Archive for June, 2012
Letter A and numbers
Saturday, June 30th, 2012This is true enough in English, but as everyone reblogging it points out, it is not true of all languages. Some have an A by the second number.
I've got them all beat. In my constructed language Trai'Pahg'Nan'Nog, the first five of ten numbers (they use a base 6 system) all have an A in them:
Ahl, tahl, zahl, kahl, mahl, ors, ahl'ors, tahl'ors, zahl'ors, kahl'ors...
(One, two, three, four, five, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen...)
Though if you use the characters designed for the language, you'll never find the Latin letter A no matter how far you go.
Torn Tongue: Verbs Beginning with “B”
Friday, June 29th, 2012English ............ Torn Tongue
to be .................. ith
to blow ............... efe
to boil ................. ilo
to bring ............... utes
to burst ............... ebroi
The War of the Stolen Mother: Translator’s Foreword
Friday, June 29th, 2012Translator’s Foreword
Jalan Atthirari Anni
Friday, June 29th, 2012If I may step away for a moment from my regularly-scheduled Dothraki posts, today my wife and I celebrate our four year wedding anniversary (though in November we will have been together ten years). Erin has stood beside me and supported me ever since we’ve been together—and that can’t have been easy. She supported me when I decided to leave graduate school to teach community college. She supported me again when I decided to leave teaching to write, with little to no prospects. She supported me yet again when I left off writing to apply for the Dothraki job, and continued to support me as I had to tell friends and family vague details about my doing “something” that was “work”, though I couldn’t tell them anything about it. It’s not a prototypical path to success (looking back, in fact, it sounds rather like the exact opposite)—and who knows how it’ll pan out five to ten years down the line—but Erin’s steadfast support and encouragement have been instrumental in my being able to muddle my way through a taxing (to say the least) decade—not to mention her linguistic expertise. (It’s great to have someone I can talk to about conlang problems!)
I’ve tried my best to thank Erin along the way however I could (I’ve already mentioned how the word erin, “good, kind”, was coined in her honor, as was alegra, “duck” [her middle name]), but I don’t think I’ve done so publicly, so I figure this is as good an opportunity to do so as any.
Erin: Thank you so much for four wonderful years of marriage, and close to ten wonderful years together. Yer jalan atthirari anni. Every day I get to spend with you is a day worth living. Anha zhilak yera nakhaan, ma hash anha laz et mae, hash anha akemok ma yeroon save. Happy anniversary!
Recent Developments in Kahtsaai
Thursday, June 28th, 2012In the last few months I have been focusing almost entirely on Kahtsaai vocabulary, and allowing that to drive any tweaks to the grammar. At this point, I consider the skeleton of the grammar complete, wanting only a lot more detail for certain sections.
The Imperfective
For most of its life Kahtsaai has had a single primary verb of motion, ló, which was usually marked with either the trans- or cis-locative prefix to distinguish go and come. This turns out to be typologically very rare, which was fine, but I finally started to find it annoying, so I added aas come. The form kóh-ló is still available for come, but it cannot be used when the speaker means "right here where we're talking now," which is aas's core meaning.
At the same time aas was coming into being, I was getting a bit annoyed about the regularity of the imperfective marker, -na. I did not want to add massive irregularity, but it just wasn't sitting right all by itself. So, I added a small number of verbs which take the imperfective in -rá/-réÃ. The choice between the two forms depends on things like stem syllable weight and compensatory lengthening after certain assimilations, but for practical purposes should be considered irregular. In a last act of randomness, I seriously modified aas, giving it an imperfective of saréÃ. Finally, an imperfective in -rá becomes -réà when the adverbial suffix -ne/-hte is added, always resulting in -réÃn. This parallels the -na > -naan change.
I have confined the -rá/-réà forms to intransitive verbs of motion ("come," "flow"), location and posture ("stand," "hang") and weather ("lightening"). I don't expect that to change. Right now only thirteen verbs have this new imperfective. Probably a few more will enter this class over time, but I doubt it will be too many.
