princeofdoom

Cross posted from Waterfall.social

I really should figure out how the cat youkai write things when necessary. Most of the older cats who learned how to write would have been living among the Heian court at some point, so I'm leaning toward something more like hiragana. But to complicate that, they have some sounds not found in Japanese, so they would either not spell things exactly as they sound, or would have symbols that derive from other sources. Plus, they would need both a version they write with brush and ink as well as one they "write" by scratching.

And to complicate things further, some younger cats (2 or less centuries old but older than 70 for sure, at the time of my story) would have been around in the Warring States period and may even have been recognized as samurai. This would mean they would have been expected to know and write kanji as well. So this would add a layer of kanji use over the use of whatever writing the cats make for themselves.

Under cut is a note about cat youkai, gender and gender make up in the story this is for:
( Read more... )

I might as well talk a little about linguistics, where I am starting from with this language and what my goals are for it. While this is in connection with my kaibyou characters and story, this is mainly a linguistics post so I won't be putting it restricted posts.

The easiest of these is probably my goal: I want to derive a language from Old Japanese (the ancestor of modern Japanese and related languages like Okinawan) to be spoken by cat youkai. I want to make it sound "cat-like" and also similar enough to Japanese to seem related, but dissimilar enough for it to be hard to understand for Japanese speakers. Of those goals, I'm willing to drop it being recognizably related to Japanese if I can succeed on the other two.

From my goal, I'm obviously starting from Old Japanese. But because there are different ways of interpenetrating the data that we have about it, there are different interpretations of what the language was like at the time. We have the written language from the time, but they used different symbols and in specific ways that have been looked into and compared to later works through time. Not to mention that writing was only starting in Japan at the time of Late Old Japanese/Early Middle Japanese, so most things we know about the language in the true Old Japanese stage had to be projected backward from the hints of Late Old Japanese.

What I'm doing is looking at the evidence I can find from more knowledgeable people, deciding what I think are the most compelling interpretations of Old Japanese, and then using those to derive a language from that "version" of Old Japanese. Which can be difficult because sometimes an author will posit that a certain feature was around from X evidence, but the sources I use to look up Japanese etymologies don't follow that, so I have to decide if I go with the default reconstruction, or if I decide this will be a case that the less often seen/known version would work better.

There's other details, like changes to word meanings, especially since cats literally don't experience things the same as humans; They don't see as well on the red side of the spectrum, and they don't taste sugar, plus they are more sensitive to scents and certain sounds, though I have decided that cats in humanoid forms have an approximately average experience between humans and cats. I'd like to also show this in their language.

Not that I'm a strict Sapir-Whorfist but that's its own post all on its own.