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Azarennya

This is the scratchpad. Put whatever odd thoughts come to you here. syllables.php syllables.php
EnglishWordlist • TokiRennya • SoundChangeSets • TiddlyWikified notes • WordLists • Notes

Words of measurement. It could be that a number was considered a proper number if it had three digits. Thus a measurement consisted of a unit word, followed by three number syllables.

There are two possibilities: Either these syllables are also used for numbers from one to ten, in which case the unit word provides the context (e.g., "counting one-two-three" and "meters one-two-three" would be understood to be referring to different numbers), or they are not, meaning that if you want to refer to the numbers one to ten, you don't use the special number syllables; you use another set of number words.

If the number syllables arose from a military context, then the syllables should be as different from each other as possible. You can't have a "five" if you have a "nine". So the vowel in one syllable must be different from that in all other syllables, and if one vowel is followed by a nasal, a similar vowel in another word must be followed by an S. In addition, every syllable must begin with a different sound, "four" and "five" would not be allowed, nor "six" and "seven". (I'm picturing something similar to the "alpha-bravo-charlie-delta" alphabet used in the U.S. military. I'm also imagining that this military terminology spread to the civilian population over time.)

"aspa" or "aaspa" -- ultimately from "supposed to" or "are supposed to" -- is a clause marker indicating disapproval with the way things are. It indicates that the clause is true or most likely true, and that the speaker is at least unhappy about it and probably resentful if not outraged about it.

More to do with Emmegan than Azarennya, but imagine that we have (1) urban farms (sort of indoor malls where fruits and vegetables are grown on multiple levels -- skyscraper greenhouses), and (2) technology to capture light and re-emit it later, so food can be grown all day, all night, all year.

2008-07-04: Articles, "of", and "and"

In Azarennya, you can say "the houses of the men" with a structure like "them house them man"; the "of" isn't needed because the association is suggested by juxtaposition. Consequently, there is no contraction equivalent to Italian "della" (of the).

On the other hand, if you want to say "the houses of the men and women," you'd use a structure like "them house them man and them woman", and frequently you'd have a one-syllable contraction for "and them," so in effect Azarennya has a contraction meaning "and the (plural)" and one meaning "and the (singular)".

On "of"

There is a word for "of", even though you can express an "of" relationship by just following one noun with another: "house boat" means "boat of houses". But when you have a long list of words -- "misunderstood programming language designer" -- it can be a slight challenge to figure out which modifier goes with which noun (which is misunderstood: programming? programming language? designer? all three?). If you say "designer of a misunderstood programming language" in English, it is immediately clear that it is not the designer who is misunderstood. You can say (in Azarennya):

"designer misunderstood of language programming" (it is the designer who is misunderstood)
"designer of language misunderstood of programming" (it is the language that is misunderstood)
"designer of language of programming misunderstood" (it is the programming that is misunderstood)

Words

(Assuming a vowel shift ah/aw > aa > e > i > ee.)

kaanki [< conquer] to solve (a problem), to find the answer to (a question or riddle), to fill (something empty), to straighten out (someone), etc. (Really it means "to solve some problem related to (someone or something).") (An example of amelioration, of a once strong and vibrant word losing its power.)
keda [< can't do] -- negative particle, often shortened to "ke". (At some point "can" came to be used only negatively.)
fes [< fast] soon; imminent; coming.

Semantics(?)

A person we'd call "hard-headed" (stubborn, unwilling to consider another path), an Azarennyan would call "locked". (A store we'd call "closed", an Az would call "locked".)

Semantic-class pronouns

...the attempts by Day to bracket the rather ingenious concept (a mysterious cult leader discovers a method to resurrect the dead) onto the already well-defined Hellraiser mythos fall mostly flat. The subject is "attempts"; the verb is "fall". They are so widely separated. But my reason for this entry was the thought that a noun like "attempts" might be referenced with a "semantic-class pronoun" indicating an approach or reaching toward something, or a journey or task undertaken. (Or just an action -- "it the action falls flat mostly.")

So Azarennya would have more pronouns than just "he", "she", "it." It would have a small suite of third-person pronouns to help establish the connections among lots of little clauses.

Just nice-sounding pseudowords

A lot of these will be taken from the alien language(s) that Azarennya speakers have encountered.

a: aashe adee aishal alla alaide anan anaasi anda anida araya asha auka
b: baiklen bausfinei beerain beerainge beevla beikaa blushanel boffla bohli bosooma brejus brobeis bunjoon
ch: chaaldran chafya chalhei chashwaili cheenji chempwen chesle chowa
d: dainya deyaffrise doshee dozhoi dronjaishal droos drozon dwamya dwamyallan dweekevis dwosso
e: eecheen eisnos ejwen enessin eshlai eskeives eslofrais
f: fais fautwun fauzon fesletra flaina fooyen fouflami fraakwe fwegya fwoghiba
g: gemeeza gewaiklin gidree glaampaan gleimwel gloswan gozhalefra grusteyal gwebun gwinashi gwoldreili gyeshin gyombun
gh:
h: haankwen hachan hachun hashei haskwa hastildor hezeen
i: ilisnai inau inei
j: jaishen jaiwa jein
k: kaasnen kassaishi kaloonya kee keinne kejushu klantrei klantreishi koomira kraivon kreestun krikwe krin -kwaili kwechaan kwendeyan kyes
l: lainoshi lalaissi lamplaili lasurain lauye leino leumigil lewizi lifikwen loidon luweel
m: magle mankyabol megyai mezhein milges mollas molonna mooshei mwannau myen myessoo
n: natroo neispe nenglissai neusha nispershun nocha nooplei novi nozha nozo nutopeusa nyera
o: oisi oissi okaufo onis oshi osnyen
p: paankya pauffel pelees poplofei poutraan prertauto pultravare puvo pwaslan pwenden
r: raashipi rainge reecho reibwa reyan rounnas
s: saakili saapi salun sanchur seeha seenwaalyin seirrupo seleebwen sena seni seshee seullen sirraa sobo soigookol soka soko sosheeva sospra suken suntee sunyaan swefyan
sh: shai shanoshal shayasma shelgee shennasal sheva shilaija shomanji shoon shugoungwol shulan
t: tabli talgreen talkyen tengraa tengraahachun tente toichon treishi trelpiklim treyal twanzhreen twenles
u: udee
v: vaduchidwin vallazha veinglo vlaaltoommei vlancho vlenamwonakwaili vokulfee voufappan vrenglos vuldei vyaangleis vyadrusapu vyannul vyemman
w: wankwi waukree waunikwa wein westa wevan
y: yaakyaa yasloval yenhoi yidree yugweya
z: zanchepos zezhlin zininbreyas zwannya zwega zyamma
zh: zhaglee zheibin zhingora zhoofree zhou zhunerdyali zhuseenilai

"There's a guy with no lips on my train"

"There is a man, he has no lips, he is on my train." This is more or less the starting point for understanding Azarennya clauses.

2007-05-21: "There is a man, having no lips, he [being] on my train." The idea is that a pronoun is not needed as a verb subject if the noun that the pronoun would refer to is RIGHT THERE: "having no lips on my train" would mean something different; the subject of "on" would be "lips", not "man".

Revisited 2008-03-17: It occurs to me that there are three reference points here: the man, the train, and me. The man and I are both on the train; I am making an observation about the man: He has no lips. So the sentence sets up the reference points, then adds in the observation. The equivalent of "seen on train mine" would set up the reference points, where "seen" is equivalent to a clause marker introducing an observation you have yourself made, "on" introduces the location reference or larger context, and "mine" means that you were also "on" the train, i.e., you had the same relation to the train, to the location or larger context, as the man you wanted to discuss.

So here "on" could just as easily mean "in" or "under" or "at" or "by"; it does not necessarily indicate your exact location relative to the train. In Azarennya, prepositions by themselves do not define locations so precisely; there may be an "in" or "inside of" word and a "by" or "outside of" word used in lieu of "on" and "under" and "next to" and "near" and "behind", but if you specifically want to say "in front of" or "in back of", you have to use a phrase -- "in area of", "in right-side of", "on top of", etc.

Also note that the prepositional phrase does not have to occur immediately after the clause marker, but putting the phrase there helps to indicate that the phrase is there only to indicate the context within which the observation was made, and that the train does not lend any added significance to the observation or alter the implications of the observation -- the man with no lips would have been just as noteworthy on the street or in a store as he was on the train.

Words (semantic shifts)

A shadow is one thing, but a shodo is any clue or sign that someone or something was present. (This implies that "a" in "cat" had a way of becoming long "o" -- so "bad", "cash", "dam", "fast", "glad", "hack", etc. become "bod", "kosh", "dom", "fost", "glod", "hok", etc. If this dialect took after Japanese, it would append -u to the ends of words that would otherwise end in a consonant: "bodu", "koshu", "domu", "fostu", "glodu", "hoku", etc.

To Do:

This whole Azarennya thing needs to be reworked. Basically the entire scratchpad and every page in the Azarennya section needs to be divided up into pages.
Unicode. Register the Azarennya characters at the ConScript Unicode Registry.
Radicals. Work on the system of radicals (borrowed from another language) used to build words in Azarennya.
MacConScript. Recreate the Azarennya characters as a MacConScript file.

