Reply to Sarah's condensed message

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sarah Marie Parker-Allen" <lloannna@...>

> In an effort to remember that you have a 100post/day limit around here,
I'm
> condensing my reply.
> Third, I was born in Azusa (seriously, at the now-demolished Center for
> Gentle Birth), and I too grew up surrounded by Spanish.
Ah, the Canyon City!  Right next door to Glendora, where I was brought up.
How long a time did you live there?  How often did you get to Glendora?  To
get to my house, you just go east on Sierra Madre until you pass Glendora
Ave, Live Oak Avenue, and just before Goddard Middle School you turn up
Entrada Way.  That's our neighborhood!

> Fourth, as you'll see from the descriptions below, my languages are in
> various states of disarray.  They're young and all that.  I just want them
> to become more speakable; I want to be able to write a "501 Verbs in
Sarah1"

Heh heh heh... that's been one of my goals, too, for Teonaht!  Actually, 501
nouns would be better, because they are more irregular.

> Fifth, Sally Caves: Come visit Disneyland during the less crowded periods
of
> time.  Best bets are Sundays, the week AFTER the new year, and more than
> three weeks before Christmas (if you need to come during the winter).
Our mistake last year was going during the time between Christmas and New
Years.

  > Sixth, to clarify, I'm not a UCLA girl.

Oops! Sorry!

> I grew up hoping to go to USC (I
> wore a USC sweater at our sixth grade "wear a college shirt or your DARE
> shirt" photo day), and it took a lot of swallowing and deep breathing to
> accept doing UCLA Extension's Russian class.  ^_^  I have nothing against
> UCLA, it's just that I'm on the other side of that particular rivalry.
It's
> nothing like all the bad things I could say about University of Michigan.
> ^_^
> Seventh, just a random thought; my mother majored in Music (she flipped a
> coin between that and Math, and I got treated to 15 years of "Sarah,
> whatEVER you do, don't flip a coin" lectures).  I've been surrounded by
> women in "unusual" occupations (my stepmother is a materials engineer)  As
> you can probably guess by my last name, I grew up in a somewhat
"liberated"
> household; my grandparents were Communists (Grandpa fought the fascists in
> Spain!) and all of that.  At one stage in my life I was even a Unitarian
> Universalist.  Even though I'm not anymore (I'm a libertarian Mormon girl
> ^_^), I wonder if that sort of upbringing helped make it easier to decide
to
> do this sort of thing.  I must say I am highly amused though, at the
> overabundance of men on this list; my other major *public* creative
pursuits
> involve fanfiction, which is populated with an overwhelmingly female
crowd.

What a background!  My feeling is that more and more women are becoming
comfortable talking on the Internet than was true, say, twelve years ago.

> The most developed language, Sarah1, is still too basic and underdeveloped
> to tell you anything.  Especially since I'm about to change all the words
> around.  Here's what I have at present (well, a sample); it was designed
to
> be spoken by elves and snooty humans.
Smirk!  For some reason, this last phrase really tickled me!  Are elves
snooty, too? <G>

> This list also illustrates a problem
> I have, in that by using LangMaker, my words have a lot of meaningless
> roots.
>
> spring                  zhoshra
> seagull                 zhoskei
> universe, cosmos                zhoslka
> library                 zhosllei
> See?  All start with the same root, "zhos," but aren't connected to each
> other.
Hmmm.  Yes, but Teonaht started out like this, too.  It means you like the
sound "zhos."  I liked the sound "ilz."  Eventually, I made it a root, but
there are still not enough basic roots in Teonaht, because so much of it was
engendered in its "salad days."  You could invent some extremely broad
meaning for zhos, so old that it has lost its meaning.  Perhaps zhos has
several meanings.  For the first three, it could mean "sky."  for library,
it could mean "book."  Vaguely related to "sky."  <G>

> Plurals:
> if it ends in a single vowel: "n"
Same as in Teonaht.  -n, -en seem to be common plurals.

> if it ends in a dipthong: "ln"
So, -ealn?  Why the "l"?  Why not just "-ean"?

> if it ends in a consnant: "eia" (ay-yah)
Interesting.

> And I'm pretty sure I was short on sleep the day I came up with this list
of
> grammatical genders:
>
> adult male
> adult female
> child/youth
> infant/animals
> inanimate (general)
> diminutive/informal familiar
> formal-superior
> formal-inferior
> spirit/ephemeral
> formal-superior-plural
> inanimate-plural
> child/youth/infant/animal-plural
> adult-plural
> collective personages-plural
That's a lot of gender categories!

> That was before I came up with the plural formation thing, I haven't
decided
> where I'm going with this.  There's something really endearing about the
> idea of making children and animals have the same grammatical gender in
the
> plural, for me.
I like the idea.

> Don't know why.  Oh, and here's the WIP list of nouns that
> will be (once I've decided what words they are!) irregular.
>
> mother, father, sister, brother, man, woman, wife, husband, home, drink,
> food, love, life, hope
Why these words in particular?  (I'm asking these questions not having read
through all of the other questions posed by other participants.  Sorry!)
These would all seem to fit into one category of noun:  family/hearth words.
When I made my list of "irregular" words, I made them derive from a foreign
root in Teonaht, and they were only very loosely based on semantics (words
for spiritual/big things; words for nature/animals).  What counted for me
was the category itself, and how the noun would be structured, how its
plural and/or declension and/or volitional would work.  My favorite
irregular noun is the yr/inis category:  Syr (shooting star--agentive, ie. a
volitional subject), sinis (shooting star--patient or object/oblique case),
syrn (shooting star--experiential or non-agentive subject).

Keep up the good work, Sarah.


Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/whatsteo.html

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