Conlangers

I'm listening to episode 45 of the Conlangery Podcast to get some ideas of how I might handle questions in FairyLang.

EDIT: They just said that in VSO languages (like this one), question words are generally move to the front of the sentence. Good to remember. I also like the "*verb* not *verb*" pattern for forming yes/no questions. Might use that.

toulke = team (noun) (some things Google found for "toulke": a rare term; a rare last name; user names; somewhat similar to Toulkerrie which is the name of a place in Queensland, Australia)

Word derivation for "team" :
Basque = talde, Finnish = joukkue
Miresua = toulke

I've decided to use the OU vowel combination. That puts a little more from Finnish into the Miresua conlang.

adri to approach
agri to leave

nerid to enter
nerig to exit

nurid to infiltrate, penetrate
nurig to escape

igfer to give
idfer to receive

igfur to sell
idfur to buy

idvor to steal

My wife always said that I should keep a log of some sort about my kids linguistic development. And while I haven’t kept a detailed log, here I am blogging about it for the second week in a row.

So: pronouns. As mentioned before, proper use of pronouns is something that children acquire late, but partial use of pronouns develops quite a bit before that. What’s interesting here is the differing rates at which English and Romanian pronouns have been acquired. Because Romanian is pro-drop, pronouns are relatively uncommon in Romanian speech. For this reason, Sebi already uses the English pronoun I fairly consistently, but has not acquired any Romanian pronouns at all. He even mixes the two languages:

I făcut caca.
I went poopy.

The only thing approaching a Romanian pronoun that either child uses is the syllable [tu:], which represents an interesting conflation of the Romanian pronoun tu (you, sg.) and the English word too. The reason for the conflation is that both English and Romanian tend to locate these words at the end of utterances, in similar contexts, and with both words bearing the prosodic stress:

Do you want some, **too**?
Vrei ÅŸi **tu**? (Lit. "Want also you?")

Because of this coincidence, both children use the syllable [tu:] with a variety of meanings, including "me, too," "also," and "let me do it." As I noted with the discussion of verb inflection, the kids tend to use second-person forms with first-person meanings, based on what they most often hear.

Despite these few examples of confusion between the two languages, the kids already seem to have a good understanding of the differences between the languages and the contexts in which each is used. Their teachers at preschool say that they never hear the boys using Romanian words at school, and at home they seem to switch effortlessly into Romanian. They have even begun to exhibit some awareness of translation, the notion of a statement in English having an equivalent in Romanian and vice-versa. I’d say that this portends good things.

Tagged: child language, conlang, language acquisition, linguistics, pronouns, romanian

My wife always said that I should keep a log of some sort about my kids linguistic development. And while I haven’t kept a detailed log, here I am blogging about it for the second week in a row.

So: pronouns. As mentioned before, proper use of pronouns is something that children acquire late, but partial use of pronouns develops quite a bit before that. What’s interesting here is the differing rates at which English and Romanian pronouns have been acquired. Because Romanian is pro-drop, pronouns are relatively uncommon in Romanian speech. For this reason, Sebi already uses the English pronoun I fairly consistently, but has not acquired any Romanian pronouns at all. He even mixes the two languages:

I făcut caca.
I went poopy.

The only thing approaching a Romanian pronoun that either child uses is the syllable [tu:], which represents an interesting conflation of the Romanian pronoun tu (you, sg.) and the English word too. The reason for the conflation is that both English and Romanian tend to locate these words at the end of utterances, in similar contexts, and with both words bearing the prosodic stress:

Do you want some, **too**?
Vrei ÅŸi **tu**? (Lit. "Want also you?")

Because of this coincidence, both children use the syllable [tu:] with a variety of meanings, including "me, too," "also," and "let me do it." As I noted with the discussion of verb inflection, the kids tend to use second-person forms with first-person meanings, based on what they most often hear.

