Teonaht

Teonaht /ˈteɪ.oʊnɑːθ/ is a constructed language that has been developed since 1962 by science fiction writer and University of Rochester English professor Sarah Higley, under the pseudonym of Sally Caves. It is spoken in the fantasy setting of the Teonim, a race of polydactyl humans who have a cultural history of worshiping catlike deities.

Teonaht
Created bySally Caves
Date1962
Setting and usageFantasy setting of the Teonim
Purpose
Sourcesdraws on Indo-European languages: Romance, Germanic and Celtic
Language codes
ISO 639-3None (mis)
GlottologNone

Teonaht uses the object–subject–verb (OSV) word order, which is rare in natural languages. An interesting feature of Teonaht is that the end of the sentence is the place of greatest emphasis, as what is mentioned last is uppermost in the mind. The language has a "Law of Detachment" whereby suffixes can be moved to the beginnings of words for emphasis and even attach onto other words such as pronouns.

Teonaht is often cited as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging.[1][2][3][4]

In May of 2019, the Washington Post shared audio of Caves singing in Teonaht.[5]

Notes
  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20060626235245/http://www.rochester.edu/College/ENG/newsletter/conlang.html
  2. Sprechen sie ELVISH?: 3/ 6/ 2004
  3. Babel's modern architects - Los Angeles Times
  4. Conley, Tim and Stephen Cain (2006). Encyclopedia of fictional and fantastic languages, pg. xxv
  5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/story-audio/sarah-higley-a-university-of-rochester-professor-sings-in-teonaht-the-language-she-invented/
gollark: No, lambda calculus is a relatively simple model you can understand fairly easily.
gollark: And with neural networks, you don't actually know *how* the network does its job, just that you feed in pixels and somehow get classification data out.
gollark: There is still not, as far as I know, an approach to detect what an object is other than just training neural networks on the task.
gollark: It's simple to say, for example, "the program should detect if something is a bird", but incredibly hard to actually explain how to detect birds.
gollark: Yes. A lot of the time something can be simple to *vaguely describe* but really hard to describe precisely enough for you to actually program it.

References
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.