inventrix

DAY 26: More translation!

tseata - v. to be named

Boy. Okay. Male person, which I think is the same as "he" in this case, plus young.
lisits - adj. young

SO.

tseatatu lisitsthoha yustisklaresskeraabsha ota shaus-hypishatu ymsha
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Tomorrow, I'm going to write one or more of these sentences out in the script.

DAY 24: Numbers

Thanks to doing a thing on Lyn's blog in a comment, I have something to start with!

One, two, and three are pa, shi, and suat. Making them instance-counters - i.e. once, twice, thrice - was adding 'th' to the end, for path, shith, and suath. (This comes from the time-pronoun ending being hyth.)

Now, four through eight.
lats, fy, sof, sash, kys

For the time-counters:
lath, fyhyth, sofyth, sashyth, kyshyth
(that's s+h not sh)

Now there's ordinal... buhhh. Prefix or suffix? Probably suffix, it's... closest conceptually to 'case'. Maybe -ta
pat, shita, suata, lasta, fyta, softa, sashta, kysta
...Sure, that works. XD

Now, how to do the numbers after eight... (It's a base eight system, you see.)

Tentatively, I'm going to say it is of the structure "twice ten five" for twenty five, which would be shithkysfy.

I'll do the other orders of magnitude later; one through eighty three is enough for now.

DAY 21: More vocab!

Note: I actually looked at my verb affixes and changed my equative verb to 'ym'

Today we are going to do the last piece of vocab in my sentence, as well as decide what to do with the subject of an object clause. Vocab first, though.

conductor, an object or material which allows a certain thing to flow freely through it. The English etymology comes from 'leader/guide', which is not the direction I want to go with it. Diving into etymology a bit gives the source of 'pipe' as the same as "peep", originally meaning a chirping noise and then going through the word for a wind instrument. And of course 'conduit' is the same root as conduct. The wind-instrument origin makes sense, but I'm considering alternate sources. Most everything related in English sources back either to pipe or to duct, both of which source from Latin, either the wind instrument or to-lead... aha! Channel/canal. So what we want for 'conductor' is really like 'channel' - either used as a noun, meaning something which allows a thing to flow through it, or as a verb, meaning the act of flowing through something. I want it to be etymologically related to the word for 'stream' meaning a natural flowing body of water, similar to how channel and canal are related.

hesfos - v. to flow through something, n. something which allows a flow through itself
etsfosh - n. a stream, creek, or river.

The verb 'to direct the flow of something', which is what we actually use 'channel' as a verb to mean, is etymologically unrelated and in fact is more like 'duct', so would etymologically be more related to 'conduct' - but is not the word we want in this sentence.

sushtyf - v. to direct the flow of something
shostif - v. to guide/direct, b. a guide/leader

(Ah, I also need a verb 'to be' which is more like 'to exist in a state'... *looks at generator* tof, let's say tof.)

And last but not least, what to do about case... Is it too much to put two cases together? ....oh!! No that's perfect, I'll fuse them like I did with outosha. nom+acc iiiis... ha+sha dammit that-- HASH okay done.

FINAL TRANSLATION!!!

khesetofao thyfha osha keuthash bouiryymao elekeutitsashyitsasha outosha iryymao hesfosfashyasha

*keuthash is t+h not th

Although technically they don't have spaces. ;D I'll write it up in the proper script later today.

DAY 18: Translation

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light.

This is a quote from a Sherlock Holmes story which I do not recognize but I love it so I'm using it.

Grammatical breakdown:

[it](nom) (dub)[is](pres) [that] [you](??) (neg)(sub?)[is](pres) [yourself](mod)[luminous](acc)
[but]-[that] [you](??) (sub?)[is](pres) [conductor](gen)[light](acc)

(English is the worst, FYI.)

Reorganizing to the right order and replacing vocab/attaches I already have:

khese[is]ao thyfha osha keut(??) (neg)iry[is]ao [yourself]itsa[luminous]sha outosha iry[is]ao [conductor]fa[light]sha

Just for kicks, replacing the unknown vocab with Xs to make it look more like words:

khesexxao thyfha osha keutxx xxiryxxao xxxxxitsaxxxxxsha outosha iryxxao xxxxxfaxxxxsha

Nyargh. Since I missed yesterday, today I'm ALSO going to make a list of all the vocab still required and fill in the missing grammatical things.

Vocab:
yourself
luminous
"is" (being used as an equative verb assigning a descriptor to a noun)
conductor (thing which allows the flow of something through itself)
light (the shining kind)

In addition, I need a "negative" prefix, probably derived from/related to the word for "no". I also need to decide what case the object-phrase (is that called a predicate phrase?) "subject" gets.