Alien radicals or roots

-ba: As a suffix, indicates place or context. Examples: chomba = city (place of reciprocation; a place where trade is done)
chon: Trade, reciprocation; tradeoff.
dan: Their word for a human finger. Pointing, holding up, showing. (Not easy to grasp the real meaning behind this root.)
gal: Eye, vision, loveliness.

Other languages

A FORTH-like language in that every word is a complete little statement. A noun means "push this idea onto the stack of your attention-span." A transitive verb connects the last two nouns "pushed" onto the "stack", so naturally the language is SOV (or possibly OSV). (A noun might still be a root or basic name plus a suffix that means "there is a person" or "there is a long floppy rope-like thing" or whatever.)

TC

to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise -- This can mean that we're talking only about compromise that is dishonorable (meaning that compromise is sometimes NOT dishonorable), or that compromise is ALWAYS dishonorable or is dishonorable by its nature. In Azarennya, "compromise dishonorable" holds the first meaning; to indicate parenthetically that compromise is ALWAYS dishonorable, i.e., if you want to make a comment about the nature of compromise and not just specify the TYPE of compromise or indicate a particular instance of it, you need to add a clause, and the clause will most likely begin with a clause marker indicating that the clause says something about the nature of something, or the nature of all things of a particular type.
I have been doing this by entering defects promptly and in test meetings. I have been doing this in test meetings, or I have been doing this by entering defects in test meetings? It seems that metaverbs might serve as an aid to untangling this. The metaverb serves as a kind of "verb pronoun" whose referent is the action or situation given in a previous clause -- not just the verb, but also the subject (whether agent or patient). So the clause on "entering defects" might be referred to with a metaverb having to do with doing something in response to a problem or unfortunate event; the clause on "I have been doing this" is vague, but there might be a metaverb used to refer to an action that is done because the work needed doing, or because the task has been assigned to me, or because it is my place or role to do this particular job. So what I have been calling a metaverb is a reference to a type of situation and stands in for both topic and verb, and so a clause can have a metaverb in lieu of a topic and verb. (Note that metaverbs would be flexible; usually you can assign any of at least two metaverbs to a typical clause, so you can talk about two similar situations at the same time and still keep things straight.)

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

-- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

A quick orthography writeup

I don't know yet what to call this orthography, but I'll call it ASCIInnya for now -- the orthography is restricted to plain ASCII characters to make typing in Azarennya with a US keyboard simple. (This means digraphs and special characters, and in some cases characters used for more than one purpose.)

The vowels are: ee i e aa a o u oo

The consonants are: b ch d f g h j k l m n p r s sh t v w y z zh

Long consonants and vowels

A long (double-duration) consonant is usually shown by doubling the consonant (bb, dd, ff, etc.), but if the consonant is represented with a digraph (ch, sh, zh), then only the 'h' is doubled (chh, shh, zhh).

A long vowel cannot be represented with a double vowel, since a double vowel is already used for three of the eight vowel sounds (ee, aa, oo). A vowel is marked as long by instead following it with an 'h', provided that the 'h' is not immediately followed by a vowel in the same word. Thus:

In "ahu", the 'a' is not long; the second syllable begins with 'h'.
In "ah'u", the 'a' IS long; there is no 'h' sound, and the vowels are separated by a glottal stop (indicated with the apostrophe).
In "ahhu", the 'a' IS long; the second syllable begins with the second 'h'.

Note that a consonant cannot be marked as long by following it with 'h' because in some cases a short consonant is followed by a syllable beginning with 'h', as in "denharra".

The apostrophe

The apostrophe is not frequently needed but is used in a few situations:

Between vowels, it marks a glottal stop: "eo" is a diphthong (and one syllable), but "e'o" is two vowel sounds (and two syllables) separated by a glottal stop. (Note that an 'h' after a vowel but before another vowel or an apostrophe is part of the preceding vowel, so "ah'u" is a long 'a' followed by a glottal stop followed by a short 'u'.)
It separates two consonants that would otherwise be a digraph: "oshi" is three sounds (o-sh-i), but "os'hi" is four sounds (o-s-h-i).
It may show a syllable boundary: "Nelana" is "ne-la-na", but placing the apostrophe after the second 'n' marks the syllable boundary as between the 'n' and the 'a': "Nelan'a" is "ne-lan-a".

Statement types and purposes

This is my mini-project: Come up with a nice long list of statement purposes, types, and intentions, organize them into likely groups, and assign a clause marker to each group, in accordance with the idea below (that a clause marker can be modified by one or more particles, or that the precise meaning of a clause marker might depend on the larger context). (Clause markers might thus be much more versatile than you might think, and as a result I can whittle their number down, to somewhere between eight and twenty. However, keep in mind that some of these might have near-synonyms, or that there are many situations where one can choose from two or more of these.)

ta: Putting one's foot down.
- ~~A direct command (when followed by a verb).~~
- ~~A firm statement about what should happen or "needs to" happen. (Less of an expectation and more of a demand.)~~
- ~~A statement meant to be final, implying that further discussion is not welcome.~~
- ~~Any statement against which there can be (in the opinion of the speaker) no serious argument; any statement the debating of which is a distraction or a source of exasperation.~~
- (Note: Overuse of "ta" would be considered very rude if not insulting, and so it's possible that some people rely on more polite words such as "nei" but use them in such a way that what sounds like a request is really a demand.)
so: Something that did not happen or has not happened, or is thought unlikely to have happened or to be true.
- ~~A conditional (as in "suppose that it did happen..." or "if it were to happen...").~~
nei: An invitation to complete a thought.
- ~~A fill-in-the-blank question.~~
- ~~An appeal for support, or an implicit request to provide evidence or verification or more information.~~
- ~~A question like "It will be done at what time tomorrow?", using "nei", may in context actually be a demand, more politely phrased than a clause like "Finish it by tomorrow" that would use "ta".~~
je: A statement which is not utterly known to be true.
- ~~A report of hearsay or gossip ("They say that..." or "I've heard that...").~~
- ~~A statement the speaker doubts.~~
- ~~An appeal for confirmation or verification ("Is this true?").~~
- ~~A yes-or-no question.~~
- ~~An indication of knowledge gained imperfectly ("My understanding is that...").~~

More on clause markers

Every Azarennya clause must begin with one of a small set of words (perhaps eight, perhaps a dozen). This first word marks the purpose of the clause and is followed by zero or more little words that have specific meaning when they are used between the clause marker and the first article.

so (like "suppose") marks a clause as "irrealis" -- meaning the action didn't happen. The clause may be a conditional ("if"), or it may be a statement that you want something to happen that hasn't happened, or that someone should do something but hasn't done it. (Direct commands are the only clause type naming an action that hasn't happened but not requiring "so".)
- so bes marks a request or a mild command (when followed by a verb), or sometimes a wish (when followed by the subject).
- so ri indicates a rule that is to be followed, or an action that shall take place.
ta marks a command. (The implication is that this is something you need to do regardless of how you feel or whether it would help you.)
nei marks a fill-in-the-blanks question.
je(n) might begin a yes-or-no question, or a statement one has doubt about, or a story or a bit of hearsay ("It is said that..."). (The implication is that the statement is probably true but that the speaker is not completely sure.)
e indicates that the statement follows from the previous one, or continues a thought or story line.
ri indicates either a statement about which the speaker is certain, or a law of nature.

Grammaticalization of many English words

Many common English content words become function words in Azarennya.

"Seen" becomes "sen", a clause marker indicating that the speaker knows something happened because he witnessed it directly. This word is also used for occasions when someone overheard a conversation. (Another word entirely is used for the act of seeing.)

Import

The "import" or importance or implication of a statement would be marked with a clause marker. You'd mark a statement like "the average temperature of the globe has been rising over the past twenty years" with something that means "That's good enough for me" or "'Nuff said!" or "What else needs to be said?" -- or you could mark it with something that means "This is a fact, but there are (probably) others." This is analogous to clause markers for lists -- one marker means "this list is complete" and another means "there were (probably) other things I didn't include." So maybe the above statement is essentially a "list" of reasons why you believe something, or a "list" of pieces of evidence for a conclusion you've reached.

Lists

Each item in a list is a "mini-clause" -- a clause marker (meaning "the previously mentioned list includes the following item") and a noun or verb phrase. There is no "and" equivalent here; to terminate the list, you use a special (one- or two-word) mini-clause that means "there are no more items in the list" (or an alternative meaning "there may be others but I won't list any more of them").

Then there are different kinds of lists, marked with different markers.

"Senator-turned-actor-turned-candidate" is a list of three items that someone has been in succession (actually it does not indicate that the person stopped being a senator once he became an actor, or that he stopped being an actor once he became a candidate).

Another kind of list might indicate that someone or something IS or DOES all of the items in the list at once (or at least all within the same slice of time). (In English, you might connect the items with "-cum-" or with slashes, as in "author-cum-artist".)

Another kind of list indicates that each item is a separate thing or entity or action. In this kind of list, "hopped and skipped and jumped" indicates that someone did these things separately, stopping one action before starting the next. In the previous kind of list, "hopped and skipped and jumped" would indicate that what the person was doing was a combination of all of these things.

Basically any relation between two things might be the basis for a list type in Azarennya.

