No changes for now

I've decided against making any major changes to the noun/pronoun systems of TN at this time. It works. It might not always produce the prettiest results with every word, but I've gotten over my objections now that I've lived with it for a while.

Updates, Personal and Linguistic

Since mid-August, we've been wrapped up in pre-moving, moving, and post-moving activities. I think things are starting to settle down and I can pick up where I left off. I'd been working on a Babel Text translation. Actually, I'd been doing two versions simultaneously, trying out two different styles.

An excerpt-- the first verse:
1. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
a. Anda teliya emas pa ya ianenat shen wa ebi def jenen shen em telam.
there-was language one in the waters-dat. all and 3rd-pl-past(have) have people all one speech-acc.

b. Bi def ya ianea shen em teliyam wa em telam.
3rd-s.-past(have) have the world all one language-acc. and one speech-acc.


In practice, my nouns aren't working out the way I'd hoped. The plural accusative of veci is vecinam, for instance. Yuck. Veci is just right, but once the rest gets tacked on... Yuck. Just... ewwww.

Compare (a.) above to the same version with case markings stripped out:
a2. Anda teliya emas pa ya ianen shen wa ebi def jenen shen em tel.

I don't know if that's better. I think I may be a little iffy on the -n plural as well. Bah. I'll have to push it around until I am happy. I just hope I don't fix it til it breaks completely.

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.

Small changes & notes

Made changes in the grammar today re: demonstratives. There are some previous examples that I need to go back and fix-- pretty much all previous instances of "alath" need to be changed to "aláth" to show the irregular stress.

I bought a new notebook, since my son thinks my old notebook may have gotten packed. The new one is like the one I already had, except a different color. It's a 2 subject, college ruled Five Star (by Mead?)notebook that has plastic covers on front and back PLUS a nylon fabric cover for the spiral binding and a plastic holder for 3x5 cards in the front. The plastic covers and the cover for the binding make it really durable as a go-everywhere, portable conlanging notebook. I think I bought the first one either at the grocery store or at Happy Harry's (aka Walgreen's-- they were a local chain that got bought out and kept the old name). The second I bought at Wal-Mart today. They should be pretty readily available (in the US), in any case.

My other all-around great notebook for dragging around is a Moleskine large reporter's notebook that I picked up at Waldenbooks while I was working in the mall. It's really nice, but it is also REALLY expensive, as notebooks go. It was my treat to myself that week.

Many more changes and additions to the grammar later this week. Lots to do over the next few days, so I don't know how much I'll get done, but you know I'll be thinking about it. Relative clauses should be popping up as a topic soon, and then I'll start some translations.

I've got a couple of idioms for the language planned:
a.)"to be in someone's eye, " meaning "to be getting on someone's nerves" ... Complete with the exclamation, "Get out of my eyes!"
b.) "to lick the cat's fur" -- a person who licks the cat's fur is the kind of person who has to do everything themselves because they are such a control freak. This is like the boss who gives you a job, then pushes you out of the way to do it himself. Needless to say, the connotations are on the negative side.

Thursday update

The notebook I'd been using to develop Teliya Nevashi (Hereafter, "TN" or "Nevashi") is still missing. I've decided to forge ahead with what I recall and make up the rest as I go. There's a lot of new material in the grammar, some of which is going to require revision of previous examples. The new stuff is subject to change as I actually work with it, since it is mostly straight out of my brain without any testing.

There are a few changes that I need to document-- my notebook had a rather ugly system for indicating sex on pronouns, but I've come up with something a little more elegant (I think), in the form of using selected noun sex suffixes as prefixes on pronouns. The hideous "vo'utu", ("him", acc.) from the system documented in my notebook and used previously in one of the examples, would become "uvot" under the new rule. The new rule is simpler to remember too: a- for female, u- for male, and they can be used (optionally) on any pronoun. I will add this into the Gender and Sex section when I get half a chance.

I am going to go over to my mother's house and see if my notebook is over there. Wherever it is, it is in the company of my copy of Describing Morphosyntax. If I don't find the notebook, Nevashi will go on. If I don't find the book, I'll be very sad.

In other news, I've eliminated SVO from my possible word orders. Now VSO and VOS are battling it out for galactic supremacy... Oh, wait... that was a different movie.

I sort of stopped rather abruptly. I have been getting kids dressed and ready to go since then. They have shoes on now, and are looking at me impatiently, so I'm going to go. I'll be back very soon. I promise.

EDIT: Threw in the new rule and I think I fixed all the instances of "vo'utu"... I didn't use "find & replace", but rather ran my eyes down the document looking for it, so I may have missed a couple. There are some formatting issues in the current publish of the grammar as well. I'll fix those sooner or later.

Notes on A Wednesday

I am going to keep republishing the grammar doc as I work on it in Google Docs, and also post notes on the side about what's going on around the language.

I am revising the pronouns across the board, so the few examples used in the grammar so far will have to be fixed when the dust settles. Pronouns have cases and I was planning on transferring those directly to the nouns (lock, stock and barrel, as they say) but I am not entirely sure right now.

I have SO much work to do in the next few hours, it may be a day or so before I get back to it.