Aldershot spin-off for "Translating RO" topic in General

So Clive made an interesting reply and I could easily derail into Aldershot territory, so I will. Just here.

This whole thread has been bending my brain from the beginning, but I think something just snapped…

It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. A lot of you have probably pieced together by now that I am quite a security nut and a little paranoid so it may not surprise to hear that in my nerdiness I have written a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language security language which I prefer to work in.

It may sound a little nutty, but I’ve always been quite the linguaphile, and got into conlanging more for engineered languages to understand how language affects human thinking and to understand how languages work at the most fundamental level. Since I am a fan of obscurity as an added layer to security, it wasn’t a huge leap to create a language for personal use in an effort to increase security.

R i g h t…

8~)

:)

I’m not real paranoid like NSA are listening or Mi5 are after me, but getting into security has made it a point of pride not getting hacked or having information leaked. I’m a little eccentric so this was a fun endeavour.

Oh, we’re in Aldershot, good…

http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Hymmnos

Yuki Kajiura (composer for loads of animé) writes songs in Kajiuran when she wants to convey an emotional message without the baggage of people trying or failing to understand lyrics in Japanese/English.

Lisa Gerrard, Sigur Rós, Enya, Adiemus… All have their own made up language with varying degrees of seriousness (I think Lisa’s is a fairly complete one while Adiemus just sounds like baby babble really).

Uber examples most surely be Klingon and Elvish. Not to mention the “does anybody actually speak it” Esperanto…

Like Gavin, I started to build my own language for a story. Using the 46 kana, and the other kana, plus some random kanji, the language was going to be built out of a hundred words. I did a bunch of planning but got a bit fed up with the language problems such as "if a bird is a sky animal then what the hell do you call a helicopter? Sky machine? Could be a plane. There were some things (sleeper carriage) that ended up with ridiculously long winded names. Yes, I was thinking of difficult objects just to see how bad it could be. I don’t recall now, but a soldering iron was something like a metal move-change fire (move-change as in position, not change as in into a different metal), and fire because heat…

Not to mention the “does anybody actually speak it” Esperanto…

Yes, and now we live in an era of native Esperanto speakers.

Yuki Kajiura (composer for loads of animé) writes songs in Kajiuran when she wants to convey an emotional message without the baggage of people trying or failing to understand lyrics in Japanese/English.

That’s incredibly clever. I wish I thought of that.

the language was going to be built out of a hundred word

I’ve done similar projected playing around with engilangs. It’s interesting and a lot of fun to play around with but as you no doubt found, not very practical. I also find you rely a lot on cultural perceptions and idioms to make it usable, but then you just have a very obscure English language, in my attempts of using a limited number of words.

I only built enough of the language for the purposes of the story – not much at all. More people’s and place’s names (sounding as though they belonged to the same languages) than anything else, but a few other bits of language for various reasons. Once for a bit of a joke: the main protagonist’s name is Owen Morley. In the land where he’s ended up, where the languages are Laana and Maara, people put their family name first (as they do in China & Vietnam & possibly other places, I don’t know) so he gets called Morley Owen – except that that sounds like Mor Liauen, which means Goat’s Intestines, so he changes his surname (to one that sounds local.)

Ah, but the thing is, James, that l’anglais apparu presque partout¹ these days, so if you create your entire OS in your custom language, tu voit toujours l’anglais. Où? Alors, c’est dans² every application that you use that hasn’t been translated, chaque site web³ you’ll be looking at, you get the idea.
I have written this message in two languages to show that with practice, c’est pas trop difficile de change le langue, même dedans⁴ the sentence. Sometimes word order complicates things but it’s plus facile pour moi parce-que j’écris toujours comme c’est foutu anglaise⁵. ;-)

¹ English appears just about everywhere

² you will always see English. Where? Hey, it’s in

³ each website

⁴ it’s not too difficult to change the language, even within

⁵ but it’s simpler for me because I always write [French] like it is ****ing English

I only built enough of the language for the purposes of the story

I’ve always been interested in doing that. If I got into novel writing, I think my tech life would die, though.

if you create your entire OS in your custom language, tu voit toujours l’anglais

My french is rusty but I just about managed that. Then I saw your footnotes. facepalm

That’s not a problem as long as the majority is translated. Plus I will probably lean on custom code more than external application so I may have a higher percentage translated that you may expect.

Anyway, point is, translate the application you use the most. Then try some other stuff. You can’t escape English, code switching will still be required, so do it bit by bit rather than attempting the entire OS and utils in one go.

