McGuffey 1:1-6

The Journal of an Eclectic Tongue has been dormant for the first half of 2012.  Did you miss it?  I needed an exercise that would give this project some life.  McGuffey's First Reader seemed like a good exercise to challenge me.  It's available from Gary Shannon's website Fiziwig.  Here's a go at the first page.

[1] Bodú bin údnígo taknok,  I see a boy.
[2] Bodú bin údnan kalkan,  I see a girl.
[3] Bodú bin tago taknok ís kalkas,  I see the body and the girl.
[4] Ta taknok pohat bina dan kalkan,  The boy can see the girl. 

[5] Bodú poham bina dan kalkan as taknoka, I can see the girl and the boy.

[6] Bodú poham bina dan kalkan, I can see the girl.

That's a lot of information.

Bodú is the usual word for the pronoun I.

Bin is the word for see, look at.  The infinitive form of the verb is bina.

Poha is the stem for the auxiliary verb can, be able to.  If the subject of poha is bodú then the ending is -m.  If the subject of poha is a noun then the ending is -t.

Údnígo and údnan are both articles meaning a (certain one).  Údnígo is masculine animate accusative, and údnan is feminine accusative.  The Eclectic Tongue is heavily inflected and the inflections have to be learned.

Taknok means child, boy.  It is a masculine noun in the Eclectic Tongue.  Masculine nouns do not alter in the ending in the nominative and accusative forms.  After as in sentence [5] taknok takes the genitive ending -a.

Kalkan means girl, with the accusative ending -n, which is added to feminine nouns.  Feminine nouns in the Eclectic Tongue do have a separate accusative form of the noun, unlike masculine nouns.  The nominative form, kalka, is not used in this group of sentences.  After ís in sentence [3] kalkan replaces the accusative ending with the genitive ending -s.

Ta is the definite masculine nominative article.  Ta takes the ending -go before an accusative masculine noun.  Dan is the feminine accusative definite article.

Ís and as are conjunctions and both mean and-the.  After both conjunctions the noun is always in the genitive form, although it is not always a possessive.  In these sentences it is understood to accompany the previous noun, not to be the possessor of it.

That's enough for this lesson.  Bye for now.

An Occasional Word: Duona Blaneta

Duona Blaneta, New Year. New Year Celebrations.

Dachant Duonan Blanetan, To celebrate New Year.

I have been working my way through a dictionary of Bislama looking for words that expand the lexicon and the use of words in Bâha. I found this word and decided it worked perfectly. In Bislama it is Boname, an obvious borrowing from French administrators in Vanuatu, who would have called it Bonne Annee.

It works equally as well for the Shente, who call it Duona Blaneta, Good Year. In their calendar they mark the beginning of the month at the new moon. The first new moon after the winter solstice is observed as the beginning of the new year. The Shente count off five days then light fires and celebrate that at the cold of the year they are calling back the sun and the days are getting longer.

If their seasons are in tune with mine then that is what they are doing around this time. Dachú Duonan Blanetan!, Celebrate the New Year!

How to learn an eclectic language

The conlang list was talking about this link a week ago as I write. Without considering the debate on the list I wondered how the sentences would work in Bâha:

Ta yablok tí kidmit, The apple is red.
Ta tí yablok a Yônú, It is John's apple.
Bodú dô ta yablok kapena Yône, I give the apple to John.
Nas dôyen ta yablok kapena tamú, We give him the apple.
Ta dôt ten kapena Yône, He gives it to John.
Da dôt ten kapena damú, She gives it to her.

Bodú mí múhant dôyant ten kapena tamú, I must give it to him.
Bodú wol dôyant ten kapena damú, I want to give it to her.

Well, creating the sentences and comparing them proved to be an interesting exercise. The first sentence shows how to use a predicative adjective, although says nothing about attributive adjectives. The rest of the first group of sentences give examples of various pronouns with number and gender and how they work. More enquiry would fill in more gaps. There is no example of a noun as subject. It also shows that Bâha declines nouns. From the examples above a learner has all the forms of the present tense finite verb, which is lucky.

And, my god, this is a long-winded language, especially when auxiliaries are used!

I think the theory has merit. A learner could be introduced to a language. It would take longer to master it, at least to the point ordering beer!

An Occasional Word: Taknok

Da tí yodin taknok-se, She has one child.

Taknok means child. When counting children the language uses 'to be' rather than 'to have' and counts the children as a reflexive. The plural of taknok is a different word: Deti. Taknok has a derived plural, takneta. I think this is a diminative plural and is used to mean 'lads'. Initially I thought that this was a gender-inclusive word. Now I'm not so sure. Takneta might be a group noun for the Boys, the Lads, as a social group. I think the female equivalent might be Kalketa, the Girls, the Lassies.

The stem is also used in an abstract noun takniost, childhood, childishness

An Occasional Word: Bahon

In the creation of the lexicon I have discovered that the Shente have few words for clothing. Bahon is one of the few that I have discovered. It is based on baju, the Bahasa word for blouse. Looking at the use of this word in Malaysia from Wikipedia I conclude that a bahon is a light cloth top worn by women over other clothing. It is normally about waist length and fastened by clasps at the front.

