{"id":162,"date":"2018-06-17T12:31:43","date_gmt":"2018-06-17T16:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/?p=162"},"modified":"2021-04-29T21:14:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-30T01:14:27","slug":"when-a-librarian-writes-conlangs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2018\/06\/17\/when-a-librarian-writes-conlangs\/","title":{"rendered":"When a Librarian Writes Conlangs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw a question on Twitter that was posted on Metafilter about words for librarian<\/em> in “geek languages,” which was retweeted with a #conlang hashtag<\/a>. Right now, I’m not sure if the original poster intended this to be mentioned in the conlang communities. I mean, there are popular geek conlangs, and then there is the vast ecosystem of conlang work happening \u2026 but it’s my birthday, so \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af.<\/p>\n

Classical Atarahi<\/h2>\n

Earlier this year, I drafted a novella about a librarian on Atara, so it’s about library science in a far-future setting. Classical Atarahi is the international prestige language on Atara. I do have a rich vocabulary to describe librarians because I needed to develop some poetic-sounding metaphors for what librarians in that society do.<\/p>\n

As a secondary concern, I want the novella to fight back against tropes and misunderstandings about librarianship in a broad sense. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me occasionally get angry about novelettes, novellas, and other stories that conflate libraries and archives or that place library science in a dusty realm of books. (And there is some great historical<\/em>\u00a0fiction about librarians, but that still leaves those of us in the profession after about 1970 out of pop culture’s conception of what a librarian is.)\u00a0As an academic science librarian in 2018, the only time I routinely touch books is when I read them on my lunch break. A librarian working in 1918 couldn’t do my job without training and vice-versa just due to how much the professional skillset has shifted.<\/p>\n

So what does this mean about far-future library science? Well.<\/p>\n

The Classical Atarahi word for librarian<\/em> is derived from the word for datum<\/em> (the singular form of data<\/em>). Atarahi societies have always had computing infrastructure. They have always had some level of AI processing. Librarians in Atarahi society work in tandem with AI routines, human archivists, and other information professionals to deliver information services. They are a public service for everyone, from firms and companies to private citizens and families, with a complex referral system.<\/p>\n

Amil<\/strong> is the word for datum<\/em> in Atarahi, pronounced \/\u02c8\u00e4.mil\/. The plural form is amilenta<\/strong>, \/\u02c8\u00e4.mil.\u0259n.\u02cct\u0251\/. The formal word for librarian<\/em> comes from the term amiy\u012b hekwakab\u012b<\/strong>, data-plunger<\/em>. Library science on Atara is filled with metaphors about diving, plunging, and immersing, much like the surviving esoteric text from Greco-Roman Egypt called The Book of Thoth<\/em>, which makes allusions to hunting and trapping for scribal work. The commonly-used Classical Atarahi word for librarian, amiyas<\/strong>, \/\u02c8\u00e4.mi.\u02ccj\u0251s\/, is the word amil<\/strong> put in the same adjective-as-noun form that is used for personal names.<\/p>\n

Note that the vocabulary above doesn’t include archivists. Library-archive hybrid places typically use amiyas<\/strong> to describe their employees. Archivists are called something else.<\/p>\n

Narahji<\/h2>\n

Classical Atarahi is not the only language for which I have developed this vocabulary. Narahji, an \u1ecagzarhjenya language, has separate language to describe its data flows (which includes both fiction and nonfiction scrolls\/books, maps, poetry in various media, qualitative\/quantitative data, et cetera) from its archival information. The terminology related to archives and archivists is related to the Narahji verb for to remember<\/em>. The terminology related to librarians is related instead to words describing datastreams, information flows, and discovery systems.<\/p>\n

Niphtora<\/strong> \/ni.p\u02b0to\u028a.\u02c8r\u0251\/ is library science<\/em>. A librarian is a niphtorakri<\/strong> \/ni.p\u02b0to\u028a.\u02c8r\u0251.k\u02bcri\/, and a library is kisaiga l\u1ecbniphtora<\/strong> \/k\u02bci.sa\u0361\u026a.\u02c8g\u0251 l\u026a.ni.p\u02b0to\u028a.\u02c8r\u0251\/, library building<\/em>. The prefix l\u1ecb-<\/strong> changes depending on whether kisaiga<\/strong> is a subject or direct\/indirect object. In pre-conquest Narahja, while city libraries often contained archives, most archival content was found in specific archival institutions or museums. The exceptions were national libraries, which had strong archival collections.<\/p>\n

Tveshi<\/h2>\n

Finally, the Tveshi language actually collapses librarians and archivists together into a single term. (I talked about this in #Lexember, too.) A library or archive is called an innod\u00e5<\/strong> \/\u0129\u00f0.\u02c8o\u028a\u032f.d\u0254\/. A librarian or archivist is an innod\u00e5kouri<\/strong> \/\u0129\u00f0.o\u028a\u032f.d\u0254.\u02c8k\u02bcou\u032f.\u027ei\/.<\/p>\n

Unnod\u00e5<\/strong> \/\u0169\u00f0.\u02c8o\u028a\u032f.d\u0254\/ is the word for an archive if one wants to be specific, and it can be suffixed with -kouri<\/strong> to make it clear one is talking about an archival professional. Oinnod\u00e5<\/strong> \/\u0254\u0129\u032f\u00f0.\u02c8o\u028a\u032f.d\u0254\/, library, can be suffixed in much the same way. The reason for this is that the national libraries in Tvesh\u0117 are also the country’s archives, so while a library campus may (and often does) include multiple buildings, they all organizationally fall under the same bureaucratic structures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw a question on Twitter that was posted on Metafilter about words for librarian in “geek languages,” which was retweeted with a #conlang hashtag. Right now, I’m not sure if the original poster intended this to be mentioned in the conlang communities. I mean, there are popular geek conlangs, and then there is the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,5,13,6,7],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-classical-atarahi","tag-conlangs","tag-library-science","tag-narahji","tag-tveshi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9qEhO-2C","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":633,"url":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2022\/05\/20\/conlanging-through-heraclitus\/","url_meta":{"origin":162,"position":0},"title":"Conlanging Through Heraclitus","author":"kaye","date":"20 May 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Sometimes translating things is a great way to get a feel for conlangs. I've been thinking more about mine over the past few days as I work through the solution I've finally found to finishing a novella about forest shrines and restless dead. That novella has been unfinished for a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"classical atarahi\"","block_context":{"text":"classical atarahi","link":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/tag\/classical-atarahi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":123,"url":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2018\/02\/19\/how-i-use-pronoun-systems-to-reflect-conlangs-and-concultures\/","url_meta":{"origin":162,"position":1},"title":"How I Use Pronoun Systems to Reflect Conlangs and Concultures","author":"kaye","date":"19 February 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was in my mid\/late twenties, I transitioned from writing stories that used\u00a0he and\u00a0she to writing stories where I referred to everyone with\u00a0le. It was extreme, and I was told that it was difficult, but it was the best way \u2014 or so I thought at the time \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"classical atarahi\"","block_context":{"text":"classical atarahi","link":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/tag\/classical-atarahi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":45,"url":"https:\/\/www.kayeboesme.com\/pangrammatike\/2017\/11\/30\/today-we-feast-tomorrow-we-lexember\/","url_meta":{"origin":162,"position":2},"title":"Today, We Feast; Tomorrow, We #Lexember","author":"kaye","date":"30 November 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Tomorrow is #lexember. I'm not a #NaNoWriMo person because, as an academic librarian, my achievable word count the month I write an academic article column for a science librarian journal is more like 20-30K. I've never understood why #NaNoWriMo is during peak academic output season. 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