Re: More on the Hermetic Language

Paul Burgess wrote:
> There are
> four genders (masculine, feminine, neuter, and royal)
> but in practice you can 98% ignore this and treat all
> nouns as neuter.
Interesting.  What does "Royal" mean?  Are the genders "natural"?  Is
the _mna_ that you use before several words a gender marker?

> The Hermetic verb has two persons (first and second/third)
Interesting division.  Does number come into play?

> three tenses (past, present, and future-- though they don't really
> quite correspond)
How do they differ from what you'd expect?

> five aspects (standard, inceptive, telative, durative, and
> causative)
What do these aspects mean?  I can guess at all but "standard", altho
causative seems odd to clump with aspect.  Can these aspects be
combined?  For example, can you have inceptive-causative?

> and eight moods (indicative, subjunctive, optative, conditional,
> imperative, jussive, potential, and permissive).
How is subjunctive used?  What's jussive?  I'm assuming potential and
permissive are more-or-less equivalent to "can/be able" and "may"?

> Negation is part of the verb conjugation. There are also
> infinitives and subordinate verbs (used in subordinate
> clauses), which have different forms depending on
> whether their subject is in an oblique or non-oblique
> case.
Interesting.

> The whole shebang is agglutinative, so not as
> messy as it may sound.
Do the affixes stay constant, or do they change depending on what word
their added, or what other affixes are combined with them, etc?

> The Hermetic adjective is inflected for case and gender,
> but not for number. It has six degrees of comparison:
> positive, comparative, superlative, negative, negative
> comparative, negative superlative.
How do you do equatives? (as ADJ as ...)  Are adjectives also
agglutinative?  How do the negative forms work?  Would the forms of an
adjective meanings, say, good be "bad", "worse", "worst" or "not good",
"less good", and "least good"?

> The Hermetic adverb agrees with the verb in person and
> tense, and also has six degrees of comparison.
Interesting.  My first conlang had agreeing adverbs, altho it was just
tense for them.

> Sentence order is fairly flexible. Most common overall
> orders are SVO and VSO, but other orders also do occur
> for emphasis or variety.
Are there any restrictions on order?  Or is it merely a matter of
certain orders being rarer than others?

> Hermetic is properly written in a script called mna
> Thiposo
Could you give us a description of the pronunciation of your conlang?

> Not terribly phonetic!
In what ways does it diverge from the ideal?  Are there multiple sounds
for a single letter and/or combination of letters, or are there multiple
spellings for the same sound, or both?  That is, is the pronunciation
ambiguous from the spelling, or is the spelling ambiguous from the
pronunciation, or (like English) both?

> and I've
> internalized Hermetic to the point where, as with
> English, I just speak and write it the way that "feels
> right" to my ear, and any analysis comes after the fact.
I wish I could say that about my lang.  :-)  There's a few things that
just "feel right", but it's still largely conscious.

--
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overheard
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