Colloquial Teliya Nevashi

This is going to be another entry that gets updated over time, in the same way that the grammar entry is always changing and evolving.

Xu! is a multipurpose interjection, meaning "Listen!", "Come on!", "Let's go!", "Get busy!", etc.

Sul! is also a multipurpose interjection, meaning "hey!", "Look here!"

The world in Nevashi is called both Ianea and Ya Ianen. The latter literally means, "The Waters". The Nevashi see the world as an endless expanse of water with a little bit of land in it, rather than as the land with water around it.

Quit bothering me! (lit, Get out of my eyes!) Rogomishi det sululat laz! (Put-away+IMP you+acc. eyes-dat. my; broken down into morphemes: Ro+gom+ishi de+t sul+ul+at la+z) It might be possible to do this with the reflexive prefix also: orogomishi sululat laz! (EDIT, 2/7/08: Corrected error-- "sulul" should be the dual of sul, not "sulel"; -el was from a very early version of the language. Not sure why I didn't catch this before. Anyway, I think sululat is easy to say than sulelat.)

O- is also the passive prefix, but it would have to be the reflexive when used with an imperative. (Note to self, add this to the grammar, for the sake of clarity. 2/7/08)

There's another "remove" verb, other than rogom, which is sigom. Sigom means to "un-put", which might actually be better. (EDIT: I'd previously declared that the correct verb for this idiom was rogom, but I am going to say that sigom and rogom are interchangeable in this saying.)

2/7/08, New Idiom: ti osa posham ti'iz. Literally, "He (or she) licks (a) cat's fur." As mentioned in another entry on the blog, this means that he's the sort of control freak who has to do everything himself. This is the boss who gives out assignments and then does the work himself anyway (or re-does the work done by his subordinates, even if they did it right) to make sure it is done right.

Wrestling with the passive and other design considerations

For several days I wrestled with the question of how (or if) I wanted to do the passive for TN. I eventually settled on a verb prefix. I don't feel like this is all that interesting as a solution, but it is functional. I am actually pretty happy with the way it sounds, in practice.

TN incorporates a lot of features that were in various conlang doodles (not even sketches) that I'd come up with over the last few years. I am trying to keep a grip on what goes into it, though. It is not my goal to include every interesting feature I can think of. It is my goal to create something functional, learnable, and aesthetically pleasing (to my personal tastes). It would be really easy to come down with Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink Syndrome, but I don't think that would be a very good design choice, given my purpose.

I think the grammar is complete enough to allow me to get started translating and writing. I need to make sure all the vocabulary is getting documented as it is being invented. As it is, I believe I have some words used in the grammar that aren't in the dictionary yet. I just want to try to keep things as consistent as possible across the board through good documentation.