Friday, 28 January 2011

An occasional word

Kamakawianin tent shúlte piedí

The Kamakawi speaker has swollen feet

This post was inspired by David's Kamakawi post on the word o'e. I was pleased to find that this language has a word for the verb 'swell', shúlant. After leaving a comment there I should record it here too. It appears to be a normal weak verb for this language.

Also I realised that this language does have a verb for 'have', tennam. Like Spanish the old verb a'nt has become an auxiliary and the verb tennam, 'hold, grasp', has shifted to fill the gap. The infinitive takes a different ending, which is a nasal ending. Otherwise it is declined like normal verbs in this language.

Wednesday, 19 January 2011

Eating out

I was reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel again. I got as far as his chapter on the beginnings of agriculture. It interested me that I had words for one of the first baskets of agriculture: padí, which is rice; and wimbí, which is millet. I have no idea how millet is used in food production so that is something that I will have to investigate.

I also had words for using for one of the secondary food cultures: gandon, which is wheat; and mina, which is oatmeal.

This would suggest that crop farming was introduced to the eclectic language speakers from a Chinese style agriculture which was later supplimented by developing European crops. What a curious fusion.

I haven't listed enough animal words to see if their animal culture is as equally diverse.

Interestingly enough the crop words listed above are taken from Indonesian, Swahili and Gaelic.

Monday, 3 January 2011

Brithenig Lexicon

A new project has distracted me today. I started copying Brithenig's lexicon, a collection of ten years onto FrathWiki. I have been thinking about this project for a while. My website is down and I had copied the Brithenig material from my computer to FrathWiki. While the old website is mirrored by Jan van Steenbergen the material on FrathWiki is more current to my thinking of the language design of Brithenig. There are some editorial changes to the information of the pages. They are minor differences.

Also as FrathWiki supports IPA I am adding this feature to the lexicon. I won't finished it in the space left in summer break. It focuses my mind as I enjoy listening to the madness that is Matinee Idle.