The Dailies. February 2, 2020
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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6 thoughts on “The Dailies. February 2, 2020”
So long time, no see. Been… very not feeling well and am behind on everybody’s beautiful languages and commenting anything about my own.
I did do this in the last week (Tues. actually) on Akachenti:
iasu • (it’s) mine; (thing that is) mine. iesu, pl.
Likewise, there’s iashu, ieshu for second person and ianu, ienu for third person.
Interestingly, this is very regular and also illuminates the thing that took me forever to dig up in this language, which is the consonants associated with persons, rather than the vowels. How this got regular is equally interesting because it became regularized from:
With the loss of the medial -h-, the vowel system collapsed down to permissible diphthongs and regularized.
These are very cool current forms but also awesome historical developments!
Can these current forms be used on their own to form a full sentence? Like would English, “It’s mine!” be translated as “Iasu!”?
Yes! In fact, that’s how it’s mostly used I think. That little i- up at the front is all that’s left of the original “ih”, meaning “it”.
Sasharák is the language that’s the closest related to Beldrēni. It’s spoken by the ethnolinguistic group the Sharák.
Unlike Beldrēni, it shows oblique case directly on the noun through a suffix instead of using a particle, and it conjugates the copula directly, negations included. And while the stress is usually on the penultimate syllable like in Beldrēni, it can move around more, including often going on the final syllable. The words Sasharák and Sharák themselves are stressed on the final syllable.
Like Beldrēni, it often uses infixes on nouns, is an SOV language that in practice often turns OSV through fronting, and it uses a topical particle. It also grammaticalizes levels of formality, though into two different registers/styles rather than three.
I haven’t found out much more about Sasharák yet.
Except! I decided recently that I wanted Sasharák to have a verbal suffix that expresses “because (of), since”. I’d put it in Beldrēni if the word lanti, ‘reason’, which also can mean ‘because’, wasn’t so engrained by now. (The word for ‘why’ in questions is glanti in Beldrēni.)
So the verbal suffix –eilu expresses ‘because’ in Sasharák.
(Now that I’d decided that, I could nick the word to make the cognate ailu in Beldrēni, where it means ‘since’ in the sense “we’ve been friends since we met”.)
I wanted to show this in action and added a couple new Sasharak words in the process, so now I have like… 10? 11? words instead of like 5.
apanía ‘teacher’ [not new]
taranía ‘bandit’ [not new]
oya topic marker
väät ‘become’; used together with the postposition hii, which usually means ‘to’
dugosa ‘unhappy’ (from dusa, ‘happy’, with the negative nominal infix -go-)
mozeano ‘healthy, lively’
móze ‘health’
óvele ‘child’
Apanía dugosa hii vääna, óveleng rennakeilu. [formal]
The teacher became unhappy, because he/she didn’t see the child.
Apanía dugosa hii vääna, taraníang renneilu. [formal]
The teacher became unhappy, because he/she saw the bandit.
Apanía dusa pa, óvelen renekeilu/ taranían reneilu. [non-formal]
The teacher isn’t happy, because he/she doesn’t see the child/sees the bandit.
Apanía dusa hii vääne, óvele mozeano baneilu. [non-formal]
The teacher became happy, because the child was healthy.
Óvele oya, taraníang renneka. [formal]
As for the child, it didn’t see the bandit.
This is lovely! I love the borrowing too and all the details of how it plays out.
Thank you!
It would be much easier to come up with words for Sasharak if I could settle on a consistent pattern of sound differences from Beldreni, but I’ve always been bad at that kind of thing…