Re: Kaikutin is dead. Long live Okaikiar!

On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 01:25:07AM -0700, Joseph Fatula wrote:
> Okaikiar looks pretty interesting, though I get the impression you've
> studied Latin before...
I am currently studying Latin, but at least consciously it had very
little to do with the design of Okaikiar, much of which predates
my Latin study.  So what makes you say that?

Is it the case system?   I originally got my case list from the
journalism questions: who, what, why, where, when, and how.  Then I
threw in whence, whither, whose, and "to/for whom" simply because I
thought they'd be useful.  The spatial/temporal mode idea resulted
in a merger of "when" and "where", while allowing "whither" and
"whence" to do double duty as "until when" and "since when". In
this way I ended up with more cases than Latin (although it reuses
its cases for various meanings to get a similar effect), but fewer
than, say, Finnish.

The declensions aries from my sample vocabulary; the proper names
"Dankar", "Ral M'kei", and "Zan T'sor" all predate any form of the
language by some years.  They are the source of all the phonemes
as well as the nominative singular forms in "-al/-an", "-ar"
and the genitive plural forms in "-ei" and "-or".  To flesh out
the declensions, I grouped the cases into sets:

                Origin          Current         Destination
Action          Nominative      Accusative      Dative
Place           Ellative        Locative        Allative
Motive          Causative       Instrumental
Ownership       Genitive

Then I gave each of the cases in the Origin column its own vowel,
and added suffixes to yield the Current and Destination cases.
The pluralizing vowel shifts all run clockwise around the edge of
the vowel trapezoid.  (Even though it's not umlaut, I probably got
the basic idea of using regular vowel changes to form the plural
from Sindarin.)

> With the "by me" form for "here", perhaps you should consider
> distinguishing different locations, as many languages do.
> If something is over here by me, not by you, use "by me".  If I'm
> talking about something near both of us, use "by us".  If it's near
> you, but not me, use "by you".  If it's far from both of us, try
> "by it".  Oldvak does something like this, having four possible
> locations based on near/far for speaker and listener.
Good idea!  That's a useful distinction, surpassing the three-level
distinction found in Spanish and Japanese (and Southern US English,
for that matter: "here" = by me, "there" = by you, and "yonder" =
not by either of us).

-Mark

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