Re: My nameless tougue (was Re: New to Language Construction)

> Yes, I would feel very uncomfortable with a
> grammar that assumes something to be absolutely
> true unless otherwise indicated.
It's somewhat of an emphatic concept.  There'll exist, when I get to to,
some word meaning 'generally', but the generic also exists for reasons
of redundancy and the capability to express complicated shdings of
meaning with verbs.  It's possible I'll demote it to a sort of archiac
or literary usage, like English's 'thee' and 'thou', while speakers tend
to use the word instead, or not at all.

> This suggests the language of a story-telling
> culture. Am I right?
Indeed.  I'm big on story-telling, though as I see it, the irrealis
<there's that pretty word again> would be used to set the 'this is the
stuff of legend' stage for mythical stories, and the retrospective would
serve to highlight important moral points or things that could be
learned from the story.  In historical tales and heroic epics, the
retrospective might be used more often to set a more educational mood,
while the irrealis marks points of doubt or features of the story that
are important to plot but unlikely to have happened.

> More affixes? Sheesh!
Yup, I love affixes.  I noticed as I got farther into the Babel Text
that words get less monotonous as you find excuses to use odd constructs
like the crescendo,  it becomes entertaining surprisingly quickly.
Although my carefully polished phonology is deteriorating... too many
consonants!  Here's the first four lines of the Babel text, since I've
got the first draft done and it's hard to imagine what a language sounds
like without seeing it written out.

Afarellihea'alea rahašia ahuela alanani eka 'o uerafani rišueli.
Anu eressellihea'oekuna una qešuellihea manuhi o'elenu šinareku 'o
havituelliheaka qanu.
Dekelli'ehea'alea anu maukešu'oe ketaruemi 'o nife'akarušu'oeo una.
Havelellihea'oemo ketaruemi ke litesume 'o sana'erina ke akayani.

Incidentally, on my comp those special characters look like an s with
the reversed circumflex, in case it looks odd.

-Shreyas
Loth 77
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/lothlorien/artists/ssampat/ssampat.html