Babyish languages

Babyish languages are a set of fictional diachronic language from a child story called "Stories in Babycasèny", which can be viewed as a pidgin of Cantonese and English.

History

an iron box with war chess inside painted by the kids with Chinese and Babyish (Tsukikoish) text written on it. (1985)

Babyish (/'beibjiʃ/) was originally a language spoken by a certain groups of kids in Hong Kong. They use Cantonese as their mother tongue, and they were taught with extensive amount of English in school as well. On the other hand, some of the kids have their grandparents speaking with another kind of language at home, and some elements were brought into their common language. When they were growing up, some of them learnt French and Japanese and they brought some elements into their common langauge.

The name for "Babyish" have two kinds of saying:

1. Such common language does not have a name before, and was named as "Babyish" later, for the comments by one of their parents about "Why are you talking in a tone like a baby?"
2. Another kind of saying is that, the Babyish was originally designed to "simplify" the complicated English as perceived by Primary school children. The word "Babyish" originated from "Baby", and the word "Baby" originated from the Cantonese saying of "Baby" (BB). "BB", however, comes from the result of the "simplified" language that all the "is" "am" "are" was simplified into "be".

Now, these native speakers of Babyish has spread around the world. Some of them lives in Toronto, some of them lives in Boston, some of them lives in Chicago, while most of them lives in Hong Kong, but scattered. I wish to use the portal to link these people up, and share their knowledge about the langauge. We used to have literatures and publications (handwritten or typed) in the past. I think this is quite an interesting way to see how a langauge is being developed.

The maximum number of language population was around 100. There are much less people who can speak this language, as they have forgotten the language when they grown up and speak the "proper language" required by the society.

Classification

See also: Babyish dialects

Babyish languages can basically be classified into two branches:

• Babyish - characterised by its 5 vowels system (ä and ö are considered part of a and o)
• Sheepness - besides a, e, i, o and u, they considered schwa as the 6th vowel and coded separatedly, while Babyish will distribute them among the 5 vowels as short vowels. For each of the branch, there are further sub-branches, differed by the suffices and articles used in sentences.

Phonology and writing system

See also: Babyish alphabet and Babyish phonology

Babyish has its own characters, being some geometric shapes, but was not used beyond illustration. It is transcripted in two ways:

• accented Latin characters
• plain ASCII text (for transcription only)

Phonology

The writing system (or Babyish orthography) of Babyish is phonemic (or phonetic, to use a simplier word). There are not many words that do not pronounce the same as it was written, and these words are usually easy to remember. All letters in Babyish are pronounced. Every phoneme in Babyish is represented by a character, and nearly every character in Babyish is represented by only one sound. The word "nearly" need to add here, because it is a language of more than 20 years. Also, as people emigrated and adopted different culture from other places, such impacts caused changes to the language as well.

Since Babyish is a pidgin of Cantonese, some words are tonal and require indication of tones. Tonal marks from pinyin is borrowed for tone indication. There are still possible ambiguity in the current lexicon, but the approach is believed the best way to represent the language.

Morphology

• Babyish affices
• Babyish adpositions

Vocabularies

Summary

English	Babyish	Origin
Cat	Uzaza / Miao	Original / Onomotopaeic
Dog	Azaza / Wou	Original / Onomotopaeic
Rabbit	Zaza / Déng	Original
Sheep	Me	Onomotopaeic
Panda	Siongmiao	Mandarin Chinese
Fish	Ör	Original
Tortoise (or turtle)	Wuggwài	Cantonese
not yet	mǐ-	Cantonese
full (after meal)	báo	Cantonese
hungry (after meal)	mǐbáo	Cantonese (= "mǐ-" not yet + "báo")
used	Yused	English
not used	Mǐyused	Cantonese+English (= "mǐ-" not yet + "yused")
Elder Brother	(le) gor	Cantonese
Younger Brother	(le) sálou	Cantonese
Elder Sister	(la) sis	English	"sis" is not pronounced as /sis/, but is pronounced as /dzit/ instead, a pattern occurred in Korean as well
Younger Sister	(la) mui	Cantonese
Father	Baba	Cantonese
Mother	Mama / Mami	Cantonese
Water	Sui	Cantonese
Clear water	Nanasui	from "sui"
Tea	Cya	Japanese (Cantonese)
Tea for guest	Oucya	Japanese
Tea for sheep	Meorcya	derived from "me"+"oucya"

Onomotopaeic

• miao: cat
• wou: dog
• me: sheep

Original

• uzaza: cat
• azaza: dog
• zaza: rabbit
• ör: fish
• mu: bear

Mixture of Original and Adoption

• muhuŋ: teddy bear (huŋ for all kinds of bears)

English

Direct Adoption

• welkom: welcome
• plänèt: planet

Indirect Adoption

• fikstā: from "fixed-star", a direct translation from the corresponding Chinese term "恆星".

Cantonese

Direct Adoption

(mostly place names)

• jü: pig
• šī: tree (pl. -s)
• šīyip: leaf (pl. -s)
• šīhuŋ: koala (pl. -s)

Indirect Adoption

• wongjü: silly/stupid

Mandarin

• Xiongmao: Panda (xióngmao)

Japanese

• Cya: tea
• o-: polite form (may be a variant of à, you cannot have polite form for vegetable like o-coi?)

French

• le/la: the
• à: at

Writing Systems

A keyboard layout is available at here for the use with “SC Unipad”.

Grammar

See also: Babyish grammar

(syntax and inflectional morphology)

Semantics

See also: Babyish semantics

(derivational morphology and miscellaneous usage notes)

See also

• Babyish alphabet
• Babyish calligraphy
• Babyish dialects
• Babyish grammar
• Babyish hanchar
• Basic Babyish vocabulary - Vocabulary collection - Yòhäŋ-sajòŋ
• Babyish literatures
• Babyish semantics
• List of people in Babyish literatures
• Babyish spellchecker
• Babyish pùblikeiçion

External Links

• Main resource storing the information of Babyish
• Webpage written in Babyish
• A transcription of an old Babyish textbook showing the change of spellings in Babyish