Building up ideas from simpler words

"Starvation" once meant "death from lack of food." I had a thought that there would be short little words that you'd combine with other words to come up with words or phrases meaning things like "death from lack of food." There'd be one word for "death," another for "social death" or the destruction of one's standing or reputation, and so on. There might be words meaning "because of a lack of/because of too little" and "because of an excess of/because of too much" and so "starvation" would be "death" + "because of a lack of" + "food".

On second thought, this particular example might not be the best one. "Because of a lack of food" would be a clause translatable as "because food was unavailable."

On third thought, the clause would not be the only way to express the idea. "Starvation" is "food-lack death" or (in Azarennya syntax) "the death lack food". "The death lack" is a death associated with (and often thought to be brought about by) a lack of something; "lack food" is a lack associated with food. (Note that when the relationship between two words is "associated with," the exact nature of the relationship may be idiomatic, i.e., different for different word pairs.)

Traces of ancestral languages

Plural -s. Azarennya might inherit one word to mean an individual thing, and also inherit the plural form of the same word to mean a group or collection. It would be as if we used "a cows" to mean "a herd." (And note semantic changes: "a cows" might change in meaning to refer to any group of creatures in one place, stopping to eat, or a group of creatures enclosed or concentrated within a small area, or even the area in which such creatures are contained.)

Functional words

There could be many cases where clause markers are used in pairs, and the meaning of a clause marker might depend on the pair of which it is a part. The word meaning "if" or "suppose" might actually be a generic irrealis marker, with the second clause marker in the pair setting the context. The "if" word might be better translated as "may--!" as in "may the blessings of all free folk go with you!" in some cases, for example.

Argument

Note that the words sena and inei are used instead of a word for "but". Azarennya does not have an exact equivalent for the English conjunction "but".

sena -- ["see now"] The following point bolsters the case or idea or argument being presented here.
inei -- The following point is a concession, or goes against the case or idea or argument being presented here. (It once meant something like "I concede" or "I admit (that this argues against my point)", but now it means "This argues against the point we're discussing at the moment.")
nocha -- I am making this point, not to argue for or against anything, but because it might be evidence of something, even of something we're not discussing. [He has lipstick on his collar. What it means, I don't know.]

Role

oyo -- From "oil" (as something that helps things move more smoothly or quickly). Marks a noun as a catalyst. A preposition meaning "with the help of."

Emphasis

nozo -- follows a word in order to emphasize it: If "me" means "I", then "me nozo" means "I and not anyone else".

Irrealis

soko -- follows a word to indicate that something is not what it is being called. (Imagine "so-called" expanded in function to handle things like events that did not happen but could, for example. "If I go soko to the store" means that I did not or will not go to the store.)

Imperatives and proposals

laas -- introduces a proposal. Means "I propose that..." and derives from "let's".

Connections

~~so -- indicates something that happens at the end of a train of other actions. Does not necessarily indicate that what happens is a result of the preceding action.~~
dra -- [imagining that voiced "th" becomes "dr" eventually] = thus, therefore. Something happens that would not have happened if the previously mentioned events didn't happen. (Note that this is different from saying that a preceding event CAUSED something to happen.)

Conditionals and truth

sobo -- If; suppose. Introduces a condition clause.
anida or anda -- And it is true that.... Sometimes used after "sobo" to indicate that a condition clause "really happened." (Suppose, and it is true, that Reagan was present in 1987.)

TCs

~~"Bush cannot be impeached because he is a conservative." Two possible meanings:~~
- "Suppose Bush is impeached -- the reason (for this action) cannot be (or should never have been, or is prohibited from being) that he is conservative." (One instance where the "if" clause marker cannot really be translated as "if", because of the clause that follows the "if-clause.")
- ~~"Note that Bush is a conservative -- because of this, Bush cannot be impeached."~~
~~"You can't rely on him." Differences in nuance would depend on clause markers.~~
- ~~"He is unreliable."~~
- ~~"It would not be fair to him to rely on him."~~
- ~~"You are doing a bad thing by relying on him (pressuring him needlessly, etc.)."~~
- ~~"Relying on him won't work for what you are trying to accomplish."~~
~~"It is difficult to visually analyze the code without making a mistake."~~
- ~~"Visually analyzing the code, and avoiding making a mistake while doing it, is difficult."~~
- ~~"Visually analyzing the code is difficult UNLESS you make a mistake while doing it."~~
~~"Philosophy and Fun of Algebra"~~
- ~~Item 1 "philosophy". Item 2 "fun of algebra"~~
- ~~Item 1 "philosophy of algebra". Item 2 "fun of algebra".~~
~~Keyes can keep his streak of never winning anything alive by running.~~
- ~~He can keep his streak alive.~~
- ~~His streak has been to never win anything alive.~~
- ~~The sentence would violate Azarennya's rule of never nesting one clause inside another:~~
  - ~~Keyes (has a streak of) never winning anything.~~
  - ~~He can keep the streak alive -- by running.~~
~~Use it or lose it.~~
- [I want a clause marker or something to indicate that if Action A is not done after a certain (unspecified) time, Action B will occur. In English, "or" often serves this purpose, but the time element is subtle, something you'd never notice unless you stopped to think about it. Azarennya might have a clause marker corresponding to this "or", and if used after a clause indicating something that hasn't happened but should or is wished for, it indicates that there is a window of opportunity to do the action, after which the second action will occur. Thus you wouldn't use the same construction for a sentence like "Let the ball go, or it cannot fall." You could hold the ball forever and it would never lose its ability to fall; it will ALWAYS fall as soon as you released it; there is no finite window of opportunity that will close after a time.]
~~...a system that can have a database too large to search within ten or fifteen seconds.~~
- ~~...a system within ten or fifteen seconds.~~
- ~~...a database within ten or fifteen seconds.~~
- ~~...too large within ten or fifteen seconds.~~
- ~~...to search within ten or fifteen seconds.~~
~~"You cannot say that one organism is transitional and another is transitioned because every animal is both transitional and transitioned."~~
- Azarennya might have a particle indicating that "one organism is transitional and another is transitioned" is meant to imply that if "one organism is transitional," the other one specifically is NOT transitional, and if "another is transitioned," the first one specifically is NOT transitioned.

Affixes

We'd benefit from some affixes -- prefixes or suffixes or both -- to provide a way to build words from other words, e.g., "help + ful", "bend + able", "sea + worthy", "air + tight", "fool + proof", "clock + wise", "water + y", etc. They'd probably be prefixes, in order to preserve the accent on the penultimate syllable, things that might have once been articles or markers, but there was a rule that said they had to be the closest thing to the noun or verb they modified and so became conceptually inseparable from the noun or verb and thus ended up fixed to the noun or verb.

wan- Affixed to a verb: likely to, tending to, having an affinity for. Affixed to a noun: tending to move toward or to reach; having as a goal or destination; etc. (Either this was borrowed from a line other than that which produced "gwan" for "one", or this should be "gwan" or "gwon" or something similar [assuming it derives from "want"].)
ka- Affixed to a verb: able to; having the power or capacity to. Affixed to a noun: able to attain, reach, achieve, become, etc.
afa- Alternative for "wan-" [< E "often"]
naa- Affixed to a verb: never going to, never able to. Affixed to a noun: never going to attain, reach, or become.
to- Affixed to an intransitive verb: to make (someone do something). (The difference between "eat" and "feed".)

It could be that, to say "it is flexible," you'd have to say something like "anyone can bend it" ("se kabaan" if "baan" is "bend")

Sourced words

ese cm [< "I see"] "I see or realize now that..." Begins a clause of revelation.
klen [< "klem" < "kelm" < "kelp" < "help"] Abstract verb: "to help", as in Person A helping Person B doing something.

Unsourced words

Words that aren't derived from any word in particular; they just feel right for the meaning.

chumai Rich, wealthy (connotes a playboy, that is, someone with enough free time to spend his money on parties, vacations, sightseeing, etc., as opposed to work or to building things).

Abstract verbs

An abstract verb does not require a verb marker. In fact, if a noun immediately follows, the noun's marker can often also be dropped.

Certain verbs became abstract verbs (or "light verbs") under the influence of a "radical-based" language, which introduced the ideas of markers for nouns, verbs, and clauses, as well as abstract verbs that needed no markers.

Note that you might use one word if you have a specific place of origin (or destination) in mind, and another if there is no specific location involved (e.g., you just want someone to "come" or to "go away", as opposed to "coming from" or "going to" a given place).

cha To divide, split up, separate, etc.
flaa [< flee, fly] To go away from something (literally or figuratively); to leave something behind.
gaa [< get] To retrieve or receive something.
o [< on] To be in a given place; to occupy a place; to be with a given person. (You might think of this as an all-purpose location preposition.)
pe [< put] To put something down; to leave something at a given place.
po [< push] To push away, repel, drive off, or send away something.
saa [< send] To "push" something to a specific location.
wa [< walk, influenced by "went"] To go, either about, or to a specific place.

~~"He has credibility with Catholics." "Not this Catholic."~~

~~The second sentence is a way of saying "I am a Catholic and he does NOT have credibility with me."~~

~~Azarennya would not use "this"; it would use "me" ("Not me Catholic"), with "Catholic" modifying "me".~~

Clause markers

I want clause markers for "this is something in the topic's favor" and "this is something against the topic", or at least an "I haven't made up my mind about the topic yea or nay; I'm just pointing this out" marker.

