Linguistics - Blog Posts
FUN FACT!!!!!! Ββ is not pronounced /b/ in (Modern) Greek! It's actually /v/. also Ηη is /i/. so beta (βήτα in greek) is pronounced vita in greek. picture related
if you want to make a b sound, you gotta do μπ (mp).
fun!
The alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwing grandma out to be eaten by polar bears; “ We are prepared to believe almost anything about such an unfamiliar and peculiar group,” says Martin, in a gentle reminder of our buried racist tendencies. The tale she tells is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people’s languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself. The original source is Franz Boas’ introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911). And all Boas says there, in the context of a low-key and slightly ill-explained discussion of independent versus derived terms for things in different languages, is that just as English uses separate roots for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning ‘water’ in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput 'snow on the ground’, qana 'falling snow’, piqsirpoq 'drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift’. Boas’ point is simply that English expresses these notions by phrases involving the root snow, but things could have been otherwise, just as the words for lake, river, etc. could have been formed derivationally or periphrastically on the root water. But with the next twist in the story, the unleashing of the xenomorphic fable of Eskimo lexicography seems to have become inevitable. What happened was that Benjamin Lee Whorf, Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier, picked up Boas’ example and used it, vaguely, in his 1940 amateur linguistics article 'Science and linguistics,’ which was published in MIT’s promotional magazine Technology Review (Whorf was an alumnus; he had done his B.S. in chemical engineering at MIT). Our word snow would seem too inclusive to an Eskimo, our man from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company confidently asserts. With an uncanny perception into the hearts and minds of the hardy Arctic denizens (the more uncanny since Eskimos were not a prominent feature of Hartford’s social scene at the time), he avers: “We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different.” […] Notice that Whorf’s statement has illicitly inflated Boas’ four terms to at least seven (1: “falling”, 2: “on the ground”, 3: “packed hard”, 4: “slushy”, 5: “flying”, 6, 7 …. : “and other kinds of snow”). Notice also that his claims about English speakers are false; I recall the stuff in question being called “snow” when fluffy and white, “slush” when partly melted, “sleet” when falling in a half-melted state, and a “blizzard” when pelting down hard enough to make driving dangerous. Whorf’s remark about his own speech community is no more reliable than his glib generalizations about what things are “sensuously and operationally different” to the generic Eskimo. But the lack of little things like verisimilitude and substantiation are not enough to stop a myth. Martin tracks the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax through successively more careless repetitions and embroiderings in a number of popular books on language. […] But never mind: three, four, seven, who cares? It’s a bunch, right? Once more popular sources start to get hold of the example, all constraints are removed: arbitrary numbers are just made up as the writer thinks appropriate for the readership. […] Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for different fonts (Caslon, Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough. If these obvious truths of specialization are supposed to be interesting facts about language, thought, and culture, then I’m sorry, but include me out. Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng’s Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: “It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos… snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes…” (p. 137). Imagine reading: “It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers.., fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes…” Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.
Geoff Pullum, in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. (via allthingslinguistic)
Nyeleti Nokwazi Nkwinika was a year into her Master’s dissertation in English, and she was struggling. This has nothing to do with her work ethic: the problem lay with her hearing. Nyeleti was born deaf and like many others in her situation, she battles with written language.
Most deaf people are born into hearing families who don’t have any skills in Sign Language. In Nyeleti’s case, she only learned to use South African Sign Language fluently at school. When she got to high school she attended a mainstream hearing school with several other top performing deaf pupils from her previous school.
By then, she had missed out on too many years of access to English. South African Sign Language and English are differently structured. This can make it hard to learn for deaf people who’ve only ever used sign language to communicate. It’s also very difficult to learn written English when one has never heard the language or used it for conversational purposes.
I am not a native Japanese speaker but the first word that comes to mind is 懐かしい (natsukashii), which is that warm fuzzy feeling you have when you think upon a fond memory or experience. Or that feeling you are having when you say, "sure brings back memories." Depending on context it gets translated to nostalgic, or longing, or dear, but by themselves they all feel somewhat inadequate.
For Chinese mandarin, I can think of 骗我的感情 (pian wo de gan qing) (there should be tone markers, but I don't know how to put them in, sorry!), which is literally "trick/bluff my feelings", which I am now finding quite to explain! Hmm... it's that disappointment you feel when someone sets your expectations up for something and then fails to deliver. I suppose like feeling cheated.
