to form shapes of arbitrary height, width, and depth. (This was an elaboration of a Late Andanese toy block script.) For political reasons, the Moonshines actually preferred the Play language to their own, but they soon set about creating toy block scripts for their children to play with as well.

History

Moonshine use of Play in diplomacy

As the Ghosts and Dreamers joined forces to invade the Play nation, the Players turned to their only ally, Moonshine. Moonshine promised to support the Players diplomatically, but signed a pact with the Ghosts (not the Dreamers) stating that if the Ghosts did not attack Moonshine, Moonshine would refuse to help the Players against the Ghosts. Moonshine did support the Players against the Dreamers, but the same Moonshine-Ghost pact also had the Ghosts promise to not let the Dreamers sail around Ghost territory to invade Moonshine. Thus the war had three sides, but this was no comfort to the Players, because the treaties forced the Players to fight both invading armies on their own.

There was no land border connecting the Play and Moonshine territory; they could only contact each other through a river. The Ghosts planned to take control of this river and cut the Players off from Moonshine completely. However, they still hosted four-party diplomatic meetings at which Play, Moonshine, Ghost, and Dreamer diplomats were all invited, and sometimes other parties sat in too.

The myth of the smarter child

As the Ghost and Dreamer militaries converged on the Play nation, the Moonshines began showing pro-Play propaganda at diplomatic meetings. They claimed that Play children were measurably smarter than other nations' adults, showing that Play children as young as five had mastered the Play toy block script, while Ghost and Dreamer diplomats could not even identify which parts of the script were the letters. The Moonshines also touted the very difficult grammar of the Play language, showing that Play children as young as five years old were able to communicate masterfully while foreign adults trying to learn the language struggled to tell the difference between nouns and verbs and wondered how the Players managed to communicate in a language that had no pronouns and no person markers.

The Moonshines wanted to impress the others at the meetings by bringing the youngest Play children they could find, and having the children challenge the adult diplomats to solve their puzzles, but the Player diplomats were more interested in stopping the ongoing slaughter of their people than in impressing the armies' diplomats. Therefore the invading armies' diplomats never met Play children up close, and never had a chance to measure their own intellectual abilities against the young Play children, as Moonshine had hoped.

Beliefs harden

Moonshine cultural attitudes

At first, the Moonshine diplomats had realized their claims were false; they needed the propaganda in order to convince their enemies that Players were much smarter than their enemies, and that intelligence should not submit to brute strength. The diplomats did not need to claim that the Moonshines were also very intelligent because neither of the armies was attacking the Moonshine nation, and so long as the Ghosts were invading the Players, they could not also invade the Moonshines.

Within just a few years, the Moonshines hired more diplomats, and both the new hires and the original diplomats had come to believe their propaganda by this point. They took them as facts and continued to repeat the claims in diplomatic meetings with foreign nations. They built replicas of messages they had seen Play children build and challenged diplomats to decipher the messages. None of the diplomats ever managed to break the code, but many assumed that the Moonshines were creating the designs themselves or that every message was written in a different code.

Diplomats attempt to learn Play

In fact, the Moonshine diplomats did not understand the code themselves, and realized that they would need to learn it if they wanted to continue to rely on their favorite argument. The Moonshines assumed that their own children were just as smart as the Players, and therefore that they could teach their children an extremely complicated script modeled after Play's without slowing down the rest of the Moonshine curriculum.

Moreover, many Moonshine citizens were not interested only in the war. They wanted to learn the Play script primarily to convince themselves that the Moonshine people were as smart as the Players. Some Moonshine artists also hoped to adapt the Play script to Moonshine itself, or at least to Moonshine's children's speech register, Gĭri.

Thus the Moonshines set about learning the Play language. They knew that some other outside nations, such as Dreamland, had failed to learn Play, but that other nations had adopted it to some extent from their captured slaves. These languages, however, were not truly identical to Play because the ruling classes had learned the language only imperfectly. The Moonshines set about the task, therefore, of learning the Play language perfectly, which no other outside tribe had done.

The Moonshines traveled to Play territory and sat for classes, because the Players were more comfortable hosting foreigners in their nation than sending their people into a foreign nation. This was possible because the diplomatic meetings were also hosted in Play territory.

Moonshines finish their studies

The Moonshines tried to learn Play as quickly as possible, because the war made travel difficult and they knew that they could not safely remain in Play territory indefinitely. Once they were convinced that they had learned the basics of the Play language, they returned to Moonshine territory, taking with them copies of many Play books that they could use to finish their studies at home.

Moonshine-written Play grammar

Back in Moonshine territory, the teachers worked together on a Play grammar which they could use to teach Play to other Moonshines. They disagreed slightly with each other on how to write the grammar, but all agreed that Play was the most difficult language they had ever come across, and how amazed they were at the young Play children who all spoke the language flawlessly. Unlike the diplomats from hostile nations, the Moonshine teachers had been allowed to meet and mingle with Play children up close and indeed, some of what they were taught overlapped with the Play children's lessons.

However, because the war forced the diplomats to return to Moonshine, and the Players refused to send Play teachers with them, the Moonshines were forced to finish their lessons through self-teaching and could not ask native Play speakers to answer the questions that came up as they worked towards mastering the language.

Mistaking an infinity for a large number

The Moonshines failed to understand the Play secret: in both their script and their language, what seemed like unfathomable complexity was actually a system based on zeroes, infinities, and ones: numbers that could not be counted. Many word classes that were closed in most languages were open in Play, or else did not exist. When Moonshine linguists tried to describe Play's grammar in terms of countable categories, they kept finding more and more of what they were looking to categorize and did not know where to stop.

