Re: Newbie here

>
>Andreas,
>
>Hejsan!  Vaelkommen till Conlang-listen!  Var i Sverige bor du?  Jag aer
>kanadensisk/amerikansk, men jag bodde 1987-1988 i Uppsala som
>utbytesstudent,
>och jag kan fortfarande lite svenska.
Kul! Jag bor utanför Linköping. Du verkar hållit din svenska ganska levande
(fast du borde skrivit "listan" inte "listen").

>
>Anyway, you should tell us a bit more about Tairezazh and the universe in
>which
>it is spoken, and perhaps post some samples.
You don't want me to tell you too much of the universe Tairezazh is spoken
in - I could easily write a goody number of pages on history, politics,
ideology etc. To make a short overview:

It's a future variant of our universe (or perhaps rather the future of a
parallel universe very close to ours), and the "present" time in it is
something like 25,000 AD. Humanity have colonized most of the milky-way
(using a kind of "warp-drive" that allows them to go from star to star in a
matter of weeks or days), not encountering any other kinds of intelligent
life (mainly so that I don't have to design believeable aliens!). A large
chunk of the galaxy centered on Earth is known as "Tshána", and is divided
into a number of antagonistic states, that despite being political and
ideological enemies have much in common culturally. One of these, called
Taireza, have Earth as the "Capital World" and Tairezazh as the official
language. Tairezazh is also the official language of the smaller state
Vaniza (the written form is identical to the Taireza standard, but the
spoken form differs in a number of respects). Related languages, especially
one called "Steienzh" (or "Steianzh" in Tairezazh), are spoken in many
neighbouring states.

Tairezazh itself is not constructed with any very definite goals. It's got a
fairly simple phonology, and I've not thought up tp much weirdities in
grammer - anyone familiar with modern European languages will recognize most
things.

The consonants are: p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, s, z, th [T], dh [D], sh [S], zh
[Z], ts, dz, tsh [tS], dzh [dZ], r, l, n, m. The golden rule of consonant
clusters is that the consonants in a cluster must be either all voiced or
all voiceless (r, l and n are normally voiced but have voiceless allophones
occuring beside voiceless stops, fricatives and affricates). The /m/ phoneme
can only occure initially, and is never part of a cluster. If compounding or
prefixing causes an /m/ to become non-initial, it changes to /n/ (eg _mév_
"day", _anév_ "today"). When in a cluster, /n/ acquires the place of
articulation of the consonant immediately after (if there's any); thus "np"
and "nk" are pronounced as [mp] and [Nk].

The vowels are: a, e, i, o, u, á, é, ó, ai, au, ei, oi, ou. The accents mark
long vowels -  long "i" and "u" don't occure.

The noun have two numbers (sg and pl) and four cases (nom, acc, dat and
gen). Regular nouns inflects like _mest_ "spaceship" below:

         sg        pl
nom      mest      mesten
acc      mests     mestens
dat      mester    mestener
gen      mesti     mestin

There's a few exceptions, but the above works for almost all nouns ending in
a consonant. For the relatively few nouns ending in a vowel, the pl ending
is simply _-n_ (eg _daive_ "house", _daiven_ "houses"), while the genitival
_-i_ forms a diphthong with the final vowel (eg _daivei_ "house's", _zau_
"star", _zoi_ "star's").

Adjective have very little inflexion. There's the comparative prefix _da-_,
the superlative _tshe-_ and not much else. Eg _taiks_ "big", _dataiks_
"bigger" and _tshetaiks_ "biggest". When speaking of prefices, I should add
the stress normally falls on the first syllable of the word stem.

Verbs have three tenses ; past, present and future. The present consists of
a bare verbal stem, while the past and future are marked with _-(e)k_ and
_-(e)st)_ respectively. Eg _tshei_ "loves", _tsheik_ "loved", _tshist_ "will
love" (for historical reasons, _ei_ sometimes becomes _i_ before consonant
clusters). There's also an infinitive in _-(e)n_ (which sometimes takes
nominal case inflections), an active participle in _-(e)dh_ and a past
participle in _-(e)zh_.

The personal pronoun table is very regular, and only includes three roots:
_ta_ "I", _sha_ "you" and _sen_ "he/she/it". These inflect for number ("we"
is considered merely the plural of "I" etc) and case just like nouns. _Sen_
can be made gender-specific by adding _-a_ form feminine and _-o_ for
masculine (but you can't morphologically mark that you're speaking about an
inaminate). So in actual usuage, simple _sen_ normally means either "it" or
"he or she" (as in "if somebody finds it, he or she can keep it"). It's
fully possible to use forms like _senoner_ "them (dative, masculine)", so
there's a fully twenty-four forms of _sen_ in use!

The basic word order is SVO, but this can be rearranged rather freely as the
cases keep track on what's the object etc. Adjectives follow their nouns, as
do genitives (including the genitive personal pronouns like _tai_ "my,
mine"). Adverbs also usually follow what the describe.

I could go on for a bit, but I think the above should do as a basic
introduction of Tairezazh grammer (Steienzh grammar is much the same).

                                                 Andreas

>The highlight of this list for me
>is reading sketches and samples of other people's languages.
>
>Cheers,
>Matt.
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