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About ten years ago, when I was 3 years old, my mother bought me a furby. I've never played with him and few days ago I found him in my house. I've noticed that he spoke in a strange language so I searched about this in the net. Furbies speak a conlang named furbish...

Whoa, it's been ages since I heard anyone mention furbies. And yes, they do have a simple conlang, although I thought everyone already knew about that.

Haha, yes, I remember... Mine was called Cloud (but in Furbish).

When mine "died" it burped for about a minute then stopped still, with its eyes half-open. Low-running batteries are a funny thing.

Let me guess... Oontai?

I remember Furbish seemed like a pretty novel concept to implement in a kid's toy. Although I do think it would've been made a bit more interesting if Furbies responded to human speech in a more interactive way--I was able to teach one to parrot a couple D'ni words, but in general they seemed pretty oblivious. It would've been a great touch if you could "chat" with a Furby in its own language.

Does Furbish have any interesting morphosyntactic properties? What are they?

cromulant wrote:Does Furbish have any interesting morphosyntactic properties? What are they?

I don't remember much about it, but I recall that it had an isolating pidgin-like grammar that mostly emulated English so probably not.

Wikipedia gives use the following:

wee-tah-kah-loo-loo: Tell me a joke.
wee-tah-kah-wee-loo: Tell me a story.
wee-tee-kah-wah-tee: Sing me a song.
u-nye-loo-lay-doo?: Do you want to play?
u-nye-ay-tay-doo?: Are you hungry?
u-nye-boh-doo?: How are you?
u-nye-way-loh-nee-way: Go to sleep now.
u-nye-noh-lah: Show me a dance.

Furbies may say these Furbish words:

doo?: What? (Furbies say this when called)
doo-dah: Yes. (Furbies say this in response to a command before doing it.)
boo: No. (Furbies say this when they do not want to carry out a command.)
yoo?: Why will you not play with me today? (This usually means the Furby is upset.)

So, we can build a corpus (also, my one was called Way-loh, which means sleep, not what I thought it meant).
From the Wikipedia Furbish corpus, we can work out the following:


wee-tah-kah = tell me (a?)
wee-tee-kah = sing me (a?)
doo? = question tag (the given translation of "what?" would appear innacurate. I'd suggest "hmm?" as a better English single-word translation)
loo-loo = (a?) joke
wee-loo = (a?) story
u-nye = you
loo-lay = (want to?) play
ay-tay = (be) hungry
boh = how (how are you - could be "good" like Chinese ni hao ma?)
way-loh-nee-way = sleep now
way-loh = sleep (from interview with native speaker)
nee-way (now)
noh-lah = to show a dance to someone?
doo-dah = yes
boo = no (from Mandarin bù?)
you = general expression of unhappiness

Additionally, The Furby Funhouse lists several phrases. Looking around other secondary sources, it would appear that it's a broadly SVO language with use of question marker words (doo?) and exclamatory words (wah!).

Ah, "kah" means me. The wordlist gives "tah" the meaning of give, so "tell me a story" is literally "give me story". Interesting.

This belongs to the Conlang subforum.

Legion wrote:This belongs to the Conlang subforum.

No, it developed naturally among the furby population.

Doo hmm? and doo-dah yes look like they might be related somehow. Perhaps boo was originally a negative question marker, with doo/boo forming a pair akin to Latin num/nonne, and then supplanted *boo-dah because yes and no sounded too similar.

Thomas Winwood wrote:Doo hmm? and doo-dah yes look like they might be related somehow. Perhaps boo was originally a negative question marker, with doo/boo forming a pair akin to Latin num/nonne, and then supplanted *boo-dah because yes and no sounded too similar.

Alternatively, it could be unrelated, like how a catastrophe has little to do with cats or trophies outside of very specific circumstances. Maybe if we had access to proto-Furbish corpora we could look into sound changes and historical forms.

Gulliver wrote:boo = no (from Mandarin bù?)

Or just English boo.

I do remember that "Kah way-lah coco" meant "me sleep again". Mine enjoyed saying that a lot.

I think it's time to give a more sensible orthography to Furbish. As of now, we have:
/n b t d k l w j ɑ i o u ai ei/ or something like that. I propose <a i o u ai e> for the vowels. Also, get rid of those hyphens!

Was it really possible to teach them to swear or was that an urban legend? (I would guess the latter because YouTube only has vids of burning furbies.)

meltman wrote:Was it really possible to teach them to swear or was that an urban legend? (I would guess the latter because YouTube only has vids of burning furbies.)

I think not. My personal theory is that they came with English preprogrammed, and that the firmware gradually replaced the furbish with it as it picked up human speech frequencies. That seems the most likely thing for the technology of the time.

I agree with the preprogramming... I didn't even talk to my Furbies very much, and they still picked up English at lightning speeds. In addition to using cutesy words which weren't used in my family... so their basic language "skills" were certainly preprogrammed.

They could also "parrot" words that were not in their vocabulary, though, which I believe is where the whole swearing rumor came from. If you said a specific word enough times the Furby would repeat it back to you. What I tought my first one was definitely not in their standard vocabulary, but he got the pronunciation spot-on... I guess there was some kind of system to parse out the sounds in a word so the Furby could pronounce it in his own voice. They didn't use these words in sentences or anything like that, though.

Ahh... Amazing robots!!!! One feature is the furbish language don't have /k/!
Also it lacks fricatives!!! Amazing!!! How furbish parrot words? Mine said "shit" to me...

Ahh... Amazing robots!!!! One feature is the furbish language don't have /k/!
Also it lacks fricatives!!! Amazing!!! How furbish parrot words? Mine said "shit" to me...

Ahh... Amazing robots!!!! One feature is the furbish language don't have /k/!
Also it lacks fricatives!!! Amazing!!! How furbish parrot words? Mine said "shit" to me...