Despite these few examples of confusion between the two languages, the kids already seem to have a good understanding of the differences between the languages and the contexts in which each is used. Their teachers at preschool say that they never hear the boys using Romanian words at school, and at home they seem to switch effortlessly into Romanian. They have even begun to exhibit some awareness of translation, the notion of a statement in English having an equivalent in Romanian and vice-versa. I’d say that this portends good things.

Tagged: child language, conlang, language acquisition, linguistics, pronouns, romanian

My wife always said that I should keep a log of some sort about my kids linguistic development. And while I haven’t kept a detailed log, here I am blogging about it for the second week in a row.

So: pronouns. As mentioned before, proper use of pronouns is something that children acquire late, but partial use of pronouns develops quite a bit before that. What’s interesting here is the differing rates at which English and Romanian pronouns have been acquired. Because Romanian is pro-drop, pronouns are relatively uncommon in Romanian speech. For this reason, Sebi already uses the English pronoun I fairly consistently, but has not acquired any Romanian pronouns at all. He even mixes the two languages:

I făcut caca.
I went poopy.

The only thing approaching a Romanian pronoun that either child uses is the syllable [tu:], which represents an interesting conflation of the Romanian pronoun tu (you, sg.) and the English word too. The reason for the conflation is that both English and Romanian tend to locate these words at the end of utterances, in similar contexts, and with both words bearing the prosodic stress:

Do you want some, **too**?
Vrei ÅŸi **tu**? (Lit. "Want also you?")

Because of this coincidence, both children use the syllable [tu:] with a variety of meanings, including "me, too," "also," and "let me do it." As I noted with the discussion of verb inflection, the kids tend to use second-person forms with first-person meanings, based on what they most often hear.

Despite these few examples of confusion between the two languages, the kids already seem to have a good understanding of the differences between the languages and the contexts in which each is used. Their teachers at preschool say that they never hear the boys using Romanian words at school, and at home they seem to switch effortlessly into Romanian. They have even begun to exhibit some awareness of translation, the notion of a statement in English having an equivalent in Romanian and vice-versa. I'd say that this portends good things.

Tagged: child language, conlang, language acquisition, linguistics, pronouns, romanian

Last year, on a whim, I created a slightly larger version of my printed dictionary by taking all the assorted stories and things that I'd ever translated (to that point, and to my knowledge) and putting them in chronological order after the dictionary lists.

This year, I've had rather a story-splosion, so the "anthology" (which I've decided to call it, since the name sounds so very official, and I love the sound of the word) will be stand-alone.  If I didn't do it on its own, I'm afraid the book would no longer fit in my pocket and would be a pain to transport- and then what good would it do me?

Last year, when I did it on a whim, I included the original versions of the texts that I'd translated without bothering to update them to more current usages.  This year (of course, sigh) I'm going to do something different.  Starting with the biggest most imposing story I've translated (King Arthur's Courage), I'm going to modernify everything in the collection to make... well, a legible and sharing-worthy (for me, at least) assortment of stories and fables and poems and songs.

I hadn't realized just how much my handling of the language changed until I printed a copy of the biggest story and started line-by-line disassembling it.  Every other line has stuff crossed-out, or re-written, words have to be shifted in place...

It's amazing what use of a conlang will do to the way it looks, even when you aren't intentionally changing anything at all.

I also found a few one-off words that I used and then for some reason either never documented or just forgot about.  Words like tialia (even though, although, despite) and aliv (hay or straw for horses) fell by the wayside, poor things.  I've scooped the ones which don't have replacements and added them to the dictionary now.

Working back over stories I translated a few years ago is fun.  The usage is different enough that I can pretend I'm reading something someone else wrote.  And the practice for my conlang that I'm getting by re-editing older versions is just awesome.

Wenai baahlnia siad ba sa me frn ba sandi skra man me ;)
I speak Sandic a bit better now on account of what I've done, I guess ;)

I should upload a picture of one of the pages I "edited".  It looks like a pencil war. :p

The attributions list for the translated works is several pages long, too.  On the smaller pocket-sized-book pages, I'm guessing it'll take up around 10 sheets or so.  We'll just have to see.  I never thought I would actually find citing something to be a useful skill.  Hooray son of citation machine.