That said, its security through obscurity. I bet most of us old timers could use RISC OS no matter what language it appears in, because it’s behaviour is regular and hasn’t changed much in decades. I could find Edit, write a message, save it to your SD card, all without paying much attention to the lack of English… Muscle memory would do most of the work, which is why the painful code switch for me is between Windows and RISC OS…I can’t count the number of times I’ve pressed ^U in Firefox to clear the URL text, only for the machine to shudder, shake, smoke, and eventually display a billion bytes of markup… :-/

Take it easy, make it fun, not a chore. Your best security is that you’re using something so unlike Windows or Linux that you’ll probably get the grey haired evil nerd saying “I saw this at school” (if only I paid attention to the teachers instead of those sixth form chicks that misbehave) and the younger evil nerd saying “the hell is this? how am I supposed to….”.
Remember, RISC OS has this lovely habit of doing nothing when you run a program. Well, I lie, it drops an easily missed icon at the bottom of the screen, but for a person expecting a huge window to open, it might seem like nothing happened. ;-)

That said, its security through obscurity.

And with Big Data analytics, based on weak signals, it can’t be called security any more.
Want to be really secure? Do not hide. Crypt.

[Rick] You can’t escape English, code switching will still be required, so do it bit by bit rather than attempting the entire OS and utils in one go.

You’re right. I think I had an idea of how I wanted it to be and got a little miffed that I couldn’t have my perfect image of what I want. I’ll probably still translate it.

[David] And with Big Data analytics, based on weak signals, it can’t be called security any more.

Maybe. It is a completely unique language, with its own idioms and such. I’ve also taken great care not to have direct translations for words into English, the grammar is nothing like English either. It has a lot of words missing, and even has a few new words English doesn’t.

As a unique perspective, and I probably shouldn’t share this, the language isn’t written with letters. It’s written entirely using numbers and I’d expect that to confuse big data as there’d be too many patterns and a lot of false positives.

At any rate, this is an extra layer. A final stand to make the perpetrator more uncomfortable. You can’t truly stop a determined hacker, you can only slow him down enough until you manually intervene or until they get bored and give up. There are no guarantees.

Also if they haven’t yet deciphered Linear A, I think I fair a good chance.

the language isn’t written with letters. It’s written entirely using numbers

Wow. Sounds like my vision of hell.

I’m absolutely fine with numbers, but their meaning is purely numerical to me.

Give me an alphabetic script – don’t really mind whether it’s the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic, Greek or Deva Nagari, and I’d learn other Indic scripts or Armenian or Georgian reasonably happily too, or possibly Hebrew. But I think I’m too old to start adapting to the very different approaches of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

Laana and Maara use alphabets, but like nothing that actually exists, and I’ve not designed them in any detail (not needed for the story) – just their Latin transliteration (which is, mostly for names of people & places).

Actually the writing system is inspired by devanagari! I just use numbers to represent the sounds. The pronunciation is stolen from Japanese.

So by default, all consonant letters/numbers have an “a” vowel tacked on. If a consonant is followed by a vowel num/letter, then the “a” is dropped. If you don’t want the “a” sound dropped, you place a dot between the numbers.

For example

1 = Sa
2 = I
12 = Si
1.2 = Sai

The language is called Sai, so “1.23” reads “Saika” or “The Sai language”

Some more fodder would be “5226” or Uiira for Wheeler.

So you’ve just made it much more insecure by posting these clues.

It wasn’t a huge leap to create a language for personal use in an effort to increase security.

Oops!

So you’ve just made it much more insecure by posting these clues.

To a degree, but by my explaining how to read the sounds, you still would be lost in understanding Sai text so not much is lost. You still don’t know the sounds of 4, 7, 8, 9 or 0.

I’ve not even touch grammar, synonyms, idioms or cultural aspects of the language, but if you think you have enough to raise the veil of obscurity, by all means do it.

I presume you don’t have 41 consonants and 14 vowels though?

5 vowels and 12 consonants.

So some of your phonemes are digraphs, then. One of the beautiful things about Deva Nagari is that it doesn’t need any digraphs – and then it goes and spoils the beauty by using compound consonants for most cases of consecutive consonants with no intervening vowel 8~) – ah well, every script has its kludges… 8~)

So some of your phonemes are digraphs, then

Yes, I use digraphs for voice unvoiced consonants. I took what I like about devanagari, but also borrowed some ideas from kana. My ultimate goal was to be able to use a phone keypad to write the majority of text.

Ah, now, Kana is a complete mystery to me. Don’t have the first inkling of how Japanese works or is pronounced.

You can’t truly stop a determined hacker, you can only slow him down enough until you manually intervene or until they get bored and give up.

But, wait, you’re using a really insecure OS!? ;-)

Thing is, what are we really worried about – script kiddie hackers or state actors? Problem is, the state doesn’t play fair – if the Brits want to know your secrets, they can just invoke RIPA or any of the other lovely laws that May passed. Cough up secrets or go straight to jail…

RIPA was passed in 2000, so it’s one of Tony’s actually. Jack Straw was Home Sec at the time.

But, wait, you’re using a really insecure OS!? ;-)

I am, but the install base is small in comparison to other OSes so chances are malicious hackers haven’t bothered reading up on it or search for many exploits. Plus I’ve put it behind a default deny pf firewall and that’s the stuff I’m willing to tell you! It is overkill.