I want a clause marker equivalent to "eta:" ("edited to add:") or "oh, and by the way...".

I want two different clause markers for getting somebody's attention (or initiating a conversation): "Hi John!" for being friendly, and "You! John!" if you're angry at him or want to call him out on something.

A clause marker meaning "Yes, I'm steeling myself up for it" and another meaning "Yes, I have an aversion for its opposite" -- as in "YES I shall go into the swamp to help find your boat" and "YES I will do all I can to prevent the invaders from burning down our town".

A clause marker that converts a specific sentence into a general one, so that "The elephant has a long trunk" is clearly marked as a statement that is true of elephants in general, and not new information about one elephant in particular.

Clause markers with the following meanings:

One meaning "obviously" or "you know this already, but..."
One stressing "this is new information for you:..."
One meaning "this is information that I'm using as support for another point I'm going to make" or "this is part of the foundation of my point."
One meaning "I say this because..." (as opposed to simply "because").

Question markers

One marking a question: "I'm not sure, but...?"
One marking a question, but with less uncertainty: "Is this NOT true that...?" Sometimes used in a subtle accusation that someone is ignoring or sidestepping the fact that something IS true.

Agreement and attitude markers

Markers used with statements of what someone else said or thought:

"It seems likely to me" or "I agree"
"I'm reserving judgement on this" or "I'm not saying whether I agree"
"I doubt it, but..." or "I disagree"
"I agree with what was just said or implied"
"I disagree with what was just said or implied"
"I am not agreeing or disagreeing" or "I withhold judgement" or "Be that as it may..."

List markers

These work like conjunctions like "and" and "or".

"One and only one of the following"
"ALL of the following"
"One or more of the following" (like "and/or")
"This list could be expanded"
"This list is complete"

Clause markers for suppositions

Azarennya's equivalent to an "if-clause" might begin only with the basic "if" marker, or it might also begin with one or more supplemental clause markers.

You have the basic supposition marker, equivalent to "if" or "suppose".
With that, you can add a truth marker -- indicating that the supposition is actually true, or acknowledging that it is false and therefore only a theoretical situation.
What these, you can add an appraisal marker, one for "happily/fortunately" or one for "sadly/unfortunately".

You need BOTH clause markers AND participle markers

I thought maybe I could get rid of participle markers and simplify the grammar, but if you do that, then the language lacks some of the redundancy needed to make half-heard statements reconstructible and thus understandable.

Markers

There is a special noun marker "vaya" that comes before a whole clause and turns the clause into a gerund. (This would turn "The man boarded the bus" into "the man's boarding of the bus", or "(someone) stole my bike" into "the stealing of my bike".) You could stack these, and come up with things like "my friends' discussion of the stealing of my bike." (This could be the same particle you'd use to create the "pronouns from verbs" described below.)

"You won't get a girl looking like that" is ambiguous: It usually means "You won't get a girl if you look like that" but could mean "You won't get a girl who looks like that." If you translate this English sentence word for word into Azarennya, you'll get a clause that has the second sense -- "you not get a girl [who-is] looking like that". To get the first sense you'd have to say (taking advantage of VOS order) "not get a girl you looking like that". Note that "you looking like that not get a girl" suggests that you look like someone who doesn't get a girl.

But what about the role of the participle? The participle is a subordinate verb

oisi and oissi -- separate words.
onis -- self-referential? onanistic? self-absorbed or narcissistic? onerous?
pi -- general sense of "near"; with nouns, "here" or "close by"; with verbs, "now" or "very recently" or "very soon"; eventually it means something that was just here but not anymore (and is presumably close by), or else an action that was just stopped or finished (and perhaps might resume again).
saapi -- [< E "sep", short for "separate"]

A relative handful of words

Noun markers

ai marks a singular noun (being introduced)
mo marks a non-singular noun (being introduced) [prob. < E "more"]
- There could be instances of using "introductory" noun markers in situations where the noun has already been introduced into the conversation, but the referent was new from the viewpoint of the people in the story or new to the situation being described, as in "Why would he have married a Chinese woman if his high-school sweetheart was still around?" (when the Chinese woman in question was already known to both speaker and listener).
di marks a singular noun (already introduced or known)
ja marks a non-singular noun (already introduced or known)

Proper noun markers (ordered by person)

me (1p) marks a proper noun (used by a person introducing himself or giving his name) (archaic: mari)
ya (2p) marks a proper noun (used when addressing the person with that name)
ri (3p) marks a proper noun

Verb markers

no marks a verb and negates it
we marks a verb as present tense (verbs are by default non-present, so if you want to say "What are you doing?" then you have to mark the verb with we) [prob. < E. "will", with an expanded meaning encompassing past tense as well as future tense]
va marks a participle (needs to immediately precede the verb; the word immediately after "va" is taken as the actual verb; you can say "no va" or "we va" but not "va no" unless "no" is supposed to be the verb) [prob. < E "be"]

Pronouns

men I, me
yan you
(Possible compounds for plurals, inclusive "we", etc.)

Clause markers

asha introduces an answer to a question ("To answer your question,...")
dan precedes a clause that is being used as the object of the preceding verb ("that...", "the fact that..."). (A clause already spoken can also be used as the subject of a verb, but you'd use a different word, as a stand-in for the verb's subject.)
e generic clause marker
gau introduces a conclusion or consequence ("then", "therefore"). "Nei gau?" means "So what?"
nei introduces a "fill in the blank" question
sa introduces a supposition or condition ("if...", "suppose...", "given that...")

~~Nouns~~

bamba boy
nina girl

Abstract verbs

es to be, to be a member of the class of, etc.
fua to grab, take, accept, receive, etc.
lan to like, prefer, enjoy, etc.
sha to act against (someone or something) [prob. < E "strike"]
shen to fit, be appropriate for, go well with, etc. [prob. < E "strong"]

OK, I can't seem to settle on exactly what WORDS to assign to each meaning below, so I'll use codes instead.

Noun markers:

NM0 = some (non-singular)
NM1 = a, an (singular)
NM2 = the (non-singular)
NM3 = the (singular)
NM4 = the one and only (used for proper nouns)

Pronouns:

PN0 = I, me
PN1 = you

Demonstratives should be connected to pronouns:

D00 = this (near me)
D01 = these (near me)
D10 = that (near you)
D11 = those (near you)

Clause markers (for clauses that simply introduce something):

CMh -- begins clause that introduces something ("Here is...")
CMs -- begins clause whose subject is the subject of the previous clause

Verb markers:

VM0 = does (main verb)
VM1 = doing (subordinate verb)
VM2 = does not (main verb, negative)
VM3 = not doing (subordinate verb, negative)

Use

Here are the paths of the animals that lead to the river.
- If this means that it is the paths that lead to the river, you'd translate this into two clauses:
  - CMh (here-are) those path being-of those animal
  - CMs (previous subject = paths) leading-to that river
- If this means that it is the animals that lead to the river, you'd translate this into one long clause:
  - CMh (here-are) those path being-of those animal leading-to that river

Possible rules

A verb cannot be referenced from another clause unless it is a MAIN verb.
A clause, as a rule, has ONE verb. If it has TWO or more, and if another clause references it, then the implication is that both verbs are part of the same action or process, and thus form a kind of compound verb.

Using verbs to connect distant clauses together

Pronouns can be created on the fly from verbs. A verb normally is preceded by a verb marker; but if instead it is preceded by a special noun marker, then it becomes a pronoun meaning "he who OR that which has already been mentioned as doing the action of the verb." A different noun marker creates a pronoun meaning "he who OR that which has already been mentioned as the object of this verb." You could use almost any verb this way, but normally you'd use one of a relatively small class of general verbs in this way.

Self-healing machines

Emmegan's peoples would have machines that mimicked living things: they heal themselves when damaged, they learn things, they talk to one another and share information, they may even reproduce (make more of themselves).

Another tangled sentence

Here we have two unelected rock stars who have taken it upon themselves to speak for Africa (Geldof has referred to himself as ‘Mr Africa’) chastising a PM who was elected by millions of Canadians for letting Canada down.

Clause markers needed

One meaning "I [respectfully] disagree" (followed by a clause contradicting what has just been said).

Stuff I wrote at Zompist

Case

I still tinker with my script from time to time, but I have no plans on adding an uppercase/lowercase distinction.

(1) The distinction is a frill, IMHO, something you don't need in a language.

(2) My conlegend is that the script for my conlang was developed by one person, most likely to make written messages harder for outsiders to read.

(2a) Another theory that people in my conworld have is that the script was developed by a warrior apprentice to help his warrior master learn to read, because the master was dyslexic. Each letter is made up of a specific set of strokes (say, two straight strokes crossing, or one "hook" stroke joined to one "loop" stroke, etc.), and each letter has a story that connects the letter to the sound it represents. (No, I don't have any of this finished; I'm still tinkering with the script.)

(3) Capitals are used in European languages mainly (a) to mark the beginning of a sentence, and (b) to mark proper nouns (or all nouns in German). I may use special swashes to mark these instead of alternate letter forms.

