Re: More on the Hermetic Language

En réponse à Paul Burgess <paul@...>:

> Here I am again, Paul Burgess, alias "mna_vanantha"...
> LOL! My conlang is called, in English, "Hermetic." In
> Hermetic itself, Hermetic is called "mna Vanantha."
>
Pronunciation please! ;)))

>
> The Hermetic noun has ten cases (nominative, accusative,
> equative, genitive, dative, illative, locative,
> instrumental, vocative, and interrogative) and three
> numbers (singular, dual, and plural). (A few nouns also
> display vestiges of an ancient trinal number.) There are
> four genders (masculine, feminine, neuter, and royal)
> but in practice you can 98% ignore this and treat all
> nouns as neuter.
>
Does it mean that gender is optional? Or semantic like in English?

> The Hermetic verb has two persons (first and
> second/third),
Do you mean that you need a pronoun to distinguish second from third person or
that there is really no second/third person distinction, like in Ebidesian?

 three tenses (past, present, and future--
> though they don't really quite correspond), three voices
> (active, middle, and passive), five aspects (standard,
> inceptive, telative, durative, and causative),
What is "telative"?

 and eight
> moods (indicative, subjunctive, optative, conditional,
> imperative, jussive, potential, and permissive).
> 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.
This looks interesting. How do you construct a subordinate clause then?

 The whole shebang is agglutinative, so not as
> messy as it may sound.
>
LOL.

>
> The Hermetic adverb agrees with the verb in person and
> tense, and also has six degrees of comparison.
>
What about adverbs that complete adjectives or other adverbs rather than verbs?
(like "very" in "very nice" or "enough" in "fast enough") Or do you use another
category of words for those?

> Sentence order is fairly flexible. Most common overall
> orders are SVO and VSO, but other orders also do occur
> for emphasis or variety.
>
> Hermetic is properly written in a script called mna
> Thiposo, which consists of nearly four dozen
> characters-- a seventeen-letter alphabetic portion (mna
> Jondir-Aosthilo) plus various syllabic signs, ligatures,
> and diacritical marks. Not terribly phonetic!
?!!! 17 letters?!! That's the inventory of the Maggel alphabet too!!!! And like
mna Thiposo, the Maggel script also contains zillions of ligatures and such
(but not that many diacritical marks ;))) ). And as you may have heard, the
Maggel script is anything *but* phonetic!!! (even the "regular" - "regular" as
in "explaining about 20% of the cases ;))) - rules aren't that phonetic at
all ;)) )

 I also
> write Hermetic in the Roman alphabet-- not fully
> phonetic, either, and to the Hermetic eye it doesn't
> really "look right." But much more convenient at the
> keyboard. :)
>
Luckily for me the Maggel script is derived from the Uncial form of the Latin
alphabet, so a transliteration in the Roman script is easy. I just have to
render ligatures separating them into their components. Of course, it doesn't
look as nice as the Maggel script itself, and there's no easy way to render the
numbers written in the traditional manner, but it's better than nothing and
mandatory with e-mail :) .

> From early on, one of the most important aspects of
> Hermetic for me has been the finely nuanced inward
> "feel" of the language-- connotations, fine shadings of
> word meaning, terms and idioms which defy exact
> translation into English. Hermetic has a mind of its
> own, and after all these years, it feels to me very much
> like a real language. I've pretty much just carried it
> in my head-- any fragmentary written grammar or word
> lists would be many, many years old, 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.
>
Great! I just hope to get to that level of understanding of Maggel one day!!!

> In fact, for me Hermetic is a very tangled ball of yarn.
> There's usually more to it than I can fully lay out on
> the table. Ask me about any point of vocabulary or
> grammar, and I'm apt to respond with a story, rambling
> around on the Hermetic people, my various other hobbies
> and interests (which have all become thoroughly
> interwoven with Hermetic), details of the physical
> location where I was standing when I first made up the
> word 25 years ago, etc.
>
LOL.

Still, I urge you to write down a grammar of the language as well as a lexicon.
This is just too precious to leave it only in your head, and we all want to
know everything about the language!!! :)))

> There is a loose cluster of Hermetic concultures,
> sometimes partially overlapping, and sometimes it's hard
> to tell what overlaps and what doesn't. More on that
> some other time.
>
Please do. And there's the conculture list if you feel like it would be a more
appropriate place for that.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.