Day 16 (22 In Base 7) Of Rewriting My Conlang

This is so cute! Kara has my brain rotting out of my skull.

They've got the power of love and anime on their side!

Day51 of rewriting my novel

University has gone back to session so I’ve had less (no) time to write, but what with American holidays, I’ve gotten a chance to increase my word count a little bit! Just figured I’d post an update.

I was initially skeptical because, honestly, some of these are only plausible w/o the Great Vowel Shift (e.g. grope, game > grapple, gamble) but yes, it's real.

Indeed, it's a no-longer-productive grammatical process dating back to Proto Germanic, where *-ilaz was an adjective suffix.

But anyways, some of these make sense with the great vowel shift. E.g. with game ~ gamble:

/geɪm/ "game" < /gaː.mə/ < /ga.mə/

/ˈgæm.ˌbl̩/ "gamble" < /ˈgam.ˌlə/ < /ˈga.mə.lə/

Note with gamble: an epenthetic /b/ is inserted after /m/ to preserve the distinction between /m/ and /l/.

Day Three of Writing my Novel, Meiste.

I didn’t write all that much today, due to obligations outside of the screen. However, I let the characters live rent-free in my head, along with letting my brother power-scale them (because he’s a hyper-nerd and it makes him happy.)

Easily the strongest (introduced) character is Dr. Este Luzrij, the Hero of Earth. She can bend space to her will, teleport, and shrink or move objects. I haven’t decided, yet, if she can do time dilation (because gravity is weird) but she’s definitely stronger than Iziser or Hotautebz.

Day 45 (1:21) of rewriting my novel

No piece of writing of mine would ever be complete without the 4-legged table theorem. So, I added it in today in the 1200 words I wrote. And I'm still not done with Part Three (but getting closer!)

Speaking of Part Three, I'm getting close two being done, I think. I have a couple gaps left to fill, but that's about it. I'm surprised I haven't managed to write the actually important last scene (that being, the meeting with Governor Bunthun.

I still feel bad about romanizing her name, but nobody (except people who read Cherokee in its romanized form) would figure out that it's pronounced [ˈbə̃.ˌθə̃] and romanized as bvthv. So, preying on the fact that English speakers (mostly) nasalize their vowels and <u> can represent the "strut" vowel, so [ˈbʌ̃n̪.ˌθə̃n] will have to do. It's close enough.

Meanwhile, outlining Part Four looms on the horizon, nebulous as it was before. I know how I want it to end, and the major points in between, but that's about it. Somehow, Part Five seems to be more fleshed-out in my mind than Part Four.

I still have to derive Modern North Zeneth, whose closest living relative is supposed to be Low Zeneth. It's derived from a northern dialect of Old High Zeneth that split away from Old High Zeneth about 800-600 years ago. Maybe then I'll have a better name for Bvthv, but it wouldn't make sense for Governor Luwbefê to call her anything other than Bvthv.

Character names are hard.

The Usual Suspects: @oldfashionedidiot @quillswriting

If you'd like to be added to my taglist, please respond to this post or DM me.

Kshafa Morphosyntax

For Kshafa I want to have a more complicated morphosyntactic alignment than what I had for Ngįout, which was marked nominative, but otherwise just plain vanilla nominative accusative. What I had come up with was inspired mainy by what I'd read about alignment in Majang, which is a complicated variant of tripartite fluid-S, in which the subject is nominative if it's "topical/expected", and ergative if not.

This whole split based on pragmatics is a bit too complicated for me, so I decided that for Kshafa the split is going to be based on the definiteness of the subject. If the subject is definite it is nominative, and if it is indefinite it is ergative in transitive clauses and absolutive in indefinite clauses.

The diachronic explenation I have for this to make it make sense in my mind is that originally it was an ergative fluid S language that is based on definiteness - transitive clauses are ergative, intransitive clauses are fluid. Then, a kind of focal definite demonstrative article thing stuck to a definite ergative argument and the nominative case was made.

