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: 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: 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.

An Occasional Word: Shente

Shente: people, a people, folk, members of an ethnic group

Bodúta dien yodní shente, We become a people.

While I'm battling with deciding where to go next with Pronouns I will post some words. This seemed a good one with which to start. It is the only word that I have listed under Groupings of People. So I will use it as a working name for the Eclectic Language People. They are the Shente.

The word comes from French gens. The ending -te comes from a list of weak plural endings in Gaelic. As a rule it goes on the end of any noun that ends in an non-obstruent, especially n, l, (r) and s. It is the same morpheme at the end of boduúta, so it wonders around a bit; and obviously plays around with a rough rule of vowel harmonisation. -Te if the word is made of front vowels; -ta if the word is made of back vowels. Originally bodú, I, your servant, was written as boduh. I decided that the word-final h was fricative enough to allow the weak plural ending. As the word shifted with use the weak ending has remained.

Note that descriptive words with shente also have to be in the plural, like yodní.

The sentence comes from a creation myth and is the first statement about human beings after they came out of the ground into the world of light. It is an important statement.