la bella luna...

It would seem that ea-luna is five years old this year. This
occurred to me the other day while I was unpacking from our
recent move. (In reality, I was looking for my Míjador
notebooks, and found ea-luna instead.) I stopped looking for
the other notebooks and started working on ea-luna instead.

I taught my husband a few useful sentences*. I started again
where I had left off at putting the lexicon into the
computer. I went off and bought 2 notebooks. The first of
these is to contain a more thorough description of ea-luna
grammar, plus translations, original writing, and cultural
notes. The second is for a daughter language.

The new language is called "Iluna"-- a contraction of "ilu"
("earth", in the sense of "the physical body of the planet")
and "luna" ("speech"). [One might recall (or might not) that
the speakers of ea-luna regard themselves as the literal
descendants and chosen people of Iludina, their "Earth
Mother" Goddess who is present in the substance of the
ground itself.] There have been a few sound changes:
w becomes gw (or returns to gw again...)

ie, ia, and iu (two syllables each) > ye [je], ya [ja], and
yu [ju] (one syllable each), but only in the words
"ie","ia", and "iu" from ea-luna. Ye, ya, and yu are
available, however, for generating entirely new words
though, e.g. "aya" is a potential new word in Iluna. (I
guess "aiea" is a potential four syllable word in ea-luna,
but it seems very unlikely that I would do that.) In the
same way, ua, ue, and ui > wa, we, and wi.

Consonants can be syllable and word final now, but only as
grammatical markers, not in the root words themselves. (Root
words still contain only CV and V syllables.) In certain
strings of verb prefixes, two consonants may appear next to
each other, which happens only in those particular instances

Iluna will have an alphabet instead of a syllabary when I
get around to designing the script for it.

These changes are a minor difference between Iluna and
ea-luna (at least for now). The larger change (so far) is in
the grammar. Like ea-luna, Iluna is VSO (VSIoDo), but
ea-luna's verb markers have been reduced to prefixes, nouns
have gained case affixes, and the only 3rd person pronoun
left is the epicene, down from 4 pronouns in ea-luna (m, f,
[inanimate] n, and epicene).

To build an Iluna verb, you string prefixes together from
three categories. In the first category are past, present,
and future tenses plus the imperative. In the second
category are speculative, habitual, and obligation markers.
The last category marks person. Negation is its own
category, and it always comes first in Iluna. (This does
make for very long verbs.)

If the noun or pronoun is the subject of the sentence, it
needs no affixes. If it is the indirect object, it has a
prefix (e-) and a suffix (-t). If it is the direct object,
it has a suffix (-n), and in a prepositional phrase, it  has
a suffix (-r). Plurals still aren't marked except in
pronouns. Noun-adjective (and definite article) agreement
has been added.

There are male/female specifier affixes: ki- (female), and
-wa (male). These can be used with either nouns or pronouns.
kili = she (emphasis on being female), liwa = he (emphasis
on being male), kiama = female spider, amawa = male spider,
etc.

Possession is shown more or less as it was in ea-luna
(possessor-pronoun-possessed), except that the pronoun is
treated as a prefix to the possessed.

Iluna is hyphen-free. I am not sure if I will keep it that
way, but it does make it look less like ea-luna.

And now for an example or two:

I should have given you the book. (ea-luna: ema punu tiwa la
de ea-dalu.)
Empunlatigwa la edet ean dalun.
em-  pun-   la- tigwa la  edet        ean  dalun.
past oblig. 1st give   I  you (I.ob.) the  book (D.obj.)

Don't cry! (ea-luna: ma ewe leri!)
Gwemadeleri!
Gwe- ma- de- leri
neg. Imp 2nd cry

Let's visit grandma's house. (ea-luna: ma webi lale ie
meme-li-nera.)
malalegwebi ye memer linerar.

ma- lale-   gwebi ye meme-r         li-nera-r
imp 1st.pl. visit to grandma-prep.  pos-home-prepositional

So, there you have it! Now y'all know pretty much everything
I know about Iluna. I will continue to play with it and
develop it, but my main project right now is to get ea-luna
into the computer so that the lexicon can be searched and an
alphabetically ordered English-ea-luna dictionary created.

--
*One might question the use of the word "useful" to describe
any phrase of a language spoken by only one person (me),
especially when that one person isn't particularly fluent.
But they would be useful if he accidentally stumbled into an
alternate universe born of my imagination.
--

Mia Soderquist
Jeezlueez Beegtrouble [EQ, Xegony]
Pietas [AO, Rubi-Ka 1]
jeezlueez@earthlink.net