Small advances in vocabulary

I added some new words that have been on my mind. There are some more words and some new affixes I want to add. I hope I get that done tomorrow. I have some pre-existing words to document in the vocab list too.

I haven't forgotten Nevashi. Our business has really take off and has been far more successful than we could have ever imagined it would be at this point. That, and all the usual kid stuff, has me crawling a little more slowly than I'd like.

Just a note

I made some adjustments and corrections to previous blog entries, the grammar, and the vocabulary. Now I am going to bed!

Minor notes

The current Teliya Nevashi vocabulary list is viewable here. I still need to comb through the grammar to see if I scare out any other words used-but-not-listed, and I have a few other words scattered around to add. I will just republish as I add things.

A State of The Language Address

It's been a while since I updated this blog, and just about as long since I did any real work on Teliya Nevashi. Things are settling down now that 2008 is well underway, so I am going to be devoting a fair amount of time every week to this language and related conculture, as well as a little side language project I am trying to get off the ground. I have quite a bit of time on the weekends that I could use for conlanging, so you can expect to see more regular updates from now on.

Today I updated my template here and added a creative commons license, which I want to clarify right here-- it applies to the Teliya Nevashi language background materials (grammar, vocabulary, any orthography that crops up) specifically. Any composition or speech *in* Teliya Nevashi belongs entirely to the author, for whatever purpose. (That is to say, I am staking some claim on the language, but not on original thoughts expressed through the medium of the language.) Anyway, the license I chose is pretty open (for non-commercial use)-- feel free to tweak, improve or remix and share what you find here (with attribution for the original work) under similar licensing. I did this because the topic of conlang ownership and use has come up a few times on the CONLANG list, and I thought I would be explicit about the material presented here. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but just got around to it today.

I mean to make the entire existing Teliya Nevashi vocabulary available in the next couple of days. I've got some side projects related to the world of Ianea stewing on a sideburner too, which I'd like to get on the Net and linked here.

Stay tuned for "2008: A Conlang Odyssey"!

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.