Legend has it that Frank Quipley once sent his nephew Josh on a trip with expensive audio recording equipment to document “one of those Australian languages, it doesn’t matter which one.” Josh returned weeks later, tanned, rested, and reeking of lager.1 When Frank got around to listening to the tapes, he could barely hear anything. Suspecting faulty equipment, he asked Josh to give him a verbal description of the language he chose to investigate. Josh replied, “So, in Auslan...”
This month, Josh reports on a language he claims to have heard about via a friend in another department. Josh filled in some of the linguistic details, no doubt with his usual standards of scientific rigor.
The language, which Josh has humbly named “Quiplese”, is unusual in that it marks semantic roles rather than syntactic roles. This makes it especially effective at rendering certain complex ideas compactly.
1.Tso!
Careful!Trevelyan-da- da!
Trevelyan-A-A!
“Watch out! (Alec) Trevelyan is a double agent!”2
2.ma-ma
ma-FORCE
Most languages reserve the word mama to refer to “mother”, but in Quiplese it is used as a concise way to phrase Newton’s second law of motion. Zipf’s Law allows us to infer that many Quiplese speakers must be physicists.3
Semantic roles can be negated.
3a.Yu-da
PRO.1SG-Arehaztar-dun
move (house)-PSTLiam-ra.
Liam-INST3b.Yu-da
PRO.1SG-Arehaztar-dun
move (house)-PSTLiam-nu-ra.
Liam-NEG-INST
Without negation, sentence 3a suggests that I couldn’t have moved without Liam’s help. With negation, sentence 3b implies that Liam stood there like a sack of potatoes and watched while I moved all the heavy furniture, then brought in a box of pillows at the end and ate three-
4a.Classical Gas-ra.
Classical Gas-INST4b.Under Pressure-nu-ra.
Under Pressure-NEG-INST4c.Classical gas-pa
Classical gas-Punder pressure-ma
under pressure-FORCEnufatar-ofa.
compresses-PRS.HAB.4d.Yu-hya
PRO.1SG-EXP irmuztar-wuza
listen (to)-IMPFug-tha-fra-za.
heat-TIME-PLACE-THEME
The first two sentences state that Classical Gas is an instrumental piece and that Under Pressure is not. Sentence 4c is Boyle’s Law in a combination of English and Quiplese.4 But I didn’t listen to either of those two songs because I was busy enjoying “Theme from A Summer Place” (sentence 4d).
5a.?Sheffield-ga!
Sheffield-GOAL!5b.Richard Dunne-se-ga!
Richard Dunne-REFL-GOAL!
Though probably grammatical, sentence 5a is unattested, as is 5b without the reflexive particle.
We’re growing neg-P with all of Josh’s dubious linguistics discoveries. In our opinion, “Quiplese” is missing a /t/. This is a monster raving loony way of semantic marking! Then again, as Prof. Anna Dewey points out, there are real languages out there that use transitive alignment, which makes even less sense. We say Don’t Believe It ... Or Do?
1 In other words, same as always.
2 GoldenEye spoiler alert.
3 The Quiplese word for “mama”, qajifluskebabagrangplozaqon, is clearly of onomatopoeic origin. For obvious reasons, this is normally shortened to simply qajifluskebagrangplozaqon, though this is technically only correct if your mother is a wombat. But the English word kid is technically correct only if your mother is a goat, so who are we to judge?
4 Native Quiplese speakers generally become fluent in English because it’s the language of their physics textbooks. There is also a native word for pressure, which derives from a reduplicated word meaning “length” combined with a suffix meaning INV and -ma.