Showing posts with label substantives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label substantives. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 June 2012

McGuffey 1:1-6

The Journal of an Eclectic Tongue has been dormant for the first half of 2012.  Did you miss it?  I needed an exercise that would give this project some life.  McGuffey's First Reader seemed like a good exercise to challenge me.  It's available from Gary Shannon's website Fiziwig.  Here's a go at the first page.

[1] Bodú bin údnígo taknok,  I see a boy.
[2] Bodú bin údnan kalkan,  I see a girl.
[3] Bodú bin tago taknok ís kalkas,  I see the body and the girl.
[4] Ta taknok pohat bina dan kalkan,  The boy can see the girl. 
[5] Bodú poham bina dan kalkan as taknoka, I can see the girl and the boy.
[6] Bodú poham bina dan kalkan, I can see the girl.

That's a lot of information.

Bodú is the usual word for the pronoun I.

Bin is the word for see, look at.  The infinitive form of the verb is bina.

Poha is the stem for the auxiliary verb can, be able to.  If the subject of poha is bodú then the ending is -m.  If the subject of poha is a noun then the ending is -t.

Údnígo and údnan are both articles meaning a (certain one).  Údnígo is masculine animate accusative, and údnan is feminine accusative.  The Eclectic Tongue is heavily inflected and the inflections have to be learned.

Taknok means child, boy.  It is a masculine noun in the Eclectic Tongue.  Masculine nouns do not alter in the ending in the nominative and accusative forms.  After as in sentence [5] taknok takes the genitive ending -a.

Kalkan means girl, with the accusative ending -n, which is added to feminine nouns.  Feminine nouns in the Eclectic Tongue do have a separate accusative form of the noun, unlike masculine nouns.  The nominative form, kalka, is not used in this group of sentences.  After ís in sentence [3] kalkan replaces the accusative ending with the genitive ending -s.

Ta is the definite masculine nominative article.  Ta takes the ending -go before an accusative masculine noun.  Dan is the feminine accusative definite article.

Ís and as are conjunctions and both mean and-the.  After both conjunctions the noun is always in the genitive form, although it is not always a possessive.  In these sentences it is understood to accompany the previous noun, not to be the possessor of it.

That's enough for this lesson.  Bye for now.

Saturday, 12 February 2011

A is for yablok

Yay! I have finished adding the substantives file to my lexicon. What a long and exhausting process it has been. I still have two more files to add to the lexicon: Pronouns and Chuvmey. They are shorter files so hopefully I can get through them more quickly. Then hopefully after that I will be in a position where I can play with this language.

Perhaps I will introduce more words from this language, and return to the dialogue exercises. After what I have learnt by compiling the lexicon the dialogues will need to be tidied up.

One of the last words to go in was yablok. It comes from Russian. You may have guessed it means Apple. The people know about yablokí, apples, surushikí, pears, and dihí, bananas. I wonder where they get the bananas from. I suspect that the people must live within a tropical belt. If they do, then I think one of their season words is going to have to shift to mean The Time of Year When The Rains Come.