Hope that helps and good luck!
bobbies
YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE AND I NEED YOUR HELP PLEASE I BEG YOU
hi. sorry about that catchy title, but you have something i need. you speak a language, maybe even multiple languages. you use emotions words everyday. i’m sure you know that languages have their own emotion words that are very hard to translate to other languages, for example, the word ‘anxiety’ doesn’t really exist in Polish, it is always a challenge to translate it in such way to convey its true meaning. Polish people don’t really feel anxiety, because they don’t have the word for it. i need your help with something: tell me an emotion word that is unique to your language or hard to translate. i’ll ask you a few questions and maybe i’ll write an essay about it using the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). it’s a linguistic theory, whatever. please help a linguist out. i need an A. i promise i won’t get an F on your precious word.
i am interested in emotion words from every language except for Polish and English.
you can reply under this post, you can message me privately, i can give you my e-mail, whatever works for you. it would really help me if you reblogged this post, but no pressure
help education.. pretty please?
So you're telling me my Texan drawl is the OG British? Fuck me I got them original colonizer way of speaking.
at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents
Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via wordsnquotes)
Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia. And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space. Lauren: Yep. Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it? Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode… Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen. Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course. But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where where people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a- Lauren: Space Creole! Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin.
Excerpt from Episode 1 of Lingthusiasm: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes. (via lingthusiasm)
the short answer is that babies are just goated at phonology. the working theory is that in order to acquire language as fast as possible, our brains need to be receptive to any and all phonetic information from birth (and possibly even earlier; there's some evidence that prenatal infants pick up on rhythm and pitch information from the sound waves that travel from the parent to the womb). linguists have been testing them on this for a long time, and until they're about 6 month babies can distinguish phonemes from languages they've never been exposed to and who's phonology is completely different to their own. eventually the brain starts to lose that ability in order to focus on correctly articulating those sounds, which is an incredibly complex task, not to mention once you have to start arranging them into patterns to form words and sentences. basically to do takes up lot of cognitive effort that then can't be used to maintain such a massive inventory of sounds.
as for adults, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that it's impossible to learn phonology, since in order to fluently speak a second language you have to be able to understand and produce all the sounds, even if they're not 100% perfect. but in terms of why it's so much more difficult to perfect than something like syntax, it's partly of your brain not being as flexible anymore and, consequently both having a worse memory and a deeply engrained phonemic inventory, to the point that it's difficult for non-native speakers to even "hear" the difference between contrasting sounds your not familiar with (to be clear it's not that you physically can't hear it, it just doesn't register phonologically). this is also why people have consistent accents instead of making pronunciation errors at random; they're still following a set of structural rules, most likely very similar to the ones of native speakers, but with the influence of their first language changing it slightly.
so like. as i understand it, at any age, if your exposure to language is restricted to a single language, you will learn that language. like it just sort of happens, your brain figures out its grammar, semantics, etc, formal training HELPS but is not required. but this is *not* the case with the language's phonology! people will live in a foreign-phone country for years, primarily exposed to its language, they will understand it perfectly, generate it perfectly, and yet will still have a strong "accent" if not trained how to avoid it. that's weird, right? why doesnt the brain learn the phonology? (and why does it learn it perfectly as a baby?) is it too "low level", muscular-level, and that stuff gets "hardened" while higher level stuff is more flexible..?
I'm as much of a descriptivist as the next linguist, but I do hate the resulting misconception that there's no such thing as incorrect grammar
Is there an alphabet or lexicon of the human version of The Speech? And if so, where can I find it?
No, there's not.
(And as I've been asked about this before, I'm just going to paste the answer in here—since though the original post is buried in the depths of Tumblr somewhere, I do have my saved draft.)
Per these, which came in very close to each other:
@melbetweenstars
This is something I’ve always wondered but never realized I could actually ask about until I read through that long meta response. (go me.) How much of the Speech do you have fleshed out? Do you create it as you go on more of a need-to-know basis, or do you have vocabulary and grammar structures ready to go? Basically I’d be really interested to hear any Speech-related meta if you have the chance because fictional languages are hella cool!
and:
@sansa–clegane
I just read your post on dark wizards and field terminologies, and am totally loving the Speech translations you provided! Now I’m wondering, though, how much of the language you actually have mapped out or established? I’m very curious as to what, for example, the standard “I - you - he/she/it/etc. - we - you plural - they” conjugation endings would be– or if there even are any in a language as complex as the Speech. I’M JUST REALLY INTERESTED IN FANTASY LINGUISTICS AAAHH
Linguistics is a big deal for me too, as people who read my stuff will have guessed. And needless to say, the Speech is on my mind a lot (along with other “magical languages” and their history/histories).