In addition, another part of the system (that was also inspired form Majang) is that the verb agrees with the definiteness of the subject, and because Kshafa has can be pro-drop, it can distinguish between intransitive clauses and transitive clauses with a dropped agent. Some examples:

A dog runs - run.3SG dog.ABS

The dog runs - run.3SG.DEF dog.NOM

A boy is being bitten - bite.3SG boy.ABS

The (known thing) bites the boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS

smth bites the dog - bite.3SG.DEF dog.ABS

A dog bites a boy - bite.3SG boy.ABS dog.ERG

The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM

Final thing is that nominative arguments can be freely fronted, so:

The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM => dog.NOM bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS

I'm pretty happy with that, it makes sense to me. The only thing is that I need to figure out what to do when non-subject arguments are definite, because I don't want to have a morphological definiteness destinction in the other cases, and having a definite article just for non-subject cases feels weird. Maybe I can just say that just like how turkish only marks definiteness on accusative arguments, Kshafa only marks definiteness on subjects.

OC Open Tag Questionaire

Open tag from @fantasy-things-and-such

I'll do this with three of my main OCs: Iziser, Hotautebz, and Lozerief.

1) Are you a night owl or a morning lark

Izi: Normally, I hear the phrase as "night owl or morning star." I sleep in too late to be a morning star, though.

Hota: Izi thinks he sleeps in late? 10 AM? Rookie numbers.

Lozerief: I don't sleep. I once went a period of two weeks without sleeping before my body had enough and I slept on the floor. My sleep schedule is so irreconcilably bad that I can't, in good conscience, answer this question.

2) what is/would be your favorite kind of cheese

Izi: I'm lactose intolerant! I hear they make good brie in the highlands, though.

Hota: I feel bad for Izi. He's missing out on the wonders of mozzarella.

Lozerief: I grew up on a dairy farm. I had a brief stint selling cheese. I can't stand the stuff anymore-cheese, milk, butter, you name it! I guess my favorite at the time was well-aged gouda. I put my heart and soul into making gouda, let me tell you.

3) whats your favorite letter?*

Izi: This question is terribly unspecific! What language? Because my favorite "normal" letter is "rr." It looks like this: 工.

Hota: Again, poor Izi doesn't know the horrors of trying to learn to write Ytos. That being said, my favorite letter is the regular "r" in Ipol, which looks like this: 口.

Lozerief: Depends on the language, mostly, and script. Like, I'm old enough to remember the Classical Zispoel abugida that Pagjom invented, like, nine hundred years ago! It's hard to choose a favorite, especially in modern Ipol, which simplified the old abugida tremendously, down into an abjad. But, "f" is my favorite letter: Π.

*Sidenote: these are relative approximations of the actual characters in the Ipol Abjad, which I may later make a post on.

I tag @theothersideofthewoods @oldfashionedidiot and @authorcoledipalo + open tag. Your questions are:

What's your favorite restaurant? If you don't have one, what's your favorite food?

How many languages do you speak? Do you speak English? How many forms of those languages do you speak?

What does magic mean for you?

"Rationalism" is up there with "Objectivism" in terms of "definitionally funny things to call your own belief system".

Dear Conlangers making A Priori, Naturalistic Languages...

Specifically those that use a protolanguage... please write down your sound changes before you copy-paste them! I've been struggling for several months to remember which sound changes happened from Old Ipol -> Modern Ipol and I cannot, for the life of me, find the file where I saved them. Please write them down I'm begging you.

Find the Words Tag Game

Thanks to @authorcoledipalo for the tag!

My words: ache, slash, bounce, wink

Your words:

Ache

Tears blurred my vision. My head raged with a headache like no other while I choked on my sobs. Mucus stained my tongue with salt while I struggled to keep my head up. He loved me. He loved me unconditionally, up until his dying breath. No, he still loved me. Even in death, his immortal love remained deep inside of me. My head finally fell.

Slash

"No," I decided. "It's-" A foul stench slashed at my nose, popping my eyes open. "What the hell?"

Bounce

I laughed, flying along the ceiling so that I could see the inside of the crystal chandelier. The crystals bounced light from electric bulbs around the center of the chandelier. I stuck my hand through it, seeing if my hand would glisten.

Wink

"The Emperor's request," chef Siz added, sending me a grin with a wink.

Paging @foxgloves-garden, @ominous-feychild, and @oldfashionedidiot, +open tag. Feel free to ignore as wanted.

Side note: Does anyone else use "bounce" as a transitive verb? I.e. "I bounce the ball" where "bounce" takes an object. (An intransitive verb is a verb which doesn't take an object: "I bounce." Is perfectly grammatical.) I feel like the transitive form feels... old? Archaic?