Sentence 4.17

Da trinia tugika tí ya kembi, kodin

The writing brush is yours, isn't it?

Well that troubled me for a moment. Why had I introduced a new adjective into the sentence, trinia? The masculine would be triní. I looked at the original text and it fell into place. The stem of the word means 'hair'. So trinia tugika means 'hair-like writing-tool', a writing brush. So this language makes its own concepts.

At least I used the correct pronoun for 'yours' unlike in sentence 4.14. I must go back and correct it in the dialogues.

I went to a class on how to do Chinese calligraphy a couple of weekends ago. It was cool. The brush is held between the first two fingers and the thumb of the right hand. The second two fingers are held against the same side of the brush as the thumb. It is always held in the right hand, no allowances for southpaws as is now the practice in writing the latin alphabet. There are eight basic strokes to be learned. In writing the stroke resting the brush against the page, and lifting it at the end of the stroke is part of good calligraphy. It was a fascinating class to do and a good introduction to how another culture records information.