Misc.

I posted this as a Facebook status:

Eki kyudit ya hoan sanzonaz wera, cora, wa moci.
3rd-pl-go change-toward the leaves trees-gen yellow, red, and brown.
(The leaves of the trees are turning yellow, red, and brown.)

I was really unsure where to put the colors in the sentence because it felt a little weird to have the subject between the change-to verb and the things that are being changed to. 'Change' (to, from, or unspecified) is a motion verb in Nevashi, so I will have to meditate on exactly how it works with the "destination" part, and whether or not that part works differently depending on whether or not it is a noun or an adjective.

The vocabulary file is up to 297 entries. A lot of those words are related to one another, though. I am looking forward to generating a lot more useful words soon. (More in both quantity and quality.)

I made a few changes to the vocabulary file as well, adjusting the meaning of some words, and replacing 'fiosfis' with 'fiosa', still allowing 'fiosfis' as an alternate choice, along with a few other possibilities. (Fiosa, "house")

I will likely be posting the grammar as a web page soon. I just haven't decided where I will have it hosted and how I will present it. Most likely it will look just like the current document with a few changes and editing. I have more things to add to the grammar yet, but it is coming along a little at a time.

I have been working on yet another project, but it's not ready for public viewing of any sort yet. I guess I am experimenting with method at this point. This other project ('Ezedani' or 'Ezedan') is not as interesting as Teliya Nevashi, in terms of features, so far, but it has a different purpose, and I've learned a little bit about faster development through consistent use already. There's just not a lot of 'there' there yet. (That last sentence made me smile.)

Need to do updates

I have created some additional vocabulary on paper that needs to make it into the lexicon spreadsheet. I have some grammar that's evolved that needs to be described. I am promising myself to do all that on Thursday.

I have also been working a little bit on ea-luna, as well. I'm reconstructing it from what I can find and what's in the notebook. The grammar was never written down beyond sets of sample sentences showing the solutions to problems I encountered. There's a pretty set formula for sentences (that is also mirrored in clauses within sentences), so it's not really difficult to learn. It's either made simpler or made far more complicated, depending on your point of view, by all the things that can potentially be omitted if the speaker believes they are reasonably obvious from the context. Not to mention the things that are usually omitted!

Anyway, in the midst of all of this, I've been giving some thought to my methods, what has worked and what hasn't worked so well for me. My efforts may be changing a bit as I move toward producing more language-in-use rather than spending too much time producing more desciption of how it should work in theory.

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.

Six more sentences

The next 6 sentences yielded more new vocabulary. They were also a little trickier than the first 8, but I guess that's the general idea of the graded sentences.

I will have to recheck this one and the previous entry with eight sentences to fix the grammatical errors I've almost certainly made, but in the meantime, here's a stab at the next six:

9. School began again. Ludi siv rakesh ya tholfis.

Lu-di siv rakesh ya tholfis.
inceptive-past-3rd s. be-in-session(active/on) again the school.

I don't know exactly why the definite article is required here, but it is. Siv may turn out to be really useful, since it can be used in sentences like, "All the lights in the house are on."

And it just made it really obvious that I need a way to use the causative and imperative together, in order to get it around to being useful in sentences like "Turn on the TV!" Back to the drawing board on that one.

10. The child ran quickly. Gi adad nisas ya mishtu.

Gi adad nis-as ya mishtu.
Past-3rd run quick-adv the child.

There's that mishtu again. Nis is quick or fast, -as makes it an adverb.

11. Yellow daffodils nodded gaily. Egi henaf jeyas denduloran wera.

Egi henaf jeyas dendulora-n wera.
3rd pl.-Past nod happy-adv daffodil-pl yellow.

Henaf, dendulora, and wera are new words. From henaf are hen (up) and naf (down). (Too precious? Deriving those from "nod" or vice versa. Probably. So is talala for 'laugh'. But I like the sound of those, so they are staying.)

12. Little Marigold cried bitterly. Ji pluva le'osias Tajítsha.

Ji pluva le'osi-as Tajítsha.
Past-3rd-s. cry bitter-adv Marigold-dim.

I had to assume that Marigold (Tajíta) is used as a name here, since it is capitalized, so I just put the diminutive on it. Tajítasha probably would have been equally correct, and I might have gone that way if TN was a penultimate-syllable-stressed language, but since it isn't, I thought Tajítsha sounded nicer.

Le'osi is a new word. I sort of felt like the glottal stop was underused, so there it is. I decided to go with a pretty literal English>TN rendering, with "bitterly" being translated exactly. I can easily see flavors being used not only for that sort of emotion, but expanded far beyond where they might appear in English, and with the flavors assigned to different emotions than you might expect if you speak English. (I tend to associate emotions (and words) with flavors and smells anyway, so this is appropriate for Nevashi from the "culture of Me" point of view.) I rather I briefly considered "sourly" for this particular translation, but "sour" has more melancholy and less anguish in it.

13. All the people shouted. Eji magan ya jenen shen.

Eji magan ya jenen shen.
3rd pl-Past shout the people all.

