janahan
On to sentence eight of the Babel text:
il tamma ien rēha ñatta janahan ja se jaþēŋŋe jacē lā;
The unfamiliar words are janahan, jaþēŋŋe, and lā.
janahan is an indefinite pronoun meaning “something” or “anything”.
“Then he said, they will make anything that …”
fiti
Fiti iko etielele!
“This winter is cold!”
Notes: HAAAAAAAAAAPPY CATURYEAR! 
I’m back home with my cat! It’s a wonderful day! Keli was hiding under the bed when we came in, but once she was sure that it was really us, and we were really back, she came out meowing! Not only did she sleep on the bed again, she stayed there the entire night. And since then, she’s been getting plenty of snuggles and love from us:
What a cat! Don’t let her expression fool you: She’s loving it!
It’s been quite an up and down year. The up was up, but, man, was the down down… Looking forward to a little more up next year.
Here’s hoping.
jala = festival (noun) (some things Google found for "jala": a very common term; an uncommon last name; JALA is an acronym for Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation; Jala Bars all natural probiotic frozen yogurt bars; Beit Jala (means "grass carpet" in Aramaic) is an Arab Christian town in the West Bank; Jala Neti nasal irrigation; JALA International does telework and telecommuting; Roti Jala (net bread) is a Malaysian dish; means "on foot" in Estonian; means "net" in Malay; in Spanish conjugations of the verb "to pull"; the name of cities in India, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sierra Leone)
I previously wrote a little intro to this conlang which you can read here: New Conlang: Qekrii. It tells a little of the backstory of why I created it and who speaks it, and has a brief overview of the phonology and phonotactics.
First I’ll go over each section of a Qekrii syllable, and then you’ll see some phonetic charts at the bottom. You can skip to those if you like =)
In the next post on Qekrii, I’ll go over the orthography I’ve chosen.
This article uses IPA symbols to represents sounds. You can find out more about the IPA here on Wikipedia. Links to Wikipedia are provided throughout the post for various linguistics terms.
As mentioned previously, Qekrii has three sets of consonants, which are used in different parts of the syllable. There is one set of consonants always used for the onset, one set optionally used as a second onset to form a cluster, and one set used as an optional coda. These groups do not overlap.
In Qekrii, syllables must begin with one of these consonants (They may not begin in a vowel). This set of consonants consists of four plosives and four fricatives. None of these are voiced. They contrast in their place of articulation: labial, alveolar, velar, and glottal.
The plosives are p, t, k, ʔ. The fricatives are ɸ, s, x, h.
Syllable onsets may be made into consonant clusters with the four consonants of this second set, which includes a voiced labiovelar approximant [w], a palatal approximant [j] (which has a velar approximant [ɰ] as an allophone), an alveolar trill [r], and a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ].
Qekrii has eleven vowels, five tense and six lax (though one is an allophone and is sometimes not counted “officially”). The lax vowels are more central/open than the tense vowels. A syllable nucleus may contain only one vowel.
Whenever the syllable is open, the vowel is tense. When the syllable is closed, the vowel is lax.
| Tense-Lax Vowel Pairs | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| orthography | a | e | i | o | u |
| tense [IPA] | [a] | [e] | [i] | [o] | [ɯ] |
| lax [IPA] | [æ] | [ɛ / ə] | [ɪ] | [ɔ] | [ʊ] |
The third set of consonants is used exclusively for the syllable coda, which is optional. They are all nasals which contrast in their place of articulation (identical to the first set of onset consonants but for the last, but only because there’s no such thing as a glottal nasal =)): labial, alveolar, velar, and uvular.
| Consonants | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| labial | alveolar | velar | uvular | glottal | |
| plosive | [p] | [t] | [k] | [ʔ] | |
| fricative | [ɸ] | [s] | [x] | [h] | |
| approx. | [w] | [j/ɰ] | |||
| trill | [r] | ||||
| lat.fric. | [ɬ] | ||||
| nasal | [m] | [n] | [ŋ] | [ɴ] | |
| Vowels | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| front | near-front | central | near-back | back | |
| close | [i] | [ɯ] | |||
| near-close | [ɪ] | [ʊ] | |||
| close-mid | [e] | [o] | |||
| mid | [ə] | ||||
| open-mid | [ɛ] | [ɔ] | |||
| near-open | [æ] | ||||
| open | [a] | ||||
Related posts:
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Soreral kajalo atiečagai: Točemkuda, rigidžolo dželamžasa en ralo tetea jakamžasatu, kaja. Rigidžon idžian-am en kakarun maltan-am dželaeča.
