Last week, a
friend told me about this constructed language called Food Tongue, which was
invented in Canada/USA Mathcamp 2004. It is based on the English Language, and is
developing continuously on its own. As its name indicates, the language uses
only the English words of food as its whole vocabulary.
When I heard about
the language, a question immediately came up to me: how is the language different
from English (or an encryption of English), given the language only uses a
small pool of English words? So I tried to compare FoodTongue to English in
terms of Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics.
PHONOLOGY: given
how FoodTongue is constructed, there is no difference between FoodTongue and
English in this aspect.
MORPHOLOGY: food
tongue uses English food names as its vocabulary, and English grammar as its
grammar guide (there are variations). While English food names comprise a small
set of nouns, food tongue vocabulary need to have all lexical categories used
in English. This fact poses numerous challenges. For example, can we make inflectional
words in Food Tongue as we construct inflectional words in English? For
example, if “grape” is a verb, how to construct the past tense or the future
tense of “grape”? According to Alan Huang, a Food Tongue speaker, there had
been discussion about using related foods as inflections—for instance, the
future tense of grape can be raisin, but this construction is unfeasible (why?).
As a result, FoodTongue doesn’t specify tense in verbs.
Another noticeable
difference, also coming from the fact that FoodTongue doesn’t have a big pool
of vocabulary, is that some words have more meanings than its correspondence in
English. For example, “and” in FoodTongue means ‘add’, ‘also’, ‘so’, ‘then’, and
‘more’; “that” also means ‘than’.
SYNTAX:
Ideally, the syntax of food tongue would be the same as that of English. However,
again, due to the small vocabulary size, speakers sometimes need to use ‘ungrammatical’
sentences, and often rely largely on context to convey meanings. For example, there
is no distinction between indicative and subjunctive conditionals in FoodTongue, so people deduct the conditional from the context; new syntactic structures appear to help the lack of vocabulary: "now be" means 'is, "I all" means 'we', "small future" means 'soon'.
SEMANTICS: The
problem in semantics is very similar to the challenges I just discussed in
morphology and syntax, so I’m not going to expand on that. However, I found
something interesting about how people learn and create words in FoodTongue.
A central rule,
agreed upon by its inventors during their first meeting, is that FoodTongue
should not when possible be explained in other languages. When people start learning
FoodTongue, they usually ask some speakers to teach them new words without
directly translating in English—a way similar to how we learned native languages,
but different from how people learn encryption. After getting to know the
language, people use the online wiki to get a more accurate definition of
words, standardize the language to suppress the growth of dialects, and expand
the vocabulary by putting new words into the online wiki.
This link is the online wiki of Food Tongue.
Unlike
traditional English dictionaries, this online wiki has image definitions in it,
like this.And
like
Since I’m not a
speaker of Food Tongue myself, I have no idea how they represent the words that
are abstract in meaning such as ‘logic’ and ‘imagination’.
As a conclusion, Food Tongue is based on and
guided by the English language, but also develops its own dictionary and
grammar. It
is also different from an encryption of English. The fact that the language lacks vocabulary means it will never be an encryption of English. It is also much more flexible and
dynamic than encryptions—maybe the language would even evolve to a point that non-speakers
would find that even the direct translation of FoodTongue seem like a foreign
language.
Cite:
No comments:
Post a Comment