(4) I'll point out, just for completion, that professionally printed Indo-European language (at least English) uses not only upper and lower case, but also italics (essentially a third and fourth form for each letter) for emphasis, book titles, etc. So I suppose you could also ask if peoples' conscripts use anything analogous to italics on professionally drawn/painted/printed material. (I think in my case I'll probably experiment with underline swashes, special stroke endings, etc. for something like this.)

Conworld idea

A planet where the dominant species communicates with low-powered lasers. Instead of vowels and consonants, they use different colors and wavelengths. (And maybe it seems implausible that there could be creatures that generate light and focus it internally into laser beams, it doesn't strike me as any more implausible than, say, creatures that hold chemicals in separate sacs, squirt both chemicals out into a combustion chamber through muscular action, and blast the resulting fumes at a predator. And of course it has the advantage that you can't "overhear" a conversation unless you happen to be more or less directly in the path of the speaker's beams. Group conversation might be a problem, unless of course these creatures are just repeating to their neighbors stuff said to them pretty much all the time.)

What do you think of Toki Pona?

I like the idea. It's a fun little toy language, and anybody can learn it. Anybody who wants to "grok" how a simple language works, for the purpose of one day making a conlang of his own, should have a look at how sentences in Toki Pona are put together. It actually has case particles, such as "e" to mark the following word as an accusative noun.

I also like the language for its "object type" words. I like that it has "linja" for any long floppy object (string, hair, cable, chains, power cord) and "lipu" for any flat flexible object (paper, 5-1/4" floppy disk, playing card).

That said, it's a toy language. It has words for "one" and "two" but not for "three" or higher numbers (unless there's some idiom you have to use for these); it has words for "time" and "money" but I don't see any way to say "four o'clock" or "five dollars". It has "moku" for food, but if you want to talk about spaghetti, you have to say something like "moku linja". So it might be cute as a lingo to talk about generalities with friends, but its usefulness is limited because it doesn't have words for specific things -- not unless you start using words not in the official 118-word list.

That said, it's a nice toy :) There's something about it that I just like, just because. (Maybe because I also like Hawaiian.)

SVO conlangs

My conlang, Azarennya, is SVO by default. (Clauses can also be VOS to emphasize the verb, or OSV to emphasize the object.)

I like SVO just because the verb comes between the two nouns, and because it suggests (to me, at any rate) a general pattern NVN (noun-verb-noun), which can be expanded to NVNVN. In this expanded pattern, the noun in the middle is both the object of the first verb AND the subject of the second verb, as in, say, "Cop threatens robber drops loot" -- that is, "the cop threatens the robber, who (then or as a result) drops the loot." I suppose you could come up with a way to chain clauses together in similarly compact fashion with other word orders, but SVO just seems to lend itself to this sort of thing.

This is the sort of compact syntax I want to have for Azarennya.

Azarennya script design, additional notes 2007-06-14

Note in your writeup about the script, that the endings are supposed to be distinguishable from one another no matter how the letters are oriented. A tail growing from the lower-right corner of the body of the letter marks the letter as a voiced stop ONLY if the tail tapers off at the end to a slight curve. If the tail curves around at least far enough to point back at the body of the letter, then not only is the letter a voiced fricative, but it is also rotated 180 degrees. If the tail ends in a sharp angle, then the letter is an unvoiced fricative, and it is vertically flipped (both upside-down and backwards). Your PDF needs to show all this in a diagram. (And note again that all this is to allow letters to be legible in any orientation, as in zero-gravity environments.)

Azarennya script design, part 1

My conlang, Azarennya, has its own script, which has a "central grid" of sixteen consonants:

Azarennya of course also has eight vowels, and six more consonants -- l m n r w y -- but these are not shown here. I just wanted to slap together something that I could post here tonight before I went to bed. The letters as drawn here aren't very pretty (sorry Serali), but I'll draw calligraphic versions of these later. Right now I just wanted to discuss the thinking behind the design of these letters.

My motivation was to try to have a "featural" alphabet that nevertheless would be acceptable to dyslexics. (I'm working on a backstory/legend that explains that the script was invented by a warrior apprentice who adored his master, who was dyslexic and illiterate. This apprentice felt himself deeply in debt to his master because his master had been such a wonderful teacher for so many years. So the young man worked long and hard on devising a new alphabet, so that the shapes of the letters might suggest to his master the sound each letter made. Of course, this moving and inspirational story is probably apocryphal. )

(I also had an idea that it would be cool if these letters could be designed so that they could be turned upside-down, backwards, at different angles, etc. and still be legible -- because the people using this script do go up in space from time to time, and they don't always have the luxury of artificial gravity.)

As you can see, the sixteen letters are based on four basic shapes -- essentially O V U L (although the U has a small hook at the top of the right prong). Each of these shapes is the same height as the "x-height" -- the height of a (lowercase) letter that has neither an ascender (like "h" or "t") nor a descender (like "g" or "p"). However, these shapes are only starting points; they are not letters by themselves.

The O suggests the mouth, so it is reserved for sounds made with the lips.
The V suggests a tooth, so it is reserved for sounds made with the teeth.
The U suggests the tongue, which is inside the mouth, and it is also a rounded version of the V, so it is reserved for sounds similar to the "tooth" sounds.
The L suggests an arrowhead pointing down and backward, e.g., down the throat, so it is reserved for sounds made in or near the throat.

In addition, each shape is transformed by attaching one of four tails:

If the sound is a simple inert-sounding voiceless stop or affricate, then the basic letter gets a descender -- a straight tail hanging straight down from the bottom of the body of the letter.
If the sound is a voiced stop or affricate, then the sound is a little more "alive," and so the tail is moved to the right-hand side of the body. It's still a descender; it still hangs down, but it curves slightly to the left, like the tail of a cat sitting and ignoring you.
If the sound is a windy or hissy sound -- an unvoiced fricative -- then the tail is an ascender; it goes up from the upper-right corner of the body of the letter, and it forms an inverted L -- it makes a sharp right angle to the left.
If the sound is among the four most "alive-sounding" of these consonants -- voiced fricatives -- then the tail is an ascender here also; it goes up from the upper-left corner of the body of the letter, and it curves into a pronounced inverted-U hook, like the tail of a cat running into the kitchen with her tail in the air because she smells yummy fish.

Hopefully the design is such that even if two letters look a little close in design, it will be because the sounds are also close together.

I'll post the rest of the script, and hopefully a prettier version of the script, at another time.

faiuwle wrote: As for the script - I like the symbolism in the main shapes, though the tails all seem rather similar if your intent was to have the script be entirely symbolic of the sounds. What do the other letter look like? Do they have similar base shapes based on their places of articulation also? It seems like you could have unadorned base-shape letters - like, if your <y> is in fact /j/, it could be considered the "quintessential" palatal, and use just the untailed U-shaped base, or /w/ could use the O.

The remaining letters are as follows (I'll post a picture later):

NASALS AND APPROXIMANTS: There are six of these: /l/ /m/ /n/ /r\/ /w/ /j/ (spelled l m n r w y). My scheme for these is to give each of these letters BOTH an ascender AND a descender, like the letter "thorn" (ţ) -- in effect, each letter would have two "tails."

VOWELS: There are eight of these: /i/ /I/ /E/ /{/ /a/ /o/ /U/ /u/ (spelled ee i e aa a o u oo). These have neither ascender nor descender; they are just simple shapes without tails. (These would be what I guess you mean by "unadorned base-shape letters.") For example, the character for /o/ would just look like O. This shouldn't be a problem if every consonant has a "tail", so an O with a straight-down tail is /p/ but an O without any tail is a vowel.

These letters aren't grouped as neatly as the sixteen in my graphic above. I'll have to see if I can slap together a second graphic tonight.

Thanks for your comments, everyone.

Ollock wrote: Anyway, I like the look of the script. My main thing is that, judging from your consonants, it looks like it would hold up with printing, but that in people's handwriting some of your distinctions might get lost. Not that that's an insufferable problem though, as the redundancy allows for one or two to be lost without causing any harm in most cases.

Still, just to make sure, I'd consider making another change. Maybe make some of the tails curve outward rather than inward as they all do now.

I've given this a little thought before answering.

My first impulse is not to worry so much about handwriting; if people are taught the four basic shapes and the four basic tail styles (i.e., not just the letters but the principles behind the letters), then people should be able to write legibly reliably.

But I can see how the tails might be confusing -- the lower-right descender (on voiced stops/affricates) and the upper-left ascender (on voiced fricatives) do look similar, at least in my clumsy diagram. What I had hoped to convey was that the voiced-fricative ascender has a pronounced curve (in the diagram, the ascenders end in semicircles) and that the voiced-stop-or-affricate descender has only a slight curve (I think I overdid the curve; the stroke shouldn't really end in a quarter-circle, but only a gentle curving to the left). The descender's curve is supposed to look distinct both from the overt curl of the ascender and from the straight-down descender of the unvoiced stops/affricates.

I also thought about your suggestion that maybe some of the tails should curve outward rather than inward. Well, the letters would be more distinct, but I decided against the idea, because I thought that my letters with inward-curving tails would be (1) more attractive and (2) less awkward to draw quickly than letters with outward-curving tails would be.