So "no" is, I think, "abu", and I'm gonna make the negative prefix "bou".

Now then, "yourself". Your self, the self which belongs to you. Now, how would they do this... It functions as a recursive reference to the pronoun, so it definitely has the pronoun in it, which in this case is 'keut'. It gets a modifier attached to it to give it the recursive meaning, which in English is "self" and means, basically, an individual entity...

Maybe evolved from the same root as the -ary suffix? So like... ele. I like that.

yourself: elekeut
himself: eletho
herself: eletso
itself: elethyf

And I just realized I managed to completely overlook the pronoun "I". Uuugh.

I: hy
myself: elehy

DAY 15: Pronouns again and I forgot yesterday

Right, so columns first. These parts go first in order in the word, too.

query: yshi
this: pfo
that: ro
that (nearby): rota
every: tsa
any: opfsi

I eliminated "some" and "no" as "no" will be a general negation prefix and "some" is part of the plurality suffix. I'm still not 100% sure about the "query" pronouns; that might be done via mood instead.

person: sypf
thing: bish
place: tath
time: hyth
method: pfoh

"adjective" was basically the determiner thing that Clare asked about before so I axed it. "amount" is also axed because they can all be replaced by other pronouns on the table.

I don't know what to do with reason, yet.

(I'm literally just randomly generating lists of syllables and picking ones I like for these, haha.)

DAY ELEVEN: Test out my grammar so far (sans actual vocab)

For a grammatical test run, I asked twitter for a random sentence, which lynthornealder did me the courtesy of providing.

Makenzie wrapped the shawl around her shoulders and thanked the old woman.

The first thing I realize is I haven't defined the sentence order! I have VSO/VOS in my notes, so I'll start with that since this is, after all, a test.

This sentence has one interesting feature which I haven't addressed yet: combined clauses. There are two sentences here, really, that are combined into one sentence as they share a subject. This works easily for an SVO or SOV structure, but for verb-first, it gets a little more complicated. Tentatively, let's replace the second subject with a pronoun; probably a unique pronoun that means 'the person referenced before', which I will call [pRef] until I do pronouns.

So now we look at the first clause: Makenzie wrapped the shawl around her shoulders

Makenzie is the subject and is nominative. 'wrapped' is the verb and is probably recent-past, since I feel like that's what would be used as narrative-past. 'the shawl' is what is being acted on and is accusative. Which brings us to 'around her shoulders' - this one is gonna be fun!

The concept of 'around' is indicated by the locative case with a "direction". So you'd think those go onto 'shoulders' - but no! The genitive is on the thing being possessed, not the possessor, so 'shoulders' gets stuck with the genitive case and the pronoun functioning as 'she' gets the direction and locative! Also, shoulders is plural.

Thus, referencing my lists of affixes, the first part looks something like this (with missing vocab represented in brackets and English):

[wrap]ittu [Makenzie]ha [shawl]sha [shoulder]bifa[she]lyfe

So far, so good! Next, we do the same for the second part: and thanked the old woman

The verb is 'thank', also near-past tense. The subject is implied and replaced with [pRef]. 'woman' is the object - accusative - and being modified by the adjective 'old'.

[thank]ittu [old][woman]sha [pRef]ha

Before I put them together, I'm going to come up with the back-reference pronoun and also the conjunction. *thinks* I think the pronoun can be used with any case, indicating it is the same thing that was previously used for that case. So e.g. if you wash and dry the dishes, you wash the dishes and [you] dry them. How about ky? Yeah. And conjunction is gonna be ota.

So, final, largely vocab-less grammar for this sentence!

[wrap]ittu [Makenzie]ha [shawl]sha [shoulder]bifa[she]lyfe ota [thank]ittu [old][woman]sha kyha

One notable point: the backreference pronoun moves to the end of the clause as it is not new information and thus less significant.

edit: Just for fun, transliterating Makenzie into Apfyma and then romanizing it back gets you Makem'sy

DAY SEVEN - Pluralize ALL the things!

First off, scratch my previous plural endings, they no longer exist. Instead, I'm going to do a couple of different plural infixes! This is entirely due to Becka and Lyn reminding me that you can do the thing.

So, there's the form of plurality which I was thinking of, indicating quantity. Lyn did an interesting thing with hers and combined it with...group-belongingness? Part of a group, the entirety of a group. Which is an interesting concept, bringing up multiples versus collectives. I think I will have 'collective' a.k.a. 'group of' be a prefix, then have two... no, three different plural infixes.

