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Re: Is conlang a generator of conlangers? or a sustainer? (was: Oops!)

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Thursday, October 8, 1998, 18:59
Sally Caves wrote:
> My other question: how much was Tolkien an influence on your decision to > invent a language?
None whatsoever. IIRC, the very first inklings of conlanging were in a middle school Latin class, but that was not a real language, just a few experiments, some musings on language. I remember I wondered if there could exist pronouns to distinguish between two nouns (i.e., obviate). Later, I read a book on Esperanto, which put a little more wood in the fireplace of conlanging. But what really got me thinking was a trilogy by Harry Harrison entitled "West of Eden", "Return to Eden", and something else. In it, he discusses three languages, Yilane` (spoken by descendents of dinosaurs), which was an interesting sound-image language (body position clarified the meaning of the spoken language), something beginning with a T, which was spoken by the main group of humans in the story, and another language, which was agglutinative. His detailed description of Yilane`, and brief descriptions of the other two, ignited the conlanging fire. I then proceeded to create Tarni'f, which was heavily influenced by Latin. It had 7 cases: Nominative, Genetive, Accusative, Dative, Locative, Temporal, and Vocative. Locative was for "prepositions of space", temporal was for "prepositions of time", and the others were very similar to Latin. There were four genders: Masculine, Feminine, Androgynous, and Neuter. Androgynous was for animates whose gender is unknown or unimportant. There were three classes of nouns, similar to the five declension classes of Latin. Class III was agglutinative, altho I didn't know the term. Masculine/Feminine Singular was indicated by -s, Androgynous/Neuter Singular by -v, Masculine/Feminine plural by -zh, and A/N plural by -b, nominative was indicated by (-e-), genetive by (-i-), accusative by -a-, dative by -E- (e-acute), locative by -fA-, temporal by -tE-, and vocative by -A-A. Adjectives could be comparative, superlative, anti-comparative, and anti-superlative (less old, least old). Verbs had personal endings combining person (including a formal/informal distinction in the 2nd person), number, active/passive, and indicative/subjunctive. There were lots of tenses. The verb was formed thuly: (prefix)-Verb-tense-person, with prefixes for conditional, progressive, reflexive, completed, stable, and repitition (with three allomorphs), immediacy. Unfortunately, I never recorded what those terms meant. I don't know what the distinction between the perfect tenses and completed was, nor what the distinction between stable and repetition were. I also had Latin-style gerunds, participles, and infinitives. There were three classes of verbs: -a^d, -ed, and -ud, which differed in the personal endings and some conjugations. There were also adverbs which agreed with their verb in time (I ran quickly-past/I will run quickly-future). In the pronouns, 1st and second person had gender, however the masculine and femine forms were only to be used in specific (unspecified) situations, so I always employed the androgynous. The vocabulary had thousands of words. However, I had never been very consistent with derivations, and so I had, in some cases, random alterations to words. I even created several scripts. The orthography was heavily influenced by English, with odd mixtures of Klingon. Here's the vowels: a = [&] a^ = [ej] e = [E] e^ = [i] er = syllabic r i = [I] i^ = [aj] ir = syllabic r, or "halfway between that and i" o = [a] o^ = [ow] u = [V] u^ = [u] or [U] (never indicated when it would be which) ao^ = [&u] eir, eer = "pronounced like the word air, or halfway between e and er (rare)" o^y = [Oj] ier, iir = "like air" [Ir(syllabic)] o followed by r becomes ar (or becomes o"r) - diereses indicated two seperate sounds, instead of a diphthong aar = ar or air ou^ = "o and u^ run together, ow as in cow, or o^" A few interesting consonants were: tlh = Klingon tlh (lateral affricate) th = [T] thth = [D] (original written th with circumflexes over each consonant) q = [x] gh = [G] k = [k] p = [p] or [p_h] t = [t_h] (?) qq = "a harsher version of q", I think I meant [X] (uvular fricative) r = "usually like English r, but sometimes like the relaxes d of ladder" (i.e., a flap) g followed by h --> kh ([k_h]?) ly = sometimes like lli in million, or like an l or a y. Sometimes like zh. (From Spanish, I didn't realize that Spanish ll was a single sound, I though it was [lj]) ' = glottal stop (that's how it was defined, but it was usually a schwa, as in l'k'tara^d, to be absent [l@k@tarejd], in fact, the use of it as a glottal stop was largely restricted to inflections. Eventually, I tired of it, and the fire burned out. Until I discovered the Internet, and discovered conlangs. That re-ignited the fire, and I've been going strong since. Come to think about it, I may resurrect Tarni'f, with some modifications. -- "A silent mouth is sweet to hear" - Irish proverb ICQ: 18656696 AOL: NikTailor http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/