So let’s take a moment to first to make it clear what the Speech is not. It’s not what’s sometimes referred to as an Adamic language (whether you take the meaning that God used it to talk to Adam, or that Adam invented it to name things.) It’s also nothing whatsoever to do with Enochian. It’s not an occultic language, or anything invented by human beings.
The basic concept is that the Speech is the language, or the very large body of descriptors, used to create the universe (and very likely others, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment). Such words are also assumed, having been used in the building of the universe, to be able to control the bits they’ve built. Every word, therefore, when used ought ideally to sound as if it contains some tremendous power.
Writing something like that every time the Speech is used, even for a much better writer than I am, would be very, very hard.
(We need a cut here. Under the cut: Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and others. ...Also a fair number of beetles. And a bear.)
It’s worth mentioning as a matter of information that I met the concept of secret / divine magical languages in Le Guin’s Earthsea long before I ran into it in C. S. Lewis. (I came pretty late to Lewis’s non-Narnian work.) Yet here Lewis, as more than occasionally before, is my master, having been over this ground right back in the mid-1940s.
There’s a point in the final novel of the so-called “Planetary Trilogy”, that big fat (now endlessly problematic but still fun-in-the-right-moods) book That Hideous Strength, where Elwin Ransom—philologist, unwilling visitor to Mars and Venus, unnerved conscript into the wars in Heaven, and Lewis’s take on both the Pendragon and the wounded Fisher King—is instructing his friend and co-linguistics scholar Dimble on how to behave in a meeting with the newly awakened, and potentially quite dangerous, Merlin Ambrosius. (The POV in this passage is that of a lady named Jane who's just recently fallen into company with the group supporting Ransom.)
“You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil [just think “Christ” for the moment: surprise surprise, that’s the parellel Lewis is using here]. Then, if he stands, conjure him.” “What shall I say in the Great Tongue?” “Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.” And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room, seemed to have become intensely quiet: even the bird, and the bear***, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance—or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon, and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.
Now if that’s not like being hit over the head with a hammer, I don’t know what is.* That moment has been before the eyes-of-my-mind for a long time as I’ve worked with the Speech.
Note, however, that Lewis does a very wise thing here. He doesn’t actually spell out any of the words out for you. Because in the reader’s mind, there’s always the six-year-old saying, “Go on, say the word: see how it sounds, see what happens…!” And when you recite the magic spell, it doesn’t work. The words come out sounding, well, like any others. And maybe not your interior six-year-old, but your interior twelve- or fifteen-year-old—the ego-state that’s about keeping you from getting hurt or looking stupid in front of other people who aren’t privy to or supportive of your dreams—says, “See, it was just another word, just a bunch of nonsense. You got fooled. Dummy!” No wise writer, I think, willingly sets their readership up for such easy and constant disappointment. It's tough enough to weave, and hold in place, the spell that is prose. Handing the audience a potential spellbreaker, over and over again, is folly.
And by rights the Speech ought to be like Lewis’s example above. If in reality you were to hear the words used to restructure matter or undo gravity, they ought to shake the air in your chest like a Saturn V launch, they should raise the hair on the back of your neck to hear them used; they should freak you out. But a long string of invented syllables isn’t going to do that. I’m stuck with using English to produce even the echo of such a result.
Which means I have to go Lewis’s route… mostly. Here and there I’ll add in a Speech-sourced word or phrase when it supports the narrative or makes it easier for characters to talk about what’s going on—as, when working with wizardry, you do sometimes have to call in precisionist-level language for words that have no casual English cognates: just as you would if you were working in particle physics or organic chemistry at the molecular level. But that’s all I’m going to do… because if you do too much linguistic work in this regard, you constantly run the risk of your readers being distracted from the real business at hand, which is the interactions between/among the characters.
