zompist bboard

I'm making a computer game were the main character plays a mouse in a fantasy medieval setting where mice have built cities, and so forth... And I was thinking of making a language for them to speak, most text/speech will be in English but was thinking of using the mouse language for maybe magic and to add so depth to the game.

So I guess my question is what would the phonology of a mouse language be like? These mice are pretty much like normal Earth mice except they can walk upright, so use their front paws just as hands and thus make tools, etc... But I imagine the mouth/head shape would be pretty similar. What sounds can a mouse make other then 'squeak'? How is the onomatopoeia 'squeak' done in different languages too (google was useless)?

I imagine the mouth/head shape would be pretty similar.

They could be, but remember that there are places of articulation fairly far down in the throat (glottal stops, etc.). Those would be altered, given that you want to change the angle of the neck so that the mice can look forwards while standing upright. I can't speak to the details of mouse anatomy,though.

Also, a world-building question: how large are these intelligent mice? If they're much bigger than real-life mice, they'll need different proportions to move effectively. If they're the same size as real mice, you should keep in mind things like surface tension and heat exchange. An example of the effects of the latter: mice eat 15% of their body mass per day, in order to keep warm and normally active.

DePaw wrote:I'm making a computer game were the main character plays a mouse in a fantasy medieval setting where mice have built cities, and so forth... And I was thinking of making a language for them to speak, most text/speech will be in English but was thinking of using the mouse language for maybe magic and to add so depth to the game.

So I guess my question is what would the phonology of a mouse language be like? These mice are pretty much like normal Earth mice except they can walk upright, so use their front paws just as hands and thus make tools, etc... But I imagine the mouth/head shape would be pretty similar. What sounds can a mouse make other then 'squeak'? How is the onomatopoeia 'squeak' done in different languages too (google was useless)?

I think I've heard that mice can make like infrasonic sounds or something, so high-pitched that humans can't hear it. You should look into that. Maybe tonemes would be more important than phonemes?

Mice say ['pi:p] in Swedish and Finnish (spelled pip in Swedish and piip in Finnish).

Yes global stops would be effected by an upright position, now i think about it.

I have them the same size as normal mice, most enemies are stuff like insects and birds, etc so it's very similar to earth bit no humans. I do have an eating mechanic in the game but a very simple one.

Interesting idea with tonemes... Seeing as squeak and piip use the same vowel looks like i may be using tones instead... Which would be very cool and fun but hard to integrate into the game without it being jarring unless i have a bloody good orthography, even then I'm not sure how appropriate it would be.

I also have rats in the game, how would a rat language differ from a mouse language? Or would they pretty much be the same or dialects at most?

DePaw wrote:I also have rats in the game, how would a rat language differ from a mouse language? Or would they pretty much be the same or dialects at most?

Most obviously to me:

Mus musculus (house mice) are a bit less than half the size of Rattus rattus (the black rat) or Rattus norvegicus (the Norway rat, one group of which led to the lab rats), in every dimension. This means that rats weigh about ten times as much as mice do, and have correspondingly larger vocal tracts.

Young and some adult rats do make ultrasonic volcalizations, in addition to the chirping that humans can hear the low-frequency end of. And they make lower-frequency (and hence human-audible) sounds by rapidly grinding their teeth together.

Also: both mice and rats don't have effective color vision - although their eyes work better towards the UV than ours do (and less well in the red). This lets them see urine left behind by earlier rodents, and is also exploited by predatory birds which home in on active trails marked by where the rodents have been recently urinating.

Both mice and rats make heavy use of smell-based signaling (pheromones). This particularly applies to male mouse urine, the smell of which can cause female mice to spontaneously abort an early-stage pregnancy. Wikipedia has an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_effect

Mice say "piep" [pip] in Dutch, and "chu" in Japanese (if my memory serves me right.)

Sacemd wrote:Mice say "piep" [pip] in Dutch, and "chu" in Japanese (if my memory serves me right.)

You recall the Japanese correctly. Hence "Pikachu" - derived from "chu" for the sound a mouse makes and "pika" for the sound of an electrical spark.

Are you making a Redwall game?

