Re: The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

Well, I'm going to make my debut post on this list here in this
thread... I'm a linguistics/conglanging autodidact who mostly just
reads this thread hoping to learn by osmosis, and I probably won't be
posting much after this, but I figured I may as well get my one
partially developed conlang in on this thread.

The language is called Toquay (that's the "Englishization", it should
be spelled _to:kwa:_ according to my transliteration... I'm sorry, my
knowledge x-sampa and the IPA is bad, so please don't expect any help
there.) and unfortunately I don't have any details online about it.
More will be coming within the next few months, but for now I'm not
confident enough about it to show any more than this.

Some notes on the interlinear I've created:
-apostrophes in the interlinear correspond with apostrophes in the
text, which indicate the joining of a clitic to a word
-two verbs joined with a + are a converb
-INF-INT means the intransitive infinitive form
-MYTH refers to a particle indicating the "mythic aspect" (if you can
suggest a better name for this, I'd love it), an aspect indicating
that the events never really transpire but are being spoken of as if
they do. Toquay does not recognize "tense", per say
-OBL indicates the oblique case, used for the direct objects of verbs
(adjectives agree in case with their head noun)
-INSTR indicates a non-content word used to indicate that the
preceding phrase is a relative clause to the following one, being
instrumental

Without further ado...

el'katso todha sore'nya na'ki:to se:b
Begin.INF-INT+Carry.2nd    away'MYTH.PART    OBL'stone.PAUC

ets hi:kar pom na'bati:n
INDEF    small.OBL    NSTR move.3rd    3rdgeneral    OBJ'moutain

"Beginning-by-carrying away stones small is-done-by one moving a mountain."

"One who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."

If I can, I'll see if I can post a slightly more thorough sketch of
Toquay later, including some x-sampa pronunciation. I'd love any
critique anyone has.

-Leland Paul