Next on the list

Ok, the next thing I've got to do in my list of prepositions is the associative preposition ya. It is a busy preposition because it can translate to mean 'with' and 'of', and also the conjunction 'and'. Sometimes how a word is used in this language seems to get a bit blurred.

Thou revisited

I have since worked out that the pronoun ako becomes -ko when it is used as an enclitic. As enclitic pronouns have been a feature of both generations of this language design I think ako has effectively ousted te as the second person pronoun/

From

I have returned to doing a list of prepositions in my eclectic language. Now I have reached ishi. The shape of the word is taken from Russian iz, but it also acts like dari in Malay. It prefixes to place words to create new prepositions meaning 'from X'. As an independent preposition it has two forms: ishi and ishipena. The second form will blend Russian iz-za and Malay daripada. I have yet to sit down and see how this will work out. That is my task before next time I write.

After I have finished prepositions I have to work out how case endings work in this language. My suspicion is that the case system is partly collapsed, especially since plural marking has become re-enforced with an enclitic. I wait to see what will arise from that.

At the other end of the formality spectrum is kembi, you sir, ma'am, your honour, etc. The accompanying first person pronoun is bonduh, your servant. The plural forms are kembiga and bonduhta.

I should note in the first version of this language tete was not reduplication, it was an infix of et. The same held for the first person me and meme. It looks like in the current version of the language these have been returned to the verb.

you and thou

The informal pronoun ako, you, comes from the Old High Eclectic verb stem adako, to be in the presence. In the first version of this language I had the second person pronouns te and tete (singular and plural). I was thinking that in this version these pronouns are replaced with tu and vos from an old Indo-European language I started to design between version one and Brithenig. My notes say allow for a familiar thou-pronoun, and I suspect that ako is going to push out tu. I may keep it in a reduced form as a suffix -t

Pronouns in a langauge of courtesy

Note to self: omae, which appears in my notes on Japanese courtesy language means '(honorific) ([thing/person] in front of me)' according to an email on the Conlang list that I read today. This means I can reconstruct it in OT2.0.

At the beginning he said...

Late in the piece I decided to take out a blogger account to record the development of the eclectic imaginary language that I have been designing these last few years.

My rules are:

Go through the contents of all my Teach Yourself Lx books; English University Press and Hodder & Staughton and pick out all the features that are listed as irregular or words of that language.

Put them together as the grammar of a new language and attempt to harmonise them into a whole.

See what results.

Already I have made lists. I have started on verbs. Currently I'm going through a list of prepositions. My next goal is to give myself a write-up of case endings for nouns to go with the prepositions.

Let's see where I go from here.