The tech inherent to a work of fantastic fiction is always an issue in this regard. Ideally L. Sprague de Camp’s very useful definition of science fiction, tweaked here for fantasy, ought to be a guideline: “A fantasy story is a human story with a human problem and a human solution that could never have happened without its fantastic content.” Yet inside the definition, there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong. Too much merely human stuff, and a work of fantasy turns into a soap with some casual magical gimmickry—all too often these days labeled as “magic realism”, when it’s not publisher code for “We’d call this fantasy if we had the nerve and we didn’t think it was going to tag us as ‘genre’ and keep us off the best-seller lists”. Too little human-problem-and-human-solution, and it turns into a modern version of what James Blish (God rest him), when writing as the gently merciless science fiction critic William Atheling Jr., used to call “The 'Greater New York and New Jersey Municipal Zeppelin Gas Works’ school of speculative fiction”, where you tour your readership through the Wonderfulness Of Your Tech (magical or otherwise) until they expire of boredom while waiting for someone to fucking do something.
You have to find a centerline between the extremes—indeed pretty much a tightrope—and walk it with some care. I’d guess that J. K. Rowling ran into the need for this balancing act; while never having read the Potter books, I nonetheless get a sense that you get the occasional Wingardium leviosa without also being burdened with long strings of magical Latin. (Though I confess that the answer to the question “Where does the magic come from? And what’s it for?” as it applies to her universe could be of some interest. I have no idea whether this ever gets explicitly handled.**)
Anyway, it’d be way too easy for the YW books to become long discourses on the Speech and its use. This aspect of the “tech”, I think, gets more than enough time onstage. Having once established that words are a tool, indeed the tool for a wizard, the ur-Tool, making every spell they build a resonance between what they do and the initial/ongoing work of Creation—my business is to stay focused on the challenge of driving plot forward by interactions between human beings (and all kinds of others) who have conflicting agendas.
…So much for the tl;dr. I do have some very basic grammatical structures tucked away, but they’re not in any fit state for other people to look at. The Speech, I think, is really best treated as an ongoing mystery that unfolds a little at a time, as required, and leaves everybody wanting more.
HTH!
*It also leads into one of numerous affectionate nods in this book toward Tolkien, as philologist, fellow novelist, and Lewis’s good friend. It's no accident that when Ransom meets up with Merlin himself, a little later in the narrative, the question of this language—the proper name of the Great Tongue is “Old Solar"—comes up again. When discussing what language they’ll speak with each other during their upcoming negotiations [they apparently start out in a rather beat-up and denatured medieval Latin], Ransom says to Merlin about the language he’d prefer to be working in, "It has been long since it was heard. Not even in Numinor was it heard in the streets.”
The Stranger gave no start … but he spoke with a new interest. “Your masters let you play with dangerous toys,” he said. “Tell me, slave, what is Numinor?” “The true West,” said Ransom. “Well,” said the other.
Yeah, “well.” Better scholars than I have dealt with the relationship between these two, as scholars and writers and friends, so enough of that for the moment. But it’s very sweet to see Lewis do something in his books that I’ve done with mine.
**It’s always possible, of course, that in the HP universe this issue is a surd: like asking “where physics comes from”. (Well, not a surd precisely, if your spiritual life tends a certain way. Mine tends toward “Whoever or whatever made the universe, that’s who made physics. And they must really like it, because they made a metric shit ton of it!” (This answer also works for beetles, though that's a slightly different issue.) :)
But if there’s a most-fundamental difference between my wizardly universe and Rowling’s, it might be best revealed in the third question that came up for me directly after “What if there was a user’s manual for human beings/the world/the universe?” and “If there was, where would it have come from?”: specifically, “And why?”
***There's a bear in the Pendragon's kitchen. Thoth only knows what initially brought that on for Lewis, but it's a character insertion that pays off later, so (shrug) wtf.
Rebloggable-d by request: Names in the Speech
So this may be an odd question, and not one you’ve thought about much — but how would the Speech interact with someone who uses/identifies as a different name than their birth/legal name? I don’t mean like Kit — presumably his name in the Speech would include a phrase along the lines of ‘Christopher, called Kit’ — but a case where the birth name has been ‘rejected’, and isn’t part of the wizard’s identity at all.
intheafterlight
had a realization that arrows or pointing can be used as pronouns if you think really hard about it
New Guinea is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, with more than 1000 distinct languages crammed into an area not much larger than the state of Texas.