I wonder if I have to give image attributions for public domain images...?  So much to learn!

The anthology and the newer dictionary I plan to have out sometime in April.  Depending on how well I like the results of my efforts, maybe I'll buy an ISBN for them.  I'm not entirely certain anyone would buy them, but it would be amusing to track, don't you think?

Has anyone else around done something similar?  Anyone have any advice for me on this?

I should find a picture for the cover, too.  Hmm.


Hooray projects. :)

That’s my nearest approximation of “quick hits”. A chiftikh is a word for a strike (with a blade) that we might describe as a “glancing blow” in English—a nick. Only a flesh wound.

A friend of mine—and one of the Old Guard conlangers—Barry Garcia has taken recently to conscripting (minus the conlanging), and this past week he wrote up a version of the numbers one through ten (and also one hundred) in Dothraki. Here’s what they look like:

That’s 1-5. Now for the rest:

The numeral glyphs above are from his own script, and the writing below is a transliterated form of the Dothraki words (i.e. at, akat, sen, etc.) The glyphs at the beginning and end are used to demarcate paragraphs or set off quotes. If I know my modern “literary” press publications right (Vintage, I’m looking at you), the English equivalent would be:

Since I introduced one at the beginning of this post, now might be as good a time as any to discuss sword fighting (or arakh fighting) terminology in Dothraki. While there are basic words like “to cut” and “to stab” in Dothraki, there are also a series of specific terms used for types of sword strikes one employs in a fight. They’re all derived in the same fashion from native animal terminology. Since we’ve already seen chiftikh, I’ll use that as my example.

A chiftikh is a weak or glancing blow with a sword—something that was intended to hit, but missed the mark (or, perhaps, was too weak to do much damage). It derives from the word chifti, which means “cricket”. To use it in a sentence, you use the verb ildat, “to strike”. The direct object, then, is the type of strike, rather than the one struck. To indicate the one who is struck, you include an allative object (optional), and if you wish to mention the weapon used, you can include an ablative object (also optional). Thus, if you wanted to say the equivalent of (I think this is the best way to word this in English), “I fetched him a glancing blow with my arakh”, you would say:

• Anha ilde chiftikh maan arakhoon anni.

And there you have it. Below I’ll list the various ildo (i.e. “sword strikes”), along with the animal they’re associated with and their meaning:

Animal Term	Ildo	Meaning
chifti “cricket”	chiftikh	A weak hit or glancing blow.
gezri “snake”	gezrikh	A feint (a strike intended to throw the opponent off and disguise one’s true intent).
hlizif “bear”	hlizifikh	A wild but powerful strike (effective if it lands, but relatively inaccurate).
hrakkar “lion”	hrakkarikh	A quick, powerful and accurate strike.
kolver “eagle”	kolverikh	A straight sword thrust (middling and relatively uncommon).
ver “wolf”	verikh	A defensive strike intended to back an opponent off, but not necessarily to land.

As a framework, this isn’t intended to encompass swordsmanship (or arakhsmanship) in any way. These are just older terms that are intended to be employed in discussing a sword fight. They’re not meant to run the gamut of sword fighting terminology, or to dictate a particular style: they’re just there to make discussion move along a bit more easily.

And you may also notice that the word for “eagle” up there drew its inspiration from Stephen Colbert. I felt I needed a word for “eagle”, and in searching for a phonological form to fit it, I decided that Stephen Colbert embodied eagleness quite well. As his last name fit Dothraki’s syllable structure rather nicely, the word for “eagle” became kolber—or, at least, in the oldest form of the language. In modern Dothraki, it, of course, comes out as kolver, with the older b changing to v, but if the t can become silent on account of a historical sound change, I figure a change from a stop to a fricative shouldn’t be all that alarming.

I’m off to Chicago on Thursday! If I get any good pictures, I’ll be sure to post them here. Fonas chek!