Postpositions and Verbs do the Frame Dance
I recently added the postposition -próh. It is imagined that at one point in its history it covered certain meanings one expects of the dative, but by about, say, a half a millennium ago it was confined to marking the experiencer of certain verbs of emotion or judgement. For example, léÃkou means insipid, flavorless, boring. With -próh one can say someone is bored,
Ra'é tápróh heléÃkou. ra'é tá-próh he-léÃkou that.INAN 1SG-to 3INAN-be.insipid That bores me.
The postposition now also marks the judicantis role, that is, the person in whose judgement a statement holds true.
Táttá aapróh máámo Å‚akÃntsááłtsi wé. tá-ttá aa-próh máámo Å‚a-kÃ-n-tsááł-ts wé 1SG-father 3AN.SG-to money TRNS-3INAN.S-3INAN-misuse-EVID this To my father, this is a waste of money.
In thinking about the core uses for -próh an interesting commonality has developed, where a stative verb takes the "detransitive of causative" marking -rÃi-se and is then used with -próh to mark the induction of some state in a person. For example, láhme means "be angry, be unpleasant," but rather than taking the causative for "to anger," instead this -rÃi-se form is used, tápróh yoláhmerÃise he made me angry. I'm expecting to see more of the construction X-próh Vstative-rÃi-se in the future.
Finally, I have started thinking more about the frames of new and existing vocabulary, and making sure I have examples covering expected uses. One result of this is that the postposition -por, "seeking after, wanting," is now used mark the ultimate goal for purposive action. For example, the verb móka means "trick" or "deceive." The postposition -por marks the goal of the deception if that is expressed,
Yokatmókats máámo onpor pá. yo-kat-móka-ts máámo on-por pá 3AN.SG-1PL-trick-EVID money 3INAN-wanting PTCL He tricked us for the money.
This week makes me want to give into the "40 words for snow" syndrome, and create a rich vocabulary to describe my own emotional state when experiencing 95-100F days and very high humidity. I'm also trying to think up a good way to express "at stake, on the line," as in the phrase, "when your life is at stake." This is a subtle one.
Recent Developments in Kahtsaai
Thursday, June 28th, 2012In the last few months I have been focusing almost entirely on Kahtsaai vocabulary, and allowing that to drive any tweaks to the grammar. At this point, I consider the skeleton of the grammar complete, wanting only a lot more detail for certain sections.
The Imperfective
For most of its life Kahtsaai has had a single primary verb of motion, ló, which was usually marked with either the trans- or cis-locative prefix to distinguish go and come. This turns out to be typologically very rare, which was fine, but I finally started to find it annoying, so I added aas come. The form kóh-ló is still available for come, but it cannot be used when the speaker means "right here where we're talking now," which is aas's core meaning.
At the same time aas was coming into being, I was getting a bit annoyed about the regularity of the imperfective marker, -na. I did not want to add massive irregularity, but it just wasn't sitting right all by itself. So, I added a small number of verbs which take the imperfective in -rá/-réÃ. The choice between the two forms depends on things like stem syllable weight and compensatory lengthening after certain assimilations, but for practical purposes should be considered irregular. In a last act of randomness, I seriously modified aas, giving it an imperfective of saréÃ. Finally, an imperfective in -rá becomes -réà when the adverbial suffix -ne/-hte is added, always resulting in -réÃn. This parallels the -na > -naan change.
I have confined the -rá/-réà forms to intransitive verbs of motion ("come," "flow"), location and posture ("stand," "hang") and weather ("lightening"). I don't expect that to change. Right now only thirteen verbs have this new imperfective. Probably a few more will enter this class over time, but I doubt it will be too many.
