Ng'and'ana
From: | Elliott Belser <renyard@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, January 23, 2002, 3:26 |
Alright you orrible men, you asked for it, you got it. This is the
first of two posts about Ng'and'ana. First off, the letters.
Ng'and'ana is alphabetic and a phonetic language, so don't worry
there. I don't have a font so I'll deal with transliteration...
incedentally I CAN write in Ng'and'ana lettering. Who here knows how
I can make a font?
Right then. I do not know how to classify letter sounds, so help me
with that... I'll use the 'like the (letter) in (word)' form. The
basic vowels are:
ae (pronouced like the 'ay' in 'way')
a (pronounced like the 'a' in 'father')
e (like the 'e' in 'left')
i (like the 'ee' in 'see')
o (like the 'o' in 'know')
u (like the 'oo' in 'food')
y (like the 'i' in 'sigh'), sometimes spelled 'ay'
The consonants, like in Hebrew, can sometimes be modified by a dot.
In this language this dot is called an 'Adam,' or 'crystallizer'
(Hard: Adam'u To harden: Adam'as Crystals: Adam) and they make
sounds guttural (the only sound word I know). The Ng'and'ana sounds
are pretty much the same as English ones, and where there are
exceptions I note them. The letters and what they turn into are
below.
(This > turns to that.)
V > B
K > Q (Like the 'Ch' in Chanuka)
D > T
F > P
G > NG (Like the Ng in Ring, but is it's own letter.)
H (Must be used at the end of a word that would have a vowel end.)
L
M > N
R > RH (Rolled R - the infamous 'kitty purr' as Terran
linguists have it.)
S > Z (Sometimes pronounced J)
Also, ideals in a word are seperated by a 'sfir' ('breath,' sfir'u
'inspired') that look like and are represented by an apostrophe.
It's a glottal stop in linguistic terms, the difference between 'uh'
and 'oh.'
So this is an Ng'and'ana sentence: Am'galahad ben'a Eliout.
Em'ben'a lom gloz'adi. (My name is Elliott. I am a linguist.)
Incedentally, Ng is 'a sharing,' and Anda is 'the soul.' The racial
name Ng'anda means 'ones of shared soul.' Ana is just a gender
marking a word as a language, so Ng'and'ana is 'the language of those
who share souls.'
Grammar is next...
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