Re: Sally back, and conlang survey part 1 and 2

En réponse à Sally Caves <scaves@...>:

>
> I've missed you TOO!
>
Thanks! (and I hope the "you" was a plural one, because otherwise,
<blush> :))) ).

> >
> > Beautful article by the way.
>
> FIRRIMBY!!
You're welcome ;)) .

>
> A lot happens in a year, Christophe!  Leave me the pleasure of
> discovery?
> Now that's naughty of you!  Fess up!
>
LOL. OK, you win :)) . But rather than explaining you what Maggelity is, I'll
show it up through examples of the language :))) .

Maggel is a language I first invented when I was around 16. My Senior High
School was organising a trip to Ireland, and I went there. Of course, before,
we acquainted ourselves with Ireland, and I specififically with Irish
Gaelic :)) . The language had made such a strong impression on me that I
started immediately to create a language influenced by Gaelic. But since I was
still a newbie at conlanging I ended up creating a relex of English (not bad
for a French speaker though :)) ) hidden in a Gaelic-like orthography. Lately
I've digged my notes up and rediscovered Maggel, and decided to revive the
project, but in a very different form. I threw away nearly everything but the
basics of the language and a main idea: let's take all the worst of Gaelic,
English, French and Tibetan orthography, and multiply it by 1 million ;))))) .
In other words, let's make a language where the written word is even further
from the spoken word than they are already in French and English. And then,
expand this madness to the grammar, making a language with a slightly Indo-
European feel (but of an alien type, like Celtic languages ;)))) ) but turned
mad ;)) .

And so Maggel second generation was born. To make its orthography as
unintuitive as possible, I decided to use even fewer letters than Irish Gaelic
uses. Maggel uses only 17 letters of the Latin alphabet, written in a variation
of the Uncial style that I like very much, to represent 80-odd phonemes (I've
been unable to pin down exactly what the phonemic inventory of Maggel is :)) .
So I represent its pronunciation using a rather phonetic description). Of
course, since Maggel doesn't do things like everyone else, this script also
features hundreds of ligatures :))) . And the digraphs, trigraphs and
tetragraphs it uses to represent sounds are everything but intuitive ;))) . And
of course, when I say something in Maggel is a rule, it means that it covers
little more than 30% of all the cases. Maggel is exception made rule ;))) .

A few words in Maggel as appetizers ;)) :
- |oun| ['a~O~n]: man
- |ragft| ['r\a~N]: woman
- |hluoifais| ['Lu:v&z]: presents (it's a feminine word, and the base form of
feminine words is plural. More about it below ;))) )
- |himidu| ['CE~mptU]: ceremony
- |imuohf| ['mbu:]: cows
- |mesha| [mE'h*&]: house (the * marks "tension" of the previous consonant, a
feature of Maggel I cannot explain much better than "muscular tension". This
noun is a "plural", i.e. a countable noun with a singular meaning but only
plural forms ;))) )
- |ibaoshoir| ['pa:x]: middle.

Grammatically speaking, Maggel is a wolf in sheep's clothes ;)))) . It has
nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, numerals, like a nice little
Indo-European language, but butchers those categories like mad ;)))) . Nouns
have grammatical gender, with masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. But when I
say that those genders are grammatical, I mean it litterally!!! Connection to
natural gender is weak at best, and agreement is purely grammatical, even when
it comes to the agreement of 3rd person pronouns!!! For instance, the word
for "captain" (which I didn't invent yet :((( . I just know that it's a worn-
down form of an expression meaning "ship's wife". I have the word for "ship":
|euoshabgi| [Ues'CEI], but not for "wife" ;)) ) is grammatically feminine, even
when it refers to a man (and Maggel doesn't have the possibility to derive
feminine and/or masculine nouns from nouns of other genders). It means that if
you refer to a man in his quality of man, you'll use the 3rd person masculine
(since |oun| is masculine), but if you refer to the same person in his quality
of captain, you will have to switch to the 3rd person feminine, even within the
same sentence!!!! I could have called the genders A, B and C that it would have
been as expressive ;))) (but I didn't, or else it wouldn't have been fun ;)) ).
Nouns also vary in number, and Maggel has no less than four numbers: singular,
dual, plural indefinite (used when there is nothing indicating the actual
number) and plural definite (when there is an indication, even vague, of how
much/many we count). Each gender marks number differently (and even within a
gender marks can be quite different. As I said, the exception is the rule in
Maggel ;))) ). All three genders can be roughly recognised by the way they
treat number though: masculine nouns have the singular as base form, and often
mark number through complex systems of umlaut; feminine nouns have the *plural
indefinite* as base form, and derive their singular from this plural; neuter
nouns have the singular as their base form, and have marks of plural often
similar to masculine marks (without umlaut though) but have all a common trait
which is to mark their non-singular numbers with an augment, a prefix on the
word. this augment can be quite different depending on the noun though ;))) .

This is only a teeny-weenie part of Maggel's insanity, but it will suffice for
now ;))) . So now I suppose you understand what maggelity stands for ;)))) . If
you want to know more about the language, don't hesitate to ask (or search the
archives, I've talked about the language quite extensively in the past few
months). Last note: |maggel| is pronounced [m@'gE:l] ;))) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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