Conlangers

leya

• (n.) rock, stone

Ale ei i leya oala takepalaki.
“Because I’m a mean talking rock.”

Notes: Hee, hee… This is my favorite line from the LCC2 Relay.

So this is the iku I was talking about yesterday. It’s kind of a combination of le and ia which…I don’t have an entry for?! Holy smoke! Okay, that’s coming next. Anyone, it’s like a combo of those two without the overline. It’s clearly different from lea, though, so I don’t see why I needed the notch on lea… Oh well. As I said, I like the cut of its jib.

Example: Emi’he’ny aservyxan min’la’mesit’sil milhan’het duixlanha’ja ,mi’la’uta se ja mje, het lajitax.
Supporter-PL azerbaijan 3PL-PST-SBJ-cry match Germany-AGAINST ,3S-PST-finish 6 against 1, later(PST).
It is possible that Azerbaijan fans cried after the match against Germany which ended 6:1.

The German national team defeated Azerbaijan 6:1. A good match, and I think a good example for what Rejistanis would call a jisu’het.

Since the word for “to cry” is a bit feeble in terms of what I can say about it (with the exception that I remember creating it for a WorldVision Song Contest), I will not dwell on it for too long. Sil’he is someone who cries and sil’het means tears (it is a mass noun in rejistanian) and sil’tan the process of crying.

Now, I can explain something, I have neglected when talking about the world cup earlier this year. Sometimes, things are so entrenched in the language of someone that they never are questioned. One of these things was that match results have a word between the 2 scores, eg: sechs zu eins (six to one). I never talked about soccer in English or French when I started creating Rejistanian. As such, when the Rejistanis entered the NS World cup, they formed match results like the Germans, except that they use ja (against) instead of zu. It took me a while and a few misunderstandings on IRC to learn that the English do not need such a crutch. Saying that the match ended “six-one” is not colloquial here. BTW: This makes is quite hard to explain to English-speakers what my email-address means. 0zu31 was a rahohu’het, it refers the highest loss in an international soccer match (American Samoa had a not-quite-great day against Australia), the alternative address, which I use for the mailing lists is as bad, but refers to the highest domestic loss ever (it’s a strange story). At the time, I thought that the email address was quite clever, but its cleverness unfortunately cannot scale the language barrier.

EDIT: I forgot to clarify something:

( xvedejas) MalfermitaKodo, what meaning of “to cry”
( xvedejas) as in “to weep” or “to shout”?
( xvedejas) article makes it seem “to weep”, okay

Exactly that meaning! Sorry, I tend to forget that “to cry” can be used for shouting.

lea

• (pron.) he (3rd person singular masculine pronoun)

Ka hekala ei i lea ae noala ke ine oku!
“I told him to sing but he wouldn’t!”

Notes: Another day, another pronoun.

I’ve decided to include a bit of grammar in today’s post. The example sentence above makes use of an object control verb. In these constructions, the direct object of the verb (in this case hekala, “to tell”) is coreferent with the subject of the following clause, but is still an argument of the matrix verb. In the case of Kamakawi, the use of the subject status marker ae carries the object pronoun over as the new subject, so it’s not quite the same mechanism as English object control verbs, but it achieves the same function.

You’ll also notice that that second clause lacks a k-. The deal is that that activity (the singing, in this case) isn’t completed, therefore it doesn’t take k-, no matter when it did (or didn’t) take place. Though Kamakawi lacks a subjunctive, this, at least, is marked in some way.

That’s how object control verbs work in Kamakawi. Hooray!

Quick comment on the iku. I got no idea what’s going on here. I think what I thought is that I had used this shape before, and so I added a little notch to differentiate it. But now that I’m looking back, I’m pretty sure I haven’t used this precise shape before… The closest is the iku for leya, but even that one’s slightly different. Oh well. The notch is cool. I likes it.

Example: Hej mi’la’onje lajitax altena ,mi’la’hadada sydi niltena, lija.
Person 3S-PST-laugh late(PST) SUP ,3S-PST-understand fast NEGSUP, reason.
The person laughs last because s/he understood least fast.

I am not sure how I created this word. It is one of the words, which does not sound like the thing it represents. But these words need to exist as well. “Big” does not sound big, “small” does not sound small, “mager” does not sound slim or thin. This and my conservatism concerning rejistanian means that the word remains, ugly or not.

falele

• (n.) forest
• (adj.) green
• (v.) to be green
• (n.) greenness
• (n.) foliage, greenery

U ala ie falele.
“Then we arrive at the forest.”

Notes: So I have a funny story about this word. For the Second Inverse Relay, Arthaey Angosii (creator of Asha’illewas using Kamakawi.

Oh, wait, let me back up. In an inverse relay, participant A translates a text into participant B’s language, then sends it to participant B. Participant B decodes the message, and translates it into participant C’s language, then passing it on to C, and so on. So everyone is using someone else’s language. It’s a lot of fun!

Okay, back to the matter at hand. Arthaey translated what should have been a very simple sentence—the one you see above. When translating it for myself, though, I looked at falele and thought, for some reason, that it just meant “grass”. It, of course, does not. I racked my brain trying to figure out what the heck “We then arrive at the grass” meant, finally assuming that she meant “grass plains”. In my version, then, I translated it into something like “grass plains” (in Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen, which was the language I was using) and passed it on.

Of course, she actually meant “forest”, which seems reasonable, since that’s what falele actually means! What a hoot. There I was, flummoxed by a word that I myself had created—and one that I should know right off the top of my head. That one deserves to go in the conlang blooper reel.

The word for “green” was a later addition to the Kamakawi color system, which is why it was derived from the word for “forest” or “foliage”. Hmm… Foliage sounds good to my right now. Leafiness. I wonder where it is to be had here in Southern California…