For example, in Moonshine and Leaper, there was a group of a few dozen verbs that could be embedded into nouns to create phrases such as "the book you gave me", but in Play, any verb could be embedded into any noun. Moonshines analyzing the language from the perspective of Moonshine did not realize this, and had no native speakers to ask; indeed it did not even occur to many of the teachers that there might be such a thing as an open class in this morpheme position; they merely assumed that Play had an extremely long list of embeddable verbs.

In some cases, Play really did have closed classes, but they escaped detection. Famously, Play had about a dozen common noun classifier suffixes, a word category also present in contemporary Moonshine and in related languages such as the still-intelligible Leaper. And yet, there was no evident morphological difference between a noun classifier suffix and the suffix that appeared at the end of certain compound nouns to pad the chain of infixes that marked verbal embedding; neither could these suffixes be identified with noun classifier suffixes. The Moonshine scholars could not tell the difference, and for that matter, Play teachers did not see a difference either; Play children simply learned the suffixes as they encountered them in new words. Therefore, the Players considered these suffixes an open class as well, but the Moonshines did not think of this possibility and instead believed that there were several dozen and perhaps over a hundred noun classifier suffixes in Play. In this case, both the Players and the Moonshines analyzed Play incorrectly, but the Play solution made more sense to learners.

This pattern continued when looking at Play more broadly as well. With no particles, no pronouns, no person markers, no nouns, and no verbs, the Play language simply had no parts of speech. Moonshine linguists attempting to count parts of speech in the manner of Moonshine added more and more categories until they realized that every Play word would be in its own part of speech. Aspects like this explained why outsiders found Play so difficult to understand, much less learn.

Likewise, although the most popular Play toy block script did take some time to learn, it was based on a design such that all possible block shapes spelled some valid Play word, and therefore it was impossible for even a toddler to misspell; they had simply made a different word. This was possible because the Play blocks were not tied to syllables or even to phonemes. The fact that there was no way to go wrong helped entice Play children to learn the script, but the Moonshines' ideas could not do this.

Struggles with early script designs

The Moonshines now wanted to adapt the Play block script to their own language, so they could make similar claims to be smarter than other nations. The same Moonshine teachers who had ridden with the diplomats in order to learn Play had also taken home thousands of toy block sets, hoping that they could not only learn how to spell Play with the toy blocks, but also their own language and perhaps other languages as well.

Direct imitation of Play

Because the Play toy block script was based on positioning new blocks relative to previously placed blocks, the Moonshines created a toy block script in which each new block was to be placed ahead, to the left, or to the right of the previous block. This provided three directions; therefore the Moonshines decided that each syllable would be spelled with three blocks. Since this would create overhang in a vertical toy block script, the Moonshines stated that it would be played on the floor instead, and that vertical orientations would need to use a second color to fill in the gaps. Satisfied that they had understood the principle of the Play toy block script, the Moonshine teachers went to their elementary schools and taught kids how to spell words in the toy block script.

The Moonshine teachers knew that their adaptation of the Play block script would have problems, but hoped that the wide-eyed Moonshine child population would figure a way to solve these problems. Since Giri's phonology was even simpler than Play's, and in fact simpler than that of Late Andanese, the teachers figured it was sure that they would find a way to write Giri with toy blocks.

Arrival at school

The first group of Moonshine teachers arrived together at a large elementary school for ages 5 to 10, as was the Moonshine custom. (Players typically stayed in school for three years longer.)

Vowel-initial syllables

The students realized immediately one problem that the teachers had been trying to hide from them: it was not possible to spell 27 syllables using relative positioning of three blocks because there was no way to position the first block in the word relative to a previous block. The Play language did not suffer from this problem because it had no vowel-initial words, and it so happened that the array of impossible first-syllable arrangements just happened to match the number of syllables that would start with a vowel in the Play arrangement.

The teachers had known this, but had been unable to fully understand it. It was clear that Play had more consonants than vowels, so by losing the ability to position the first block in a word, it seemed that the number of possible initial Play syllables should be reduced by two-thirds. Yet the Play toy block script operated perfectly with this reduced inventory, and the Moonshine teachers had failed to understand the reason why.

Wraparound words

The teachers decided to solve the problem above by starting each word with a four-block sequence instead of three, though admitting it was inelegant. The next problem soon became apparent: to position blocks in three directions, the Moonshine teachers needed to rotate the frame of reference with each new block, since otherwise a sequence of left-right or right-left would be impossible. But using a rotating frame of reference, a sequence of right-right-right or left-left-left would return the stack of blocks to a previously arrived point, often meaning that further progress was impossible. This was not always a problem, as Giri mostly used short words, and the next word could simply be spelled with a new block tower. But the Moonshines knew that Play was able to spell very long words with this its positioning mechanism, which also rotated after placing each block, and that the teachers must therefore have misunderstood this aspect of Play as well.

Symmetrical toy block scripts

A toy block set with a different block for each letter could be stored in a cube three blocks high. However this would mean each syllable could be used only once, while many Giri words had duplicated syllables because it was a children's speech register.

Single-width columns

A lesser-used Late Andanese script involved placing blocks in sets of six, three blocks high and two blocks wide, to represent their 30-character syllabary. These blocks had two colors. Thus the Andanese used only 31 of the 64 possible block combinations (30 if not using blocks to also spell the spaces).

Using three colors instead of two, the Moonshines could place two blocks to represent a consonant and one for a vowel. Thus the Moonshines could represent the Giri language with just three block faces, and since each block had six sides, so only one style of block was needed. Although this system would theoretically produce a more noisy, random-looking block wall when spelling long words, Giri was more repetitive by nature than Late Andanese, and the Moonshines figured it would balance out. But the Moonshines wanted something more artistic to compete with this very basic idea.