Re: More on the Hermetic Language

3/11/03 6:21:04 AM, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>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! ;)))
Ummmm, oh gee, there was a time when I was more or less
familiar with the IPA. But that was way back 25 years
ago or more.

"mnah Vah-NAHN-thah," with "ah" like the /a/ in
"father" or the /o/ in "hot" (pronounced the same in the
part of the American Midwest where I live). And /th/ as
in "thin." In Hermetic, there is less of a tendency than
in English for this vowel to tend toward schwa in
unaccented syllables.

>> 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?

Gender in Hermetic is not grammatical gender as in
French. A noun referring to a male is, in Hermetic,
*often* (but not always) put in the masculine gender.
And an adjective referring to a female would be
*usually* (but not absolutely always) inflected as a
feminine adjective. Et cetera. With the adjectives,
there are narrow (and fairly idiomatic) bounds within
which gender is optional. For instance, in describing
myself, I would probably put an adjective in the
masculine gender, but not 100% of the time.

>> 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?

In Hermetic, you need a pronoun to distinguish second
from third person:

iw'omdhralis, "I read"
atho dralis, "you (sing.) read"
ocho dralis, "he/she reads"

yin omdhralis, "we two read" (no inclusive/exclusive
distinction)
athin dralis, "you two read"
ochin dralis, "they two read"

iy'omdhralis, "we read" (three or more)
athi dralis, "you read"
ochi dralis, "they read"

Pronouns in Hermetic are often omitted when they can be
readily inferred from context, or sometimes even when
they *can't* be readily inferred.


>five aspects (standard,
>> inceptive, telative, durative, and causative),
>
>What is "telative"?
Used to indicate an action or state which is ending or
winding down:

golis, "it is red"
golliis, "it reddens"
golanis, "it is ceasing being red"

> 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?

Here are a few examples:

Mna yaldo chocilias, "The young person was sitting
down."

Mna yaldo schociliiso nthaas yo mna sipiroth, "The young
person who was sitting down gave me the book."

Somchociliisw'omnthaas yaldo mna sipiroth, "I who was
sitting down [or, as I was sitting down, I] gave the
young person a book."

Omnthaas yaldo chociliiso mna sipiroth, "I gave the
young person who was sitting down the book."

>> 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?
In Hermetic, an adjective is completed by another
adjective, and an adverb is completed by another adverb.

>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!!! :)))
>
Yes, I ought to do this. Though the problem is (1)
finding the time, and (2) Hermetic has long since grown
to the point where anything I put down on paper will be
only a partial and very incomplete description of the
language and its workings. :)


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     E-mail   paul@paulburgess.org
     Website  http://www.paulburgess.org
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