Thursday, April 23, 2009

6 days short of a year later...

When I make changes to the Nevashi grammar, I include the date of the addition or change. Today I added the causative+imperative in order to make "start the car" and "turn on the light" possible with the vocabulary that already exists, and I noticed that I added the regular imperative on 4/29/08. That's where the title of this post comes from.

And here's the new bit:
Imperative+causative. -(i)xi, s.; i- -(i)xi, pl., e.g. "muzhuxi ya otomom", "start the car" (run+causative_imperative the car-acc.)or "isivixi ya ombam", "Turn on the lamp, y'all." (pl-be active-causative_imperative the lamp-acc.)
Unlike the -shi imperative, the final i is never dropped. [Added 4/23/2009]


I haven't had time to work on the language much lately. I hope I'll get some work done on it this week. I'm going to continue doing translations and addressing grammar issues as they arise. I've got tentative solutions to a few problems I've encountered that also need to be documented and road tested.

Also, I'll be working on creating new words, both in the course of translation and by categorical lists. While I am at it, I need to find a way to work zabli and ovni into the language. Zabli is a nonsense word my 10-year-old daughter was saying recently, and then I was flipping through channels on the TV and passed a show about UFOs, which made me think (one meandering path of thought later) that ovni sounds like a Nevashi word. So does "ufo" for that matter.