I'll also have to give a little more thought to handwriting, specifically to (1) stroke count and order (as taught in schools) and (2) modifications to the design of the "print" characters to accommodate speedy handwriters (such as, say, a convention that the "teeth" (V-shape) and "throat" (L-shape) letters should be drawn narrow, but that the "lips" (O-shape) and "palate" (U-shape) letters should be drawn wide.

Azarennya script design, part 2

I managed to get off my duff and prepare my first public draft of the rest of the alphabet:

And again I have a few notes about the design:

Just as stops and affricates have descenders, and fricatives have ascenders, so nasals and approximates have both ascenders and descenders, and vowels have neither.
Note that the "m" has the basic "O" shape, like the other lip sounds (b, p, f, v).
Note that the "n" has the basic "V" shape, like the other tooth sounds (t, d, s, z).
Note that the "y" (/j/) is a variation on the "ee" (/i/), and that the "w" is a variation on the "oo" (/u/).
Note that the "i" (/I/) and "u" (/U/) are the thinnest vowels. These sounds are the "little vowels" in Azarennya. They are more "schwa-like" than the other vowels, in that their sound tends to move more toward the center of the mouth, and they are usually unstressed. (Stress in Azarennya usually falls on the next-to-last syllable, but if the vowel in that syllable is one of the "little vowels," then the stress moves to the previous syllable instead.)
[EDIT: Also note that the vertical line "i" (/I/) is a simplification of the inverted-L "ee" (/i/), and that the backward-J "u" (/U/) is a simplification of the U-shaped "oo" (/u/). Ehhh, that's probably enough design notes. :p ]

I guess I'll need to work on numerals and punctuation next. :D

I guess it would also be beneficial to post a sample of actual text, at the very least so that the ascenders and descenders become clear. So here is a script sample, the transliteration, a quick-and-dirty gloss, and the English translation.

(Note the "double-N" character in "tanna".)

nebula wind phone wrote: I like what you're doing about gemination. I'd be curious to see how it works out with the other consonants.

Usually if a word contains a double consonant, then the consonant is printed or written twice. I may come up with other shorthand forms for other double consonants, but right now the W-looking glyph for "nn" is the only shorthand character I have. (But then I came up with that one on the spur of the moment, so who knows?)

nebula wind phone wrote: There's something about the way your vertical and diagonal lines are coming together that's bothering my eyes. /d/, /S/ and /n/ are especially odd-looking. I guess that's a font design issue, though, and not a problem with the script itself -- which overall looks really nice.

Yes, I drew these letters quickly in order to show off their design. I do have it on my list of things to do eventually, to come up with a really good-looking TrueType font for my script. I'll do that by drawing the letters on paper, carefully, taking my time, and then scanning them and importing them into Font Creator. These samples here I made in Microsoft Paint, and I made them in a hurry. So, yeah, I'm most interested in comments on the design of their letters and not so much how they look in the samples above.

Thanks for your comments, though, I appreciate them. :)

Sano wrote: [Quote: Usually if a word contains a double consonant, then the consonant is printed or written twice. I may come up with other shorthand forms for other double consonants, but right now the W-looking glyph for "nn" is the only shorthand character I have. (But then I came up with that one on the spur of the moment, so who knows?)]

Have you considered a diacritc to mark a doubled consonant?

It can make shorthand look very complete wihtout having to create entire new glyphs.

Hmmm...use diacritics for length? I gave it some thought and decided against it.

(1) SIMPLICITY OF LETTER DESIGN. I was going for a "clean" look, where every letter is a single figure, drawn with a single stroke, or at most, two strokes crossing each other.

(2) SHORTHAND = FRILL. The shorthand glyphs, like the "nn" above, would be an option, not a requirement; you could still write or type "tanna" by entering the "single N" character twice.

(3) FONT CONSIDERATION. If I do create a diacritic mark for a long consonant, it would have to be placed in slightly different positions, depending on the consonant -- so it doesn't collide with the left-hand ascender of the N or R glyph, or with the right-hand flag ascender of the S or SH glyph. So while in theory I could design a diacritic mark with zero width (i.e., you type the character and the character appears, but the cursor doesn't move forward, so you could then type the main character, and that character appears under the diacritic and then the cursor moves forward), its use would likely lead to character combinations that looked awkward unless I planned things VERY carefully, and that just seemed like a pain. So if I wanted consonants with diacritics, I might just as well create a complete separate glyph for each such consonant, in addition to each corresponding consonant without a diacritic.

(4) SYLLABLE BOUNDARIES. In my conworld, there would certainly be purists who frowned on the use of such long-consonant glyphs. Why? Because a long consonant arises in my language only across a syllable boundary. So "tanna" consists of two syllables -- "tan" and "na". If a word at the end of a paragraph line can be split on a syllable boundary, as they are in English books (so one line of text ends with "simul-" and the next picks up with "taneously"), then these double-consonant glyphs would be a bad thing. (I think that if text is crammed into narrow columns, to provide for a short line length for ease of reading, then splitting long words across lines is a useful custom. I haven't decided yet if Azarennya speakers will actually display text in this way, but I haven't ruled it out either.) So I think in the end that these double-consonant glyphs would probably be used for posters and other places where you'd use short passages of large text. "Sit-down" text, paragraphs of text, would just show a long consonant by printing the consonant twice.

faiuwle wrote: Neat. I like the double-n character too.

However, I'm still wondering why your /i/ and /j/ letters resemble your velars and your /w/ and /u/ letters resemble your palatals. That seems a little backwards to me, based on the fact that you said the intent was to be featurial. I can see how your conpeople might conceive of /o/ as being primarily labial, though.

Thanks for the attention to detail.

To be honest, I didn't really try to make the vowels fit in with the consonant groups. The vowels are separate from all consonants because they have neither ascender nor descender; a velar consonant will always reach higher or lower than the "ee" glyph. My main concern was trying to keep the vowels (1) distinct from one another, and (2) not confusable with other letters, even if you rotated or flipped them. For example, you can flip the "ee" letter any way you want, but it won't likely be confused with a velar consonant because a consonant always has a "tail" and is thus always taller than the vowel.

So the vowels aren't meant to fit with the consonant grid.

I also expect that when schoolchildren (in my conworld, obviously) are taught these letters, they'll be taught the letters in groups, and to examine letters for tails sticking up above or down below the "short" vowels.

So there are a couple of areas where things don't fit perfectly. I tried to keep the palatals separate from the "U" vowel by adding a curve to the right prong of the "U" shape of each palatal, and I tried to keep the velars separate from the "I" vowel by inverting the "L" shape.

And in addition to the featural thing, I tried to keep the letters as simple as possible, so they could be easily drawn with one stroke or at most two. When doing that, there's always a risk that I'll still end up with letters resembling one another in ways they shouldn't.

On second thought: 'w' and 'u', being front sounds, go with the lippy sounds reasonably well, and 'y' and 'i', being back sounds, go with the velar sounds reasonably well too. (Can you tell I just thought of this twenty seconds ago? :p ) Nevertheless, I think I might go over the vowels again and try to fit their shapes better with the grid. Thus /w/, /u/, and /U/ should be based on a circle, /o/ and /a/ should be based on a "V" shape or an inverted "V" shape, /{/ and /e/ should be based on a "U" shape, and /I/, /i/, and /y/ should be based on an "L" shape or inverted "L". Thus the sounds go in a line from the front of the mouth to the back, in the same way that the consonants do.

Thanks for making me think this over. :)

faiuwle wrote: Well, I think technically /w/ and /u/ are back sounds, but phonology isn't very definite about any kind of place of articulation for vowels... they're also labial, though, because they're rounded, so that works (/o/ is labial for the same reason).

On the other hand, /j/ and /i/ always struck me as being in the palatal area, and /i/ is a front vowel.

Either way, though, it sounds like its turning out well. :)

Flying jellies

I was just thinking that a floating jellyfish-like thing would be extremely fragile or vulnerable for one reason or another, but on the other hand, if these things reproduce like crazy, laying thousands or millions of eggs at a time, then maybe these things could be almost as fragile as soap bubbles and STILL reproduce and continue the species. If they're laying millions of eggs and these things mature very quickly, then even if only a dozen out of a million survive long enough to reproduce, then their numbers will inevitably grow, and the species will thrive.

Yes, I think the idea is plausible.

How do your conpeople mutilate each others' languages?

I really don't have such details yet, and replying to this thread is risky because I'm still hammering out the details of my grammar (and my conworld) and probably will continue to do so into 2008, but I'm replying anyway because it gives me an excuse to ramble around in my imagination a bit. :D

First off, the speakers of Azarennya (my conlang) have a simplified dialect that they teach to outsiders and use with outsiders, because they have come to understand that importing outsiders and their ideas and their energy for work helps keep the country healthy. This dialect is spoken most commonly in the cities, so people in the cities are quite tolerant and forgiving of other people "butchering" their language.

The way that people most frequently butcher the language is by dropping "markers" from their sentences. Markers are particles that signal: -- where the nouns are -- where the verb is -- whether the noun is singular or non-singular -- whether the verb action is complete or not -- whether the verb action occurs in the present or in another time -- whether a word modifies the topic of the sentence, the noun or verb at the head of the phrase, or the immediately preceding word -- what the connection of the sentence is to what has already been said.

