Mentolatian syllabary, was Re: 4 days to go

You can see the T shirt sample at:

http://www.geocities.com/elemtilas/samples/

It's the third one down, being in the Mentolatian
language, hinted at in the recent thread about
IE-based conlangs.

It reads right to left:

=.NO.I.I.MA.LA.GE.O.DO.MA(N).FO.QUA.
.VE.U.DA.DU.MA(N).FO.MA.RE.DU.

Or in legible words, "Qua fomand oglammaíjno; durem
fomandu dauv": concerning language in-dying; create
language thou.

qua (*kwi-) has become a topic marker, which fronts
the principal object of the sentence. og- is simply a
preposition, -inno (or -íjno, here) is an affix that
makes a stative noun from a verb (in this case
"lamman", die). -em is the imperative ending of
"duran", fashion or create. "Duran" is contrasted with
"puaran", which has a more organic sense. "Dauv" (*tu)
is the 2s pronoun.

duran; v. make, fashion
dauv; pron. thou
fomand; n. language, speech
lammaíjno; vn. dying; death
og; prep. in, at, within
qua; rel. ptc. of, for, with respect to

The syllabary is formed of series of consonant+vowel
conjoined signs that can be sorted a couple different
ways. I've sorted them by point of articulation and
voice; they might best be sorted _natively_ by which
series of vowel segments is used (amongst all these
signs, there are two basic vowel segment types). Apart
from this, there are simple (disjoined) vowel, glide
and consonant signs. [I know, that's not well
described, but it would be much clearer if I drew up
and showed you the syllabary chart!]

As you can see from comparing the transliteration
above with the text, the syllabary doesn't match
perfectly: O.GE.LA.MA.I.I.NO / oglammaíjno; sometimes
the vowel segment is ignored. The usual default sign
is the Ce sign. Doubled signs seem to indicate long
vowels; but I haven't really worked that sort of thing
out yet.

Padraic.

--- Mario Bonassin <zebuleon@...> wrote:
> There is 4 days to go until I lock down the T-shirt
> image this time around.
>  If you want to be on it get me your translation.
> In case you don't know it
> by now its
>
> Fight lingusitic extinction!
> Invent a Language!
>
> If you have a script email me a pic of it, or just
> send the text.
>
>
> Thanks
> Mario

=====
raps il tenós mathin la ngouerma;
     mays comez le nces il luchets le secund.

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