Prepositions, again

I'm back at this for the holidays. I think prepositions ending with a dental stop are going to change their forms.

kot will become ko, from
nad will become na, above, over
niúrut will become niúru, in the middle
kaúrut will become kaúru, to the middle
ishiúrut will become ishiúru, from the middle

These forms will be used before consonants. Before vowels they will end in a d.

Feminine declension

The word ahbana, daughter, is regular, in as far as ghostian can be regular. Most feminine nouns follow after it.

ahbana, nominative

ahbanan, accusative

ahbanaga, nominative/accusative plural

ahbanas, ahbana, genitive singular, and plural

ahbana, ahbanan, dative singular, and plural

The feminine noun, including the -tas agent noun, does not have a separative form for the instrumental case, so prepositions that govern the instrumental case are always followed by wa. I haven't decided what form the noun takes, probably either genitive or dative.

nâshritas

Nâshritas looks like the final form for the word actor. In ghostian culture an actor always wears a mask. The ending -tas is used for agent nouns and overlaps with the feminine declension. The forms of the noun are:

nâshritas nominative singular
nâshritan accusative singular
nâshritú genitive singular
nâshrita dative/instrumental singular


The plural form has levelled out as nâshritaren.

Declension

Dún means person. The plural is liudí. It means persons or people (a group of persons). This form is both the nominative and accusative. It looks like masculine nouns do not distinguish between these two cases. Feminine nouns appear to, that is an entry for another day.

The accusative noun governs the following prepositions: keresh, kasha, ishísha, pena, kakon, ishakon, kablekag, ishíblekag, kabalek, ishíbalek, kapena, ishí ishípena, kanì, ishínâ.

The genitive case is dúnies and liudí. A possessed noun is ya dúnies and ya liudí. The genitive case governs the following prepositions poslí, kú, kot, do, korom, ishísha, bo, and besh.

The dative case is dúnie and liudien. It governs the following prepositions: e, po and pena.

The instrumental case is dúniom and liudimí. It governs the prepositions: nisha, nakon, nibon and wa.

Words about culture

From Greek nákritís, actor, one who wears a mask.

From Swahili alí, cooked rice

From Arabic banú, sons of. . . , a clan name.

Putting all these together and the culture of the ghostian speakers begins to emerge.

Ya

I forgot that the preposition ya is also a construct state substantive. It is declined for number, gender and case.

Preposition List

Writing up the preposition list for ghostian took me a long time, probably off and on over nine months. I'm done now. So I should post up the list.

Preposition prefixes:

ni- at, on, in
ka- to, for
ishi from (part of this set, written separately from following word)

Longer forms:
pena
kapena
ishipena
These forms are used when the following word is considered a place word.

place word prepositions:
-atara between, among
-úrut middle
-akon before, front, ahead
-nâ above
-balek reverse
-bon under
-blekag back, rear, behind
-sha around, behind

other prepositions:
aslen as, like
do before
nad above, over
keresh across, through
kot from (opposite of kú)
korom except, apart
kú at, near
piro instead
po along, around, on/in (time)
posli after
besh without
b' during
sh' from, out (opposite of ninâ)

Particles that act as prepositions:
e topic
wa instrumental
ya associative

Next project will be working out the cases for the substantives.

Yes

An American said that she says yeáh with a long a while she hears New Zealanders saying with a long yéah with a long e sound. I knew that the affirmative particle in ghostian is based on Welsh ie, so this gives me the idea to write it as íe to show that the first vowel is long.

Nothing new to report on making an eclectic language. Instead I'm going further into deep stealth mode as I will be without an internet connection for a while.

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.