"All the people" gave me fits. I considered "Shena kye ya jenen" ("All(n) consisting-of the people") and several other alternatives before settling on just using "all" as an adjective for "the people". It also means "total" or "complete", so I think it implies "all of this".

I thought about telozh for shout, but I think magan represents a higher volume than that. It (the word) sounds bigger. Telozh is your Uncle Danny talking over everyone else at Thanksgiving. Magan is your Aunt Betty telling him to "SHUT UP!" when she just can't take any more.


14. I recited twice. Ja hlal ravan.

Ja hlal ravan.
1st s.-past recite twice.

Ravan comes from ra+van (ra+two). Cf. Rakesh, again. ra+more.

Hlal is a new word. There are a lot of initial consonant clusters permissable that I haven't been using, and I love hl and hr, so there it is. This word means "to tell a story, give a speech, or recite". Derived from it is hlalim, "story, speech, recitation".

First 158 words of Language X

I found a bit of a conlang in a little notebook that was at the bottom of one of my totebags. It's mostly just a word list, and now it is HERE. There are no notes about grammar to accompany the list. WYSIWYG.

I was able to tease some of the intended phonology out of notes with that were with certain entries on the list. |c| = /tS/, |x| = /S/, |j| = /Z/, as noted in many of the entries.

The pronouns have two forms-- the first is an honorific form you might use with someone you perceive to have authority or to be of a higher social status. That much surfaced in my memory when I was putting it all into that spreadsheet. 

There are two words for "book", and I really don't know that there's a difference between them, except that one seems derived from "read" and the other from "write", so I guess it depends on whether you see books primarily as something written or something read.

Some of the words were obviously begged, borrowed, or stolen from English or Spanish. There seem to be some derivational affixes in there (mostly prefixes), but I haven't broken them down to see what, if anything, they contribute to the meaning. 

It's not much of anything, but I've come to the conclusion that more documentation is better than less. I've been toying with the idea of a collaborative language project, so I wonder if this would work as seed vocabulary for such a thing. 

I've been involved in a few collaborative conlangs that eventually fizzled (some sooner than others). I've been wondering if a collabolang (which is REALLY fun to say) might be more successful if it were built for a specific purpose-- for instance, as an in-game language for a guild in some massively multiplayer online RPG.

And with that, I now return you to your regularly scheduled Teliya Nevashi... 

Eight sentences

Teliya Nevashi has no marking for collective/mass plurals like "birds", nor does it have marking for habitual actions, so these first ones were pretty straightforward...

Sort of.

1. Birds sing. Eci selis shanan.

2. Children play. Eti voya mishtun.[1]

3. Dogs bark. Eci buf kevrin.

4. Bees hum. Eci zhun mintan. 

5. Baby laughed. Ji talala Bene.[m]; Ji talala Bena. [f.]  

6. The sun shines. Si donu ya cea. 

7. The wind blows. Si feyu ya shushu.

8. The car started. Luti muzhu ya otomo. [2]

[1] Speakers of Nevashi are apparently much more age and gender conscious than speakers of English, because there are words for boy and girl at different age ranges (infant, toddler, preschooler, school kid (5-11), teenager (12-17)) that would be in far greater circulation than mishtu, which is a gender neutral word for a minor (non-adult). And though some people might consider it sexist and awful, the male form would probably be used for mixed groups and mass plural as well. So, while this is a correct and straightforward translation, a native speaker might well say "Eti voya levten." (Levte = boy, 5-11.) 

[2] Ha! A use for the inceptive! Muzhu refers to the running or working of engines, motors and machines, so this could be translated back as "The car began to run."

Weekend Conlanging Plans

Since I won't be at the Language Creation Conference this weekend, except through the magic of Internet simulcast, I thought I might actually do some conlanging this weekend instead.  To that end, I've printed the first two lists of graded sentences from Gary Shannon's site -- this one and this one -- to translate, in order to work out some grammatical knots and expand the Nevashi lexicon. 

I am hoping to develop a more comfortable relationship with the language on my way to fluency, and that's the other part of why I will be translating all those sentences. I start every language with the intention of becoming fluent in it, but those good intentions usually fail to produce the results I'd like. 

I was able to use ea-luna to some degree once upon a time, but that was a long time ago. I've got an urge to translate those sentences into ea-luna at the same time that I am working on the Nevashi translations, but that would probably be counterproductive in several different ways. I will give ea-luna some attention in the near future, but for now, I am working mainly on TN.

Speaking of what projects I am working on (or not working on), I opened a little notebook that was in the bottom of the totebag I've been using to carry my books around and discovered the beginnings of yet another language. I am going to take a little time this evening to document the vocabulary and grammar notes from that. It's not much of anything and it doesn't even have a name, but it might yet have words I can steal, or it might later develop into something more than what it currently is. In any case,  if there's one thing I've learned from ea-luna, it is that having a single hardcopy of any given bit of conlang documentation is a bad idea. Multiple electronic copies FTW.