Conlangers

For the past few days, I have been retranslating the story by Aesop, “The North Wind and the Sun”. Click to read it. While translating, two things came up to consider:

• How does Ayeri deal with gender resolution (Corbett 243–253)?
• How does Ayeri handle “the … the …” and “as … as …” constructions? Does it have them at all, or will rephrasing be necessary when translating from e.g. English?

Regarding the latter question, there is a blog article, “Correlative Conjunctions” (2012-12-10), but it fails to account for the two combinations mentioned above.

One thing that could be interesting is to have the passive more sensitive to the semantic role of the object of the verb; thus, objects that are stimuli acquire different passive markers than objects that are patients, etc.

But what if we want to mark a subject's role with similar precision? Simple, use a voice that turns the subject into an object (and drops the regular object, and makes the verb lack subject), then stack the passive on top of it, giving us the following:

verb_stem-antiactive-passive[semantic role]

Just like how scholars compared Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit to come up with Proto-Indo-European, why don’t you make a proto-language tying together Basque and Georgian?

This should be called Comparative Ancient Kartvelo-Euskaran.

Congrats, you now have CAKE to go with your PIE.

Consider a morpheme along the lines of English 'too'. This word has multiple meanings:

~even: a baboon, too, was set to appear on stage ~ even a baboon was set to appear on stage

~also: me too!

~exceeding some kind of limit: that is too big

Historically, too is the same as to, but has gone through slightly different sound changes in most dialects due to different prosodical situations obtaining for the different meanings. Now, cognates to to are used for slightly different meanings as well:

en till: one more (as in one to (the ones already counted/included))

to, obviously, also has a locative and dative meaning. To me this suggests a nice little thing for a language with postpositions: conflate the (singular) dative, the nominative plural, and something along the line of -que (morphemes similar to -que exist in Finnish (-kin), and Georgian (-ts), so I am convinced they're not all that unusual elsewhere either). Obviously it's no huge idea or anything, but it's the kind of nice little twist that has an air of realism to it, while also not being quite identical to, say, English conflating plurals, singular genitives and plural genitives.

Description

Christian Gainsley needs a magical language for a fantasy short story or novel. A number of phrases (approx. 20) will be needed. These phrases are derivative of four utterances which were spoken at the creation of the world. The initial four utterances will not be needed (they would be very long and will not be revealed), but there needs to be a sufficient system to allow these phrases to exist and be manipulated as necessary. Employer is willing to take input from the conlanger as to the details on how the language would work.

Email c <dot> kosasa <at> gmail <dot> com

sekasus = secret (noun) (Some things Google found for "sekasus": a rare to unusual term; user names; may possibly mean something untranslatable in Indonesian; similar sukses means success in Indonesian; 1905 telegraph cipher code for a specific number of boxes of a specific size of citrus fruit; similar Sekasua is the name of a place in Ghana)

Word derivation for "secret" :
Basque = sekretu, Finnish = salaisuus
Miresua = sekasus

This is a new word. The Basque word may be a borrowed word, or may be derived from Latin.

I found the word secret once in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, it's in a verse read by the White Rabbit at the court of justice.

"Don't let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me."

I’m not really comfortable answering this in public, but message me off anon and I’ll tell you!