Azarennya tends to be SVO, so as long as an outsider can at least put nouns and verbs in that order, a native speaker can usually piece together the meaning of a sentence. Even if an outsider tends to begin sentences with the subject noun instead of the clause marker (which indicates the clause's connection with what has been said, or points to the reason for making the statement, and is supposed to come before anything else in the clause), he only sounds a little abrupt, and people have to listen more carefully to fill in the missing connections, but they will usually understand what the outsider is saying.

On the other hand, Azarennya is strict about modifiers -- adjectives always FOLLOW nouns; adverbs always FOLLOW verbs and adjectives. Outsiders who attempt sentences more complicated than "Dick sees Jane" and put modifiers BEFORE what they modify will almost certainly confuse people.

Even worse is if people can't get the vowels and consonants right. Azarennya's phonology is only slightly-to-moderately demanding -- it has eight vowels and twenty-two consonants, which include both /l/ and /4/ (<r>), both /s/ and /S/, both /p/ and /f/, voiced counterparts to these sounds, and two slightly exotic sounds, /x/ and /G/ (though you could get away with substituting /h/ for /x/, and /G/ is relatively uncommon). Its tone requirements are no more strenuous than those of English. But if an outsider cannot pronounce /f/ and produces /p/ in its place, or consistently substitutes /4/ for /l/, then understanding will suffer.

Now, as I said, the urban speakers of Azarennya tend to be understanding and forgiving of mistakes and supportive of people struggling with the language. The standard dialect has a simplified and regularized grammar with very few irregularities and with dependable rules for building even highly complex sentences with great precision. However, the same cannot be said for the various "local" varieties of Azarennya spoken by the natives among themselves, particularly away from the main cities, and most particularly among the many old walled communities that were built hundreds of years ago, when life was more "nasty, brutish and short" than today ("today" being 1200 years after human beings first arrived on this planet, Emmegan).

First off, the local varieties of Azarennya are thornier. There are irregular verbs. There are nouns that form plurals the old-fashioned way -- with suffixes, or with phrases equivalent to "herd of cattle" instead of "cows" or "bulls" -- and nouns form plurals in different ways. There is said to be a dialect that distinguishes plain /p/ and aspirated /p_h/, and plain labiodental /f/ and bilabial /p\/, far to the west. The use of markers is not as straightforward in these dialects as it is in the standard dialect. There are many localisms and idioms that would make no sense to an outsider. There are many, many traps for an outsider attempting to speak in a local dialect, and when he tries, a rural native will stop him and start talking in a slightly stilted-sounding rendition of the more "high-falutin'" if "dumbed-down" standard dialect.

Secondly, the standard dialect is often viewed by rural Azarennya speakers as "dumbed down" and lacking the subtlety and poetry of "real" Azarennya, with its way of saying "herd" instead of "cows" when you want to talk about more than one (yes, there are some who regard this sort of thing as a real strength of the language and part of its genius). A consequence of this is that an outsider who can't even get the "dumbed down" standard dialect right is a person who is just ignorant.

Rural people, able to fill all their needs by speaking strictly to other people who speak the same dialect [and take great pride in being self-sufficient and regard a man as incomplete if he isn't], generally don't feel obliged to court outsiders in the same way that the urban people do, who are more conscious of a dependence on science and technology and of the innovation that bright educated outsiders bring. Obviously this is a bit of an oversimplification; there are rural people who praise and esteem outsiders, and there are urban people who would like nothing better than for outsiders to be deported, but the general tendencies are there.

"Ladyboys" in your conculture?

Well, I hadn't thought of it -- it's not exactly the first idea I've had for my conworld -- but now that the subject has been breached, I think there probably would be a few "ladyboys" (or the closest equivalent) in my conworld. Not many, but a few. After all, my conworld is supposed to be populated with hundreds of millions of people, AND it's a technological world where a person could remake himself through surgery. It makes sense that there would be cities here and there that are the equivalent of Amsterdam or San Francisco or perhaps Berlin in the years before Hitler took power -- where the kind of debauchery that is frowned on in most places will occur quite freely and openly -- the kind of places that would appeal to those who want to lose themselves in a genteel opium haze in a hothouse pleasuredome.

Verb tenses and time travel

My current conlanging strategy is to try to keep things simple -- in this case, to have just two tenses, "present" and "non-present". Anything that happens in another time, past or future, in your own timestream or someone else's, is "non-present". You'd establish the context of the "non-present" with something like "I was fifteen years into the future and returned fifteen minutes ago," after which any non-present verb deals with your experience wandering around in the world of fifteen years from now.

Clause markers

There may be one or more "meta" clause markers, used to make a noun or verb into a clause marker.

One such is used to make the following verb into a kind of imperative, where the clause that follows serves as a reason or justification for the imperative.

Work on "systems" in the language

In this context, a "system" is a group of "radicals" (syllables or short words) that can be combined to form compounds. A radical has only one meaning within a given system, but it can be used in another system with another meaning (if it makes sense, based on etymology).

Numbers first and foremost -- not only the numbers themselves, but also measurements, groups, and just about anything that is reducible to mathematics.
Familial relations
Colors (and wavelengths of light)
Pronouns

Clause markers needed

One to indicate that the clause indicates an action that actually happened (or is happening) but that this should be a surprise, or that the action ought not to have happened. Could be translated as "To my surprise".
One to indicate that the statement should be known to the listener: "As you know" or "Clearly" or "Obviously".

Need one-syllable words for "class" ideas

Lots of words used in an older language, when adjectives still preceded nouns:

wire/string ("swee"), cat, dog, rat/weasel, building/shelter/shed ("-kas"), water/liquid ("-gwo"), waste/trash, fire/heat, mother/tender, father/creator, way/direction, sun/day, dark/night, not ("no")

Word candidates

kapa = container, esp. of liquid
shapa = to disappear or go away [< "shut up"]
heena (hee) = to use
sutoun = to be durable or proof against (equivalent to "un----able" or "in----ible")
gal = eye OR to see
sutoun gal = invisible, hard to see, well-hidden
- (Thought: Azarennya doesn't normally use "absolute" or "out of the question" words like "invisible" meaning impossible to see, or indeed words like "impossible", though they use words like "sutoun" which indicates making something extremely difficult. You have to create a phrase for "impossible" such as "the world would never let such a thing happen." You'd do this to describe moving faster than light, for instance.)

Quotes found online

"If you want to be sober, Charlie, it's only because you're a maverick and you'll try anything." --Von Humboldt Fleisher

Particles (clause markers and prepositions)

Hopefully many of these at least feel like they might have come from English:

olo = merely, only, just (to emphasize the relative slightness of something). [< "only"]
shasha = as much as, to the extent that (to emphasize the relative "weight" of something). The opposite of "olo". [< "such a" (plus consonant harmony)]
faafaa = hype, gossip, speculation, esp. in the public square; fluff-filled or useless or excessive talk about something on the minds of many people or about some "public" concern or issue. [Clearly a relatively new word. Time will generalize this word until it means just "useless talk".]
penna = one's "place", function, purpose, role, or rank; one's location in a sequence

Inflection marks

In English, you can say something like this -- "the bandwagon with the kick me if you can labels on the side" -- and your intonation makes it clear that those words "kick me if you can" refer to what the "labels on the side" say. English writing does not really mark intonation very well. It has things like the comma, the question mark, the exclamation point, and even italics, but not much else.

If intonation can mark a phrase as being a noun or an adjective (or an article in Azarennya), then perhaps the writing system needs its own intonation marks. (For "romannya," i.e., Azarennya written in ASCII, I might use single and double commas and apostrophes to mark low and high intonation, so that ",vena 'vena" might indicate an article "vena" followed by a noun or verb "vena". If you break off in midsentence, you can precede the dash with a comma or an apostrophe to indicate the intonation you were about to use, e.g., "vena ,--" or "vena '--".)

Note that this allows the use of "custom articles" -- regular words used as articles -- though this would be relatively rare, like embedded swear words (as in "absofrigginglutely" and "none whatsofreakingever"). Custom articles would be one obvious way that concept words get grammaticalized.

Our formalized vocabulary — "informalized" in Azarennya

I'm going through a mini-course on how employees are evaluated at the company where I work. It occurred to me that much of the Latinized vocabulary is an attempt to describe precisely things that are pretty much a part of life anyway. "Managing risk", to take one phrase, basically just means watching out for things that could go wrong, and making gambles intelligently. "Achieve results" is another phrase whose meaning seems to merit two or at most three syllables (except that English's basic vocabulary seems to be somewhat impoverished in this regard, presumably because these are abstractions of or guides to behavior, not specific acts). "Leverage relationships," "act with integrity," "competency" (meaning a general type of action to be competent at).

Misc.

2006-12-05: I need another (third) article [in addition to lalle/nanya and go/le], standing in for "a" in "the output of a function" when you're NOT introducing a function, you're just asking the listener to imagine a hypothetical function, and the function exists only to introduce the function's output. You might translate this other article as "a" or "some".

2006-12-04: Use articles with possessive pronouns as Italian apparently does: "my mother", Italian "la madre mia", Azarennya "go mava mi". (Important because the article marks number.)

Pronouns?

