Rayalaka

A Synesthetic Language

Introduction

Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulating one sensory or cognitive pathway involuntarily invokes another, different sensory or cognitive pathway. For example, hearing music can provoke the perception of color, or numbers can have a particular gender and personality. The most common type of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which graphemes, such as letters and numbers, are perceived as being inherently colored. A similar type of synesthesia is ordinal linguistic personification, in which elements of an ordered set, such as numbers, weekdays, and months, are perceived as having their own personalities.

I have no idea if I'm actually a synesthete or not, but I can assign a color to just about anything. It started rather early in my lifetime, when I assigned colors to the days of the week with pushpins on my bulletin board: Sunday is orange, Monday is red, Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is white, Thursday is brown, Friday is violet, and Saturday is yellow. These assignments may appear completely arbitrary to most people, but here's the thing: they make complete, logical sense to me. I don't actually see the color when I think of the concept, but I do make the association; if I were a synesthete, I'd be an associator as opposed to a projector. It seems that my mind, at the most basic level, thinks in terms of color.

So one day, I got a crazy idea. What would it be like if I created a language in which everything was expressed as a series of colors? Instead of sounds or letters, phonemes and graphemes, as the basic units of the language, the basic units would be blocks of color. Would I be able to communicate more effectively if I could use what could very well be my brain's "native" language? Concepts would be mapped to colors, and sounds would be mapped to colors as well, which is atypical of language (usually letters are mapped to sounds, not the other way around!), so what would such a language sound like? From these questions came Rayalaka, a synesthetic language.

There are certain trends among synesthetes (the letter A tends to be red, for example), but for the most part one synesthete's associations will differ widely from another's. It would also be interesting to hear what other synesthetes' personal languages, constructed similarly to Rayalaka, would sound like.

Below is my synesthetic alphabet, showing my own unique grapheme-color associations. (Interestingly, or maybe uninterestingly, my letter A is not red.)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 i e π

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

These same associations will be used in Rayalaka, except for the letters (since Rayalaka has little use for them).

The Rayalaka Color System

Most color systems have three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue, as is commonly taught in art classes, or red, green, and blue, used in color displays, or cyan, magenta, and yellow, used in printing. Primaries can combine with each other to make secondary colors, or with secondaries to make tertiary colors. The three primaries and three secondaries together make what are usually considered the major colors. Sometimes people like to sneak in an extra seventh color just to be annoying, but what's really annoying is that the two common sets of "major" colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta) are not the same. As a color-thinking person, I can see all of these "major" colors as clearly distinct from each other; to me, each set is missing colors! Basically, I'm going to sneak in two extra colors just to be annoying!

Instead of three primaries, Rayalaka has four: red, yellow, cyan, and violet. (Let the whole physiological rods and cones thing be damned!) The secondaries are orange, green, blue, and magenta. This completes the whole set of eight "most important" colors and results in the color wheel below.

As can be seen above, instead of a triangle like most color spaces, Rayalaka forms a quadrilateral in the CIE xyY color space. (There's your actual, real color science for the day.)

The primaries and secondaries, all together, are red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet, magenta.

The tertiaries of this system are called scarlet, gold, chartreuse, aquamarine, azure, indigo, purple, rose.

All together they are red, scarlet, orange, gold, yellow, chartreuse, green, aquamarine, cyan, azure, blue, indigo, violet, purple, magenta, rose!

Tints of the primaries and secondaries are called coral, corange, lemon, lime, sky, frost, lavender, pink.

Shades of the primaries and secondaries are called maroon, umber, olive, pine, teal, navy, eggplant, plum.

Finally, there are six special colors, white, gray, black, creme, brown, and squant. These form the basic units, or color blocks, of Rayalaka.

Rayalaka Pronunciation and Orthography

The most basic units of Rayalaka are color blocks. For the purposes of speaking the language, or writing the language in a colorless context, we cannot merely assign sounds and letters to the color blocks, because doing so would make those sounds and letters more basic than the colors themselves. Instead, we have to take a preexisting set of sounds (say, consonant sounds in English) and assign colors to them.

To develop a pronunciation and orthography for Rayalaka, I took the IPA chart of pulmonic consonants, reduced it down to the sounds found in English, and started coloring the consonants. I used the value of a color (light, medium, or dark) to determine vowels. The result is the chart below.

Rayalaka Vocabulary

Words in Rayalaka are organized into sets. A sequence of colors is assigned to a set, then one or more following colors are assigned to each member of the set. Since a member of a set may be another set, several sequences may be concatenated together to form one word. (This is similar to how compound nouns work in German.) The Rayalaka lexicon becomes a taxonomy of sorts.

A particular set of words (say, the set of all weekdays, or the set of all fruits) is organized on what I call a recipe card. (I call it that for no other reason than "it just feels right.") A few examples are shown below.

Home - Back to KreativeKorp

© 1999-2012 Rebecca G. Bettencourt. All rights reserved. Exceptions are otherwise noted.