I really can’t do better than steal Linguistic Dragon’s alternate title for the post he put up on Monday: Lingustic Dragon Geeks Out at the Chance to Actually Put His Degree to Use for Something:

As my choice of Dragon name might imply, my academic background is (mostly) in linguistics – it wasn’t what I went intocollege for, but it’s the degree I came out with. It’s a broader subject than most people expect, but to put it in as succinct terms as possible, it’s essentially the science of language. From sentence structure to how languages are related to each other and change over time, from how new words form and enter the common vernacular to etymology and local slang and dialects – they all fall under some branch of linguistics. Language and its uses fascinates me. I spent a half hour in a class once discussing the differences in the subtleties behind ‘unlawful’ as opposed to ‘illegal’ and loved every minute of it. My parents sent me a book on the Hawaiian language as a souvenir from a trip they took several years back, and I spent weeks poring through it for some fascinating tidbits (like the fact there’s four separate words in the language for ‘we’, depending on how many people are in that ‘we’ and whether you’re including the person you’re speaking with). I’ve studied four languages besides my native English, though I’m not really fluent in any of them, and I analyze speech patterns and dissect accents about as naturally as breathing by this point.

All of this is to give a little perspective on exactly why I’ve been eagerly awaiting the right moment to do a little analysis in regards to Gargish.

Yes. Very yes. It’s well worth reading the post in full, because Linguistic goes all in: it’s a full-on analysis of International Phonetic Alphabet, sound types, and how the Gargish language seems to have been put together with certain patterns and pronunciations in mind:

let’s examine the Gargish R. The English R is /ɹ/, an alveolar approximant. The Gargish R, however, is enumerated with the bottom row of characters, which makes me more inclined to think of it as the more throaty version used in a language like French or German – either the uvular approximant /ʁ/ or its associated trill /ʀ/. (if you can roll your r’s, that’s the trill /r/, typically used for the Spanish or Italian R). Then there’s the vowels – since U is in the first row, with the most forward sounds, I’m more inclined to think of it as closer to a /ʉ/ or possibly even a /y/ rather than the typical ‘oo’ (/u/) sound we English speakers are used to. Then there’s the dot over the symbols in the first three columns – it’s possible that this is a diacritic of sorts, although I’m more inclined to think of it as simply a part of the letter, like the dot over an i or j. However, it does differentiate the bilabial /p/, /b/, and /m/ from the labiodental /f/ and /v/ in the first row, as well as the velar /k/, /g/, and ‘ng’ (/ŋ/) from the glottal /h/ and the probably-uvular /ʁ/. And if this is the case, it may be indicative of ‘frontedness,’ which would imply the Gargish /t/ and /d/ to be dentals rather than alveolars, made with the tongue against the back of the teeth rather than at the roof of the mouth and therefore giving it more in common with the Italian T and D rather than the English ones.

We can make a few other conjectures on the nature of Gargish pronunciation by extending analysis to the Gargish vocabulary we have access to – since it’s a featural alphabet we’re working with, we can draw a few conjectures based off the choice of spelling in certain words. For example, ‘summ,’ meaning ‘honor’ – why is this spelled with two ‘m’s? The presence of double-consonants in the spelling of a language using a featural alphabet suggests to me that the language makes use of what are called ‘geminate’ consonants – essentially the consonantal equivalent of a prolonged vowel sound. It’s something that comes up frequently in Italian – compare /papa/, the Italian word for father, with /pappa/, the word for pope. The latter’s a geminate consonant. (Pairs of words like this, that differ in only one sound, are referred to as ‘minimal pairs,’ and are what’s used to identify a speech sound as distinct in the set of speech sounds, or ‘phonemic inventory,’ that a language uses, rather than simply a variant of another sound used in the language, or an ‘allophone.’) In addition, take a Gargish word like ‘beh’ or ‘kah’ – in an English pronunciation of these words, those h’s would probably be silent, but for a language involving a featural alphabet, I’m more inclined to take this as a mark of aspiration, which is a sort of breathyness added to a vowel – if you distinguish the pronunciation of ‘witch’ from ‘which,’ then you can hear what I’m talking about. ‘Witch’ begins with an unaspirated W, whereas ‘which’ starts with an aspirated W.

Oh, and he concludes thusly:

…am I really going to pass up a chance to take a closer look at a fictional language? If nothing else, it gives me a few things to go off of while I practice my Gargish accent!

I mean, I do have a pretty decent microphone. Maybe recording a few practice phrases down the line isn’t out of the question?

I think we just found fodder for a podcast episode!

Additionally, Linguistic was able to finish Ultima 6 this week:

The Vortex Cube had been stolen by a band last seen heading for Stonegate, and there I found a young boy raised by a pair of cyclopes, who had lost their own son and cared for the child as their own when he was shipwrecked near their home in the remains of the castle. Speaking with them suggested that I might find the Cube in their basement, which was kept under lock and key. The key was in the male cyclops’ possession, and he was willing to exchange it for – a fish. So I spent some time on the coast nearby until I had a bite, and made the trade. The basement of the castle was difficult to navigate, mostly because of tight quarters and secret doors, but I found the Cube behind some energy fields and reclaimed it.

From there I used a summoned moongate to get to the Shrine of Humility, and then sailed from there to the Shrine of the Codex. The stone guardians allowed us to pass, thanks to the quest the Shrine of Singularity had bestowed upon us, and the Codex itself was open to the page I needed, detailing what I needed to do in order to send it back into the Void. I placed the lenses at just the right places to direct the light from the two flames near it, then placed the moonstones I’d collected at the very beginning of my adventure into the Vortex Cube and set it at the base of the Codex. This was enough to send it back into the Void, and though Lord British and Draxinusom both barged in through moongates of their own, exceedingly irate, once I pressed the lenses into their hands and let them read some wisdom of their own from the Codex, they looked at each other not with hatred, but with understanding, and I knew that my quest had been completed.

There is much more to that post as well; do read the whole thing, as it also covers Linguistic’s explorations of each of the Gargish shrines. His conclusion is also rather excellent:

… I don’t know where in the creative process the decision to bring in Mondain, Minax and Exodus again came in, before or after the choice of Control, Passion and Diligence as the Gargish principles, but it’s a very nice match when it comes down to it. Especially considering that each of their speeches mention how they went overboard with their respective principles – Mondain’s desire for control led him to rule the world with an iron fist, Minax’s passion sent her into a rage when her mentor and lover died, Exodus’ mechanical nature brought about unwavering, disciplined diligence that could not understand nuance nor feeling. And this, too, is a contrast with the Britannian system – many of the anti-virtues are a lack of the counterpart, whereas the errors that the sort-of-reformed Triad of Evil mention stem from an excess.

The second thing that caught my attention came at the very end, and it was just a very small detail when it comes down to it, but I felt it was the best way to go about the final scenes. And that’s the fact that we don’t see exactly what the Codex reveals to Lord British and Draxinusom at the very end. Negative space is a powerful thing in storytelling, and I think it works better here than any eloquent speech that could have been written in its place. It’s already stated that the Codex is always open to exactly the page that’s needed – all we really need know is that the Codex shows the two monarchs the precise bit of wisdom they need to hear in order to realize each other’s standpoint. It’s simple and elegant, calls back to a few tidbits about the Codex, and ultimately means that the instrument of division between the two races also ends up the instrument of healing.

It should be noted that we’ll be treated to one more post about Ultima 6 in the near future, as Linguistic offers up his final thoughts on the game before moving on to some of the Ultima games that came out between Ultima 6 and Ultima 7. And who can wait to hear him take on those titles?