I might as well admit that as of 2006-11-30 I still don't have the pronoun thing nailed yet. I intended that the first item in a clause would be the topic of the sentence, and thus the referent of the proximate pronoun, while the obviate pronoun would have as its referent the most recent previous noun.

What if a sentence is a long chain of clauses, the first of which sets the topic for the rest of the sentence? A very long sentence with many clauses might use three pronouns: main-topic, local-topic, and other. The referent of the main-topic pronoun is the first item in the first clause in the sentence. The referent of the local-topic pronoun is the first item in the most recent previous clause that did not begin with a pronoun, and the referent of the other pronoun is simply the most recent previous noun not already refered to by either of the other two pronouns.

The strategy would be, I would think, to try to put a noun, not a pronoun, in the main-topic slot. This would allow you the use of the main-topic pronoun in addition to all of the other pronouns. (If the topic is "mi" then you'd use "mi" throughout the sentence, not the main-topic pronoun.)

Bera (good) and khodu (bad)

These words do not indicate standards in Azarennya. You can't just say that something is bera (good); something is bera only in comparison with something else.

Verb nuances

Progress:

He started the job.
He's working on it.
He's almost finished.

Expectations:

He managed to finish.
He should finish. (I'd be surprised if he didn't.)

Attitude:

He should finish. (He has an obligation to do so, or it would be infuriating if he didn't.)

So: Attitude markers? (Probably more clause markers.)

"I feel at ease (or safe, or relieved) knowing (or expecting) that..."
"I feel uneasy because I don't expect that..."

Confusing English syntax

In July 1949, she had arrived in New Jersey, where Hubbard [a man] was supposedly working on a film script, flat broke and pregnant. Azarennya would insist on a pronoun or something before "flat broke and pregnant."

History

It has been observed that there is a tendency for daughter languages spoken close to the land of the mother tongue to change relatively radically from the mother tongue, while "outliers," daughter languages spoken far from their place of origin, tend to be more conservative, to have changed less from the mother tongue than the daughter languages closer to home. Hawaiian and Icelandic are two examples. Such "outlier" languages are more likely to have words and features that other languages have discarded as archaic.

How nicely this fits in with Azarennya, which is cut off from contact with Indo-European speakers, and whose innermost core is almost scarily close to English in some ways (father is "fava").

Later, after the speakers of my language have been cut off from Earth, they come into contact with other people over the centuries and import a lot of words. But nevertheless, there remain in Azarennya some words that are considered archaic or obsolete in closely related languages.

Useful notes from Zompist

Best first foreign language to learn: Spanish. Ignore the more arcane verb tenses such as pluperfect subjunctive; do learn both the past and the perfect forms for verbs.

Syntax test

The black dog chased the white cat.
- O daga gooma ve gyain o gado shima.
- Ve gyain o gado shima o daga gooma.
- O gado shima o daga gooma ve gyain.
The dog who climbed the fence chased the cat.
- O daga vanda klo o pechan; sa ve gyain o gado.
- O daga ve gyain o gado; sa vanda klo o pechan.
- If I had used veda instead of vanda, the sentence would mean something like "The dog, while climbing the fence, was chasing the cat." Using van clearly indicates that the dog had finished climbing the fence before chasing the cat.

Distinctions

Evidential markers: (Could these be adverbs, i.e., modifiers after verbs? But if they modify the "realis state" of the verb, shouldn't they precede the verb?)

He did it [I know it]. I saw (or heard) him do it.
He did it [probably]. Everyone like him does it.
He did it [I am certain]. I have (or have seen) evidence for it.
He did it [plausibly]. Somebody told me so.

Script

Shape elements

Shape elements include:

dot
circle
semicircle
straight line. Simple lines may be perpendicular, parallel, or diagonal; they are most often diagonal to distinguish them from hooks and waves.
hook (straight line ending in a curve) -- two hooks "facing each other" form a heart shape. Hooks are always perpendicular to the line of text ("vertical" from our point of view).
wave (an S shape, or a "hook" with two curves pointing in opposite directions). Waves are always parallel to the line of text ("horizontal" from our point of view).

Elements are not aligned "up" or "down" or "left" or "right", but "face each other" or "face away from the center" etc. Letter shapes are supposed to be recognizable from any angle. Elements are not "vertical" or "horizontal", but "parallel" or "perpendicular to the line of text" (but even this is discouraged, as it encourages the creation of letters or symbols that are harder to recognize by themselves; such letters have to be part of a line of text to be recognizable).

6 elements squared = 36 letters. The idea is that there should not be more than one letter involving two straight lines, nor more than one letter involving two hooks, nor more than one involving one circle and one wave, etc. VARIATION: If two letters have the same two elements, then the first element in the first letter may be the larger of the two elements, while it may be the other element that is larger in the other letter.

Element connections

Elements may have several connection types:

outside (no connection): elements are simply near each other
inside (no connection): one element is drawn within the hollow of, but does not touch, a circle, semicircle, or hook.
end touch: one end or the other of a semicircle, straight line, hook, or wave is connected at an angle to one end or the other of another element. (Our letter "L" can be seen as two straight lines connected with an end touch.)
midpoint touch: one end or the other of a semicircle, straight line, hook, or wave is connected perpendicularly to the midpoint of another element. (Our letter "T" can be seen as two straight lines connected with a midpoint touch.)
end close: one element connects to both endpoints of a semicircle or hook. (Our letter "D" consists of a semicircle "end-closed" by a straight line. So does "P".)
crossing: two elements are laid so that the midpoint of one crosses over the midpoint of the other. (Our letter "X" is a crossing of two straight lines. The Greek letter phi, Φ, is a crossing of a circle and a straight line, while psi, Ψ, is a crossing of a semicircle and a straight line.)
fitting: one element is laid within another so that the end points of the first both touch the inside of the other. If the outer element has endpoints, the inner element does not touch either of them. (Our letter "A" can be drawn as a horizontal straight line fitted within a semicircle.)

What I wrote about my script on Zompist

I still tinker with my script from time to time, but I have no plans on adding an uppercase/lowercase distinction.

(1) The distinction is a frill, IMHO, something you don't need in a language.

(2) My conlegend is that the script for my conlang was developed by one person, most likely to make written messages harder for outsiders to read.

Drawings for my script

Older sketches:

What I wrote about my language's history

My language is going to have distinct "strata" of vocabulary. It's like English: English has a bunch of "core" words inherited from Proto-Germanic, then it has a few quasi-Teutonic words from Old Norse (like "skull" and "skip"), then it has ancient borrowings from Roman times ("cheese", "salt"), then it has words from Old French from after the Norman Conquest ("beef", "venison"), then it has learned words pieced together from Greek and Latin roots, then it has lots of words borrowed from cultures all over the world ("taboo", "spaghetti", "chateau", "moccasin", etc.), and finally it has specialized terms in science and medicine, also from Greek and Latin, but cooked up in modern times.

So my language will have strata. The bottom stratum of "core words" will be derived from English, plus a scattering of words from Spanish and Japanese and a few others. I'm working on a PHP script to take a subset of a text file I found online (on the Cambridge Mellon University website -- a text file that gives the pronunciation of thousands of English words and names, e.g., "ENGLISH IH NG G L IH SH"; each line in the file gives a word or name, which is followed by a symbol for each sound) and apply sound changes to it. I want to get the right sound changes so that I'll end up with a bunch of words that will serve as the core vocabulary of my language. For example, "WATER W AH T ER" might end up as something like "WATER G OH RH AH" after I run my finished script.

To handle other strata, I'll either get inspiration from looking through various foreign-language dictionaries, or I'll just make up words, and say that these words were borrowed into my language from somewhere, or that they began as persons' names, and that a person's name would often come to mean some attribute of the original person.

Imperatives

Just as a non-imperative verb could be marked for evidentiality (e.g., you know something happened because you saw it, or you heard someone say it happened, or you infer from evidence that it happened), an imperative verb could indicate a beneficiary. In "Have a seat," the beneficiary is the person to whom the imperative was directed ("please, make yourself comfortable"). In "Come sit with me," the beneficiary is the speaker ("do it for me, please"). In "Sit down," there might not be a beneficiary marking (and a lack of a beneficiary marking could be taken as either urgent, forceful, or rude).

Prepositions and conjunctions

First, articles should really be called prepositions, and clause markers should really be called conjunctions.

Second, you need different object prepositions. "O" indicates a regular object affected by the verb. A different preposition should mark an object where the verb doesn't affect the verb, for the difference between "I shot the deer" and "I shot at the deer [and missed]".

Third, if you call them prepositions, note that you can chain two or more prepositions together so they have one common object.

Fourth, there should be a verb-preposition for each of the two cases "as now" and "unlike now", so you can say "As now (in the present), I was sick (in narrative time)" or "Unlike now (I'm feeling better in the present), I was sick."

Also, there are only so many monosyllables in the language, so some of these might need to be two syllables long. (Well, wait: 20 C x 7 V = 140 CV, but 40 CC x 7 V = 280 CCV, 20 C x 6 VV = 120 CVV, and 40 CC x 6 VV = 240 CCVV. 140 + 280 + 120 + 240 = 780 syllables without a coda, and 780 x 4 codas = 3120 syllables with codas.)

20 C	x 7 V	= 140 CV
20 C	x 6 VV	= 120 CVV
40 CC	x 7 V