Postpositions and Verbs do the Frame Dance
I recently added the postposition -próh. It is imagined that at one point in its history it covered certain meanings one expects of the dative, but by about, say, a half a millennium ago it was confined to marking the experiencer of certain verbs of emotion or judgement. For example, léÃkou means insipid, flavorless, boring. With -próh one can say someone is bored,
Ra'é tápróh heléÃkou. ra'é tá-próh he-léÃkou that.INAN 1SG-to 3INAN-be.insipid That bores me.
The postposition now also marks the judicantis role, that is, the person in whose judgement a statement holds true.
Táttá aapróh máámo Å‚akÃntsááłtsi wé. tá-ttá aa-próh máámo Å‚a-kÃ-n-tsááł-ts wé 1SG-father 3AN.SG-to money TRNS-3INAN.S-3INAN-misuse-EVID this To my father, this is a waste of money.
In thinking about the core uses for -próh an interesting commonality has developed, where a stative verb takes the "detransitive of causative" marking -rÃi-se and is then used with -próh to mark the induction of some state in a person. For example, láhme means "be angry, be unpleasant," but rather than taking the causative for "to anger," instead this -rÃi-se form is used, tápróh yoláhmerÃise he made me angry. I'm expecting to see more of the construction X-próh Vstative-rÃi-se in the future.
Finally, I have started thinking more about the frames of new and existing vocabulary, and making sure I have examples covering expected uses. One result of this is that the postposition -por, "seeking after, wanting," is now used mark the ultimate goal for purposive action. For example, the verb móka means "trick" or "deceive." The postposition -por marks the goal of the deception if that is expressed,
Yokatmókats máámo onpor pá. yo-kat-móka-ts máámo on-por pá 3AN.SG-1PL-trick-EVID money 3INAN-wanting PTCL He tricked us for the money.
This week makes me want to give into the "40 words for snow" syndrome, and create a rich vocabulary to describe my own emotional state when experiencing 95-100F days and very high humidity. I'm also trying to think up a good way to express "at stake, on the line," as in the phrase, "when your life is at stake." This is a subtle one.
Recent Developments in Kahtsaai
Thursday, June 28th, 2012In the last few months I have been focusing almost entirely on Kahtsaai vocabulary, and allowing that to drive any tweaks to the grammar. At this point, I consider the skeleton of the grammar complete, wanting only a lot more detail for certain sections.
The Imperfective
For most of its life Kahtsaai has had a single primary verb of motion, ló, which was usually marked with either the trans- or cis-locative prefix to distinguish go and come. This turns out to be typologically very rare, which was fine, but I finally started to find it annoying, so I added aas come. The form kóh-ló is still available for come, but it cannot be used when the speaker means "right here where we're talking now," which is aas's core meaning.
At the same time aas was coming into being, I was getting a bit annoyed about the regularity of the imperfective marker, -na. I did not want to add massive irregularity, but it just wasn't sitting right all by itself. So, I added a small number of verbs which take the imperfective in -rá/-réÃ. The choice between the two forms depends on things like stem syllable weight and compensatory lengthening after certain assimilations, but for practical purposes should be considered irregular. In a last act of randomness, I seriously modified aas, giving it an imperfective of saréÃ. Finally, an imperfective in -rá becomes -réà when the adverbial suffix -ne/-hte is added, always resulting in -réÃn. This parallels the -na > -naan change.
I have confined the -rá/-réà forms to intransitive verbs of motion ("come," "flow"), location and posture ("stand," "hang") and weather ("lightening"). I don't expect that to change. Right now only thirteen verbs have this new imperfective. Probably a few more will enter this class over time, but I doubt it will be too many.
Postpositions and Verbs do the Frame Dance
I recently added the postposition -próh. It is imagined that at one point in its history it covered certain meanings one expects of the dative, but by about, say, a half a millennium ago it was confined to marking the experiencer of certain verbs of emotion or judgement. For example, léÃkou means insipid, flavorless, boring. With -próh one can say someone is bored,
Ra'é tápróh heléÃkou. ra'é tá-próh he-léÃkou that.INAN 1SG-to 3INAN-be.insipid That bores me.
