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Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at even though you have better things to do.

From:Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...>
Date:Saturday, August 28, 2004, 12:15
Hello!

On Saturday 28 August 2004 01:10, joshua tanaka wrote:

 > >alyo, yeirg-in os zhash-yep
 > >greetings, name-(my) is josh-(stop)
 > >hello my name is josh.
 >
 > os basically means 'equals' it is even used in math.
 >
 > ar av la os cha-b
 >
 > one plus two is/equals three-(stop)
 >
 > one plus two equals three.

Sorry for this nitpicking, but you still have not seemed to
care about what people told you about giving glosses in
your translations. You should _*REALLY*_ read through the
Leipzig rules -- and if you tend to use own abbreviations
like me, you must explain what you mean.
That you try to gloss your stuff is nice, but as has been
said, one does not know *exactly* how the words are
built grammatically.

As you said you're a newbie, you maybe don't know what a
morpheme is: The smallest sensible part of a word, an atom
of meaning so to say. Here is an example -- English has
relatively few morphemes per word. This feature is called
"isolating", though English is not as isolating as Chinese
is. English is also "inflecting" -- you inflect endings
after a fix scheme for grammatical features. However:

   He listens to the music.
   He      listen-s   to the music
   PRN:3sg listen.3sg to ART music
   [hi "lIsnz tu T@ "mju:zIk] <-- My German biased
                                  pronounciation* ;-)

Or an example from my conlang Ayeri:

   Evain aris ming silvoiayang.
   ["evain "a4Is   mIN  "silvOjAi)AN]
   --------------------------------------
   Eva-in  aris    ming silv-oi-ay-ang
   2sg.TRG TRG=PAT can  see.NEG.{1sg.AGT}
   --------------------------------------
   => I can't see you.

When explaining how your lang works, it's really useful to
give an interlinear (also called 'morpheme breakdown') like
I did above. After all we others want to know how your
language works. You needn't necessarily give the pronounciation,
although of course it is nice to know how to correctly
pronounce your words.
Translating things word-by-word is not possible sometimes:
Words like "aris" for example have no meaning so you can't
ranslate them. In the case of "aris" it just tells you that the
focused argument (TRG) is the patient of the action, and that
it is animate regarding the gender.
And damn, get rid of that 'stop'! You needn't translate
sentence marks. When your punctuation differs from English
(or other natlangs using the Latin alphabet) you can
explain it seperately.

*) This is X-Sampa, an ASCII variety of the International
Pronounciation Alphabet (IPA) -- I don't know any links
from the top of my head, I'm sorry. If you can't read
IPA/XS yet, you really should learn it.

I'm really sorry if this hurt, but to me it has been
necessary to say that again.

Carsten

--
Eri silveváng aibannama padangin.
Nivaie evaenain eri ming silvoieváng caparei.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
  -> http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri

Replies

Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
joshua tanaka <joshuatanaka@...>