#kamakawi

[dedalvs]

@dedalvs, I've finally found you! I've stumbled into the world of conlanging thanks to you and Kamakawi!

I was at the wee young age of 24 when I learned about your webpage and your kitty Okeo. Naturally, I wanted to create a language, and eventually, I gave up. But I never forgot about Kamakawi.

At last, you are here on Tumblr (and found your page). I have so many questions to ask.

One question I do want to ask: How do you determine the syllable structure for Kamakawi word roots? I would imagine it's (C)V, but how many syllables are allowed for roots?

Thank you!

Hey, long time no answer! Very sorry, but helea to you! For the most part, Kamakawi roots are (C)V(V)(C)V(V), but I know some are longer than that. You absolutely do get (C)V(C)V(C)V. Kamakawi goose is a bit loosier than my more recent conlangs, so the roots weren't as strict as all that. They could have been, but I did start in 2001. I wasn't as experienced at that point.

Thank you for the ask!

[dedalvs]

hey, this might be a stupid question, but what's the character in your pfp?

It's the Kamakawi glyph for kala which means "speak". It's one of my favorite Kamakawi glyphs so I use it as a logo on various social media things.

[dedalvs]

what does Imeimei mean? are you somebody's meimei?

In 2001 I started work on a language called Kamakawi. In it, there is a word mei which means "to stay". Meimei means something like "to be left over", "to still be around". Imeimei means "leftovers", or "that which remains". At the time, this Tumblr was whatever I wasn't doing on other social media platforms. Now it is, rather prophetically, one of the only ones I have left, and I'd really rather not leave it.

Speaking of Tumblr and what's been going on very recently, I'd like to say that trans individuals have the right to exist, the trans community has the right to exist, and addressing someone how they wish to be addressed isn't as big an imposition as it's made out to be. After all, most of the time if you're addressing someone directly, you don't have to worry about pronouns, because we have the all-encompassing, all-gender, all-number pronoun YOU that rather neatly takes care of everything. The only time you really have to worry about pronouns is when you're talking about someone, at which point you can decide how much of an ass you want to be. It would be nice, though, if when we decide to insult someone, we insulted them based on what they do or say, rather than what they are, and it should be taken as the very bare minimum of decency to refer to someone how they want to be referred to. Much of the discussion we all have as humans about other humans occurs without the knowledge of those we're referring to, so frankly, misgendering someone in private conversation doesn't hurt them: it makes you look either ignorant or vile—or both. Mistakes happen, of course (in fact, I'd wager every single person on the planet has been misgendered at least once, cis or trans or nonbinary. I'm a cismale and always have been, but I've gotten my shares of accidental "ma'am"'s in a store), and mistakes are fine, but they should be genuine, honest mistakes, not "mistakes" ("Oh, my stars, did I use those pronouns? Oh, how clumsy of me!"), and certainly not intentional. I don't have any other way to say it: It really is the bare minimum of common decency, and being basically decent to one another should be a goal we all strive towards.

[dedalvs]

what is your profile picture? i assume it's a character (maybe a logograph?) from a script of yours, but which one, and what does it mean?

It's a glyph from my old language Kamakawi. It stands for kala, which is a verb for "to speak". Kamakawi is the first language I did a logographic system for.

[dedalvs]

do you have any tips for creating a font for a logographic conscript?

Yes: Create a classification/call up system. I created a logographic font for Kamakawi (in fact, my icon is one of the glyphs), and despite the fact that I feel like I could do a better job now, I think I did a pretty decent job with the design of the glyphs and the system. The one thing I absolutely did NOT do well is design a useable font. Since, at the time, you could only really access the characters you could type using lower case, upper case, alt, and alt + upper case (as well as the numbers), you only had access to ≈100 characters for a font. Furthermore, characters would be in random places. To expand the number of characters I could access, I made italic, bold, and bold+italic versions of the Kamakawi font that didn't actually italicize or bold the font at all: They brought up different character sets.

So, take, for example, the keystroke <l> (that's an ell). By typing it in various combinations, you could get all the following:

Regular (lower case): syllabic glyph for [la]

Regular (upper case): syllabic glyph for [lo]

Regular (alt): the agentive infix [-li-]

Regular (alt + upper case): the causative suffix [-le]

Italic (lower case): glyph for [eli] "to love"

Italic (upper case): glyph for [peka] "land"

Italic (alt): glyph for [poi] "scarcity"

Italic (alt + upper case): glyph for [elu] "long"

Bold (lower case): glyph for [kilika] "lobster"

Bold (upper case): glyph for [kala] "to speak"

Bold (alt): glyph for [tiki] "lava"

Bold (alt + upper case): glyph for [noe] "leaf"

Bold Italic (lower case): glyph for [maʔa] "to learn"

Bold Italic (upper case): glyph for [tama] "leg"

Bold Italic (alt): glyph for [halaʔi] "life"

Bold Italic (alt + upper case): glyph for [ite] "shortness of breath"

And it took me, like, 15 minutes to find all these, because that's how hard it is to manage this "system" which isn't a system at all.

For High Valyrian, I created a much simpler system. It goes like this:

Type #

Type a word in English

Type another #

Then the font automatically returns the glyph you need.

Now, I have to program every word in there as a contextual ligature, but my GOD is it worth it. Plus I have a full list detailing each glyph, what words it's used for, what words can be used to call it up in the font, etc. This is the organization system that Kamakawi desperately needed, but I had no idea how to do it.

So, that's my advice for creating a font that features logographs. If you don't have a way to organize all the glyphs, I promise you, you'll lose some of them. I need to catalog Kamakawi's glyphs at some point (maybe do a new font...). Eh. Someday.

[dedalvs]

Hey David! I've always been curious about what you do for a living betwen conlangs. do you have a main job? do you have many? of course you don't have to answer if you don't wanna :P Also this may be old but I really love your page on Kamakawi baby names!

Thank you! I like them, too! I've been waiting to hear someone named their baby something in Kamakawi. I think some of them are very nice. :) (For those curious, the page is here.)

And the answer to your other question is no, I don't have another job. This is all I do. In fact, my daughter has a rather unique long form birth certificate, I think, since under the profession of the father I got to write "language creator". Had nothing else to write! lol

[dedalvs]

What do Imeimei numerals look like?

Nothing special, to be honest. (Assuming you’re talking about Kamakawi’s script.) A summary can be found here, and I’ll go ahead and upload a screenshot of the graphic I have there. Voilà!

Thanks for the ask!

[dedalvs]

I was reading about the applicative in your book, and I didn't quite understand all of it. In my native Dutch, there is an applicative, so most of the examples you gave made sense to me, except the relative clause one. In that example, the word "lalauku'u" was in the applicative but also in the passive, so why does it have "ie hate" as a direct object? If I use my Dutch instinct, the phrase should be something like "The fire that was thrown into with an onion by me." (without a direct object)

You know, I never thought about this, because the grammar is very familiar to me, but Kamakawi was probably a bad example. The reason is that the accusative and the dative are identical. The full sentence is this:

E kava poke lalauku'u ie hate ti'i.

In the interlinear I have i tagged as OBJ, which is probably right, because it tags direct and indirect objects, but the two are actually different. In fact, there is an error in this example, but it’s not in the spoken version: It’s in the orthography. What’s in there is this:

But what it should be is this:

The dative i has a different spelling from the accusative i. But, of course, they sound the same. That the dative is used here is a bit odd, I’ll warrant, but it’s not impossible.

Thanks for letting me know! I’ll see if I can get the image corrected.