The postposition now also marks the judicantis role, that is, the person in whose judgement a statement holds true.
Táttá aapróh máámo Å‚akÃntsááłtsi wé. tá-ttá aa-próh máámo Å‚a-kÃ-n-tsááł-ts wé 1SG-father 3AN.SG-to money TRNS-3INAN.S-3INAN-misuse-EVID this To my father, this is a waste of money.
In thinking about the core uses for -próh an interesting commonality has developed, where a stative verb takes the "detransitive of causative" marking -rÃi-se and is then used with -próh to mark the induction of some state in a person. For example, láhme means "be angry, be unpleasant," but rather than taking the causative for "to anger," instead this -rÃi-se form is used, tápróh yoláhmerÃise he made me angry. I'm expecting to see more of the construction X-próh Vstative-rÃi-se in the future.
Finally, I have started thinking more about the frames of new and existing vocabulary, and making sure I have examples covering expected uses. One result of this is that the postposition -por, "seeking after, wanting," is now used mark the ultimate goal for purposive action. For example, the verb móka means "trick" or "deceive." The postposition -por marks the goal of the deception if that is expressed,
Yokatmókats máámo onpor pá. yo-kat-móka-ts máámo on-por pá 3AN.SG-1PL-trick-EVID money 3INAN-wanting PTCL He tricked us for the money.
This week makes me want to give into the "40 words for snow" syndrome, and create a rich vocabulary to describe my own emotional state when experiencing 95-100F days and very high humidity. I'm also trying to think up a good way to express "at stake, on the line," as in the phrase, "when your life is at stake." This is a subtle one.
Recent Developments in Kahtsaai
Thursday, June 28th, 2012In the last few months I have been focusing almost entirely on Kahtsaai vocabulary, and allowing that to drive any tweaks to the grammar. At this point, I consider the skeleton of the grammar complete, wanting only a lot more detail for certain sections.
The Imperfective
For most of its life Kahtsaai has had a single primary verb of motion, ló, which was usually marked with either the trans- or cis-locative prefix to distinguish go and come. This turns out to be typologically very rare, which was fine, but I finally started to find it annoying, so I added aas come. The form kóh-ló is still available for come, but it cannot be used when the speaker means "right here where we're talking now," which is aas's core meaning.
At the same time aas was coming into being, I was getting a bit annoyed about the regularity of the imperfective marker, -na. I did not want to add massive irregularity, but it just wasn't sitting right all by itself. So, I added a small number of verbs which take the imperfective in -rá/-réÃ. The choice between the two forms depends on things like stem syllable weight and compensatory lengthening after certain assimilations, but for practical purposes should be considered irregular. In a last act of randomness, I seriously modified aas, giving it an imperfective of saréÃ. Finally, an imperfective in -rá becomes -réà when the adverbial suffix -ne/-hte is added, always resulting in -réÃn. This parallels the -na > -naan change.
I have confined the -rá/-réà forms to intransitive verbs of motion ("come," "flow"), location and posture ("stand," "hang") and weather ("lightening"). I don't expect that to change. Right now only thirteen verbs have this new imperfective. Probably a few more will enter this class over time, but I doubt it will be too many.
Postpositions and Verbs do the Frame Dance
I recently added the postposition -próh. It is imagined that at one point in its history it covered certain meanings one expects of the dative, but by about, say, a half a millennium ago it was confined to marking the experiencer of certain verbs of emotion or judgement. For example, léÃkou means insipid, flavorless, boring. With -próh one can say someone is bored,
Ra'é tápróh heléÃkou. ra'é tá-próh he-léÃkou that.INAN 1SG-to 3INAN-be.insipid That bores me.
The postposition now also marks the judicantis role, that is, the person in whose judgement a statement holds true.
Táttá aapróh máámo Å‚akÃntsááłtsi wé. tá-ttá aa-próh máámo Å‚a-kÃ-n-tsááł-ts wé 1SG-father 3AN.SG-to money TRNS-3INAN.S-3INAN-misuse-EVID this To my father, this is a waste of money.