Despite this rich variety—for comparison, Europe contains about 280 languages—linguists have only analyzed the grammatical structures of a fraction of the South Pacific island’s languages. Now, Simon Greenhill, a linguist at Australian National University in Canberra, is trying to remedy that situation, by gathering together hundreds of thousands of words from published surveys, book chapters, and articles, as well as the accounts of early European explorers, and putting them into an online database called TransNewGuinea.org.
Updated daily, the site already contains glossaries for more than 1000 languages from 23 different language families, including 145,000 words. There are roughly 1000 different words for “water,” as well as for “louse,” and linguists and language enthusiasts can view all the languages by geographic origin in an interactive map.
Greenhill introduced the scientific community to the site(PDF) this week in the journal PLOS ONE; already, he has used the database to look for clues about how the different languages are related. Through comparative, historical, and computational analyses of the data, he hopes the linguistic community will now use the site to solve long-standing questions about how New Guinean populations expanded and spread their culture.
so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…
reply with more, i’m fascinated
Professor Bathsheda Babbling
Professor Bathsheda Babbling was a witch and professor of Study of Ancient Runes at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Professor Babbling is the only language teacher in Hogwarts.
Anciet Runes is more than only a language in the Wizardry World given its magical properties, but still...
"I mistranslated ehwaz... It means partnership, not defence; I mixed it up with eihwaz."
—Hermione Granger after her Ancient Runes O.W.L.
The Study of Ancient Runes (commonly shortened to Ancient Runes) is an elective course at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and presumably Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, that can be taken by students third year and above.
It was taught by Professor Bathsheda Babbling during the 1990s at least and it is the study of runic scriptures, or Runology. Ancient Runes is a mostly theoretical subject that studies the ancient runic scripts of magic.
Linguist in the Harry Potter Universe
logically? no, not really. emotionally*? I've been raised around people of my accent my whole life, and thus my accent feels like the normal accent
also @ people rbing saying "wifewolf"/"wifwolf" and/or "manwolf". you get it.
also. learned that "were" (of "werewolf") meant man/male, and thus there's another word for woman/female, "wif", whick is the origin of the "wo-" in woman (wif man), and "man" was just. person. this has been my ted talk, thank you wifs, weres, and men. (also wifwolves and manwolves are things. i declare it to be so. because why not)
also. learned that "were" (of "werewolf") meant man/male, and thus there's another word for woman/female, "wif", whick is the origin of the "wo-" in woman (wif man), and "man" was just. person. this has been my ted talk, thank you wifs, weres, and men. (also wifwolves and manwolves are things. i declare it to be so. because why not)
Hi y'all,
I've been working on IWH mostly in the background, but especially the main setting of the story: New Katla Khi.
Anyways, here's a cool conlang (Kját-ra Khí) translation of a scene in my story:
Yése, gjêw sa mèrnrún’ rwek ga? Yessei, is your daughter gone?
Gìnger tan’ sa rwéng… I feel for you…
rjě sêr ta-ra, I understand you.
San’ nweng da, You are hard-working
san’ vèr áp da. You are the witch.
Nrekkháp zásorn’ sêr, nga ga? You’re cursed by Zasor, right?
Nga tan’ sêr. I am not you.
Gjêw tan’ sêr, I have been you,
rwek san’ têr. you will be me
Nga-phâi sa-gjo jeśú, Your path is not easy
Dàk-phâi. but it is virtuous.
Gwók sêr wjék khjàk-na. You will err and move on many times.
Dàkmèr tan’ sêr, Zàkgrí tan’ sêr. I believe in you, and I love you.
I'll probably post a grammar for this conlang in a later post, because it's easily one of my most fleshed-out. I only have about 200 words, and my goal is to get to 2,000, before I'll call it "done."
Y'all,
I took a class on conlanging this semester, and today was the last day, so the prof presented snippits from conlangs.
My snippit was that really sad quote I made in an earlier post, and I had to explain how the Sêi (the Time God) works and how she exists at all times kinda deal.
But tone of my classmates made a language with classifiers from set theory and discrete math.
Snippits from his conlang included phrases like "for all boys they are smarter than him" and "there exists a boy such that he is smarter than him."
I failed to ask him about what possessed him to do this, but I may get back here after that.