Yay! This blog is no longer disappearing into the void of its own sounding board. It has joined the the Conlang Aggregator Blog. Yes! *Pumps fist*
As most people read blogs from when they join them I should insert an introduction here.
I'm Andrew Smith. I did Brithenig. This is not a Brithenig blog, that language so has its own life now. This is a blog for creating an Eclectic Language Project. I pulled every Teach Yourself Grammar off the shelf and listed every irregularities in the grammar and non-English word listed in the contents of each. I broadly catagorized them as Verbs, Substantives, Prepositions, Pronouns and Chuvmey (a useful Klingon word that means leaftovers). A quick count and I have collected 56 grammars on my shelf. At the moment I am reading through Teach Yourself Chinese (1947: English Universities Press) and translating them into this new language. There is no extent grammar except of what I putting together and revising as I go. Bear with me.
The language is quite eclectic. It has a lot of rules which must be ferreted out and applied. It has three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, marks plurals, and has a adjective system that combines gender, case and weak/strong adjectives. The verbs are more regular, although some common verbs appear to use endings from an older form of the language. What a challenge!
In English I call the language ghostian, the language of the pale people. They haven't told me their name for it yet. In one dialogue it has been called riaknia nena, national language, a borrowing from Chinese. The completed dialogues are being posted to FrathWiki.
I should finish with today's sentence:
A sapiet kiriban kodin?
Teacher asks Can you write? This introduces sapiet, the word for can or know how. The stem sapie- comes from latin. A introduces a question; kiriban is the word for writing; and kodin is used as a question tag, 'don't you?' The normal word for you, kembí has been dropped here presumably for length and is taken for granted.
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So, I don't quite understand. When you say you took every word from you TY books, does this mean you have a list of, say, 56 different words for "mother", "father", "son", "daughter", etc.? And what do you classify as an "irregularity"? Can you give us an example?
ReplyDeleteAh! I've picked a book off the shelf. It's TY Russian (1963). When I looked down the contents I can see I picked out Lesson 16 Irregular Noun Declensions; Lessons 26-27 Declension of etot, etc., and chey, etc.; and Lesson 33 Irregular Verb Conjugations. I haven't made lists of words, instead I search through the annotations of the texts, which I've typed onto my computer and see if I can find examples of words I'm looking for. If I have multiple choices then I decide which characteristics fit best together, for example the stem from X with the grammatical rules of Y. Sometimes there is an information overload, other times there are gaps which I must use imagination to leap. Hope that helps.
ReplyDeleteSo it's truly eclectic. Wow. That sounds like a lot of fun! I'll follow your progress with interest.
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