In thinking about the core uses for -próh an interesting commonality has developed, where a stative verb takes the "detransitive of causative" marking -rÃi-se and is then used with -próh to mark the induction of some state in a person. For example, láhme means "be angry, be unpleasant," but rather than taking the causative for "to anger," instead this -rÃi-se form is used, tápróh yoláhmerÃise he made me angry. I'm expecting to see more of the construction X-próh Vstative-rÃi-se in the future.
Finally, I have started thinking more about the frames of new and existing vocabulary, and making sure I have examples covering expected uses. One result of this is that the postposition -por, "seeking after, wanting," is now used mark the ultimate goal for purposive action. For example, the verb móka means "trick" or "deceive." The postposition -por marks the goal of the deception if that is expressed,
Yokatmókats máámo onpor pá. yo-kat-móka-ts máámo on-por pá 3AN.SG-1PL-trick-EVID money 3INAN-wanting PTCL He tricked us for the money.
This week makes me want to give into the "40 words for snow" syndrome, and create a rich vocabulary to describe my own emotional state when experiencing 95-100F days and very high humidity. I'm also trying to think up a good way to express "at stake, on the line," as in the phrase, "when your life is at stake." This is a subtle one.
Recent Developments in Kahtsaai
Thursday, June 28th, 2012In the last few months I have been focusing almost entirely on Kahtsaai vocabulary, and allowing that to drive any tweaks to the grammar. At this point, I consider the skeleton of the grammar complete, wanting only a lot more detail for certain sections.
The Imperfective
For most of its life Kahtsaai has had a single primary verb of motion, ló, which was usually marked with either the trans- or cis-locative prefix to distinguish go and come. This turns out to be typologically very rare, which was fine, but I finally started to find it annoying, so I added aas come. The form kóh-ló is still available for come, but it cannot be used when the speaker means "right here where we're talking now," which is aas's core meaning.
At the same time aas was coming into being, I was getting a bit annoyed about the regularity of the imperfective marker, -na. I did not want to add massive irregularity, but it just wasn't sitting right all by itself. So, I added a small number of verbs which take the imperfective in -rá/-réÃ. The choice between the two forms depends on things like stem syllable weight and compensatory lengthening after certain assimilations, but for practical purposes should be considered irregular. In a last act of randomness, I seriously modified aas, giving it an imperfective of saréÃ. Finally, an imperfective in -rá becomes -réà when the adverbial suffix -ne/-hte is added, always resulting in -réÃn. This parallels the -na > -naan change.
I have confined the -rá/-réà forms to intransitive verbs of motion ("come," "flow"), location and posture ("stand," "hang") and weather ("lightening"). I don't expect that to change. Right now only thirteen verbs have this new imperfective. Probably a few more will enter this class over time, but I doubt it will be too many.
Postpositions and Verbs do the Frame Dance
I recently added the postposition -próh. It is imagined that at one point in its history it covered certain meanings one expects of the dative, but by about, say, a half a millennium ago it was confined to marking the experiencer of certain verbs of emotion or judgement. For example, léÃkou means insipid, flavorless, boring. With -próh one can say someone is bored,
Ra'é tápróh heléÃkou. ra'é tá-próh he-léÃkou that.INAN 1SG-to 3INAN-be.insipid That bores me.
The postposition now also marks the judicantis role, that is, the person in whose judgement a statement holds true.
Táttá aapróh máámo Å‚akÃntsááłtsi wé. tá-ttá aa-próh máámo Å‚a-kÃ-n-tsááł-ts wé 1SG-father 3AN.SG-to money TRNS-3INAN.S-3INAN-misuse-EVID this To my father, this is a waste of money.
In thinking about the core uses for -próh an interesting commonality has developed, where a stative verb takes the "detransitive of causative" marking -rÃi-se and is then used with -próh to mark the induction of some state in a person. For example, láhme means "be angry, be unpleasant," but rather than taking the causative for "to anger," instead this -rÃi-se form is used, tápróh yoláhmerÃise he made me angry. I'm expecting to see more of the construction X-próh Vstative-rÃi-se in the future.