Talajyn: Rigidžon idžian-am en kakarun maltan-am dželaeča.
Gloss: bricks stone-not and tar mortar-not make
English: They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Instead of using a verb meaning “to use”, Talajyn repeats the same verb “make” from the previous sentence, and uses the dative/instrumental case on the nouns. The sentence actually means something more like “[They] made [it] using brick, not stone, and tar, not mortar.” The “they” and “it” are implied/understood by context.
The “en” (and) is not necessary; the sentence would still be grammatical without it.
rigidžo-n
brick(s)-[dative/instrumental]
idžia-n-am en
stone(s)-[dative/instrumental]-no/not and
kakaru-n
tar-[dative/instrumental]
malta-n-am
mortar-[dative/instrumental]-no/not
džela-eča
make-[honorific distant past]
Related posts:
jānne
OK. Last post on the seventh sentence of the Babel text:
il tamma ien ē pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna ī la ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha pa jāo jānne;
jānne means “beginning” and modifies jāo, and the phrase pa jāo jānne modifies ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha. I mentioned yesterday that jāo refers to pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna “the people have unity and they have only one language”. So that state is the beginning of ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha “the doable deeds that they will do”.
“And he said: the people have unity and they have only one language and the deeds they will do have this as a beginning.”
And that’s all for the seventh sentence. Yay!
kiokuku
Kiko i kiokuku!
“It’s nothing day!”
Notes: HAPPY NOTHING DAY!
The change of the moon from one phase to its opposite doesn’t always line up exactly with fourteen days. So it may happen that neki has come, but the moon isn’t full (or new, depending on where one started from). When that happens, the village chief declares a kiokuku.
A kiokuku is a kind of holiday, where anything goes. And since its declaration is dependent entirely on the discretion of those keeping track of the calendar, you can sometimes get several kiokuku in a row. And it will frequently happen that different islands which don’t communicate with each other regularly enough will end up being on different days. When that happens, one or the other of them will declare however many kiokuku are necessary to get the two calendars in sync again.
That (referring to all the calendar posts) is the Kamakawi calendar in a nutshell (at least, before the coming of the Zhyler speakers).
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Soreral kajalo atiečagai: Točemkuda, rigidžolo dželamžasa en ralo tetea jakamžasatu, kaja. Rigidžon idžian-am en kakarun maltan-am dželaeča.
Talajyn: Točemkuda, rigidžolo dželamžasa en ralo tetea jakamžasatu, kaja.
Gloss: come, bricks make and them thoroughly bake, this
English: “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”
This section is pretty similar to the English, except that I gave the verbs “make” and “bake” different endings. The verb “make” has just an honorific future ending; taken together with the imperative “Come”, it gives the sense of a very polite command, perhaps to a superior or in distinguished company: “Come, we will make bricks”. The “we” is understood by context.
The second verb, “bake”, has the honorific future ending plus a hortative ending. The phrase “ralo jakamžasatu”, “them bake[future][horative]” is more of a request than a command: “Let’s bake them!” So taking the two phrases and slightly different endings in mind, we have something connoting a translation more like “Come, we will make bricks, and let’s bake them thoroughly!”
There are a lot of different ways I could have phrased this, like using the hortative on both or no verbs, or not using an imperative at all, but I took some artistic license and like the connotative result! =)
You may be wondering what the “this” on the end is for. It’s one way of quoting someone in Talajyn, and signals the end of the quote. Think of it this way: “Here’s what they said: Blah blah blah <--this." The word doesn't take any case endings; it's just a plain "kaja"/"this", the proximal demonstrative pronoun.
Now, word-for-word:
toč-emkuda
toča is “to come”, “emkuda” (replacing the ending vowel of the verb) is the honorific imperative ending
rigidžo-lo
brick(s)-[accusative]
džela-mžasa
make/build-[honorific future]
en ra-lo
and [3rd-person singular pronoun]-[accusative]
tete-a
“teteu” means thoroughly; you change the last vowel to match the modified verb; in this case, “jaka” (bake)
jaka-mžasa-tu
bake-[honorific future]-hortative
I’ll do the last sentence next time. Questions? Comments? Please to share below.
Related posts:
jāo
Still on the seventh sentence of the Babel text:
il tamma ien ē pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna ī la ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha pa jāo jānne;
jāo is an abstract pronoun or rather a pronoun that refers to an abstraction. In this sentence jāo refers to pa mēli anānīke ī pa sāim antaxōni ān tēna and not to ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha as one might think. jāo can’t refer to ankāe ancēji ja ñatta rēha because the entire pa clause pa jāo jānne refers to it already.