HandsomeRob wrote:Redwall

OMG I used to love that!

Never heard of it

DePaw wrote:Never heard of it

Brian Jacques' fantasy series, targeted at the children's market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall

Now up to 22 books, apparently. I read some of the early ones when I was in grade school. Not bad, but after a while it became clear that every single one is simply a slight variation on the basic version of the Hero's Journey plot. That and technological and social status that holds over several dozen generations was annoying.

There's also the Mouse Guard, which is both a comic series and tabletop roleplaying game.

Great minds think alike, eh?

Heard of Mouse Guard before. There's also another Mouse themed tabletop game I've played.

Ok phonology we got so far:
/skp/
/w/
/i:/

Pretty limited... Let's assume if they can make an /s/ they can also make a /t/ as they can articulate there and also make stops. /s/, /k/, and /p/ are all voiceless so going to assume either no voiced consonants or no distinction made. Maybe add /ɸ/??

What you guys think?

By the same logic, you could also get away with /x/, I reckon. Maybe /u:/ as well.

That also works nicely.

Maybe add in /ä:/ too to make the vowel system a bit fun?

Also glottal stop and /h/?

As they have /s/ and /t/ add in an r and l, I think a trill is most mousy, and lateral fricative?

Are nasals sensible or not?

Okay look for God's sake unless you contrast central and front open vowels in the language DO NOT PUT TREMATA OVER <a> IN PHONEME SLASHES!

Thank you.

DePaw wrote:Heard of Mouse Guard before. There's also another Mouse themed tabletop game I've played.

Ok phonology we got so far:
/skp/
/w/
/i:/

Pretty limited... Let's assume if they can make an /s/ they can also make a /t/ as they can articulate there and also make stops. /s/, /k/, and /p/ are all voiceless so going to assume either no voiced consonants or no distinction made. Maybe add /ɸ/??

What you guys think?

I doubt mice are physiologically capable of producing any human consonant, or even speech sound.

Cromulant, you're no fun!

Ok so phonology so far:
/p t k ʔ/ <p t k q>
/ɸ s x h/ <f s x h>
/r l/ <r l>
/w/ <w>
/a: i: ɯ:/ <a i u>

Add in /ɑ:/ <o> or not? Maybe /ə:/ too? Not sure what orthgraphy to use for /ə:/ though.

For tones I was thinking three tones (low, mid, high) and also raising and falling tones, for a total of five tones patterns.

For example I was thinking of calling the character you play in my game Kâvǔs /ka:˥˩vɯ:˩˥s/. The /f/ changes to /v/ between vowels.

DePaw wrote:Not sure what orthgraphy to use for /ə:/ though.

<y> is a fairly standard choice. <e> is an alternative.

Mice are obligatory nasal breathers - they don't breathe through their mouths, although I suspect that like many similar animals they can do so if truly necessary. Their language would probably sound very nasal, and might involve changing the shape of the nasal cavity rather than the oral. Whether they can actually do this is questionable, but then again we only recently found out that rats giggle when tickled, so...

Think I'll go for <e>...

And good point about nasal breathing. But if all consonants are nasalised then no destinction needs to be made?

Since consonants are made by changing the way the oral cavity is shaped, I don't think mice will be able to produce any.

Perhaps they would have an hummed language, entirely tonal.

Melend wrote:Since consonants are made by changing the way the oral cavity is shaped, I don't think mice will be able to produce any.

What little research I have read about this says that mice can articulate the airflow - at least to some extent. e.g. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0046610 .

As I noted above, their vocalizations are primarily ultrasonic. Mice and rats also make non-vocal sounds (e.g. teeth grinding) and use scent-based signalling. So an actual mouse language would not be something normal human senses would appreciate. For the game described, there would need to be some convention for at least converting the language into something the player could hear.

Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see that article saying that mice can articulate consonants - only that they can modulate the sounds they make. It's entirely possible that mice can sing but not 'speak', being unable to produce anything we would recognize as a vowel or consonant

You may want to look up Solresol - but I've been unable to locate any detailed information online, and suspect that this musical conlang now exists only in some university library collections.