Finally, I have started thinking more about the frames of new and existing vocabulary, and making sure I have examples covering expected uses. One result of this is that the postposition -por, "seeking after, wanting," is now used mark the ultimate goal for purposive action. For example, the verb móka means "trick" or "deceive." The postposition -por marks the goal of the deception if that is expressed,
Yokatmókats máámo onpor pá. yo-kat-móka-ts máámo on-por pá 3AN.SG-1PL-trick-EVID money 3INAN-wanting PTCL He tricked us for the money.
This week makes me want to give into the "40 words for snow" syndrome, and create a rich vocabulary to describe my own emotional state when experiencing 95-100F days and very high humidity. I'm also trying to think up a good way to express "at stake, on the line," as in the phrase, "when your life is at stake." This is a subtle one.
Anha Tihak Yera
Thursday, June 28th, 2012Little multiconlingual pun there for you. A while back, I was profiled on the CNN show The Next List. When I was prepping for the show, they asked me if I could get some videos of fans speaking Dothraki—about a minute, they said. I don’t think they understood just how long a full minute is, because the videos (supplied by our own Hrakkar and Daenerys) only show up on screen for a few seconds, and they had to do a lot of work to produce (and pronounce!) a full minute of Dothraki dialogue. It was a lot of work (and hopefully fun!), and since you only get to see a very little bit on the show, I thought I’d put both videos up here.
The first is Hrakkar’s video, which is actually a reading of the LCC4 conlang relay text I did for the Fourth Language Creation Conference. The text is called Dorvi Zichome, or “The Disrespectful Goat”, and here it is:
Right on! Dig the lion décor. (By the way, sorry the still image it starts with is a bit pixellated. No idea thy it’s doing that—or why I can’t embed my own darn videos and have to go through Photobucket. Hope you have flash, if you’re reading this… When is HTML5 getting here?!)
(Update: I believe I fixed the image problem. The funny thing [for me] is that I fixed this problem before this post was ever posted, so no one but me ever actually saw the problem. Ha, ha… Anha nemo allayafak…)
Our next video is from Daenerys, who wrote her own script, which must have taken quite a while!
Thanks so much to Dany and Hrakkar! Anha chomak yeri ma anha vemerak ma athhajaraan ma oakahaan yeri!
In other news, I’m going to speaking at the American Mensa Annual Gathering next week. I believe you have to be a Mensa member to attend, but if you are (and you’re going to be in Reno), stop on by!
Recently, I participated in the Conlangery podcast where we discussed Dothraki and growing a lexicon. You can listen to the podcast here. I also did an interview with Saul Gonzalez over at KCRW today. Not sure when it’ll be going up, but when I get word, I’ll let everyone know. Finally, last weekend I gave a conlang workshop at WyrdCon 2012. The convention was a lot of fun, and I got an INCREDIBLE medallion—just for attending! Everyone who attended got one of these (it was the equivalent of a name badge at other conventions). Check it out:
That’s metal—die cut. I honestly wish I was the type of person that wore necklaces and that I had a reason (and the wherewithal) to wear this around. I’m going to do something with it; just not sure what yet.
Oh, but yeah. The whole reason this came up is because I did an interview (or a couple of them) while I was at WyrdCon, and you can read a post about one of them here. (By the way, shout out to Brittany Hanson, who works for the Garden Grove Journal—my local hometown paper! If you go there right now you can read about my old high school’s baseball team winning the CIF championship this year. Go Mariners!)
Also, I recently started a Tumblr account. Not sure where it’ll go, but if you’d like to follow me there, you can do so here.
The Dothraki lexicon and reference grammar document just ticked over to 300 pages yesterday! The language continues to grow, albeit slowly as I’ve gotten bogged down with other work. Until next time, hajas!