I doubt that the Shente are an immodest people. I will have to consider other means to find what are their clothing and costume words.

An Occasional Word: Liudí

Liudí, people, persons, human beings

Liudí tent maluk, Human beings are hurting.

This is true in Christchurch, New Zealand, tonight. While this loss doesn't affect my immediate whanau that I know of, I am moved by the loss to so many in my country, the restraint that so many have shown in the face of adversity, and the generosity of so many in our islands and across the ocean.

In Maori cosmogony Ruaumoko is the unborn child of Papatuanuku, Broad Mother Earth. When he turns in his mother's womb he causes earthquakes and eruptions. Well that's a big baby's kick that he provided this week and the city of Christchurch came tumbling down.

Liudí is used as the plural of dunianin which means human beings regardless of gender.

An Occasional Word: Dunianin

Dunianin: man, person, human being

Bodú mí yodin dunianin, shim yodin nome, I am a human being, not a number.

The first of the people words: human being, without reference to gender. Ignore that reference to man coming first. Man as a male human will come later. The Shente could argue that this is humanity when they first came out of the earth. The first doctrine says: The human creature is a noble creature.

This may also be human as contrasted to other talking races. The lexicon makes no mention of them.

A is for yablok

Yay! I have finished adding the substantives file to my lexicon. What a long and exhausting process it has been. I still have two more files to add to the lexicon: Pronouns and Chuvmey. They are shorter files so hopefully I can get through them more quickly. Then hopefully after that I will be in a position where I can play with this language.

Perhaps I will introduce more words from this language, and return to the dialogue exercises. After what I have learnt by compiling the lexicon the dialogues will need to be tidied up.

One of the last words to go in was yablok. It comes from Russian. You may have guessed it means Apple. The people know about yablokí, apples, surushikí, pears, and dihí, bananas. I wonder where they get the bananas from. I suspect that the people must live within a tropical belt. If they do, then I think one of their season words is going to have to shift to mean The Time of Year When The Rains Come.

An occasional word

Kamakawianin tent shúlte piedí

The Kamakawi speaker has swollen feet

This post was inspired by David's Kamakawi post on the word o'e. I was pleased to find that this language has a word for the verb 'swell', shúlant. After leaving a comment there I should record it here too. It appears to be a normal weak verb for this language.

Also I realised that this language does have a verb for 'have', tennam. Like Spanish the old verb a'nt has become an auxiliary and the verb tennam, 'hold, grasp', has shifted to fill the gap. The infinitive takes a different ending, which is a nasal ending. Otherwise it is declined like normal verbs in this language.

Brithenig Lexicon

A new project has distracted me today. I started copying Brithenig's lexicon, a collection of ten years onto FrathWiki. I have been thinking about this project for a while. My website is down and I had copied the Brithenig material from my computer to FrathWiki. While the old website is mirrored by Jan van Steenbergen the material on FrathWiki is more current to my thinking of the language design of Brithenig. There are some editorial changes to the information of the pages. They are minor differences.

Also as FrathWiki supports IPA I am adding this feature to the lexicon. I won't finished it in the space left in summer break. It focuses my mind as I enjoy listening to the madness that is Matinee Idle.

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.....

Lexicon

I have completed my notes for a lexicon from my file on verbs. So I will move on and fill in the lists from the substantives file. My favorite part of this lexicon at the moment is to discover that I have eight words that describe vehicles. They know about flying machines, which they call aweríon; and they have wheeled vehicles, makkina and know about buses and trucks: otobus and grushowik. I don't know what I am going to do with otobus. It is an international word and should be retained. They know about trains, trenon and have a stem for bikes kikl. They appear to have an advanced material culture with technology and machines.

Not dead but re-lexing

Just popped in to say this blog hasn't died. I got distracted by creating a complete lexicon for this language. Everything is being sorted out and placed into a list of words based on Rick Harrison's lexicon. I have an old copy of it on my computer under the heading UWL for Universal Word Lexicon. I have had to add a section for words that come outside the lists in the collection.

In the time that I have been silent I have not yet managed to complete working through my list of verbs. Currently I have reached a section from Bengali about verbs which mark the agent with the instrumental preposition in the past tense, and those which don't. It adds a curious restriction on the language as many of them are common verbs.

Afterwards I shall move on to including my notes on Substantives, Pronouns and Chuvmey (mostly particles). You may hear from me soon.

Sentences 4.5-6

It's time to get back to this after having moved flats and then waiting an unbearable amount of time for my internet connection to catch up with me! These things happen.

Let me look at the next sentence:

A tí da chet? Da tí yodna pokan chân

Q. What is that? A. That is a teapot.

The word for that is feminine da, so we already know the gender of the object (useful, that!) The word for pot is poka. In the sentence above it is in the accusative case. Followed by the word chân, tea, also in the accusative case it becomes teapot, pot of tea. The feminine indefinite article yodna does not have the accusative ending.

The enforced lack of access to the internet has not been without benefits. I found a copy of TY Turkish and took some notes from that. What an interesting language that one is: on the edge of Europe yet different from anything else around it.

Also I have started making a list of words and meanings found in this language. It has begun in the last week. I think it will effect how I see words joining together and creating new ones in this language.