The plurals go between the noun and the case (and before the direction infix), so [word][number]{direction}[case]. The three different magnitudes of plurality will loosely align with "a couple", "some", and "a lot". The first one just means two, maybe two-or-three, can sometimes be used as meaning a generally small number; the second is used mostly as a general plural; the last is used for very large quantities.

Now I have to make them up haha...hah...

Plurals
a couple: -bi-
some: -oro-
many: -pey-

collective: lyri-

DAY FIVE - Noun modification

Right, so we have suffixes for noun cases as of yesterday, which led to my train of thought going to adjectives and nouns-acting-as-adjectives.

When you have a word modifying a noun, it gets attached to the beginning. e.g. [book][store][case], a store of the variety that sells books. This got me thinking of my possessive methods; the possessive form of a word usually attaches to a word syntactically like an adjective. "Suzie's book", for example, has the book as the word, and the modifier as "Suzie's". THEREFORE, I have decided that the possessive suffix gets added to the word being attached at the beginning as a modifier. e.g. [book][gen-case][Suzie][case]

In addition, there's a suffix that you can attach to a noun to mark it as an adjective before attaching it to the noun you want to modify it with. This happens a lot for, say, colors.

I think... adjectives will all end in that suffix "normally", as well. Now the question is, do I want it to start with a consonant or a vowel...? Time to look at my alphabet again~

Okay, a decision has been made. The suffix for adjective construction is going to be -vcv, with the last v being dropped if the noun it modifies starts with e i or y. The actual suffix... is going to be -itsa. Actual adjectives sometimes end in a different vowel, so they could end in e.g. -itse

Additionally, for the 'locative' case, there needs to be an indication of... directionality, so to speak. I decided last night that this gets inserted between the noun and the case suffix... so I guess now I need to come up with what they are, eh?

Directionality infixes
near/around: -ly-
towards: -ap-
away from: -kho-
above: -yre-
below: -ush-

That's enough for today, I think.

DAY THREE - How do sounds change if grammar or etymology creates Forbidden Consonant Combinations?

First off, I have no linguistic basis for this method of constructing rules and to that I say TORPEDOES BE DAMNED, FULL SPEED AHEAD.

So, first we'll do fricative/affricate combinations, to which I have made an amendment. Fricatives do not follow fricatives or affricates. This has the value of consistency; fricative sound into fricative sound. So.

Fricative to fricative, the first one is dropped. i.e. s+sh goes to sh, h+f goes to f, etc. Affricate into fricative... After staring at my consonants for five minutes and thinking, I've decided the fricative is dropped.

All right. Now I have that s, ts, r, and l cannot be followed by k, kh, sh, or h. s and ts plus sh or h are already handled under the fricative rules. Again, I have sat and stared at my consonant chart for several minutes while thinking. The result of this is... ah...

Well.

I am redoing my consonant sound rules! HURRAY! Ignore everything you just read!

- silent vowel after a stop when the stop is followed by another consonant
- fricatives can follow ANY consonant
- r, l and m cannot precede a consonant - perhaps they cannot end a syllable at all
- affricates that follow a consonant tend to turn into their corresponding fricative. pf->f etc.

Also, I'm going to reverse the silent consonant to preceding a front vowel when the prior sound is a vowel; I like the sound flow generally going back-to-front rather than front-to-back.

*brushes hands off* I think that does it for now. Tomorrow, we will start ~grammar~.

So the challenge of Languary is to do one thing on your conlang each day in January with the goal of translating an entire sentence by the end of the month. It's geared mainly towards new conlang projects but what the heck! I missed Lexember and my grammar needs resuscitation, so here we go.

DAY ONE: Reorganize and collect my notes to assess what I actually have.

- I've got my alphabet (and a base writing system now, too, huzzah). Plotted it out on consonant and vowel charts, too, as well as pronunciation guidelines for the vowels.
- There's a note here about doubled consonants sounding the same as single and I'm not sure what I was thinking when I put it there... I guess that you could have doubled consonants? Probably as artifacts...?
- No diphthongs, no vowel combos, they're pronounced distinctly.
- I have a few positive/negative/neutral sound associations. Not sure why I went with that alignment; English has emotion and size associations, mostly, I think. I'll want to expand or elaborate on this before I start making more vocab.

- There are syllable and phoneme structure rules here but I have no memory of what I was thinking when I made them, so I need to reasses and possibly redo them. That'll be tomorrow's task.

- Word and sentence rules based on an agglutinating system. They're rigidly overcomplicated and a mess; I'm going to start from scratch here. That'll take at least a week.

- I have a small vocabulary based on the current grammatical system which I'll likely need to tweak dramatically once I finish redoing the grammar. That's for last.