Conlang Card Exchange 2012e

Ní âre premye babik Yeu ve shapâmet premyeron nenon.

Ossí premyeron nenon wo' a?

Ossí ya dacha pidya údna binnya bina ve milt pena woha.

Ossí pena shapâma premye babik Yeu ve dúde latette nilimwege.

Daka kembí sha.

make.IMP you together

May you do likewise.

The final line of the Conlang Card Exchange is an admonition.  Daka is an imperative, 'make!', 'do!'  The pronoun modifies it to a jussive, 'may you do!', and sha is a useful adverb that adds emphasis, 'very', 'the same', 'just'.

I think one of the reasons for conlanging is putting things together, quite literally, like models. One of the early names for the Secret Vice on the internet was Model Languages.  What I think we are modelling, ultimately, is the universe.  Language shapes perception of the world we live in.  So go play and show what you come up with!

Fiat lingua!

Conlang Card Exchange 2012d

Ní âre premye babik Yeu ve shapâmet premyeron nenon.

Ossí premyeron nenon wo' a?

Ossí ya dacha pidya údna binnya bina ve milt pena woha.

Ossí pena shapâma premye babik Yeu ve dúde latette nilimwege

CONJ in command.INF first grandfather Y. NONPRESENT gave order in.world.DAT

And in speaking First Grandfather Yeu gave order to the world.

Sorry to take so long over this.  One last line which I hope to post tomorrow.

Conlang Card Exchange 2012c

Ní âre premye babik Yeu ve shapâmet premyeron nenon. 

Ossí premyeron nenon wo' a? 

Ossí ya dacha pidya údna binnya bina ve milt pena woha.

CONJ COM do.INF ask.INF one.NEUTER:PL thousand.ADJ:NEUTER:PL thousand.NEUTER:PL NON:PRESENT come:to.3PRES in be.INF

And with the asking of the (first) question a thousand thousand things came into being.

It seems to be an appropriate line to end this chiasma.  I return to completing this translation after the interruption of the holidays.  I would have returned to it earlier except that I pushed my way through making notes from Describing Morphosyntax by Thomas Payne.  The next challenge I have set myself is to create a coherent language out of my notes.  I hope you remain with me as I rally and compile my thoughts.

Conlang Card Exchange 2012b

Second Line:

Ní âre premye babik Yeu ve shapâmet premyeron nenon. 

Ossí premyeron nenon wo' a?

conj first.neuter word be.past interrogative

In the beginning first grandfather Yeu said the first word.

And the first word was 'eh?'

The interrogative particle a usually comes at the beginning of a sentence where it acts like the English verb 'do' in a question: A shapâmet Yeu? Does Yeu speak?  In this text I decided to play with it and use it as an utterance of surprise: oh! hey! huh!  So for the Shente they say, In the beginning was the word, and the word was D'oh!  Maybe things started out differently for them.

Conlang Exchange Card 2012a

I posted my cards for the Conlang Exchange today.  Here is the first line:

Ní âre premye babik Yeu ve shapâmet premyeron nenon.

loc beginning.dat first.masc grandfather Y. nonpresent command.past first.neuter word

In the beginning first grandfather Yeu uttered the first word.

First grandfather Yeu is the primal ancestor of the Shente.  The Shente call him babik grandfather because everything originated from him.  Because of his importance the Shente use superior status language when talking about him.  He doesn't just say the first word, he commands the first word.

 The language of the Shente has grammatical gender.  Babik is masculine and nenon word is neuter.  The word for 'first' changes before each word, being premye before babik and premyeron before nenon.

Summer Greetings

This is the greeting that I sent out on the Conlang Exchange Cards. I should record it as I found the text in my wastepaper basket without making a record of it. Especially since the language after two years has not standardised.

Hastâ uba, sole ya, nin yule
Ya tai ten íhí shúa shradiim e nas
Sha ko kem mera ya lastes hastât
Pocheno piedí ye nas dansa lechon nin gâ
Nin nuan lehú penan shaklútí ye kata
Údin kuatok a lastes brat raran!

Kam ten ítí shim pena wiô ye (yí) kembí, tai laston dâyet lúb.

Stand still, O sun, in the sky
Let there be light in our hearts
As long as summer's day lasts
May our feet dance lightly on the earth
In the dark forest at the end of time
A summer flower brings joy!

If there is winter in your life, then summer returns.

Note to self, the phrase sha ko kem literally means 'only because that'.

All three forms of the accompanitive preposition ya, ye, yí are used here. Ya for the masculine and neuter possessor in a nominative and accusative phrase; ye for the masculine and neuter possessor in an oblique phrase; and yí for the feminine possessor. It took me a while to master this so there is some variation in grammar of the cards.

Conlang Exchange

I have decided to use this language for the Conlang Exchange. Creating something proved to be easy. I bought some cards from the stationary warehouse and played around with creating a rose window design on them. This fits in with the Amenite festival of Rose Moon, this year on the solstice full moon at the 21st December. Now the challenge is creating a text to accompany the card. More difficult than I originally thought. I haven't discovered the words for the astrological bodies yet: sun, moon, and stars. This rules out talking about solstice and full moon in the Amenite religion

There are other gaps in the lexicon, like how to say renew the vows of priesthood. I shall probably find more gaps as I work through my cards' blurb.

I could go through the books that I haven't used to add words to the language because they didn't fit into the criteria with which I was researching the language initially. At this stage that feels like cheating. It would feel like I'm cherry picking words from those books just to fill a gap I have at this time. It could prove that part of the culture of this language is that it has gaps that I need to discover and fill after I've finished this stage of language creation. Maybe there should be gaps in the language. For instance I'm intrigued to discover that the language has titles for nobles, and a verb for electing, yet at this stage no word is listed in my lexicon I'm making for president or prime minister.

There is still more work to do before I feel that this language is a presentable working corpus. I want to have the cards posted in the next couple of days. So tonight I shall spend some time piecing together a festive text. Hmmmmm.....

Sentence 4.12

Kú ye bodú, kembí em wolt, kodin?

I have, do you want some?

The same possessive phrase as sentence 4.11 is repeated. Then it is followed by a question. The verb is wolt, want, wish, would like, be willing. Shamelessly Euroclone!

Then we have the object pronoun em. It comes before the verb, and also is a part of the language's Euroclone heritage. It's borrowed from French en (I have it on loan) and is used to mean of it, of them, some. This is its first appearance in Dialogue 4 and will appear a couple of more times.

I have been to the Conlang Card Exchange to update my address. This year I hope to use this language and its culture and be creative with it. I am looking forward to it.